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- A talented musician, Hill began writing folk-songs about labor reform, encouraging people everywhere to organize by joining the IWW. His tunes used inspiring lyrics to unite workers against what he called the injustice of corrupt and greedy business owners.
history.byu.edu/joe-hill
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In October 1902, when nearly 23, Joel and his brother Paul Elias Hägglund (1877–1955) emigrated to the United States. Hill became an itinerant laborer, moving from New York City to Cleveland, and eventually to the west coast. He was in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake.
- Early Life
- Organizing and Writing
- Trial and Execution
- Legacy
- Sources
Born in Sweden in 1879, Joe Hill was the son of a railroad worker who encouraged his family to play music. Young Joe learned to play the violin. When his father died of work-related injuries, Joe had to leave school and begin working in a rope factory. As a teenager, a bout of tuberculosis led him to seek treatment in Stockholm, where he recovered....
Going by the name Joseph Hillstrom, he became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World(IWW). The union, known widely as The Wobblies, was viewed as a radical faction by the public and the mainstream labor movement. Yet it had a devoted following, and Hillstrom, who began calling himself Joe Hill, became an ardent organizer for the union. H...
On January 10, 1914, a former policeman, John Morrison, was attacked in his grocery store in Salt Lake City, Utah. In an apparent robbery, Morrison and his son were shot and killed. Later the same night, Joe Hill, nursing a bullet wound to his chest, presented himself at a local doctor. He claimed he had been shot in a quarrel over a woman and refu...
Hill's body was given a funeral in Utah. His coffin was then taken to Chicago, where a service was conducted by the IWW in a large hall. Hill's coffin was draped in a red flag, and newspaper reports noted bitterly that many of the mourners seemed to be immigrants. Union orators denounced the Utah authorities, and performers sang some of Hill's unio...
"Hill, Joe 1879-1915." American Decades, edited by Judith S. Baughman, et al., vol. 2: 1910-1919, Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library.Thompson, Bruce E.R. "Hill, Joe (1879–1914)." The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment, edited by Mary Jo Poole, Greenhaven Press, 2006, pp. 136-137. Gale Virtual Reference Library."Joe Hill." Encyclopedia of World Biography, vol. 37, Gale, 2017.Hill, Joe. "The Preacher and the Slave." World War I and the Jazz Age, Primary Source Media, 1999. American Journey.Oct 3, 2024 · Joe Hill was a Swedish-born American songwriter and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); his execution for an alleged robbery-murder made him a martyr and folk hero in the radical American labour movement.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
To what extent did Joe Hill’s involvement in labor unions and his status in labor unions influence the perception of his trial? Why was there such an outpouring of support and opposition surround Joe Hill's trial?
Nov 19, 2015 · His legacy lives on not only in his songs, but also in his vision of a labor movement that organizes across borders, empowers workers to act on their own behalf, and stands for a better world: If the workers take a notion, they can stop all speeding trains;
Oct 29, 2021 · Since his death, Hill’s face and songs have risen to mythic status in the labor movement. His final words — “Don’t waste any time mourning, organize!” — now read like sacred secular text. But amid the hero worship and iconography, the actual man was lost.
Nov 19, 2015 · There is power in a union. Hill believed in the power of a united working class, of organizing to fight the system, not other people. He joined the IWW because it was open to all workers — people of color, women, the un-skilled and foreigners, who were excluded from the AFL at that time.
