The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon by William M. Adler (review)

When internationally renowned writers Victor Hugo and Emile Zola died, thousands of workers marched in their funeral cortege. In November 1915 some 30,000 people gathered in Chicago to honour working-class artist and rebel, Joe Hill. In the pantheon of international labour heroes Joe Hill figures most prominently. Many of his songs are considered a part of the American folk music heritage. Although they were written for a different era his songs continue to be sung on picket lines, recorded, and reprinted in songbooks.

Since his execution Joe Hill’s life story has been shrouded in myth and patchwork presentations with an overabundance of historical inaccuracies as well as cynical conjecture of both his character and of the revolutionary union of which he was a member. In his ground-breaking work Joe Hill, Theiww& the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr, 2003), Franklin Rosemont decisively dismantled the often poor research, focusing his attention on Hill as a working-class artist (songwriter, cartoonist, poet) and activist within a continent-wide revolutionary movement and upsurge of significant proportions. Previously little known aspects of Hill’s life were revealed.

William Adler continues to fill in the missing gaps and details of Joe Hill’s life from his youth in Sweden, becoming a labourer by the age of ten, his sojourns across the United States into Mexico and Canada, to the intriguing details of the judicial battles following his arrest for allegedly murdering a store owner. Adler fleshes out the events in Hill’s life by portraying the grim realities of life for the industrial working class in the US where workers were too often treated as expendable beasts and those who protested and organized against such conditions were painted as naive idealists at best or, more often, as bloodthirsty vermin by the alliance of politicians, employers and journalists. The class war was often brutal and violent.

Adler teases out intriguing details about Joe Hill’s life, providing a better understanding of his character and the development of his artistry and political beliefs. The myth is that Hill became a prolific songwriter of songs meant to “fan the flames of discontent,” inspired by the work of the Wobblies. One of Hill’s most famous songs, “The Preacher and the Slave,” written to the tune of a religious hymn with its barbed lyrics aimed at religious “holy rollers” and the Salvation Army, is assumed to have been written solely on the basis of the street corner competition between the radical union and the revivalists for the hearts and minds of the working class. Adler points out that Hill was already writing humorous jingles to religious tunes many years prior to his emigration and would have already been very well acquainted with the work of the Salvation Army in his home town of Gävle. Hill’s dismissive attitudes to religion may well have been part of the Swedish industrial working class reaction to the conservatism of Sweden’s state church even though that country’s working-class organizations themselves developed in part from the social gospel. While Hill poked fun at what the Wobblies referred to “sky pilots” he was not averse to befriending and working alongside the minister of the non-denominational Swedish seaman’s hall where he composed many of his songs. Songwriting, according to those who knew Hill, did not come easily to him.

An entire chapter of the book is devoted to Hill’s excursion into the 1911 armed struggle of the insurgent libertarian commune in northern Mexico inspired by the Flores Magon brothers. This little known chapter of Wobbly history, according to Adler, had a transformative effect on Hill, turning him into the hardened believer visualizing the struggle between labour and capital as a universal class war. Adler’s research further shows that Hill considered himself to be a socialist and “strong disciple” of...