In the nearly 75 years since his execution by a Utah firing squad, Joe Hill has been endowed by legend, if not historical fact, as a martyr whose blood nourished America's labor movement.
Hill himself gave his posthumous career as the working man's saint a boost with memorable, sardonic wit. "I am going to get a new trial or die trying," he said after his June 28, 1914, conviction in the slayings of Salt Lake grocer John G. Morrison and his 17-year-old son, Arling.Even on the eve of his Nov. 19, 1915, execution, the 36-year-old International Workers of the World songwriter and organizer couldn't resist a sly slap at the state.
"I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning - organize!," he wrote in a farewell to IWW General Secretary William "Big Bill" Haywood. Then, he added: "It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah."
Hill's ashes, placed in envelopes and distributed to IWW locals in every state but Utah, were released to the winds on May Day, 1916, a symbolic gesture that helped propel the IWW, or "Wobblies," to 100,000 members in 1923.
By the late 1930s, however, IWW's call for "One Big Union" and a socialist order was ringing hollow as thousands scrambled to the banners of the more moderate American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Today, the Chicago-based IWW seems a historical anachronism claiming 1,000 members. The AFL-CIO, which evolved from the early labor movement the Wobblies once led, boasts 15 million members.
"I would imagine that if Joe Hill was alive today, he would say the same thing as he did 75 years ago, basically, `Don't agonize, organize,' " says Utah AFL-CIO President Ed Mayne, whose union has proclaimed 1990 the "Year of Joe Hill."
The Joe Hill Organizing Committee, composed of local union representatives, historians and community leaders, is planning a variety of activities to commemorate Hill's life and death.
"We're honoring Joe Hill, the man - organizer, poet and songwriter - and his contributions to the human race and workers of his time," Mayne said.
In addition to art and music shows, a high school writing contest and a Nov. 15-17 labor history conference at the University of Utah, the group plans a Nov. 19 candlelight vigil at Sugarhouse Park - where Hill's state prison execution site once stood.
John G. Morrison won't be paying any homage. The grandson and namesake of the grocer killed during the robbery by two masked robbers - and son of the only eyewitness - is sure Hill was guilty.
"No one's going to make him innocent by propaganda, I hope," said Morrison, whose father, Merlin Morrison, died in 1983. "There was absolutely no doubt in my father's mind about what he saw."
However, while the then 13-year-old boy testified that Hill was the same height and build as one of the killers, he was unable to conclusively identify Hill as the perpetrator.
In the end, it didn't matter. Prosecutors convinced the 3rd District Court jury that a chain of circumstantial evidence was enough. Perhaps more damning was Hill's refusal to offer more than a cursory explanation of a gunshot wound he sustained the night of the Jan. 10, 1914, robbery.
Merlin Morrison testified that before his older brother, Arling, was gunned down, he shot one of the assailants. Hill said he had been wounded in the chest during a fight over a woman, but would give no details.
"The evidence was strong enough that the jury system, and all the people who were alive and could do something about it at the time, were convinced he was guilty," said Morrison, 56.
Morrison insists that Hill had a history of trouble with the law. The organizer was arrested by San Pedro, Calif., police in June 1913 on suspicion he had robbed a streetcar. However, he was released when no one could identify him as the holdup man.
Later that summer, Hill left California for Chicago, stopping in Utah to earn money for the rest of the trip. But Hill lost his job in Park City's mines during an unspecified illness that hospitalized him for two weeks. When arrested Jan. 13, Hill was staying with Swedish friends in suburban Murray. Hill had emigrated in 1902 from Sweden, where he was born Joel Hagglund.
Mayne, while sympathizing with the Morrison family's feelings, is convinced Hill was railroaded, possibly with the blessings of "copper barons" worried about the IWW's efforts to organize mine workers.
"I think that in today's justice system, he would never have been convicted," Mayne said. "But (the Morrisons) have to live with their convictions, and we will with ours."
Brian Barnard, a Salt Lake attorney and member of the Joe Hill committee, acknowledges he has some nagging doubts about Hill's innocence but says Hill's trial was a travesty.
"My focus, and this is my lawyer training coming out, is whether guilty or not, he didn't get a fair trial," Barnard said. "There's always going to be questions whether he was guilty, but not on whether he got a fair trial."
In addition to the lack of positive identification, the trial was beset by what Barnard says were serious errors warranting reversal, or at least a new trial.
For example, Prosecutor E.O. Leatherwood was allowed, in his concluding remarks to the jury, to say that Hill's failure to testify imputed guilt - a maneuver that trampled the guarantee that no presumption of guilt can be attached to a defendant's refusal to testify.
But perhaps the most controversial error occurred when trial Judge M.L. Ritchie's instructions to the jury ignored Utah Supreme Court rulings that circumstantial evidence must be considered as a chain, no stronger than its weakest link.
Ritchie told the panel to consider the evidence as a whole. Inexplicably, Hill's attorneys failed to raise the issue in their unsuccessful May 28, 1915, appeal.
Over that summer, Hill's cause drew international attention. Union sympathizers wrote thousands of protest letters, and President Woodrow Wilson's pleas for mercy were echoed by the Swedish ambassador and Helen Keller, among others.
On Nov. 17, in the second of two telegram appeals to Gov. William Spry, Wilson urged "a thorough reconsideration" of the case. The Utah governor responded by accusing the president of meddling.
"Your interference in the case may have elevated it to an undue importance," Spry wrote, insisting Hill's case had had "more careful and painstaking consideration . . . than any other like case in the history of the state."
Shortly before 8 a.m. the next day, a five-member firing squad shredded the paper target pinned over Hill's heart. The author of such stirring IWW songs as "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones - The Union Scab" was dead.