‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”
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history of a militant c hu r c h. And Stegner certainly did a good job of offending
the Wobblie faithful by suggesting that Hill may have committed the robbery
and murder for which he was executed by a Utah firing squad on 19 November
1915. Stegner created a fictional character named Gustave Lund as a confidant
of Hill, who visited the condemned man on the evening before his execution.
Hill appears to welcome the opportunity to become a martyr for the cause. Thus,
his final directive to not waste time in mourning, but continue to organize
becomes a predetermined course of action rather than simply an inspirational
refrain produced by adversity and suppression. Challenging Hill’s innocence and
motivation was, to many Wobblies, the equivalent of questioning the motivation
of Jesus on the cross for Christians. Stegner’s doubts about Hill’s innocence and
martyrdom were initially set forth in a 1948 piece for The New Republic. In
response, Wobblies boycotted the New York City offices of the magazine and
reasserted that an innocent man was murdered by the Utah authorities.'^^ Even
during the early years of the Second Red Scare, Wobblie voices of protest were
not intimidated.
In general, the post World War II years were not a period in which the
achievements of Joe Hill and the IWW were lauded. Union membership in the
United States declined as reformers and labor activists were denounced as part
of the international communist criminal conspiracy. Questions of Hill’s
innocence or guilt paled beside the reactionary politics of an era characterized
by McCarthyism and the blacklist.
The IWW, however, would make a comeback during the 1960s when
the Wobblie spirit of challenging authority and agitating for social and economic
change was once again in vogue. In 1964, Joyce L. Kombluh edited Rebel
Voices: An IWW Anthology, introducing the Wobblies to a new generation
confronting the gender, racial, and economic inequality within America while
the nation waged a war of aggression in Southeast Asia. Those involved in a
culture of protest in the 1960s could certainly make commo n cause with the
Wobblies, who, in the words of Kombluh, were “one of the first social
movements in this country to develop an extensive literature and lore of its own.
The Wobblies sang their songs of savage mockery and sardonic humor. They
aired their songs, poems, stories, anecdotes, skits, language, and visual
symbolism to transmit their own values within the structure of a society they
wished to change.”" Kombluh’s anthology is a rich collection of Wobblie
speeches, art work, editorials, letters, and, most importantly, music and song
lyrics.
Kornbluh’s work was followed by Philip S. Foner’s The Industrial
Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (1965) and English journalist Patrick
Renshaw’s The Wobblies (1969), but the scholarly volume which legitimized the
IWW within the academic community was labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky’s
detailed history of the union. We Shall Be All (1969).'" While Dubofsky
certainly sympathized with the travails of the IWW, the scholar took pains to not
romanticize the Wobblies and Joe Hill. Dubofsky’s history, nevertheless, was