The Songwriter Who Said Don't Mourn, Organize

Joe Hill is one of the most famous martyrs in the history of the American labour movement — a wandering songwriter who was executed by firing squad on evidence that would never convict him today, and who faced his death with a defiance so complete that his last words became a rallying cry sung around the world for over a hundred years.

He was born Joel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, in 1879, into a musical, religious family. In 1902 he emigrated to America, chasing the promise of a better life — and found, instead, the brutal reality of an immigrant labourer’s existence in the early 20th century. He drifted across the country as a hobo, riding the freight trains, taking backbreaking work in mines, docks, and lumber camps, and seeing first-hand the savage exploitation of working people. Somewhere along the way, the naive idealist became a fighter.

The Horror

Around 1910, Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World — the IWW, the radical union whose members were nicknamed the “Wobblies,” who dreamed of uniting all workers into “One Big Union.” And Joe Hill found his weapon: not a fist, but a song. He had a gift for writing catchy, funny, furious songs about the life of the working man, setting new lyrics to popular tunes and hymns so that any worker could sing them on a picket line. Published in the IWW’s little “Red Song Book,” his songs — “The Preacher and the Slave,” “The Rebel Girl,” “Casey Jones the Union Scab” — spread across the country and made him the troubadour of the labour movement, a voice that turned the anger of the exploited into music.

This made him powerful. And it made him dangerous — to the mine owners, the “copper bosses,” and the industrialists who hated and feared the IWW.

In 1913, Hill came to Utah for work. And in January 1914, in Salt Lake City, a grocer named John Morrison and his son were shot dead in their shop by two masked men. That same night, Joe Hill turned up at a doctor’s door with a gunshot wound. He said he’d been shot in a quarrel over a woman — and, crucially, he refused to explain further or name the woman involved, apparently to protect her reputation. That was enough. Hill was arrested and charged with the murders.

The case against him was entirely circumstantial. No one identified him as the killer. The murder weapon was never conclusively tied to him. The main fact against him was his own gunshot wound and his refusal to explain where he’d really been that night — a silence he maintained to the end, insisting that a man should be presumed innocent and that he shouldn’t have to prove his alibi. His supporters were convinced he was being railroaded: that Utah’s authorities and business interests wanted to destroy a prominent, troublemaking IWW agitator, and had found their excuse. As the Utah History Encyclopedia itself later concluded, under today’s laws, Joe Hill would not have been executed on the evidence presented at his trial.

But in 1914, he was convicted of first-degree murder. Given the choice of how to die — Utah offered hanging or firing squad — Hill reportedly chose the firing squad, saying he’d been shot at plenty of times and wasn’t afraid of it.

His conviction ignited an international firestorm. Joe Hill became world news. A massive campaign erupted to save him. The IWW organised letter-writing drives; tens of thousands of Australian Wobblies petitioned the governor; resolutions poured in from Britain and across Europe. Even the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, personally intervened twice, asking Utah’s governor for a reprieve and a retrial. The governor refused. The execution was set for the 19th of November, 1915.

THE MODERN RELIC In his final hours, Joe Hill wrote his way into immortality. He sent a telegram to Big Bill Haywood, the leader of the IWW, with a message that would outlive him by a century. It read: “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!”

“Don’t mourn — organize.” It was the perfect distillation of everything he stood for: even facing his own death, he told his comrades not to weep for him, but to turn their grief into action, into solidarity, into the fight. He followed it with a second telegram of dark, defiant humour, asking to have his body taken out of the state for burial, because — as he put it — “I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.” And in his cell he wrote a final poem, his “Last Will,” giving instructions for his body to be cremated and scattered, because “my body? Oh, if I could choose, I would to ashes it reduce, and let the merry breezes blow my dust to where some flowers grow.”

At dawn on the 19th of November 1915, Joe Hill was strapped to a chair in the yard of the Utah state prison, and a paper target was pinned over his heart. Five riflemen took aim. And in the last account of his defiance, when the sheriff began to give the commands and there was a hesitation, Joe Hill himself called out the order — telling the firing squad, in effect, to get on with it. “Yes, aim!” he is said to have shouted. “Fire!” He commanded his own execution, refusing to let his killers flinch, controlling even the moment of his death. Then the volley came, and Joe Hill was dead at thirty-six.

But he had promised he wouldn’t stay dead in Utah — and he didn’t. His body was taken to Chicago, where a colossal funeral drew thousands, singing his songs. He was cremated, and, following his wishes, his ashes were divided into small packets and mailed to IWW locals in every American state (except Utah) and to supporters on every inhabited continent — and on May Day, 1916, they were scattered to the winds all around the world, so that Joe Hill was, quite literally, spread across the whole earth.

The relic is his songs and his legend, and they never died. Joe Hill became the subject of one of the most famous protest songs ever written — “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” in which the dead organiser appears to tell the singer, “I never died,” and “where working men defend their rights, it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.” Sung by Paul Robeson, by Joan Baez at Woodstock, and at labour rallies for generations, it made his defiant promise come true. The penniless immigrant they shot in a prison yard for a murder they couldn’t prove turned his own death into a song — and a hundred years on, he is still, exactly as he wanted, alive wherever people organise and fight.

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