Today in Labor History

November 19  --  Union Communications Services, Inc.

Joe Hill, labor leader and songwriter, executed in Utah on what many believe was a framed charge of murder. Before he died he declared: “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize.” - 1915

The nation’s first automatic toll collection machine is used at the Union Toll Plaza on New Jersey's Garden State Parkway - 1954

The National Writers Union is founded, representing freelance and contract writers and others in the trade. In 1992 it was to merge into and become a local of the United Auto Workers - 1981

Joe Hill, labor leader and song writer, executed in Utah on what many believe was a framed charge of murder. Before he died he declared: “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize.” - 1915 ~De

Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, and also known as Joseph Hillström (October 7, 1879[1] – November 19, 1915) was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the "Wobblies").[2] A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco.[3] Hill, as an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular song writer and cartoonist for the radical union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave", "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which generally express the harsh but combative life of itinerant workers, and the apparent necessity of organizing to improve conditions for working people.
He joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies around 1910, when working on the docks in San Pedro, California. In late 1910 he wrote a letter to the IWW newspaper Industrial Worker, identifying himself as a member of the IWW local chapter in Portland, Oregon.

He rose in the IWW organization and traveled widely, organizing workers under the IWW banner, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He shortened his pseudonym to 'Joe Hill' as the pen-name under which his songs, cartoons and other writings appeared.

The San Pedro dockworkers' strike led to Hill's first recorded encounter with the police, who arrested him in June 1913 and held him for 30 days on a charge of vagrancy because, he said later, he was "a little too active to suit the chief of the burg" during the strike. On Jan. 10, 1914, Hill knocked on the door of a Salt Lake City doctor at 11:30 p.m. asking to be treated for a gunshot wound he said was inflicted by an angry husband who had accused Hill of insulting his wife. Earlier that evening, in another part of town, a grocer and his son had been killed. One of the assailants was wounded in the chest by the younger victim before he died. Hill's injury therefore tied him to the incident. The uncertain testimony of two eyewitnesses and the lack of any corroboration of Hill's alibi convinced a local jury of Hill's guilt, even though neither witness was able to identify Hill conclusively and the gun used in the murders was never recovered.

The campaign to exonerate Hill began two months before the trial and continued up to and even beyond his execution by firing squad on Nov. 19, 1915. His supporters included the socially prominent daughter of a former Mormon church president, labor radicals, activists and sympathizers including AFL President Samuel Gompers, the Swedish minister to the United States and even President Woodrow Wilson. The Utah Supreme Court, however, refused to overturn the verdict and the Utah Board of Pardons refused to commute Hill's sentence. The board declared its willingness to hear testimony from the woman's husband in a closed session, but Hill refused to identify his alleged assailant, insisting that to do so would harm the reputation of the lady.

Hill became more famous in death than he had been in life. To Bill Haywood, the former president of the Western Federation of Miners and the best-known leader of the IWW, Hill wrote: "Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning, organize! It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah." Apparently he did die like a rebel. A member of the firing squad at his execution claimed that the command to "Fire!" had come from Hill himself.

After a brief service in Salt Lake City, Hill's body was sent to Chicago, where thousands of mourners heard Hill's "Rebel Girl" sung for the first time, listened to hours of speeches and then walked behind his casket to Graceland Cemetery, where the body was cremated and the ashes mailed to IWW locals in every state but Utah as well as to supporters in every inhabited continent on the globe. According to one of Hill's Wobbly-songwriter colleagues, Ralph Chaplin (who wrote the words to "Solidarity Forever," among other songs), all the envelopes were opened on May 1, 1916, and their contents scattered to the winds, in accordance with Hill's last wishes, expressed in a poem written on the eve of his death:
My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some fading flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flowers then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill
http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Key-People-in-Labor-History/Joe-Hill-1879-1915
Joe Hill's song 'The Preacher and the Slave' (tune by J.P. Webster) played by Harry K McClintock with a brief interview by Sam Eskin.

Recorded Feb. 3 1951 in San Pedro California.
Originally released 1972, fro Haywire Mac, (Folkways FD 5272)

Known as ''Pie in the Sky'' and ''Long-Haired Preacher Song'' this was the first of 25 of Joe Hill's songs and poems to appear between 1911 and 1916 in the I.W.W.'s Little Red Songbook (I.W.W. -Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent). Joe Hill popularized the expression ''pie in the sky''.
http://youtu.be/DXGuHCsjXro