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Joe Hill (October 7, 1879 – November 19, 1915), born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, [1] was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, familiarly called the "Wobblies"). [2]
Convicted of murder on meager evidence, the singing Wobbly Joe Hill is sentenced on July 8, 1914 to be executed in Utah. A native of Sweden who immigrated to the U.S. in 1879, Joe Hill...
Nov 19, 2022 · Joe Hill — the Wobbly composer of revolutionary songs, the writer of revolutionary poems, an organizer on the docks of San Pedro, just thirty-six years old — was gone. Joe Hill to some, Joe Hillstrom to others, was murdered that morning in Salt Lake City, a victim of Utah’s authorities — or was it the copper bosses?
Joe HIll. A songwriter, itinerant laborer, and union organizer, Joe Hill became famous around the world after a Utah court convicted him of murder. Even before the international campaign to have his conviction reversed, however, Joe Hill was well known in hobo jungles, on picket lines and at workers' rallies as the author of popular labor songs ...
- 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.May 19, 2016 · Joe Hill was a satirical lyricist, who used wit and fire to raise the big issues facing workers at the beginning of the twentieth century before the Second World War. The issues he tackled may have been shaped by the time and can be understood in their historical context.
Sep 6, 2017 · Joe Hill is a folk hero troubadour of the early 20th-century American labor movement, a Swedish-born itinerant worker/union organizer/agitator who died by firing squad in Utah for a murder he likely didn’t commit.
