Fwd: Peaceful or Violent: Joe Hill, memory of a protester

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 07:31:48 -0800
Subject: Peaceful or Violent: Joe Hill, memory of a protester
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>

Alice,
Here is a piece on Joe Hill. I quoted from the song, Joe Hill because
I totally believe that our future is in our ability to stand up for
our dignity and rights as human beings. Protests may make some folks
uncomfortable, but protest is how we make progress.
Carl Jarvis
Joe Hill (1879-1915)

A songwriter, itinerant laborer, and union organizer, Joe Hill became
famous around the world after a Utah court convicted him of murder.
Even before the
international campaign to have his conviction reversed, however, Joe
Hill was well known in hobo jungles, on picket lines and at workers'
rallies as the
author of popular labor songs and as an Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) agitator. Thanks in large part to his songs and to his
stirring, well--publicized
call to his fellow workers on the eve of his execution--"Don't waste
time mourning, organize!"--Hill became, and he has remained, the
best--known IWW martyr
and labor folk hero.

Born Joel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, the future "troubadour of
discontent" grew up the fourth of six surviving children in a devoutly
religious Lutheran
family in Gävle, Sweden, where his father, Olaf, worked as a railroad
conductor. Both his parents enjoyed music and often led the family in
song. As a
young man, Hill composed songs about members of his family, attended
concerts at the workers' association hall in Gävle and played piano in
a local café.

In 1887, Hill's father died from an occupational injury and the
children were forced to quit school to support themselves. The
9-year-old Hill worked in
a rope factory and later as a fireman on a steam-powered crane.
Stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis in 1900, Hill moved to
Stockholm in search of
a cure and worked odd jobs while receiving radiation treatment and
enduring a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck. Two
years later, Hill's
mother, Margareta Katarina Hägglund, died after also undergoing a
series of operations to cure a persistent back ailment. With her
death, the six surviving
Hägglund children sold the family home and ventured out on their own.
Four of them settled elsewhere in Sweden, but the future Joe Hill and
his younger
brother, Paul, booked passage to the United States in 1902.

Little is known of Hill's doings or whereabouts for the next 12 years.
He reportedly worked at various odd jobs in New York before striking
out for Chicago,
where he worked in a machine shop, got fired and was blacklisted for
trying to organize a union. The record finds him in Cleveland in 1905,
in San Francisco
during the April 1906 Great Earthquake and in San Pedro, Calif., in
1910. There he joined the IWW, served for several years as the
secretary for the San
Pedro local and wrote many of his most famous songs, including "The
Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones--A Union Scab." His songs,
appearing in the
IWW's "Little Red Song Book," addressed the experience of vitually
every major IWW group, from immigrant factory workers to homeless
migratory workers
to railway shopcraft workers.

In 1911, he was in Tijuana, Mexico, part of an army of several hundred
wandering hoboes and radicals who sought to overthrow the Mexican
dictatorship of
Porfirio Diaz, seize Baja California, emancipate the working class and
declare industrial freedom. (The invasion lasted six months before
internal dissension
and a large detachment of better--trained Mexican troops drove the last
100 rebels back across the border.) In 1912, Hill apparently was
active in a "Free
Speech" coalition of Wobblies, socialists, single taxers, suffragists
and AFL members in San Diego that protested a police decision to close
the downtown
area to street meetings. He also put in an appearance at a railroad
construction crew strike in British Columbia, writing several songs
before returning
to San Pedro, where he lent musical support to a strike of Italian dockworkers.

The San Pedro dockworkers' strike led to Hill's first recorded
encounter with the police, who arrested him in June 1913 and held him
for 30 days on a charge
of vagrancy because, he said later, he was "a little too active to
suit the chief of the burg" during the strike. On Jan. 10, 1914, Hill
knocked on the
door of a Salt Lake City doctor at 11:30 p.m. asking to be treated for
a gunshot wound he said was inflicted by an angry husband who had
accused Hill of
insulting his wife. Earlier that evening, in another part of town, a
grocer and his son had been killed. One of the assailants was wounded
in the chest
by the younger victim before he died. Hill's injury therefore tied him
to the incident. The uncertain testimony of two eyewitnesses and the
lack of any
corroboration of Hill's alibi convinced a local jury of Hill's guilt,
even though neither witness was able to identify Hill conclusively and
the gun used
in the murders was never recovered.

The campaign to exonerate Hill began two months before the trial and
continued up to and even beyond his execution by firing squad on Nov.
19, 1915. His
supporters included the socially prominent daughter of a former Mormon
church president, labor radicals, activists and sympathizers including
AFL President
Samuel Gompers, the Swedish minister to the United States and even
President Woodrow Wilson. The Utah Supreme Court, however, refused to
overturn the verdict
and the Utah Board of Pardons refused to commute Hill's sentence. The
board declared its willingness to hear testimony from the woman's
husband in a closed
session, but Hill refused to identify his alleged assailant, insisting
that to do so would harm the reputation of the lady.

Hill became more famous in death than he had been in life. To Bill
Haywood, the former president of the Western Federation of Miners and
the best-known
leader of the IWW, Hill wrote: "Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel.
Don't waste any time mourning, organize! It is a hundred miles from
here to Wyoming.
Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be
buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah." Apparently he did die
like a rebel. A
member of the firing squad at his execution claimed that the command
to "Fire!" had come from Hill himself.

