“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I 'But Joe, you're ten years dead'....”
“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I 'But Joe, you're ten years dead'....”
'Joe Hill never died!' That is the protagonist's standard, expected, retort to any reference to Joe Hill in Piers Anthony's science-fiction saga of Hope Hubris, 'Bio of a Space Tyrant'. In Anthony's vision of a twenty-sixth century off-earth human civilisation centred on the Jupiter ecliptic, Hubris moves within a migrant culture to which Joe Hill was a multiform entity, amenable to different levels of interpretation, at once a real person, a generic nickname, a mythic personality and a state of mind.
But Joe Hill is more than fiction. I would learn that later. And his song is more than legend, though it does transcend mere reality. I start with Anthony's pulp fiction because that was my first encounter with Joe Hill and all he represents: hope, grim defiance, the rock-solid knowledge that truth, by definition, is the designated victor over lies and injustice, every time. Reading the lyrics of the song of Joe Hill on Anthony's pages, I would make up my own inept tunes and try to sing along, for its commonplace description of an ordinary man faced with extraordinary challenges exerted a pull that demanded an emotional response from me that went beyond mere entertainment. I had no idea at the time that the song was actually not Anthony's composition, but an immortal piece of American folklore. Eventually I would hear a recording of Joan Baez's heart-stopping rendition of the song, at a time I was immersing myself in American folk music and the conditions that birthed the 60's hippy generation, and a lot of things became clear to me.
Joe Hill really lived. And he died. But he never really died. See?
The song explains everything. It also explains the world you live in today. It tells you your future, if you're willing to accept its truth and pay the price. There's another popular rendition of the song in Paul Robeson's impressive baritone, but for me Joan Baez's crystal clear notes carry the spirit of the essential Joe Hill: you cannot listen to Baez and believe for one moment that Joe Hill ever died.
To the history: Joe Hill was a Swedish immigrant to America, originally born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund in 1879. Orphaned early, he taught himself to play the piano, the guitar and the violin. Arriving in New York in 1902, he went to San Francisco as an itinerant worker and wandered up and down the West Coast doing a succession of jobs. He wrote songs about his first-hand experiences of the plight of America's dispossessed, and as a poet, singer and song-writer his influence in America's protest music culture is evidenced in such icons as John Lennon, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
It was a grim time to be an industrial worker in America then, a hundred years ago, at the culminating point of the second industrial revolution. It was the era of the steel-fingered ice-hearted robber barons that shaped the American economy, bringing in brilliant innovations in industry and financing which expanded productivity to unimagined levels on the one hand, and creating hideous conditions within their factories which reduced their workers to mere factors of production without regard for their welfare or safety. It was the era of the Vanderbilts and Carnegies, the Fords and Schwabs, the Oil Trust of Rockefeller and the Money Trust of J. P. Morgan.
The Bethlehem Steel strike of 1910, where the police were brought into shoot down unarmed steel workers on a peaceful strike for better conditions, highlighted the desperate plight of the workers, and the ruthless ambitions of the nation's leading industrialists. A government inquiry in due course established that:
“Over 97 percent of the work force had a work day of 10 hours, and 51 percent worked 12 hours or more. Twenty nine percent of the men worked seven-day weeks with no extra pay for Sunday work. Accidents were common. In 1909, 10 percent of the men at the plant met with some kind of industrial injury. Twenty one men lost their lives that year. South Bethlehem lawyer Harry A. Cyphers told investigators, "We see the ambulance go three or four or five times a day, sometimes six or eight, to and from the hospital; it passes my office." (Peter Linebaugh)
Charles Schwab was the owner of Bethlehem Steel and he knew his own mind. His reaction to the public outcry against his strikebreaking methods was to threaten to uproot his plant and take it somewhere else where his valuable contributions to the economy would be better appreciated. The town leaders of Bethlehem backed off at this threat, denying crucial support to the strikers when it mattered most, and the strike eventually fizzled out as hunger drove the workers back to work.
In actuality, America had declared her allegiance to the cult of moneymaking, and thus the high priests of mammon powering up her immense economy could do no wrong. The miserable conditions of the working class were deemed an acceptable price to pay for the blessing of near-miraculous industrialisation. In this conspiracy to sanctify greed, every significant institution was co-opted: the church, academia, the mainstream political parties, the arts and popular culture. Adam Smith's ideal of unbridled free enterprise was held as the crystallisation of the American dream.
It was this mentality that Joe Hill was to confront in his doomed odyssey along the West Coast. He knew that there was no one to help the workers unless they helped themselves, and that the canard of the divine right of capital they were being sold by their bosses was just that, a lie. Hill recognised that the workers were indispensable to the working of this economy, and that if they could speak with one voice they would be able to claw back their rights. But the awareness of their own power must first be created and made universal!
Hill joined the International Workers of the World, a trade union that was feared and despised by the establishment as having dangerously socialist leanings, and he worked up some effective musical propaganda for the union. He contended: "A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once. But a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read."
Too dangerous to live, Joe Hill was. He was arrested for the murder of a local butcher/ex-policeman in Salt Lake City, and with little or no evidence, and no possible ascribable motive, was sentenced to death by firing squad. “The police, the copper trust, and the Mormon Church launched a campaign of vilification. The San Pedro police chief favoured execution explaining, "he is somewhat of a musician and writer of songs for the IWW songbook." (Linebaugh). In spite of a campaign for clemency supported by President Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, the Swedish ambassador and the international labour union movement, Joe Hill was executed in 1915.
