Organizing, Not Mourning, in Salt Lake City (Joe Hill)

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5584/organizing_not_mourning_in_salt_lake_city/

Wednesday February 17 3:18 pm

Social justice, peace and union activists gather for two-day 'Climate of Change' event

By Steve Early and Rand Wilson

SALT LAKE CITY—Ninety-five years ago, the copper barons and silver mine owners here in Utah conspired with local cops to pin the robbery-murder of a grocery store owner on a quiet, self-effacing Swedish immigrant whose birth name was Joel Emmanuel Hagglund.

If the suspect had been just another career criminal, a foreign vagabond menacing the good citizens of Salt Lake City for nothing more than personal gain, the man known as Joseph Hillstrom and then just plain Joe Hill would be entirely unknown today.


Labor hero and martyr Joe Hill.


Instead, among local labor, anti-war, and environmental activists, Joe's gaunt, haunting visage still appears, Che Guevara-style, on T-shirts promoting Utah Jobs with Justice and on buttons commemorating his life and death. In the wider world of labor, everyone knows that the martyred organizer—who instructed his co-workers not to “waste time mourning” after his execution by a firing squad in 1915—was a talented poet, songwriter, musician and “class war humorist” whose singular devotion to radical labor organizing continues to inspire.

Before he ascended to folk hero status on the left and even in the embattled mainstream of modern unionism, Hill was also just a guy who needed a job. So, in typical immigrant worker fashion, a friend of his from the old country (in this case, a fellow member of the Industrial Workers of the World) got him hired into the machine shop of the Silver King mine.

The rough mining camp where Hill lived is now a place where indy film stars come to preen and play at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. In Hill’s day, however, Park City was not a glitzy once-a-year cultural hotspot, a host for the Winter Olympics, or a mecca for well-heeled “powder hounds" (who, if they have an eye for labor history, can still find slope-side architectural remnants of the ski area’s industrial past).

A century ago, the foreign-born were on the cutting edge of labor unrest in the mountain states and urban America as well. In Utah, the business-backed nativist backlash and related “red scare” that killed Hill was triggered by immigrant worker militancy linked to radical politics and opposition to imperialist war.

FULL story at link.

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