Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Man Who Didn't Die

It?s November 19th, 1915. We?re in a courtyard at the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe hill. He stands before them straight and stiff and proud.

?Fire!? he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn?t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, ?ain?t never died.? He lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.

Joe Hill?s story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces ? a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed ? who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action they had to take to overcome their powerful oppressors.

Joe Hill?s story is that of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the Industrial Workers of the World laid the groundwork for mass unionization ,,, ,inspired the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents ? prompted prison and farm labor reforms? and left behind a genuine heritage ? industrial democracy.

Joe Hill?s story is also that of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets. His simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force.

Yov?ve probably heard some of them ? songs like ?The Preacher and the sSave.? You know, the one that promises ?you will eat bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky ? Work and pray, live on hay. You?ll get pie in the sky when you die.?

The cause of radical unionism that Joe Hill devoted his life to was lost a long time ago. Yet Joe Hill?s fiery words and deeds, his courage and his sacrifices, continue to inspire political, labor and civil liberties activists.

They still sing his songs, and echo his spirit of protest and militancy ? his demand for true equality ? share his fervent belief in solidarity? use tactics first used by Hill and his comrades.

Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, working at a variety of jobs as he made his way across the country to San Diego. As he traveled, he translated into compelling lyrics the hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers.

In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many ?free speech fights? waged by the IWW against attempts by municipal authorities around the country to silence the streetcorner oratory that was a key part of the IWW?s organizing strategy.

Not long afterward Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City, where he helped lead a construction workers strike and began helping to organize another free speech fight.

Within a month, hill was arrested on charges of shooting to death a grocer and his son in a botched robbery attempt. Immediately branded guilty by the local newspapers and authorities, Hill was convicted and executed on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Joe Hill?s body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero?s funeral. The ashes were divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had declared that ?I don?t want to be caught dead in Utah,?

Even in death, Joe Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago, was seized by postal inspectors. They invoked the espionage act, passed after the United States entered World War I that year. The act made it illegal to mail any material that advocated, quote, treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States. A law, in other words, that only a George W. Bush could love.

The postal authorities apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of Hill on the frongt of the envelope. ?Joe Hill,? it said, ?murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915."

This is Dick Meister.