I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night ...



November 15, 1915 USA: IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) labor organizer, folk-poet and songwriter, Joe Hill (Joseph Hillstrom), was murdered by state firing squad in Utah. Hill has become the subject of numerous songs, plays, and books, and some of his songs have been available continuously in the IWW’s Little Red Song Book, now in its 36th edition.

Utah authorities and copper bosses executed Hill for his organizing with the IWW – despite an international movement to save him.

Hill was convicted of killing a grocer and his son, even though the bullets were not from Hill’s revolver and no one identified him as the murderer. His last words:

“Don’t mourn, organize!”

Poet Alfred Hays wrote a ballad in Hill’s memory:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe you’re ten years dead,”
“I never died,” says he.

Longtime labor organizer for the radical IWW (known collectively as 'the Wobblies') and writer of union songs, Hill became a martyr upon his execution. Efforts by President Woodrow Wilson, the government of Sweden, and many prominent Americans (such as Helen Keller) to get him a new trial had failed.

Joe Hill's body was rushed from the prison yard in Utah to Chicago, where Wobblies staged a funeral (pictured above) attended by more than 30,000 mourners.

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