After a brief service in Salt Lake City, Hill's body was sent to
Chicago, where thousands of mourners heard Hill's "Rebel Girl" sung
for the first time,
listened to hours of speeches and then walked behind his casket to
Graceland Cemetery, where the body was cremated and the ashes mailed
to IWW locals in
every state but Utah as well as to supporters in every inhabited
continent on the globe. According to one of Hill's Wobbly-songwriter
colleagues, Ralph
Chaplin (who wrote the words to "Solidarity Forever," among other
songs), all the envelopes were opened on May 1, 1916, and their
contents scattered to
the winds, in accordance with Hill's last wishes, expressed in a poem
written on the eve of his death:

My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some fading flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flowers then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to you.

On 12/17/14, Alice Dampman Humel <alicedh@verizon.net> wrote:
> What's the citation of this quoted material at the end of your message,
> Carl?
> Thanks
> Alice
> On Dec 16, 2014, at 1:04 PM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ted does put his finger on the pulse of a great many Americans.
>> "Don't bother me or get in my way with your troubles".
>> But to suggest that protesting will accomplish nothing, and even
>> backfire, is to ignore much of the Working Class gains over the years.
>> Read the history of the social movement in this nation, and you will
>> be met by hundreds of protest marches and demonstrations.
>> To those who become impatient and angry over the inconvenience of
>> demonstrations, I can only say, your turn is coming. And when it is
>> your job, home, pension, health care, or freedom that is under attack,
>> how will you behave? Will you simply take it? Suck it up? Or are
>> there really folks who believe they are never going to be effected?
>> "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.
>> Alive as you and me.
>> But Joe, I said, you're ten years dead.
>> I never died, said he.
>> The copper bosses got you, Joe,
>> They got you, Joe, I said.
>> They framed you on a murder charge,
>> Said Joe, but I ain't dead,
>> Said Joe, but I ain't dead.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 12/14/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> OH Yes, you're correct. Americans don't want to be inconvenienced. If
>>> one
>>> is
>>> on his way to work or home or to the supermarket, one certainly doesn't
>>> want
>>> to be inconvenienced by people protesting because black people whom one
>>> doesn't know or care about are being killed by white cops who won't be
>>> held
>>> accountable. And if you need to shop at Walmart, you don't want to be
>>> inconvenienced by a picket line because why should it matter to you if
>>> workrs aren't paid a living wage and don't have health benefits. If you
>>> happen to be young, poor and black, it's so much wiser to just try to
>>> stay
>>> out of trouble, to not be noticed, and to be sure not to do anything
>>> that
>>> will anger white Americans. After all, if they become angry enough at
>>> you,
>>> they might sanction police shooting you if they see more than 5 of you
>>> standing on a street corner holding signs.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Blind-Democracy [mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On
>>> Behalf Of ted chittenden
>>> Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:41 PM
>>> To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
>>> Subject: Re: Peaceful or Violent?
>>>
>>> Miriam:
>>> The vast majority of middle-class U.S. citizens do not want to be
>>> inconvenienced by protest demonstrations. If you believe that you are
>>> going
>>> to convert some guy who is driving to work to your side by laying down
>>> in
>>> front of his car, you've got another thing coming to you!
>>>
>>> It reminds me of the native American protests when the railroads were
>>> being
>>> built. What the protesters would do would be to sit or lay down on the
>>> railroad tracks with the idea that by sitting or lying there, they would
>>> force the trains to stop because the engineers and conductors didn't
>>> want
>>> to
>>> kill another human being. Unfortunately for those sitting or lying on
>>> the
>>> tracks, that didn't happen, partially because those driving the iron
>>> horses
>>> (as trains were called by the native American protesters) didn't see
>>> them
>>> until it was too late to actually stop the trains and partially because
>>> the
>>> engineers and conductors were under orders to make sure to get the
>>> freight
>>> and/or passengers to a specified destination by a specified time, no
>>> matter
>>> what!
>>>
>>> Frankly, I think that it's about time to recognize that protesting to
>>> make
>>> people inconvenienced or uncomfortable is more likely to bring about the
>>> kind of changes the protesters don't want, especially when it comes to
>>> free
>>> speech issues.
>>> --
>>> Ted Chittenden
>>>
>>> Every story has at least two sides if not more.
>>> ---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> In the article which I just posted, the following sentence appeared.
>>>
>>> The rallies were mainly peaceful, though police in Boston said they
>>> arrested
>>> 23 people who tried to block a highway.
>>>
>>> This sentence gives me pause. It implies that if demonstrators block a
>>> highway or the entrance to a building, if they sit down in a location
>>> and
>>> refuse to move, if, in other words, they do anything which disrupts the
>>> usual course of events and inconveniences anyone, they are being
>>> violent.
>>> But when people demonstrate in order to protest injustice, the point is
>>> to
>>> disrupt the normal course of events so that everyone, especially the
>>> powerful, will be forced to take notice. It seems to me that we have
>>> been
>>> brainwashed to believe that a proper demonstration is supposed to be a
>>> purely cosmetic event, people walking in an orderly manner in a location
>>> previously approved by government officials, in sukch a way that no one
>>> will
>>> be inconvenienced. Demonstrations have come to be accepted as exercises
>>> in
>>> emotion, a way for people to purge their feelings without actually
>>> affecting
>>> anyone or making anyone uncomfortable. Peaceful now means being passive
>>> and
>>> acquiescent. Allowing this kind of demonstration allows America to claim
>>> that it is a democratic society which permits dissent. Demonstrations
>>> are
>>> therapeutic exercises for disgruntled citizens which do not disrupt and
>>> do
>>> not effect change.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
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>>>
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