Joe Hill killed by US GOV

1. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Killed by US GOV

2. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Hill, Joe (1879 - 1915) Joel Hägglund from Gävle emigrated to the United States, where he joined the trade union movement. He wrote songs under the name "Joe Hill", which immediately became popular. In 1914, Joe Hill was charged with the murder of a former police officer. Hill refused and the lawsuit had a huge impact in the press. The US president and famous cultural figures demanded a new trial. Hill was eventually sentenced to death. By the time Joe Hill was executed on November 19, 1915, he had already reached iconic status. He was seen as a martyr by the labor movement.

3. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Joe Hill bornOctober7, 1879 and dead November 19, 1915, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky), songs, The Tramp, There Is Power in a Union, The Rebel Girl, and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.

4. Joe Hill 1879 – 1915 Last Will His last will, which was eventually set to music by Ethel Raim, founder of the group The Pennywhistlers, requested a cremation and reads: My will is easy to decide For there is nothing to divide My kin don't need to fuss and moan Moss does not cling to rolling stone 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 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

5. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 In 1914, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men. The same evening, Hill arrived at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound, and briefly mentioned a fight over a woman. He refused to explain further, even after he was accused of the grocery store murders on the basis of his injury. Hill was convicted of the murders in a controversial trial. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency from high-profile figures and workers' organizations, Hill was executed in November 1915. After his death, he was memorialized by several folk songs. His life and death have inspired books and poetry. The identity of the woman and the rival who supposedly caused Hill's injury, though frequently speculated upon, remained mostly conjecture for nearly a century. William M. Adler's 2011 biography of Hill presents information about a possible alibi, which was never introduced at the trial.

6. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 According to Adler, Hill and his friend and countryman Otto Appelquist were rivals for the attention of 20-year-old Hilda Erickson, a member of the family with whom the two men were lodging. In a recently discovered letter, Erickson confirmed her relationship with the two men and the rivalry between them. The letter indicates that when she first discovered Hill was injured, he explained to her that Appelquist had shot him, apparently out of jealousy.

7. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Early life Joel Emmanuel Hägglund was born 1879 in Gävle, a city in the province of Gästrikland, Sweden. He was the third child in a family of nine, where three children died young. His father, Olof, worked as a conductor on the Gefle-Dala railway line. Olof born year1846 and dead year1887 died at the age of 41, and his death meant economic disaster for the family. Joe's mother Margareta Catharina born year1844 and dead1902 did however, succeed in keeping the family together until she died when Joel was in his early twenties. The Hägglund family home still stands in Gävle at the address Nedre Bergsgatan 28, in Gamla Stan, the Old Town. As of 2011 it houses a museum and the Joe Hill-gården, which hosts cultural events.

8. Joe Hill-gården N. Bergsgatan 28 Gävle

9. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 In his late teens-early twenties, Joel fell seriously ill with skin and glandular tuberculosis, and underwent extensive treatment in Stockholm. In October 1902, when nearly 23, Joel and his brother Paul Elias Hägglund born year1877and dead year1955 immigrated to the United States. Hill became an itinerant laborer, moving from New York City to Cleveland, and eventually to the west coast. He was in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake. San Francisco Earthquake of 1906: Ruins in vicinity of Post and Grant Avenue. Looking northeast.

12. San Francisco

13. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 By this time using the name Joe or Joseph Hillstrom (possibly because of anti-union blacklisting), he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies around 1910, when working on the docks in San Pedro, California. In late 1910 he wrote a letter to the IWW newspaper Industrial Worker, identifying himself as a member of the IWW local chapter in Portland, Oregon. He rose in the IWW organization and traveled widely, organizing workers under the IWW banner, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He shortened his pseudonym to "Joe Hill" as the pen-name under which his songs, cartoons and other writings appeared.

14. Record that was recorded by the band Mora Träsk in 1979 when Länsmuseet Gävleborg had a Joe Hill exhibition in memory of his birth a hundred years ago. Länsmuseet Gävleborg

15. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 His songs frequently appropriated familiar melodies from popular songs and hymns of the time. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky", which appeared in his song "The Preacher and the Slave" (a parody of the hymn "In the Sweet By-and-By"). Other notable songs written by Hill include "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab". Pie in the sky The phrase is originally from the song “The Preacher and the Slave” (1911) by Swedish-American labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill (1879–1915), which he wrote as a parody of the Salvation Army hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” (published 1868). The song criticizes the Salvation Army for focusing on people’s salvation rather than on their material needs. 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.

16. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 By this time using the name Joe or Joseph Hillstrom (possibly because of anti-union blacklisting), he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies around 1910, when working on the docks in San Pedro, California. In late 1910 he wrote a letter to the IWW newspaper Industrial Worker, identifying himself as a member of the IWW local chapter in Portland, Oregon. He rose in the IWW organization and traveled widely, organizing workers under the IWW banner, writing political songs and satirical poems, and making speeches. He shortened his pseudonym to "Joe Hill" as the pen-name under which his songs, cartoons and other writings appeared. His songs frequently appropriated familiar melodies from popular songs and hymns of the time. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky", which appeared in his song "The Preacher and the Slave" (a parody of the hymn "In the Sweet By-and-By"). Other notable songs written by Hill include "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab".

17. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Trial As an itinerant worker, Hill moved around the west, hopping freight trains, going from job to job. By the end of 1913, he was working as a laborer at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah, not far from Salt Lake City. On January 10, 1914, John G. Morrison and his son Arling were killed in their Salt Lake City grocery store by two armed intruders masked in red bandanas. The police first thought it was a crime of revenge, for nothing had been stolen and the elder Morrison had been a police officer, possibly creating many enemies. On the same evening, Joe Hill appeared on the doorstep of a local doctor, with a bullet wound through the left lung. Hill said that he had been shot in an argument over a woman, whom he refused to name. The doctor reported that Hill was armed with a pistol. Considering Morrison's past as a police officer, several men he had arrested were at first considered suspects

18. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 12 people were arrested in the case before Hill was arrested and charged with the murder. A red bandana was found in Hill's room. The pistol purported to be in Hill's possession at the doctor's office was not found. Hill resolutely denied that he was involved in the robbery and killing of Morrison. He said that when he was shot, his hands were over his head, and the bullet hole in his coat—four inches below the exit wound in his back—seemed to support this claim. Hill did not testify at his trial, but his lawyers pointed out that four other people were treated for bullet wounds in Salt Lake City that same night, and that the lack of robbery and Hill's unfamiliarity with Morrison left him with no motive. The prosecution, for its part, produced a dozen eyewitnesses who said that the killer resembled Hill, including 13-year-old Merlin Morrison, the victims' son, and a brother, who upon first seeing Hill said, "That's not him at all" but later identified him as the murderer. The jury took just a few hours to find him guilty of murder. An appeal to the Utah Supreme Court was unsuccessful. Orrin N. Hilton, the lawyer representing Hill during the appeal, declared: "The main thing the state had on Hill was that he was a Wobbly and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the IWW out of the trial, but the press fastened it upon him.

19. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 In a letter to the court, Hill continued to deny that the state had a right to inquire into the origins of his wound, leaving little doubt that the judges would affirm the conviction. Chief Justice Daniel Straup wrote that his unexplained wound was "a distinguishing mark", and that "the defendant may not avoid the natural and reasonable inferences of remaining silent. In an article for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Hill wrote: "Owing to the prominence of Mr. Morrison, there had to be a 'goat’ a scapegoat and the undersigned being, as they thought, a friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, an IWW, had no right to live anyway, and was therefore duly selected to be 'the goat’ The case turned into a major media event. President Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller (the blind and deaf author and fellow-IWW member), the Swedish ambassador and the Swedish public all became involved in a bid for clemency. It generated international union attention, and critics charged that the trial and conviction were unfair. More recently, Utah Phillips considered Joe Hill to have been a political prisoner who was executed for his political agitation through songwriting.

20. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 In a biography published in 2011, William M. Adler concludes that Hill was probably innocent of murder, but also suggests that Hill came to see himself as worth more to the labor movement as a dead martyr than he was alive, and that this understanding may have influenced his decisions not to testify at the trial and subsequently to spurn all chances of a pardon. Adler reports that evidence pointed to early police suspect Frank Z. Wilson, and cites Hilda Erickson's letter, which states that Hill had told her he had been shot by her former fiance.

21. Joe Hill 1879 – 1915 (was executed November 19) Joe Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915 at Utah's Sugar House Prison. When Deputy Shettler, who led the firing squad, called out the sequence of commands preparatory to firing Ready, aim, Hill shouted, Fire go on and fire! That same day, a dynamite bomb was discovered at the Tarrytown estate of John D. Archbold, President of the Standard Oil Company. Police theorized the bomb was planted by anarchists and IWW radicals as a protest against Hill's execution. The bomb was discovered by a gardener, who found four sticks of dynamite, weighing a pound each, half hidden in a rut in a driveway fifty feet from the front entrance of the residence. The dynamite sticks were bound together by a length of wire, fitted with percussion caps, and wrapped with a piece of paper matching the color of the driveway, a path used by Archbold in going to or from his home by automobile. The bomb was later defused by police.

22. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 Diagram of the execution of Joe Hill on November 19, 1915 Just prior to his execution, Hill had written to Bill Haywood, an IWW leader, saying, Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize, 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. Hunter S. Thompson asserted that Joe's last words were "Don't mourn. Organize.

23. Cartoon by Joe Hill: The Food Question, One Big Union Monthly, November 1919

24. Joe Hill 1879 - 1915 The Swedish socialist leader Ture Nerman born 1886 and dead 1969) wrote a biography of Joe Hill. For the project, Nerman did the first serious research about Hill's life story, including finding and interviewing Hill's family members in Sweden. Nerman, who was a poet himself, also translated most of Hill's songs into Swedish.