POLITICS AND POETICS

FIRE: JOE HILL AND THE SOUND THAT ENDURED

NATHAN ABEL

October 16, 2025

He died a century ago, yet his echo still refuses to fade. A Swedish immigrant who sang himself into the bloodstream of America, Joe Hill turned labor into lyric and defiance into form. His life compressed the century’s contradictions: faith and industry, exile and belonging, poetry and punishment. What remains is not a body, but a verb. The sound of resistance spoken once, and still resounding.

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In the courtyard of Sugar House Prison, a firing squad waited under the long shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. Joe Hill stood upright, hands bound, the breeze lifting the corner of his collar. It was November 19, 1915. He was thirty-six years old, a labor agitator, a songwriter, an immigrant, and an enemy of the state of Utah.

The castle where Utah locked up its troubadour

He gave his body to history the way some men give testimony: without hesitation. When the officer asked if he had any last words, Hill said simply, “Fire.” The command left no space for hesitation. The rifles answered, and the echo folded itself into the valley.

The night before, he had written a telegram to Big Bill Haywood, head of the Industrial Workers of the World. “Goodbye Bill,” it read. “I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize.” The two lines together, Fire and Don’t mourn, organize, bookend his transformation from man to myth.

They fired at dawn, but the sound has not yet stopped.

Big Bill, small patience

He was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, on October 7, 1879, in the port city of Gävle, Sweden, a place of sawmills, sailmakers, and Lutheran restraint. His father was a railroad worker who died when Joel was eight, leaving a widow and six children. His mother, Catarina, washed laundry for wealthier families and played the organ at church. The family sang hymns in the evenings, those melancholic Swedish hymns that move in minor keys, more lament than praise.

The children were expected to work young. When Catarina died, the household dissolved. Joel, barely a teenager, became a laborer, then a sailor. The sea was the only horizon that promised motion. He left Sweden in 1902, age twenty-three, with little more than a violin and a notebook of songs.

In the ledger of immigration, he disappears into a larger tide—the millions who came to America at the turn of the century from Norway, Poland, Italy, and beyond, all drawn by the same longing for freedom or a better life, or both. The ports of New York and Boston were clogged with such hopefuls, their names transformed into syllables the clerks could pronounce. Joel Hägglund became Joseph Hillström, then, eventually, Joe Hill, the phonetic minimalism of a man reborn for use.

He went West. There were no cities yet, only the idea of them. He worked in railyards and mines, harvesting ice, driving nails, shoveling ore. The landscape of labor was endless and temporary. Campgrounds that vanished when the work was done, pay in scrip redeemable only at the company store.

It was in these camps that he began to write the songs that would outlive him. The melodies were borrowed from hymns, popular tunes, and Salvation Army marches, but the words were new. He understood that parody could travel where politics could not.

“You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky.

Work and pray, live on hay—

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

“The Preacher and the Slave” (1911) mocked the passivity of promised salvation. Hill rewired the hymn into a protest anthem, its humor concealing the despair of those who sang it. It was not the poetry of beauty but of survival, the ability to laugh while counting injuries.

In 1910, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, known as the Wobblies. They preached the abolition of wage slavery and the unity of all workers, regardless of trade or race. Theirs was not a movement of speeches and platforms but of pamphlets and picket lines. They organized where other unions refused to go: lumber camps, mines, sweatshops.

When dissent still required a hat. The crowd listens, the bosses worry.

Joe Hill became their unofficial voice. His songs spread faster than the union itself. They were sung during marches, in jails, at funerals. To sing was to organize, to turn isolation into rhythm, grievance into chorus. He wrote “Casey Jones—the Union Scab” (1912), a parody of the American folk hero; “Rebel Girl” (1915), dedicated to labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; and “There Is Power in a Union” (1914), which became the anthem of the Wobblies. His voice was dry, almost amused, but his words carried an undertow of mourning. He understood that every joke was a weapon against despair.

The Rebel Girl herself: fearless, eloquent, and never on the guest list

By 1914, he had drifted to Salt Lake City. The boom had slowed; the West was settling into its myths. Utah was still half frontier, half theocracy. A place where the law was written in two languages: civil code and divine command.

On the night of January 10, a grocer named John Morrison, a former policeman, was shot to death along with his son. Two men fled the scene. Later that night, Joe Hill appeared at a doctor’s door with a bullet wound. He said he had been shot in a quarrel over a woman, but refused to name her.

That refusal would define his life and death.

The police, desperate for an arrest, found in Hill a convenient suspect. A radical, an immigrant, a stranger. The evidence was circumstantial, the story convenient.

At the trial, Hill sat impassive, his expression unreadable. He denied guilt but refused to defend himself. It was a gesture that confused the court and transformed him, in the public imagination, from agitator to romantic martyr.

Even as he awaited execution, his letters remained calm, measured, almost bureaucratic in tone. “I have lived like an artist,” he wrote, “and I shall die like one.”

