JOE HILL: His Story and Ballads
Part One
In 2007 the Workers Party republished a pamphlet written by members of the Official Republican movement in the early 1970s. We reproduce the pamphlet here as a four part series, lightly edited and with additional photographs and links to the songs and relevant websites. The story of Joe Hill is perhaps better known now than it might have been in early-seventies Ireland. But the story told in the pamphlet is admirably clear and it still serves as an admirable introduction to the life, times and songs of Joe Hill. In the spirit of the Wobblies of early twentieth-century America, who filled the streets and the hearts and dreams of multitudes of American workers from all over the world, we hope that this series will be instructive and entertaining to readers.
Foreword, 2007 (slightly edited)
This booklet was originally produced by Craobh Ui Chadhain (a central Dublin branch of the Official Republican movement) in the early 1970s. It had a fairly small production run and has been out of print for many years.
‘Joe Hill: His Life and Ballads’ was a very important publication for the Republican Movement at the time of its production. The late 1960s and early 1970s were times of great political change and massive political upheaval throughout Ireland. Naturally, therefore, most publications produced by the Republican Movement related to then-current issues, Irish history, or political theory as it related to Ireland.
The Joe Hill booklet was a step outside those parameters. Hill’s entire political life was with the industrial and political struggle in the United States. At a very conservative time in Irish life — immediately after Fianna Fáil’s successful Red Scare against the Labour Party in the 1969 general election, and with John Charles McQuaid still leading the “Church Triumphant” as Catholic Primate — the booklet spelled out clearly the collusion between the bosses and the state in the judicial murder of a Labour activist.
Joe Hill had no Irish roots or particular links to Irish politics. He had peripheral links to the Irish labour struggle in so far as he, and the IWW tradition, influenced and impinged on the political thought of the two leading Irish union activists — Connolly and Larkin. The authors of the booklet cleverly used those links, and indeed the links to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, as literary hooks to engage an Irish audience. Yet at no time was the Irish angle overplayed, or the trade union and labour angle downplayed.
The Workers Party believes that this is an opportune time to reproduce this pamphlet. Across the developed Western world, trade unions and the concept of trade unionism are under sustained ideological attack. Across the developing world, trade unionists are under sustained physical attack from the state apparatus and from paramilitary death squads financed by local oligarchs, multinational conglomerates, and the CIA. It is important that the continuity of struggle is recognised and celebrated.
Joe Hill and the IWW represent all that is best in the struggle for justice for working people and all that is noble in the struggle for a better world.
From Sweden to America
One day In November 1915. Jim Larkin, on entering the building in New York where his office was, found the place full of Federal men. His officers were being raided by the American secret surface. Service. Acting. quickly he got the next train to Chicago, arriving for the funeral of Joe Hill, who had just been executed by a firing squad in Utah for the. alleged murder in Salt Lake City.
Who was Joe Hill? For many years little was known about his early lire. Research over the last number of decades does, however, give us a fairly complete picture to his background.Joe Hill was an immigrant to the United States. He was born in Gävle, Sweden on 7th October 1879. His family name was Hägglund and he was christened Joel Emmanuel Hägglund. He was the fourth of six surviving children of Margareta and her husband Olof Hägglund, a railroad worker. They were both a very religious and a very musical family.
In 1887 Olof Hägglund died from an occupational injury and the children were forced to find work to support the family. The 9-year¬old Joel worked in a rope factory and later as a fireman on a steam-powered crane. Stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis in 1900, Joel moved to Stockholm in search of a cure and worked at odd jobs while receiving radiation treatment and enduring a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck. At this time, he was described as "tall, slim with exceptionally blonde hair and deep blue eyes in a long thin face.
Two years later, in 1902, Margareta Hägglund died after also undergoing a series of operations to cure a persistent back ailment. With her death, the six surviving Hägglund children sold the family home and went their separate ways. Four of them settled elsewhere in Sweden, but the future Joe Hill and his younger brother, Paul, booked their passage to the United States in 1902.
Like many other immigrants, Joe’s arrival in New York was not paved with gold. He worked in various manual jobs in New York. He then moved west and worked in many other areas, including Chicago, at a variety of jobs, including farming, forestry, dock work, and construction.
In about 1906, Joel Hägglund changed his name to Joseph Hillström. Different reasons have been put forward for this change, and the exact reason, or mixture of reasons, may never be known. However, we can see that when, in 1910, he shortened and anglicised his name, that Joseph Hillström led easily to ‘Joe Hill’.
The Wobblies
Joe joined the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World), popularly called the “Wobblies,” in 1910. The Wobblies were a union founded in 1905. They were very revolutionary minded, with the aim of forming One Big Union (O.B.U.) and uniting workers all over the world. Jim Larkin’s I.T.G.W.U. was the Irish branch, as it were.
By 1925, American big business and state authorities had, by both judicial and extrajudicial methods, hounded the Wobblies almost out of existence, and they never regained their former strength.
The Wobblies were involved in the famous “free speech fights,” for which hundreds of them were thrown into jail, and their tactics resembled today’s civil rights campaigns.
As a union, they engaged in strikes, sabotage, pickets, and propaganda — all aimed at an eventual takeover of industry. This was known as Syndicalism.
THE SYNDICALIST IDEA
If the workers took a notion
They could stop all speeding trains,
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation.
Every mine and every mill.
Fleets and armies of the nation.
Will at their command stand still.
Joe Hill
James Connolly and the Wobblies
Whilst in America (1903-1910) James Connolly was greatly influenced by the Wobblies and became involved in some of their great internal controversies. James Larkin, too, in America from 1914 to 1923 was closely associated with them and spoke from many Wobbly platforms.
Joe Hill joined the Wobblies in 1910. In 1911 he fought with the rebel army in the Mexican revolution. In 1912, in the famous San Diego free speech fight, he was badly beaten up and his body was left covered with scars for life.
Joe Hill - the ballad singer
Like thousands of migratory workers, Joe travelled around the U.S. looking for work and wrote songs and parodies on the backs of laundry tickets and envelopes. He set them to popular tunes, and sometimes to religious tunes which he had known from his youth in Sweden. His ballads often dealt with particular strikes.
When strikers on the South Pacific line were being beaten by scabs, Joe wrote the ballad that first made him famous: “Casey Jones - The Union Scab .” Soon it was being sung on picket lines, meetings, and in jails all over the United States.
His songs went into the I.W.W. little red songbook. Soon "The Preacher and the Slave", "A Little Talk with Golden", "Nearer my Job to Thee", "There's Power in a Union" and many more of his compositions were being sung at demonstrations, employment lines in jails and on the job.
They swept America: their humour, satire, tenderness, humanity and rage going right to the hearts of the vast American dispossessed, especially the hordes of migrant labourers, the Spailpín Fánachs of An Oileain Uir (the wandering labourers of the New World).
