Joe Hill

No thoroughly adequate history of the
IWW
exists. The standard histories are factual and doctrinal summaries, valuable for the record of the
IWW
’s organization and activities but stopping short of the real climax of the movement just after World War I, and lacking in the kind of poetic understanding which should invest any history of a militant church.

From 1905 to the early twenties, the
IWW
was just that—a church which enlisted all the enthusiasm, idealism, rebelliousness, devotion, and selfless zeal of thousands of mainly young, mainly migrant workers. Its history is a chronicle of strikes, free-speech fights, riots, trials, frame-ups, and martyrdoms. It began in the industrial-union notions of Vincent St. John and Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners. It was born of union and compromise in a national convention in 1905. It suffered its schisms and its withdrawals, especially when the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialists of De Leon and Debs withdrew in protest against
IWW
violence. It followed its own star of direct action, One Big Union, and the solidarity of all labor, applying its own industrial weapons of the strike, sabotage, free-speech fights. It won its great victories, as in the Lawrence strike when Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti not only broke down the mill owners to the workers’ demands, but won their legal fight against a murder charge in the Salem court. It had its magnetic leaders—St. John, Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, the Magon brothers, Frank Little, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—and its areas of power, as in the lumberwoods of the Northwest and the harvest circle from Oklahoma to eastern Washington. It had its legendry, its lore, its songs. A singing union, volatile, mobile, “with more guts than good sense,” it made itself in its short life the most militant and dramatic organization in the history of American labor.

It represented the very dissidence of dissent, the rebelliousness
of rebellion, and it lived an increasingly violent life, battered at by all the power of industry and industry’s local law, from 1905 to the series of anti-syndicalism trials that broke its back in the twenties. By the time its back was broken many of its founders and leaders were in jail, and had been since 1918, on charges of resisting the draft. Chaplin, Haywood, the Magons, dozens of others, shared the fate of Eugene Debs in those years. And others of the leaders were dead, like Frank Little, whose crippled lynched body swung from a Butte bridge a long time before anyone cut it down. Still others had drifted into the orbit of the newly formed Communist Party, headed for the sad manipulation and eventual disillusionment that awaited Haywood. Others hung on, and still hang on, belligerent as ever, dissenters to the end of a long resistant life, hating the ballotboxers as dupes, despising yellow socialists for their gradualism, loathing the Communists for the way they have taken over
IWW
methods and twisted them to perverted uses. The
IWW
now is an exclusive and somewhat mellowed club, but it can still rise up when it is stepped on, it can still muster pickets before the doors of the
New Republic
when it prints an article by me implying that Joe Hill, one of the great martyrs, could have been guilty. An injury to one is still an injury to all; the union doctrine has not changed by a hair’s breadth. But now it is a church of old men.

They were militant in a period when militancy meant floggings, jail, bloodshed. They fought fire with fire, dynamite with dynamite. Police, newspapers, the middle-class citizenry, were all against them. Organizers disappeared, were run out of town, flogged through gauntlets, threatened with death. Towns passed laws against their speaking on street corners, and the word went out so that every loose Wobbly in five hundred miles grabbed the next freight, intent on climbing up on a soapbox long enough to get himself arrested. They jammed the jails, wore out the police, used up the city funds, and they kept on coming till the authorities buckled or they themselves were overwhelmed. And sometimes, as at Everett, they were mowed down by the guns of special deputies. Sometimes, as at Centralia, they were rushed by Armistice Day paraders, and out of that riot came another martyr, Wesley Everest, beaten and castrated and lynched and pumped full of bullets.

The
IWW
was a fighting faith. It’s members were the shock
troops of labor. Its weakness was that it really liked a fight better than it liked planning, negotiations, politicking. It won victories and attracted thousands of new members and let them drift away again for lack of a concrete program. Its ideas were vaguely the anarcho-syndicalist ideas that had stirred France a little earlier; its methods and shibboleths, even the “wooden shoe” symbol of sabotage, were the same. Its membership was an utterly American mixture, with a good percentage of the foreign-born because the foreign-born were often the most migrant, the most economically adrift, and also the most politically awakened. But in the best American tradition, it took its orders from no one, was ripped by internal quarrels of policy, and fought the battles that were most immediate and most concrete.

It was conflict of the bloodiest kind that kept the
IWW
together. It existed for the prime purpose of making the first breaches in the resistance of entrenched industry so that later organizations could widen and deepen them. Its greatest single contribution was the production of martyrs.

The Preacher and the Slave
is in no sense a history of the
IWW
, even by implication. It is not history, though it deals here and there with historical episodes and sometimes incorporates historical documents; and it is not biography, though it deals with a life. It is fiction, with fiction’s prerogatives and none of history’s limiting obligations. I hope and believe it is after a kind of truth, but a different kind from that which historians follow.

For turning sometimes-historical people and sometimes-historical events to the purposes of fiction I have two justifications. One is that all fiction is made this way and cannot draw upon any other material than actual material. The other is that fact and fiction had already become so entangled around the controversial figure of Joe Hill that it seemed permissible to leave him as tangled as I found him. Innocent or guilty, he was already legend, thanks to his own flair for self-dramatization and to the campaign that built him into a martyr. Murderer or martyr, he was certain to resist absolute definition. So I contented myself with trying to make him a man, such a man as he might have been, with his legend at his feet like a lengthening shadow.

The people who have contributed to my knowledge of both the
legend and the facts are many, and I thank them all. But they are surely not in any way responsible for the interpretation I have given to
IWW
history, the events that led to Joe Hill’s death, or the ambiguous personality of Joe Hill himself. Joe Hill as he appears here—let me repeat it—is an act of the imagination.

Let me tell you.

In the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle there were three new graves in a row. They had been there since November but now on May first they were still new, still mounded with flowers, and there was a crowd of hundreds gathered under the spindling trees. From a knoll of lawn above the graves speakers talked one after another, and their talk was all of the martyrs.

We were rich in martyrs then. Their names were big in the speakers’ mouths, even though this was before the lynching of Frank Little, before the Armistice Day riot in Centralia where Wesley Everest died, before the Department of Justice raids that sent so many
IWW
’s to the pen. But even in 1916 we were rich in martyrs; the road militant labor had come was soaked with their blood from Lawrence to Ludlow. We heard about them all again that day, and especially about the three under the row of flower-heaped mounds.