Trouble was - they shot the wrong guy. Joe Hill as a man was meaningless to the establishment that railroaded him to virtual judicial murder. What they were targeting was his spirit of defiance to the established order, in the hope that one scapegoat would teach their uppity workers a lesson. But in the song of Joe hill, when Hill is told he's ten years dead, the reply is resoundingly negative:
'I never died, said he,
I never died, said he'
The narrator in the song repeatedly confronts the spectre of Joe Hill with the reality of his death. It's a fact of history, after all:
"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
They shot you Joe" says I
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
And Hill gives the illuminating reply:
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe "What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize"
That was the point his murderers missed. The power of Joe Hill lay not just in his personality, magnetic though it was. It lay in the message he passed on to his hearers before he was silenced - that they had the power within them to create a better deal for themselves at the hands of their exploiters if they would only put aside their individual differences and unite to fight for their rights. That the reason why their lives were miserable even though their employers were swimming in prosperity was that their employers were organised and they were not. His last written words were: “Don't waste any time in mourning. Organise!”
That the message was learned well is evidenced by the history of the trade union movement in America. By the 1940's auto workers were receiving a vastly improved compensation package negotiated by collecting bargaining by the unions. They succeeded perhaps too well, for by the 1980's, American industry found itself struggling to compete with upstarts like the Japanese, whose initial stirrings of worker revolt (notably at Nissan) had been ruthlessly crushed by the bosses.
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill!
The song of Joe Hill is a universal one, for its message applies far beyond San Diego and even Maine. It is a reminder to all the little people of the world in all walks of life that their interests will only be protected when they identify them for themselves and organise to fight for them. The oppressor is always organised; that is precisely why he is able to be an oppressor. If for instance corruption is rampant and untouchable in Nigeria, you may confidently deduce that it is because there is a viable system in place that births, protects and nourishes corruption. There is an identifiable interest group for whom corruption, both political and economic, is the preferred modus operandi. But it only survives because the bulk of the Nigerian people, who pay the awful price for this corruption, have not been able to identify their common interest in fighting this cancer as the highest priority of all. We are disorganised and ‘misorganised’. We are organised along ethnic lines, oblivious to the fact that corruption speaks all the 650 dialects native to Nigeria. We pay more attention to religious affiliation than probity, more weight to kinship ties than uprightness of character when deciding whom to trust with the management of our nation's affairs.
I firmly believe that the only way to ensure a job is done right is to do it yourself. The beauty of the democratic system of governance is that it gives us an opportunity to decide the quality of governance we want, if we are willing to do what is necessary to hold our leaders strictly to account. The only way to effectively do that is to band together with like-minded people who believe in what you believe and who do not take no or silence for an answer. It is only in unity that we are able to apply effective sanctions that political leaders recognise and fear. Enough of trusting this leader because he speaks your language when he comes to your street on campaign; enough of trusting that one because he wears an Awo cap or carries a Zik fan; enough of trusting this other because he rolls ecstatically on the floor in your church or donates millions to build your mosque. It's time for we the people to start the hard work of envisioning what exactly we want for our country, and deciding, each one of us, precisely what we are going to do to make it a reality. How exactly are we going to torment our leaders to start enthroning the rule of law? How are we going to start harassing them into doing something about the glaring corruption cases? How do we scare them into realising that transparency is not an option but an imperative if they want to remain in power?
It lies in our hands. It first entails jettisoning a lot of the stinking thinking they have wired into our heads that makes us act against our own interests. Our old ways of blindly following and blindly hating without doing our own research and thinking simply will not do anymore; we can't afford it. We also cannot afford to shrug in helplessness at each symptom of the Nigerian Disease that crops up on our newspaper headlines every day. We must begin to remind ourselves that if 1.0billion Naira was stolen yesterday, it is because we didn't do something to prevent it, yes. We didn't ask the right questions. We didn't monitor the right people. We didn't lend our last breath to the latest call for accountability and transparency that was being raised by our fellow citizens. Enough of siddon look.
Speaking of which, I would like you to take your outrage as a concerned citizen who is sick of being robbed and misruled and go and add your voice to those of your fellow citizens in the nascent movement called Kick Out Siddon Look. I don't say follow blindly, in fact quite the opposite: be very clear in your own mind what you want for your country and be sure to make your own voice heard. In true communication lies the seeds of trust, and in trust lies the secret of unity. If we are united as friends of Nigeria, those who have constituted themselves the enemies of Nigeria, regardless of political affiliation, will find themselves branded and hounded for the criminals that they are. Check out their Facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/groups/kickoutsiddonlook2015/541204025920505/?notif_t=group_activity
So please next time you turn your tap on and no water flows, don't complain, Organise. When power goes off again, don't yell NEPA, Organise.When you endure another bone-rattling journey on a pothole-filled road because another fat-bellied crook has taken public money earmarked for road maintenance and spent it on junkets to Dubai, my sister, don't siddon look. Organise.
Please, let Joe Hill ask you a question, and please, ponder on your answer:
“Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave.
Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?"
Peter A. Oshun is a Legal Practitioner in Islington, London
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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