Labor Day and the Spirit of Joe Hill | Common Dreams

Labor Day and the Spirit of Joe Hill | Common Dreams

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Published on Monday, September 5, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Labor Day and the Spirit of Joe Hill
Joe Hill, workers' martyr, was executed by firing squad nearly a century ago, but his message lives on: 'Don't mourn – organise!'
by Clancy Sigal

l eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die

– "The Preacher and the Slave", a parody hymn written by rebel singer and labour icon Joe Hill

Anyone who is a fan of Billy Bragg, as I am, or Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie or the sixties protest singer Phil Ochs knows that radical America's greatest songwriter-educator Joe Hill is still alive in the young-in-heart on this besieged Labor Day. [IWW hero Joe Hill.] IWW hero Joe Hill.

Joe, a Swedish immigrant and wandering troubadour-troublemaker, was a "Wobbly", an agitating member of the One Big Union, the red flag International Workers of the World, a harum-scarum, mad-as-hell, happy-in-fellowship bunch of hoboes and gypsy workingmen who scared the pants off business leaders, pious church-goers, police chiefs, governors and all right-thinking citizens in the early part of the last century.

As a just published, terrific biography of Hill, The Man Who Never Died, by William Adler, makes clear yet again, Joe Hillström (né Joel Hägglund, his birth name) was framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah, strapped into a chair and shot by a firing squad.