Joe Hill (1879-1915): Labor Troubadour, Union Organizer & Execution in Utah (Season 1, Ep. 12 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:07)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. My name is Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian at the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us. It speaks to both our shared and to our separate identities. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, curators, all those who contribute to Utah's history, share their insights and discoveries. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, this is the place.
My guest today is Salt Lake Tribune Director of Photography, Jeromy Harmon, who is also an ardent researcher regarding Utah's industrial labor or the working history during the first quarter of the 20th century, and the life and times and the death and the mystery and story after the union leader and folk hero, and really a music troubadour, Joe Hill, who was put to death for murder in 1915 at the Utah State Penitentiary, once located in what is today Sugar House Park in Salt Lake City. Jeromy is also a contributor to the website, joehill.sltrib.com, saltlaketribune.com.
Hello, Jeromy. Welcome to Speak Your Piece.

**Jeromy Harmon** (1:31)
It's fun to be here with you.

**Brad Westwood** (1:33)
Jeromy and I have known each other for a number of years.
He is not only a devoted photo historian and photo archivist and photo director for the Tribune, he's also someone who deeply loves and understands Utah's history. So thank you, thank you for being here.

**Jeromy Harmon** (1:52)
I really appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk about this.

**Brad Westwood** (1:56)
In this first segment, Jeromy, tell us first the overall story, the historical context of Utah's early 20th century industries, the unions that developed it sprang up around really across the United States, and then the Joe Hill story, his arrest, murder, and the birth of this legend called Joe Hill.

**Jeromy Harmon** (2:17)
Okay. That's a lot to start with.
So in this time period we're talking about in Utah, you've got to understand that this is pre-World War I. There's just an influx of the Transcontinental Railroad has been completed several years earlier and Utah is changing very rapidly.

**Brad Westwood** (2:44)
Becoming an industrial type of place.

**Jeromy Harmon** (2:48)
Yeah, there's all kinds of mining.
There's the copper mine in the south end of the valley that we're familiar with. There's mining in Park City. There's just mining all over the place. There's railroads coming in. There's just influx of workers coming from all over the country, all over the world.

**Brad Westwood** (3:05)
I think at the Kennecott in 1914, the Kennecott company announced that they had drawn out of the Ochre Mountains a million dollars worth of copper previously.

**Jeromy Harmon** (3:19)
That's in 1914 dollars too. That's not today's money, so it's not an insignificant sum.
You've got this influx of workers coming in, industry springing up everywhere. At the same time, you've got a huge influx of immigration coming from really all over the world because of the LDS Church, missionaries going out. So it really is just a wave after wave of different kinds of people who are arriving in the Salt Lake Valley.
Along with that, you're getting all the different ideas that come from all these different places, you're getting all the different struggles, and the labor struggle here was as hard-fought, as kind of critical to the state's development, really as it was anywhere else in the country. We hear a lot about labor struggles in this time, like in Chicago and New York and things like that, but there certainly were things going on here as well that were equally as harrowing, equally as violent. There's just all kinds of stuff going on. And into this mix, there were a number of different labor movements, a number of different labor unions. In about 1911, I want to say it is, you get the first mention of the Industrial Workers of the World in Salt Lake City. And the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, or the Wobblies, I'll use those terms interchangeably. At the time, the Wobblies easily were the most radical left politically of these unions.

**Brad Westwood** (5:14)
And also during this time, there's a fairly large socialistic movement in Utah. I mean, it's pre-Russian Revolution, it's pre kind of the Red Scare concepts that we have later in the century. There's a whole lot of people involved in this idea of workers getting some kind of a fair share of the economy.

**Jeromy Harmon** (5:35)
One thing that's really interesting in this time period, like there weren't a lot of cities in Utah, but there were a fair number of cities in Utah that had socialist mayors, socialist city councils.