Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

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.

as of 1950

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.

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 It is not history, though it deals here and there with historical episodes and sometimes incorporates historical documents; and it is not biography, though it deals with a life.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 limitin...

Did this have another title, The Preacher & the Slave, when it appeared in 1950?

he saw that Lund was speaking directly at him. “… what it is that we are after in this life,” the missionary said. “We carry around all our lives a load of bitterness and discontent, pretending that it’s something else than what it is. We hate the rich, or hate the capitalistic system, or hate women, or hate politicians, or hate God. But I’ll tell you what we really hate. We hate ourselves.” Heavy, his chest and shoulders bulky in his too-small coat, his face shining a little in the warmth of the close room, he leaned on the back of a chair and spoke at Joe, watching him steadily and crinkling the corners of his eyes slightly and speaking with an unpretentious dignity so that Joe was compelled to watch him and listen. “We hate ourselves,” he said. “We hate our own failures and our own weaknesses. We hate ourselves because we cannot help comparing what we are with what we might be. Our discontent is the voice of God in us, prodding us to live up to ourselves. Until we recognize and admit this we will always turn savagely outward, destroying other things because ourselves are at fault.” His mustache twitched and his eyes crinkled more deeply. For a second he seemed to smile with some inward knowledge; his square teeth showed briefly. “Live up to the best that’s in you and you’ll stand all right with God and man,” he said almost lamely, and picked up his Bible and stepped down. The self-regulating life of the mission went on, ignoring Joe Hillstrom where he sat.

Live a Christian life and work hard and develop your talents and stay away from bad companions and turn the other cheek and organize in some good sound AFL union and make well-bred demands and thank the bosses when they raise your wages ten cents a day, or forgive them when they lay you off or cut your pay envelope. Above all, take your licking philosophically when they break your strikes with Pinkertons and gunmen. Be polite and the plutocrats might toss you a bone. Maybe there’ll be a job scabbing on someone less polite. You might get to be Casey Jones the Union Scab, and blow a whistle on the S.P. line.

In ordinary times itinerant radical intellectuals and organizers hit the Pedro waterfront as if on a Lyceum circuit—ex-professors and ex-preachers, rebellious college boys, union delegates, professional revolutionaries preaching socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, bimetallism, the single tax. With faces like saints or madmen or prize fighters or farmers or clerks, but always with the eyes of believers, they come and go, leaving a little deposit of their eloquence and fervor and belief among the men who will listen. Now with the waterfront struck they come in greater numbers, and back from the picket lines in the temporary headquarters, and in the shade of sheds and warehouses, little meetings go on. Prominent among the men in the audiences are those with the red button of the Wobblies in their shirts.

“I don’t care what flag it marches under. But no class war. No crusades. No inquisition. No riots, no damnation threats, no hellfire. Something that probably sounds funny. Christian love. Human decency. The golden rule.” Joe felt sorry for Lund. As long as he lived he would never know what the world was about. He would go on living with his head in a bag. “The golden rule like the one the lumber trust or the S.P. follows?” he said.

He was no soapboxer, anyway, and it was the soapboxers who dared town authorities in the free-speech fights. He was another kind of organizer: a singer, a player of the piano at local meetings, a maker of catchy rhymes and drawer of cartoons. The name of Joe Hill was better known than the man, for it was signed to cartoons pinned up in almost every hall up and down the coast, and his songs in the Little Red Songbook were the kind that men in a crowd discovered they knew. Any time, at any season, he was likely to drop quietly into town, spend a day or two or three, help out with a meeting, get out and work the waterfront or the bunkhouses, and disappear again, leaving behind a cartoon on the back of a laundry ticket, or a song written in a round neat hand that would next year be printed in the songbook but would be known by hundreds of Wobblies before it ever appeared. He was seen in Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Frisco, Fresno, San Pedro, San Diego, Tia Juana, out in the islands, a silent and almost diffident man. He looked like a man who nursed a grudge, but he was quiet, well spoken, a good jungle cook, full of unexpected sarcasms and humorous remarks. But a man who never led with his tongue; a counterpuncher strictly. At parties he sometimes seemed to want to mix and to be held back and stiffened by some incurable reserve. A singleton, a loner, a man with a hot temper and no really close friends. But a rebel from his skin inwards, with an absolute faith in the One Big Uni...

only there had been some triumph in it, if the crowd hadn’t quit just when it began to get militant, if it had stayed together and they could all have faced the returning law coolly, with a set of demands and a clear irrefutable statement of how the trouble had started. If it were possible to say that Art died helping three thousand pickers to some of the decencies of life. But you couldn’t say that. You couldn’t say anything but that he got trampled in the mob, unable even to put up the kind of grim slugging battle he was capable of. A stray bullet, a stray rock, a stray blow, and a good man dead and nothing gained. It seemed to Joe, sitting on the beach and thinking it over for the hundredth time, that inevitably the fight ended up in running. He was always running, every strike and brawl and revolution and mass meeting ended the same way, in a choice between being a willing sacrifice for no real purpose, and running like a scared animal when the law moved in.

the slaves won’t organize and fight for their rights, if they fold up just when they should hang together, then there will have to be other ways. The trouble with the soft-pedal wing of the union was that they never carried their logic to its conclusion. They believed in the class war, they swore by the Preamble, but they didn’t admit it was really war. Strikes were okay, free-speech fights were okay, sabotage was fair in a really bitter fight like some of the fights up in the lumber woods, but they tried to stop there, halfway.

