Joe Hill (1879-1915): Labor Troubadour, Union Organizer & Execution in Utah (Season 1, Ep. 12 - Part 2)

**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.
My guest for the first segment and the second segment is Salt Lake Tribune Director of Photography, Jeromy Harmon. Jeromy, thanks again for being part of Speak Your Piece.

**Jeromy Harmon** (0:30)
I really enjoy talking about this topic, so I'm happy to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (0:34)
It has implications not only for Utah's history, but for American history and ethnic history. There's just so many ways of coming at this. Now, because it's been such an enduring interest, there's a number of books that have been written.
Describe the field of books, the websites that our listeners can read. What are the best books or sources and why?

**Jeromy Harmon** (1:00)
My favorite book on the topic is Franklin Rosemont's, Joe Hill.
It's got a subtitle that's really long. I'm blanking on it. But it's basically the IWW and the making of a counterculture.

**Brad Westwood** (1:19)
It's IWW and the making of a revolutionary working class counterculture.

**Jeromy Harmon** (1:25)
There you go.

**Brad Westwood** (1:25)
Thank you.

**Jeromy Harmon** (1:31)
That book, if you're really interested in the topic and you want to know about it from every possible point of view, that is the book. It is a hefty book. It is a deep dive.
Rosemont really comes at it from the cultural stuff, the political side of it. He addresses a lot of the myths that were going on. He's pulling in figures that are left out of some of the more, for lack of a better word, digestible biographies on it. His book is really, it's a deep dive.
There's a book called The Man Who Never Died by William Adler. That's another excellent book. He spends a good portion of his book tracking down this other guy, who the police originally thought might have done it. He spends a lot of time exploring who that guy was. That is a fascinating part of the book. Knowing more about who that man was is really interesting. He was a career criminal. After he left Salt Lake City, he bounced around a little bit, but he eventually ended up being basically a hired goon for Al Capone. He was a bad dude.
There's a really famous gangland massacre in Chicago, and the getaway car belonged to this guy. He spent some time here.

**Brad Westwood** (2:56)
He was in Salt Lake City at the time.

**Jeromy Harmon** (2:58)
Yeah, and he was shot that night, and he's somebody the police were looking for, but it all ended up in Joe Hills lap. That's a fascinating book. Gibbs Smith's book, Joe Hill from the late 60s. Everybody's standing on the shoulders of that book. That really was the first academic biography that had ever been written about Joe Hill, so that's a great one. One book I would mention that is not specifically about Joe Hill, but it does have a chapter about Joe Hill, is the autobiography of a guy named Ralph Chaplin. It's called Wobbly.
Chaplin is a beautiful writer. He had a fascinating life. He was in the thick of the fight from the time he was a very young boy.
All the way till his death, and he was on the central board of the IWW at the time of Joe Hills execution. And so he's got some really interesting insights about what Joe meant to the Union at large. But because Joe's like a secondary character in the story, you get a really good sense of how all-encompassing the labor movement was at the time and just all the stuff that was going on. Chaplin was a close personal friend of Eugene Debs. So you get that whole side of it. It's just, it's a really, I really enjoy that book a lot. One book that when I'm talking about what books you should read, there's one book that I definitely think people should not read. And that's Wallace Stegner's Joe Hill novel.
This is not a knock on Wallace Stegner.
This is not a, it's not that the book isn't beautifully written. The book is so heavily fictionalized that for any kind of like academic understanding, the book really is useless.

**Brad Westwood** (5:03)
So far as following the threads of historical evidence, following some kind of journalistic or historical methodology, it's none of the above.

**Jeromy Harmon** (5:12)
It's none of the above.

**Brad Westwood** (5:14)
It is a novel.

**Jeromy Harmon** (5:15)
It's a novel.

**Brad Westwood** (5:15)
And Stegner is a Utah son and whom we are really respect and love as a writer. But you're saying don't turn to that book.