Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (review)

In 1914, Joe Hill, songwriter and labor agitator, died before a Utah firing squad, convicted of the murder of a Salt Lake City grocer after perhaps one of the most notoriously unfair trials in the history of the United States; railroaded to his death on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence by a governor who, immediately after the execution, boasted, "The fight has just begun. We are not going to stop until the state is entirely rid of this lawless element that now infests it" (139). Hill, of course, became almost immediately one of American labor's most famous martyrs, and his death row demand to those involved in the campaign to save his life, "Don't waste any time mourning—organize!" (usually abbreviated as "Don't mourn, organize!"), has continued to resound throughout the nine decades of popular struggle that have followed his death.

Franklin Rosemont, in his Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, has produced something much more important than yet another class war hagiography. Part biography, part cultural history, and part treatise on the relevance of poetry for revolution, Rosemont's book remains throughout remarkably accessible and refreshingly honest.

Hill's life and death are impossible to understand outside of the context of his membership in the Industrial Workers of the World. It is within the IWW, in its union halls and on its picket lines, that Hill's songs were written and sung, it is the IWW that published Hill's songs in its widely circulated "Little Red Songbook," and it is Hill's association with the IWW that, in all probability, sealed his fate before the rifles of the state of Utah. Above all, the IWW, whose program of uniting the entire working class in a horizontal union based on direct action and militant solidarity, was what had made Hill's songs dangerous.

Rosemont, however, is careful to treat both Hill and his union with the respect they merit, refraining from reducing one to the other—the IWW does not merely serve as the backdrop to the tragic story of Joe Hill, and Hill is nowhere reduced to a mere symbol of the IWW. Rosemont's book, besides being the most comprehensive book on Hill to date, is also perhaps the first systematic examination of the IWW's cultural legacy.

It would be an error to take the fragments of biography and exegesis that Rosemont offers as a stylistic decision: as objects for critical reconstruction, both Hill's life and the development of the IWW's innovative cultural practices present exactly those difficulties that are inherent in any attempt to piece together a history which itself lies in fragments, an underground history. Hill's brief life was that of a drifter, a migrant worker, an ititerant "troubadour of discontent" (1); any biography has, consequently, to make the most of the scraps of knowledge passed down by those who encountered him. An analysis of his trial presents similar problems: "the proceedings can be reconstructed only in broad outline, with the help of newspaper accounts; many crucial details are missing, because the entire first volume of the trial transcript was mysteriously 'lost' years ago by the Salt Lake County Clerk's office, and never recovered" (115). Hill had entrusted a copy of the records to the IWW, but federal raids on the union's headquarters in 1917 resulted in the seizure and destruction of this copy along with most of the union's other records.

In his treatment of the IWW, Rosemont forgoes a general history of the union's founding, its strikes, free speech fights, and decades of struggle against systematic government repression, referring the reader to other works like Fred Thompson's The IWW: Its First Fifty Years and Joyce Kornbluh's Rebel Voices. What interests him instead in Joe Hill is the IWW's cultural sensibility, its radical conception of an intimate relationship between political praxis...