Lund was stung. If there was one thing he feared it was the thing he had seen too often in his own profession, the self-righteousness that could creep up on a man like fat or baldness, greasing the mind and clouding the vision and making a good man over into something almost detestable. In an unappreciated profession it was so easy to take comfort and justification from one’s own sense of blamelessness. A hot retort jumped into his mind, but he held it back, glaring across the table into Joe’s narrowed eyes. He saw the amusement there, and after a moment he could laugh. He was being baited again, and by one who knew how to find the tender spot. “Self-righteousness is the vice of the meek,”

“Well, I’m sorry for all the souls I’ve bribed over onto the boss’s side with coffee and doughnuts.” He was disappointed in Joe. The power to discriminate was no longer there; the hard uncompromising arrogance of the self-righteous was in his voice and in the sterile doctrines he preached. It was as if he looked out on the world through a set of ideas as rigid as the bars on a jail window, and everything he saw was striped in the same pattern.

Lund found himself thinking that Joe could be absurd, as the intelligent but under-educated could always be absurd, and he could perhaps be dangerous, a really deadly partisan, but he would also be something of a seeker always, and something of an artist. He continued to look smilingly into Joe’s face. Finally he said, “Life is a battleground to you.” “It’s always been a battleground. It’s taken the working class hundreds of years to get to the point where they can fight with a chance of winning.” “But you think they’ll win.” “It’s inevitable.” “And after they’ve won, then what? After they’ve thrown the bosses off their backs and broken up this system, what do they erect in its place?” “Then the workers will own the instruments of production and will operate industry for the good of all. After the class war is won there is no more need for the state. The armed men and the ballot boxes and all the rest of it will wither away, and we get a classless and stateless society.” Lund knocked hot ash into his palm and held it there till it grew too hot to hold, when he dumped it in the trash bucket. The hope. The unshakable piety! He whistled a moment between his lips and then said, “And you attack me for being a Heaven-monger.” “What?” “Let it go, let it go.” He thought to himself ruefully that he had taken up the wrong mythology. His own had led him to scepticism and humanitarianism. Joe had a faith that would have shamed a Christian martyr, and it led him to crusades, blood-lett...

humanity moves both ways on a street with a double dead-end, and that Vengeance sits with an axe at one end and Mercy sits in weak tears at the other, and that only Justice, which sits in the middle and looks both ways, can really choose. He said none of this, though he thought it with a kind of anguish, because he liked Joe Hillstrom and took him seriously both as a man and as a representative. Instead he said placidly, pulling his heavy mustache, “So here we sit cheek by jowl, the Preacher and the Slave.”

Like grains of sand pouring between his fingers the generations came and passed, and centuries after they had passed the dry husks of their names made a forlorn sound in the world in which they and all their works were as grass. This was the stuff millions of good Christians read for gospel. This was the way they built up patience in themselves to accept what they were given and bear the yoke they bore. And one generation of workers worked and got nothing and bore children and died, and another generation labored and was cheated and begot children and died, and all the days of every generation were sixty or seventy years of sweat and sickness and wage slavery, and they died.

Joe’s cheeks were emaciated, blackened with a week’s beard. The lips were drawn back wolfishly. Out of hollow sockets the eyes smoldered half-lidded and contemptuous. Joe must have known when the picture was taken that he had a face to scare babies, yet he had turned it straight into the camera in bitterness and contempt. It was the face of a desperado—or of an El Greco martyr before suffering or art or both had refined the passion and defiance out of the eyes and mouth. He tried to read it, to see behind it, but he could not for his life have said whether it was the face of a guilty man showing his teeth or that of an innocent one bitter at injustice. If it had not had a caption under it he would never have known it for the face of Joe Hillstrom.

In a place so severe and bare as this the most solemn and deliberate injustices could be done impartially, impersonally, without bias or ill will, because everything in the room, even the expressions on the faces of spectators and bailiffs and attorneys, made it clear that the actors here, judge and jury, prosecutor and witnesses, had ceased to be men and were for the time being mere instruments. Only the accused, in such a room, remained touched by human frailty, and he was reduced to helplessness like a child among grownups.