There is something almost aesthetic in that detachment—an understanding that to narrate one’s death is to control it.

Joe Hill eternal: agitator, accordionist, patron saint of the unemployable

The campaign to save Joe Hill became an international event. The Swedish consul, labor unions, and intellectuals petitioned for clemency. Even President Woodrow Wilson intervened, urging the governor of Utah to reconsider. But the state refused. To them, he was not a poet but a precedent.

He requested that no flowers be placed on his grave, because there would be no grave. “Let my ashes be scattered to the winds,” he said, “so they may carry my song to every land.”

Ashes to ashes, melody to memory: Hill’s will written in a worker’s hand

It was over, except that it wasn’t.

The Wobblies published his songs in a small red pamphlet, Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent: Joe Hill Memorial Edition (1916). His image appeared on banners and buttons. In death, he became more portable than he had ever been alive.

Ten cents for a revolution, printed in red

His ashes were divided into small envelopes and mailed to union halls across the world—Australia, South Africa, Sweden, Argentina. One envelope, intercepted by the US Post Office for “subversive content,” was locked away until 1988. Even his dust was treated as sedition.

In Gävle, his birthplace, the house where he was born became a museum. The rooms are narrow, the floors wooden. There is a violin in a glass case, a few letters, and photographs of the young man before he became a legend. Visitors walk quietly, as though entering a chapel. Outside, the Baltic light turns everything gray and pure.

When I think of Joe Hill now, I think less of the songs than of that double silence: the refusal to name the woman, the refusal to plead. There is dignity in withholding. The modern age, so eager to confess, has made secrecy a form of resistance.

To say “Fire” to one’s executioners is not bravado; it is syntax. It reclaims agency over the final sentence. The word restores order to a moment designed to erase it. It rearranges power, in that the condemned becomes the grammarian—the one who dictates the verb, who commands the timing, who closes his own paragraph. The rifles may belong to the state, but the word belonged to him.

Every myth is an act of editing. Joe Hill edited himself into clarity. No family, no confession, no narrative clutter. What remains is what he intended to remain: the songs, the voice, the idea.

Hill stands in a lineage of those who turned speech into weaponry: Jeanne d’Arc, Rosa Luxemburg, Jesus, Spartacus, and the many nameless slaves who sang through chains. But Hill’s revolution was linguistic, not military. He fought not for utopia but for dignity, the right to speak one’s own sentence before dying.

There’s a photograph taken shortly before his execution. Hill sits at a wooden table, cigarette in hand, shirt buttoned to the throat. His expression is unreadable: neither fear nor faith, but something in between. The caption identifies him as “Joe Hill, labor agitator.”

I imagine him hearing the hymns of his childhood as the shots approached. I imagine him thinking of his mother’s hands on the church organ, the small harmonies of survival.

What haunts me is the geography of that life, the distance between the gray harbor of Gävle and the red dust of Utah. Between them lies the twentieth century: migration, industry, faith, betrayal. The song is still playing somewhere beneath all that noise.

From bullets to ballads: the resurrection on vinyl

Every generation rediscovers Joe Hill in its own idiom. Woody Guthrie sang about him, then Pete Seeger, then Joan Baez. Each version softened him slightly, made him safer. The radical became a folk saint. But the real story resists comfort. It is not about triumph; it is about endurance. Hill’s America was not a land of opportunity but of wages, accidents, and laws that worked only in one direction. He sang so that others could remember the difference between work and life.

And perhaps that is why his story still matters. In an age of digital slogans and vanishing solidarities, “Don’t mourn, organize” reads like a forgotten grammar, a reminder that feeling without action is only sentiment. The phrase is not nostalgic; it is diagnostic.

We mourn too much and organize too little.

When the envelopes of ashes arrived in Sweden, a local newspaper reported that some were scattered in the sea off Gävle. The salt air carried them inland, toward the pine forests, the frozen rivers. No grave to visit. Only movement.

Distributed worldwide: one martyr, in 600 small packages

If there is an afterlife, it is this: the way a name persists in language long after the body is gone. Joe Hill has no descendants, no estate, no monument of marble. He exists in repetition. Each time his name is mentioned, each time one of his songs is played or sung, he is reconstituted, as if the air itself were his medium.

There is something unnervingly pure in that, the way he managed to evade ownership even in death. He cannot be canceled, sold, or domesticated. The state shot him, but the myth refused to die. What remains is an image: a man standing in the cold light of Utah, cigarette smoke curling upward, the faint smile of someone who has already stepped beyond fear.

And perhaps that is the truest definition of art—to stand beyond fear.

Nathan Abel (b. 1968 in Duluth, Minnesota) is a former steelworker turned writer. His essays bridge labor history and poetics, covering work, protest, and the American vernacular. He has written on Woody Guthrie, Florence Reece, Victor Jara, and the Lomax recordings. He says the rhythm of a rolling mill never really leaves his sentences.

Cover image: A face made for the picket line: clarity, defiance, and the faint patience of the condemned