Joe Hill

The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture

Franklin Rosemont

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629632100
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A monumental work, expansive in scope, covering the life, times, and culture of that most famous of the Wobblies—songwriter, poet, hobo, thinker, humorist, martyr—Joe Hill. It is a journey into the Wobbly culture that made Hill and the capitalist culture that killed him. Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in IWW historian Franklin Rosemont's opus.

In great detail, the issues that Joe Hill raised and grappled with in his life: capitalism, white supremacy, gender, religion, wilderness, law, prison, and industrial unionism are shown in both the context of Hill's life and for their enduring relevance in the century since his death.

Collected too is Joe Hill's art, plus scores of other images featuring Hill-inspired art by IWW illustrators from Ralph Chaplin to Carlos Cortez, as well as contributions from many other labor artists.

As Rosemont suggests in this remarkable book, Joe Hill never really died. He lives in the minds of young (and old) rebels as long as his songs are sung, his ideas are circulated, and his political descendants keep fighting for a better day.

Robert Green: Ink drawng, 1990

ENVOI

The following poem erupted in a fit of automatic writing in the early fall of 1965. In November I added a few lines, gave it a title, and intended to read it at a Joe Hill Memorial organized by the Chicago IWW Branch at a club called Poor Richard’s in Old Town. The program, however, ran longer than expected, and the poem remained unread. It was issued as a broadside in 1990, with the drawing by Robert Green that is reproduced above.

I regard this wild call across the years, written in a kind of trance, as a suitably sur-objective conclusion to this book. As the poet Jones Very once put it, “I value these verses, not because they are mine, but because they are not.”

JOE HILL: A LONG-DISTANCE CALL

The desert sand a veinless sky

weeping thorns of sleepless water

Slowly but suddenly a roof

which is not even barking

collapses in the white eyes of a dog

looking out

from behind the comer

of its teeth

But no ghostly girl blinks her hands

Joe Hill Joe Hill your hat is full of stones

Magic stones piano stones dream stones fire stones

They are too small to see

They are very far away

beyond all first fruits

beyond all second thoughts

beyond all last chances

out there

where all windows are broken like flies

where all rooms are grayer than spoons

where all nights are blotched with scorpions

Yet somehow somewhere

there is an orange

Joe Hill they started killing you the day you were born

They tightened their whistles around your neck

They stole all the things

they never would have let you have

You watched you listened you drifted you dreamed

You spat in the face of their facelessness

You felt the touch of an unseen sun

of a life more real than real estate

The eye and its double

doubled you

and played back your own true voice

for the first time

once and for all

You sang an algebra aching with rage

The laughter you breathed was blacker than tea

and a million times hotter than hope

You sparked a defiance so vast so light

that the streets of the city

ran away with the stars

These passenger pigeons are confused in their flight

through fog choked up with glaciers of news

Someone is waving a fork in the dawn

No doubt a carnival is opening

a thousand miles away

Joe Hill Joe Hill I have found you at last

in ships that have grown back into trees

in desperate pedestrians’ white hair

in diagrams of impossible machines

in the red breath of escaped gorillas

in charts of seismographic tremors

in the taste of strange medicines

in old photographs of cave men

in the numbers of disconnected telephones

in maps of secret Catalonias

deep in the Himalayas

Joe Hill your restlessness is our best bet

Joe Hill your solitude is our call of the wild

Joe Hill your extravagance is our jump for joy

Felonious freedom’s indivisible dream

multiplied by lovers armed and danger...