HOLY COMMUNION? Happy birthday to Joe Hill, a man who may have come to give his life for his fellows, Joel Emmanuel Hägglund of Gävle, Sweden, was known as Joseph Hillström and finally as Joe Hill, as repeated blacklisting for labor activism forced him to assume ever more American names. A songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. The Woody Guthrie of the Gilded Age, he was popular song writer and cartoonist for the radical union. His most famous songs include The Preacher and the Slave (also known as Therell be Pie in the Sky By-and-By), The Tramp, There is Power in a Union, The Rebel Girl, and Casey Jones—the Union Scab (which may have been unjust to the man, tho a useful corrective to aspects of the myth) As an itinerant worker, Hill moved around the west, hopping freight trains, going from job to job. By the end of 1913, he was working as a laborer at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah, not far from Salt Lake City. A friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, an IWW, (who) had no right to live anyway, he appeared on the doorstep of a local doctor, with a bullet wound through the left lung. Hill said that he had been shot in an argument over a woman, whom he refused to name. The same night, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men. Altho three other men were treted for gunshot wounds that night, and twelve men, including the other three gunshot victims and nine men arrested by Morrison, were initially suspects, once the police found Joe Hill among the shooting victims, both Joe and the Pigs realized at once they would search no longer, despite 13-year-old Merlin Morrison, the victims son and brother, who said Thats not him at all upon first seeing Hill. Joe seems to have known his fate from the first. It is unsurprising he refused to co-operate or testify, partly out of chivalry and possibly friendship for the man who shoot him, partially because he accepted the futility and decided to be a dead martyr. Joe Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915. When Deputy Shettler, who led the firing squad, called out the sequence of commands preparatory to firing (Ready, aim,) Hill shouted, Fire — go on and fire! Just prior to his execution, Hill had written to Bill Haywood, an IWW leader, saying, Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Dont waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I dont want to be found dead in Utah. His last will, which was eventually set to music by Ethel Raim, founder of the group The Pennywhistlers, reads... My will is easy to decide, For there is nothing to divide. My kin dont need to fuss and moan, Moss does not cling to a rolling stone. My body? Oh, if I could choose I would to ashes it reduce, And let the merry breezes blow, My dust to where some flowers grow. Perhaps some fading flower then Would come to life and bloom again. This is my Last and final Will. Good Luck to All of you, Joe Hill Hills body was sent to Chicago where it was cremated. His ashes were placed into 600 small envelopes and according to Wobbly folklore, sent around the world, and most were released to the winds on May Day 1916. Ashes were cast to the wind in the US, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Nicaragua. The ashes sent to Sweden were only partly cast to the wind. The main part was interred in the wall of a union office in Landskrona, a minor city in the south of the country, with a plaque commemorating Hill. That room is now the reading room of the local city library. In 1988 it was discovered that an envelope had been seized by the United States Post Office Department in 1917 because of its subversive potential. The envelope, with a photo affixed, captioned, Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915, as well as its contents, was deposited at the National Archives. A story appeared in the United Auto Workers magazine Solidarity and a small item followed it in The New Yorker Magazine. Members of the IWW in Chicago quickly laid claim to the contents of the envelope. After some negotiations, the last of Hills ashes (but not the envelope that contained them) was turned over to the IWW in 1988. The weekly In These Times ran notice of the ashes and invited readers to suggest what should be done with them. Suggestions varied from enshrining them at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC to Abbie Hoffmans suggestion that they be eaten by todays Joe Hills like Billy Bragg. Bragg did indeed swallow a small bit of the ashes with some Union beer to wash it down, One small packet of ashes was scattered at a 1989 ceremony which unveiled a monument to six unarmed IWW coal miners buried in Lafayette, Colorado, who had been machine-gunned by Colorado state police in 1927 in the Columbine Mine Massacre. Until 1989 the graves of five of these men were unmarked. Another famous Wobbly, Carlos Cortez, scattered Joe Hills ashes on the graves at the commemoration. On the night of November 18, 1990, the S.E. Michigan Central Committee of the IWW hosted a gatherings of wobs in a remote wooded area at which a dinner, followed by a bonfire, featured a reading of Hills last will, and then his ashes were released into the flames and carried up above the trees.... The next day ... one wob collected a bowl full of ashes from the smoldering fire pit. At that event several IWW members consumed a portion of Hills ashes before the rest was consigned to the fire. Holy Communion! youtube/watch?v=ING-1fAAntA
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 21:15:11 +0000
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