Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2015

  Copyright © 1950 by Wallace Stegner

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1950.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91171-6

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  To My Wife and Son

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  May Day, 1916

  The Bindle Stiff

  Yours for the OBU

  The Singing Union

  The Captive

  The Martyr

  May Day, 1916

  About the Author

  Foreword

  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. It began in the industrial-union notions of Vincent St. John and Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners. It was born of union and compromise in a national convention in 1905. It suffered its schisms and its withdrawals, especially when the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialists of De Leon and Debs withdrew in protest against IWW violence. It followed its own star of direct action, One Big Union, and the solidarity of all labor, applying its own industrial weapons of the strike, sabotage, free-speech fights. It won its great victories, as in the Lawrence strike when Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti not only broke down the mill owners to the workers’ demands, but won their legal fight against a murder charge in the Salem court. It had its magnetic leaders—St. John, Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, the Magon brothers, Frank Little, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—and its areas of power, as in the lumberwoods of the Northwest and the harvest circle from Oklahoma to eastern Washington. It had its legendry, its lore, its songs. A singing union, volatile, mobile, “with more guts than good sense,” it made itself in its short life the most militant and dramatic organization in the history of American labor.

  It represented the very dissidence of dissent, the rebelliousness of rebellion, and it lived an increasingly violent life, battered at by all the power of industry and industry’s local law, from 1905 to the series of anti-syndicalism trials that broke its back in the twenties. By the time its back was broken many of its founders and leaders were in jail, and had been since 1918, on charges of resisting the draft. Chaplin, Haywood, the Magons, dozens of others, shared the fate of Eugene Debs in those years. And others of the leaders were dead, like Frank Little, whose crippled lynched body swung from a Butte bridge a long time before anyone cut it down. Still others had drifted into the orbit of the newly formed Communist Party, headed for the sad manipulation and eventual disillusionment that awaited Haywood. Others hung on, and still hang on, belligerent as ever, dissenters to the end of a long resistant life, hating the ballotboxers as dupes, despising yellow socialists for their gradualism, loathing the Communists for the way they have taken over IWW methods and twisted them to perverted uses. 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.

  They were militant in a period when militancy meant floggings, jail, bloodshed. They fought fire with fire, dynamite with dynamite. Police, newspapers, the middle-class citizenry, were all against them. Organizers disappeared, were run out of town, flogged through gauntlets, threatened with death. Towns passed laws against their speaking on street corners, and the word went out so that every loose Wobbly in five hundred miles grabbed the next freight, intent on climbing up on a soapbox long enough to get himself arrested. They jammed the jails, wore out the police, used up the city funds, and they kept on coming till the authorities buckled or they themselves were overwhelmed. And sometimes, as at Everett, they were mowed down by the guns of special deputies. Sometimes, as at Centralia, they were rushed by Armistice Day paraders, and out of that riot came another martyr, Wesley Everest, beaten and castrated and lynched and pumped full of bullets.

  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 limiting obligations. I hope and believe it is after a kind of truth, but a different kind from that which historians follow.

  For turning sometimes-historical people and sometimes-historical events to the purposes of fiction I have two justifications. One is that all fiction is made this way and cannot draw upon any other material than actual material. The other is that fact and fiction had already become so entangled around the controversial figure of Joe Hill that it seemed permissible to leave him as tangled as I found him. Innocent or guilty, he was already legend, thanks to his own flair for self-dramatization and to the campaign that built him into a martyr. Murderer or martyr, he was certain to resist absolute definition. So I contented myself with trying to make him a man, such a man as he might have been, with his legend at his feet like a lengthening shadow.

  The people who have contributed to my knowledge of both the legend and the facts are many, and I thank them all. But they are surely not in any way responsible for the interpretation I have given to IWW history, the events that led to Joe Hill’s death, or the ambiguous personality of Joe Hill himself. Joe Hill as he appears here—let me repeat it—is an act of the imagination.

  May Day, 1916

  Let me tell you.

  In the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle there were three new graves in a row. They had been there since November but now on May first they were still new, still mounded with flo
wers, and there was a crowd of hundreds gathered under the spindling trees. From a knoll of lawn above the graves speakers talked one after another, and their talk was all of the martyrs.

