A century ago, US authorities murdered one of the country’s most beloved working class poets and songwriters, Joe Hill. He was framed for murder in Salt Lake City, Utah, and shot by firing squad on 19 November 1915, in the midst of a nationwide campaign against the revolutionary labour organisation the Industrial Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”).

Joe Hill had joined the IWW five years before, but the humour, pathos and defiance of his lyrics, written on the picket line, in the strike camp or the boxcar, ensured that he would be remembered in the pantheon of great US rebel poets and working class agitators.

It is why the song “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, written in the 1930s by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, has become a standard. When the African American singer Paul Robeson sang to the Sydney Opera House workers in 1960, he introduced the song by explaining that Hill’s “spirit still lived in the hearts of all American working people”:

From San Diego up to Maine,

In every mine and mill –

Where working men defend their rights

It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.

Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund on 7 October 1879, to impoverished Lutheran parents in Gavle, Sweden. After his father died in an industrial accident, Joel went to work at a rope factory at age 12. There he contracted tuberculosis of the joints and skin and required surgery as a result. When his mother died of illness, his family split up; he and his elder brother Paul went to New York in 1902.

For the next 10 years, little is known about his life other than that he worked in numerous jobs across the United States, including a year in New York playing piano and cleaning spittoons in a Bowery saloon. In 1906, he was in San Francisco and he probably joined the IWW in San Pedro, California, in 1910.

In 1911, he joined a Wobbly contingent aligned with the Magonistas and fought in the Mexican revolution in Baja California, on the side of the Partido Liberal de Mexico (the far left of the revolutionary forces). After they were overwhelmed by the US-backed Federales, Hill returned to San Pedro.

Like many IWW organisers, he was an itinerant agitator. In 1912, he was in San Diego for a free speech campaign. He travelled to British Columbia in Canada to help organise the Fraser River strike of railway workers. Returning to San Pedro, he became involved in a strike of Italian dockworkers and was charged with vagrancy in June 1913. Afterwards, he moved to Utah, where the IWW had been organising construction workers. Hill apparently hoped to move on to Chicago.

On 10 January 1914, the Morrisons, father and son grocers, were murdered in Salt Lake City. On the same night, Hill received a gunshot wound. He was charged with their murders and the resulting trial was a farce, part of a growing police and government campaign against the IWW that would peak around those years.

There was no physical evidence tying Hill to the murders, but the anti-IWW hysteria whipped up by the local and national media, as well as Hill’s refusal to explain his own gunshot wound, was enough for the jury to convict him. He was murdered by a Salt Lake City firing squad on 19 November 1915.

Hill wrote some of the USA’s favourite labour songs, including “Casey Jones – the union scab”, “It’s a long way down to the soupline”, “Mr Block”, “Should I ever be a soldier” and “The rebel girl”. It was to IWW leader Big Bill Haywood that he wrote the immortal lines, “Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning, organise!”

Hill’s last wish was honoured by his IWW comrades. In his letter to Haywood, he had written, “I don’t want to be found dead in Utah”, so his body was sent to Chicago, where thousands of workers attended his funeral. He was cremated, and his ashes were sent in 600 envelopes to IWW branches in every state except Utah, and overseas including to Australia.

In 1988, an envelope containing Hill’s ashes was discovered in the US National Archives, having been seized in 1917 because of its “subversive potential”. His last remaining ashes were freed from government custody and scattered to the winds in several countries.

One of Hill’s most famous songs, “Workers of the World Awaken!”, was written from his prison cell. It was first published in the 1916 Joe Hill Memorial Edition of the IWW’s Little Red Songbook:

Workers of the world, awaken!

Break your chains. demand your rights.

AII the wealth you make is taken

By exploiting parasites.

Shall you kneel in deep submission

From your cradles to your graves?

Is the height of your ambition

To be good and willing slaves? …

If the workers take a notion,

They can stop all speeding trains;

Every ship upon the ocean

They can tie with mighty chains.

Every wheel in the creation,

Every mine and every mill,

Fleets and armies of the nation,

Will at their command stand still

Workers of the world, awaken!

Rise in all your splendid might;

Take the wealth that you are making,

It belongs to you by right.

No one will for bread be crying,

We’ll have freedom, love and health.

When the grand red flag is flying

In the Workers’ Commonwealth.