Part Two: Salt Lake City
Joe arrived in Utah in 1913. His arrival there could not have been more ill-timed. It is not known for sure if he was there as a Wobbly organiser, but he carried his little red membership card. At this time the Utah Copper Co. and Bingham Construction Co. were hiring gunmen and scabs to keep out union organisers. Gunmen were employed to break up I.W.W. meetings in Salt Lake City and the State considered mere membership as virtually a crime in itself.
Governor William Spry, a Mormon, was for clearing up the state and weeping out lawless elements including "IWW agitators". There were no doubts about Spry's anti-labour sentiments. it was he who vetoed a bill introduced to make a coroner's inquest obligatory in the case of anyone who died in the mines.
ARRESTED
Joe failed to get a job. He was already blacklisted by most employers all down the West Coast. Then fate caught up with Joe. He was arrested and charged with the murder of a grocer, John Morrison and his seventeen-year-old son Alving. Morrison, an ex-policeman, had been subject to threats and attacks several times before. It looked as if someone was determined to get Morrison for some reason or another. Enigmatically enough he is reported to have once said - "I have lived to regret that I ever was a member of the force."
Fourteen-year-old Merlin Morrison witnessed the killing. He said two men were involved. Just at closing hour they rushed in shooting Morrison and exclaiming "We've got you now." The elder brother seized a gun and shot before he died. One ran out shouting, "Oh God! I'm shot!"
Later that night a Dr. Frank McHugh reported to the police that he had treated one, Joe Hill, for a gunshot wound in his left lung that same night. The doctor noticed a revolver in his patient's shoulder holster. The police didn’t seem to know who Joe Hill was. Three days after the twelve suspects had been arrested, the police burst into Hill’s room, where he lay in a state of unconsciousness. Despite this, and without any legal representation, a bullet grazed his shoulder and went right through his hand.
The bosses (operating through the state police) had got their man: a card-carrying Wobbly. What more could they look for? Without any further ado, the other suspects were dismissed.
The Trial
Joe Hill declared himself innocent and said he had received the bullet wound in a quarrel over a married woman. He stuck to this story throughout the trial but refused to compromise the married woman by disclosing her identity. Beyond this, he did little else to defend himself. In the middle of the case, he dramatically fired his lawyers, and the I.W.W. hired the famous labour attorney, Judge Orrin N. Hilton.
Neither Merlin Morrison nor any other witness succeeded in identifying Hill as the killer. There were two bullet holes in his coat, four inches above the corresponding bullet holes in his chest. His defence claimed that the reason for this was that he had his hands above his head, thus stretching the coat, and that it was in this position that he was shot.
However, one might say that while Joe lay in critical condition for five months, awaiting his trial and not in the prison hospital but in a solitary cell, his case was decided. The local papers called for his blood, published his "criminal record," and scandalously vilified the man before he even went to court. Anyway, he was a Wobbly, wasn’t he? What more proof could you want? Wasn’t that a crime in itself?
The judge's summing up, however, was completely at variance with established Utah custom as far as it concerned the law of circumstantial evidence. According to the law, to be convicted a man's guilt must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. There was very definitely great ground for reasonable doubt. But the jury found him guilty, and Judge Ritchie sentenced him with the maximum penalty: death.
Attorney Hilton appealed against this sentence and despite Joe's protest on account of the great expense involved in going further with the case, the I.W.W. determined to appeal to the Supreme Court.