  We were rich in martyrs then. Their names were big in the speakers’ mouths, even though this was before the lynching of Frank Little, before the Armistice Day riot in Centralia where Wesley Everest died, before the Department of Justice raids that sent so many IWW’s to the pen. But even in 1916 we were rich in martyrs; the road militant labor had come was soaked with their blood from Lawrence to Ludlow. We heard about them all again that day, and especially about the three under the row of flower-heaped mounds.

  John Looney, Felix Baran, Hugo Gerlot—Irishman, Frenchman, German, three young migratory workers, hardly more than boys. The speakers told their story and the story of the others who had stood on the deck of the steamer Verona when Sheriff MacRae’s gunmen and the good citizens of the Commercial Club swept it with murderous rifle fire from their hiding places in the warehouses on the Everett dock. We heard it all: how MacRae tried for weeks to keep the IWW out of town, how he raided and closed the hall time after time only to have new organizers open it again, how he arrested street speakers, beat them up, exposed them to the saps and brass knuckles and “Robinson clubs” of special deputies, how he led pickets of the striking shingle weavers into a trap on the trestle, where they were ganged by scabs, how he ran forty-one Wobblies through the gauntlet and the bloody cattleguard on the tracks out by Beverly Park. We heard it all, though we knew it already: how young Hugo Gerlot was up on the mast cheering and waving as the Verona nosed into the Everett dock, yelling greetings to the thousands who had assembled for an open-air meeting to protest MacRae’s tyranny and the bloody oppression of the lumber trust. Those thousands were watching from the hill when the deputies opened fire. We heard again how at the first volley young Gerlot threw his arms wide and plunged like a diver from the mast. He was the youngest; there were tears among the crowd to be reminded.

  Four known dead, unknown others left in the bloody water of the bay, more than forty wounded: that was the toll of martyrdom MacRae’s deputies took at Everett. And sixty still in the Seattle jail, charged with everything from riot to murder.

  The sober crowd stood quietly during the speeches, and it watched in silence while two more martyrs were added to the three already there. It watched the ashes of Jesse Lloyd and Pat Brennan shaken into the air from the knoll, and a low murmur grew as the two small dense clouds of white dust blew downward over the hill. But the murmur swelled and grew when it came time to scatter the ashes of Joe Hill.

  Not many in that crowd had known Joe Hill; all of them knew about him. All knew that on that May Day, in every civilized country in the world and every state in the Union except one, tiny envelopes of Joe Hill’s dust were being scattered. They were giving him to the air from a ridge of the Coast Range south of San Francisco, they were letting the mountain wind take him in Colorado. All except Utah, where they killed him, where he did not want to be found dead.

  The sound of the crowd was a low, continuous murmur like the sound of the sea on a quiet day; then it fell to silence so still the tick of poplar leaves could be heard a long way. On the knoll one of the speakers stood up again, a skinny man with a great bush of hair, a high collar, a big nose. He read three verses, the verses of Joe Hill’s last will.

  My will is easy to decide

  For there is nothing to divide.

  My kin don’t need to fuss and moan—

  “Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

  My body? Ah, if I could choose

  I would to ashes it reduce

  And let the merry breezes blow

  My dust to where some flowers grow.

  Perhaps some fading flower then

  Would come to life and bloom again.

  This is my last and final will.

  Good luck to all of you. Joe Hill.

  After the speaking of the last words, that name that was like a promise of final triumph for the workers of the world, and an assurance that even death could not prevent it or even slow it down, the speaker stood with his head back, his eyes far out over the crowd. The silence ticked away as he stood; it was so still we heard the bells of some steamer nosing into a slip on the sound—perhaps the very steamer Verona on which so many IWW had died and shed blood.

  Then the speaker raised his hand, tossed the envelope into the air. A sigh like a wind went through the hundreds watching, for as the envelope fluttered and began to fall, a puff of breeze came from nowhere and blew the thin pinch of dust outward and upward away from its container. It seemed to us that like the dust of a great volcano thrown high into the upper air, that pinch of white ash might blow all the way around the world.

  The Bindle Stiff

  1 Seattle, June, 1910

  The two of them sat on the stern of the floathouse and looked across the water to the gasworks on the island. Worms of red and yellow light crawled on the lake surface, and the barge hull rocked softly and heavily in the ghost of a swell. Joe squinted his eyes, shutting out everything but the swimming, trembling rods of light. He had let the kid talk for a half-hour without himself saying a word. Now he said without lifting his chin off his chest, “You ever read The Ancient Mariner?”

