culture

An excerpt from the novel Lonesome Travelers

“I’ll take the shooting. I’m used to that. I’ve been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it again.”

—Joe Hill

I was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund but more commonly I was also known as Joseph Hillström. But to my people I am known as Joe Hill. Always will be. Born in Sweden, 1879. Killed, some say, in the unholy state of Utah, by the Starvation Army, 1915. Still, here I am. Very revealing. My popularity? As it is, I attribute it to the value of my message. Do you know my friend Fred Hampton? He said, “You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill a revolution…you can jail a liberator but you can’t jail liberation.” I wish I’da said that. But I got a lot of good ones myself, and I begrudge nothing from my good comrades.

That is what I said, about getting shot, to the judge in Salt Lake who sentenced me to death because I was a revolutionary. That wasn’t the crime, it rarely is. Subterfuge is the greatest ally of the oppressors. Smoke and mirrors. Carrots and sticks. Illusions. Truth the greatest aim of the revolution. The truth of the Unity of all life. Forget that and risk the future. Betray the revolution. Those who control the narrative try to drown out the signal. Power is very corrosive. The replacement they offer is plentiful without being satisfying, profits out of balance. A comrade, regardless of the propaganda, is an individual dedicated to Unity and charged to work toward the elimination of all needless want.

You know what I have? A song in my heart. Each chorus built of individual voices, brought together for a higher purpose. A guitar has multiple strings which work together to strum. A ballad of love a lament of martyrdom. If one knows no words they can always hum. In time the words will reemerge to make manifest.

A song is repeated more than any speech. It gets stuck in the head. It trans-mutates. It triggers. Triggering is the full focus of the true artist, who is by necessity a subversive. A revolutionary. A true artist is so far along the trail they are as likely to be hated as lauded. Revolution requires time.

My friend Thomas Merton says, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Both important pastimes. Sometimes the most productive thing is to pass the time.

A lot of my songs are parodies of the songs of the Starvation Army. A counter-point. And which are remembered? Mine are. I made Casey Jones a union scab. I pointed out the irrelevancy of pie-in-the-sky on an empty stomach. A karmic I-owe-you dishonored.

But the act of creation allows one to change a thing into another, to trans-mutate. For all intents and relevant purposes. There is nothing but change. Stability is an illusion. There is the past, the future, the now, the then, and the ideal. Some look in the past to find the ideal, some to the future. And they will fight over it. Fight over something which isn’t there, which exists only in the boundaries of the mind. Fluid. Even the ideal of the past never really existed. We almost always remember better the good. Or envision it. But sometimes you have to look at the bad. There is no other way to address it. Ignoring it with your head in the sand, digging down to make a hole, a home, albeit temporary, is rarely the best option. It is best to have an ideal. A good one. Always a good one. The best. Something to live up to.

I always tried to make friends wherever I went. It was easy for me, in a way, because I brought the music. Still, I was poor, an itinerant worker. So were my people, my audience. Listeners, backup singers. I joined the IWW, the Wobblies, the One Big Union. I cartooned for their newspaper. Our newspaper. And I wrote songs printed in their Little Red Songbook. Our Little Red Songbook. A songbook for all the people. Many printings, still sought after today.

I was an immigrant. A Swedish speaker. But I learned English as I traveled the country and became an artist in a new culture. But we were hated. By some. Loved and aided by others, those disposed to Love.

When a town, controlled by the robber barons of the local industry (and were there ever a shortage of such!), declared the union illegal, when they pledged to jail all unionists, the call went out through the IWW and the Wobblies surged to town. We filled the jails. We overwhelmed the system. We broke them when they tried to break us. We stripped them of their only dear possession: money. And if they would not share it they would lose some by protecting it, watch it drain away. But they took solace they were still not sharing! And what is money but an imaginary marker of time, time transferred from the worker to the robber barons so they can stockpile other people’s time. Think of themselves as timekeepers. Regulators. Lords. Leave the time to their heirs. Build shrines to their own glory as many starve. We would not allow such oppression to stand unchallenged.

I could not be there, but in 1919 the city of Seattle stopped for five days in a general strike of fellow workers. Wages frozen by years of what they called a “Great” war, an innovation on the old, the authorities were content to starve the workers to feed the war. And the workers rose up. It was part of the larger struggle, same as the Diggers on Saint George’s Hill in 1649. Two years later, in 1921, the sailors joined the people in Kronstadt in a rebellion against the Soviet government because they also failed to feed the people, having established a new class structure to replace the old, as the revolution spun. Out of control.

I provided anthems of resistance which reverberate through time.

I observe, report, pass it on. Pass it on.

The world is divided between the haves and the have-nots. Their numbers are not equitable. The larger class serves the smaller. The larger class makes possible the luxury of the smaller. The system functions to serve the smaller class. They control it. It is sold as the natural order.

Many are employed as servants, but over time things do change. While today there are still many servants employed by the leisure class, more and more workers toil on factory floors. Construction. Building the future worker’s state under the nose of the taskmasters.

Times change. The hermit is on the wane. Hermitages. Men (men only for it is a sexist trade, as men are not employed in whore-houses, to each opposite work) employed by the manor born to live in a shack (a hermitage) on the outskirts of the estate. Near the road in. To be seen, but not heard. Split from the herd. Kept isolated. Alienated from his fellow workers as well as his product. What is the product? Possession. Alienated even from human touch. That is one way to impede the spread of the resistance, One Big Union.

But no more – they won’t even let a man alone!

Now one must be cramped alone together, closed in, alone in the crowd, still alienated from the fruits of their own labor. Revolution. Revolution. Revolution.

I was arrested.

I was not charged as a revolutionary, though, as I say, that was the true charge. It was a matter of the honor of a good woman.

So when they asked, and they asked, “Did you kill that man? Did not he shoot you and wound you?” In various formulations I said, “I am innocent of this charge. I have robbed no store and shot no shopkeep. My injury is honest; as am I.” For this was a different matter which were none of their concern and risked the reputation of a fine lady. And I had earned this gunshot wound piercing my lung in order to protect her honor, as I would face the next.

I would not tell them the truth. The story of the triangle. The woman. The other man. Which was nowhere near the shopkeep’s end.

The boy eyewitness, after brought to look at me, said, “That’s not him at all!” But he changed his song when they reasoned with him. Though I had no motive. And there had been no robbery. And I was not there.

I will tell you, brothers and sisters, to not waste time mourning my body but to busy yourselves organizing the greater resistance.

I told my friend Big Bill Haywood, “Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t wish to be caught dead in Utah.” He told me he would arrange to have my ashes divided up into 600 small packets to be mailed to union locals around the world.

I walked with them to the yard.

When the man shouted, “Ready… Aim…”

I shouted, “Fire! Go on and Fire!”

Last Will of Joe Hill

My will is easy to decide,

For there is nothing to divide.

My kind don’t need to fuss and moan —

“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Ah, If I could choose,

I would to ashes it reduce,

And let the merry breezes blow

My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then

Would come to life and bloom again.

This is my last and final will.

Good luck to all of you.

—Joe Hill, 1915