The Wobblies, Lund was thinking as he went toward his hotel to get his suitcase, were as automatic as a burglar alarm. Touch any part of the mechanism, let one member be misused, anywhere, and they went off in a loud single-minded uproar. An injury to one was an injury to all. They went no further. There was one enemy, the System. No matter what happened, they knew who was to blame. They recognized one virtue, loyalty to the cause, so that their souls and stomachs were not visited by doubt and queasiness. The revolutionary faith was a flux that absorbed moral complexities and even rational doubts as limestone absorbed impurities from iron ore. Once the flux had begun to operate, there were only two possibilities, one choice. Either or, our side or theirs, iron or slag. Joe would have support, if he would accept it; he would have a defense, if he would permit it; he would have widespread and unquestioning belief for any statement he chose to make, or any statement made in his name. He could sit still, as he had said he would, but others would move the chair he sat in. Those who would convict him because he was an IWW or those who would free him unquestioned for the same reason would pick a bone over his fate. But what of those who saw with a twist of almost fatherly solicitude the broken and crippled hand, and those who wondered against their own wish if Joe Hillstrom could really have entered that grocery store masked and armed, and if he had, then why? Was it disloyal to ...

Consider the way circumstance has of taking a man out of his own proper and recognizable character and subtly transforming him, coating him with the ions of a new personality as a lead tray is glazed with silver in an electroplating tank. Two men are on trial before the Third District Court in Salt Lake City. One is the IWW poet and song writer Joe Hill, a name known to many, and now a face that begins to be known too, a sensitive and thoughtful and fine face, with a resolute mouth and eyes like a compassionate Christ. Folders bearing his picture are stuck up in every hall west of the Big Sioux; an indignation meeting in New York has marched with his portrait on banners; sailors have carried the story of his case over the world. Shining with firm innocence, victimized because of his organizing activities, Joe Hill rises out of the murk of the labor wars, still serving the cause even in the System’s jail. More than life-size, of an immortal calmness and unshakable resolution, he takes shape in the minds of thousands, legendary, even mythical: Labor’s Songster.

Who can determine how much a man imposes his own myth of himself upon others and how much that myth is created by those who know him? Joe Hill began to be born in his songs and cartoons; certainly he lived, imperfectly realized, in the mind of a Swede sailor sitting on the San Pedro waterfront feeding a rat, or looking down the sad trough of Beacon Street and dreaming a dream of leading thousands. But now he acquires stature and outline through the labors of a committee; he is issued from a headquarters like news bulletins, and the headquarters is not Salt Lake County jail but the IWW hall. Step by step, as the union fights his case against the hardening prejudices of courts and public, in an atmosphere increasingly edged and hostile, the character of Joe Hill is filled in by broadsides, pamphlets, appeals, form letters, news stories for the labor press. He emanates piecemeal from a dusty bare room where transient men sleep and cook and discuss and convene: a meager flophouse, a minimal lodge, a scanty asylum, a threadbare club, a primitive church whose symbol is the clenched fist of solidarity. It is in this cell of the new society forming within the shell of the old, this skimpy few square feet of the revolutionary future, that Joe Hill is properly born. Throughout the course of his creation his prototype Joe Hillstrom sits waiting in the county jail. Forbidden newspapers, he can be only vaguely aware of what is happening to his identity. The little information he gets c...

At the center of all this, generating lines of force that went through the whole world, was a sailor friend of his, a Swede with a knack for drawing pictures and writing poems, a man with little education but with a strong inclination toward the arts, a man who used to drop in and drink coffee and argue social rebellion in the mission kitchen. He was as remote now as a vague great name in the papers.

It embarrassed him to watch Joe’s violence, because he could not rid himself of the feeling that the violence was faked. The sudden brief tirade had the artificiality of an act, like his tirade in court when he fired his lawyers. It wasn’t like Joe; right now Joe was breathing harder and faster than he needed to, working himself up to a passion for some obscure reason. And how could it be said to him now, a few hours before his death, that his martyrdom was tainted by the dubious methods his friends had used in advertising or—concede the suspicion-promoting it? Joe Hill as he lived in the minds of well-wishers around the world was a fiction, the product of deliberate manufacture.

Waiting for the guard, he was drawn up like a prince. The light falling from above poured over his fair hair and his slim rigid shoulders. He was limned with light as he thrust the paper through the bars. Every slightest motion was exaggerated, theatrical, posed—or was it kingly? Inscrutable, wrapped in dignity or clothed in affectation and an actor’s sense of his own conspicuousness, he stood alone under the floodlights of a stage watched by hundreds of thousands, and he spoke his curtain line and it rang like a blow on iron. What was on his conscience would not matter.

image of Joe Hillstrom, full of some ecstatic vision, living out in his last hours not his own life but his forming legend.