  The kid said doubtfully, “That the one about the old whaler from New Bedford?”

  “No, it’s a poem. I read it once when I was learning English.”

  “What about it?”

  Joe did not answer. After a minute the kid said, still doubtfully, “I guess I never read it.”

  The silence spread out again, dark and circular, from the momentary disturbance of their speech. Joe squinted his eyes more narrowly, drowsily melancholy and dreaming, letting the light wriggle across the water and in between his lids. Lights on water. A thousand nights of his life there had been lights on water. The air was cool, with the dense moist texture of air near the sea, the kind of air you could feel between your fingers. But there was a strangeness about this air because there was not the salt smell of the sea in it. It had a brackish smell of mud.

  “Ship coming in the canal,” the kid said.

  Now that his attention was called to it, Joe was aware that he had been hearing the engines for some time. Against the dark loom of the hill across the lake the ship’s lights came on steadily, and the sound of the engines gained on the whisper of city noise that trembled on the air back on shore. The sound grew, the engines turning over slow, but there were no voices from the ship, even when she got within a few hundred yards. There was about her something mysterious and sad and dark; a wayfarer, a homeless wanderer, she slipped into a strange harbor by night. Then the high bow shoved across the lights of the gasworks, and just as it did so the gasworks opened a coke oven. The white-hot light flamed like a sun, outlining the freighter’s stubby masts; the upraised spider arms of the booms stared like a hangman’s tree against the light.

  “I didn’t know you’d been a sailor,” the kid said.

  As a matter of fact, he didn’t know it now. Some connection his mind had made, hooking his companion up with the ancient mariner, with a freighter coming in the canal. Joe let his eyes follow the ship’s bulk with the fading glare of the oven behind it as it slid smoothly into Lake Union. It seemed to him that a salt whiff came with her, a fresher breath than the flat damp air of the lake, and for a moment homesickness was an utterly unexpected knife between his ribs, and he smelled the bay and the wharves at Gefle and the stiff wind running between the islands in the Alandshaf.

  The kid’s uncertain, feeling voice groped out again. “You from Sweden?”

  Vaguely irritated, Joe let the words run off him, and after a minute he heard the elaborate yawning and stretching of the legs that covered the momentary awkwardness. But there was talk in the kid, an eagerness to be liked and responded to. His chair squeaked as he tilted it back against the wall; his voice was fake-hearty, false-assured.

  “Boy, this is all rig
ht,” he said. “This is better’n rapturin’ a gut on a crosscut and sleepin’ in a stinkin’ bunkhouse.”

  Joe made a low, indeterminate sound. The boy’s voice ran on. “Bottles is a fine guy,” he said. “You meet a lot of fine guys. Just boomin’ around, you meet stiffs from all over, and all kinds of them are fine guys.”

  By turning his head a little Joe could see the boy’s face with the last dying glow of the coke oven on it. It was a good-natured kid face. He had a lot to learn.

  “Just for instance,” the kid was saying, “who’d ever expect to light in a place like this? You blow in from somewhere, I blow in from the woods, we both know somebody that knows Bottles, and bingo, here we sit like millionaires on a private yacht.” He laughed and stretched out flatter in the tilted chair with his arms locked over his head.

  Joe said nothing. He watched the delayed coming of the freighter’s wave. The gasworks lights bent like glowing rods in the water, and then the smooth wave reached the floathouse, shouldering it heavily upward and passing under and losing itself against the shore. The following waves rocked them, slapping under the flat hull.

  “I’m sort of surprised,” the kid said. “I expected to run into all kinds of rough stuff on the road. You know the kind of stories you hear. I thought I’d be runnin’ into nothin’ but a lot of stew-bums and fruits. But Jesus, it’s mainly nice guys you meet, just ordinary guys like you are yourself.”

  He yawned again, and the front legs of his chair hit the deck. “Well, it’s a great life,” he said, and yawned a third time, not so convincingly. “Always some’n new,” he said. “You gonna ship out, or stick around Seattle, or what?”

  It was only because he had been thinking about the same thing that Joe bothered to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll head south.”