JOE HILL (1877-1915) is the best-known figure in the heroic history of the Indus trial Workers of the World (a.k.a. Wobblies). U.S. labor's most world-renowned martyr and celebrated song-writer, he is remembered above all for his songs in the Little Red Song Book: "The Preacher and the Slave" ("Pie in the Sky"), "Mr Block," "There Is Power in a Union," and many more that are still popular on picketlines today.
Franklin Rosemont's important new book presents a fresh and in-depth study of the life and work of the famous Wobbly bard, and of the revolutionary counter-culture he came to personify. Older books on Hill focused on the crime he didn't commit, his frame-up and martyrdom. This study sheds new light on those topics -particularly on the ongoing use of frame-up in the U.S."justice" system-but its overall focus is on Hill's ideas and activity: as songwriter, poet, artist, hobo, thinker, humorist, and archetypal rank-and-file Wobbly.
No other book discusses in such detail Hill's views on capitalism, white supremacy, gender issues, religion, wilderness, law, and prison, as well as on songwriting, humor, direct action, and revolutionary industrial union-ism. Several chapters explore Hill's little-known work as a cartoonist. Collected here for the first time is all his art, including his one surviving painting. The scores of other illustrations feature Hill-inspired art by IWWs from Ralph Chaplin to Carlos Cortez, and by such other labor artists as Mike Alewitz, Gary Huck, Mike Konopacki, and Lisa Lyons.
Examining Hill's status as a "near-mythic" figure in history as well as his enormous influence-on Wob artists; other radicals, songwriters, and poets; on movements as varied as the 1910s Chicago Renaissance and the 1950s Beat Generation-Rosemont also examines the many appearances by Hill and the IWW in popular culture, including mass-market mysteries, science-fiction, and rock'n'roll. In chapters on "The Hobo Contribution to Critical Theory," "Wobblies Against Whiteness," "Forerunners of Earth First! and Eco-Socialism," and "Surrealism, Wobbly Style" he argues that Hill's legacy -the profound but playful old-time Wobbly counter-culture-is still the "most important inspiration and model for a new revolutionary movement" today.
Franklin Rosemont's nearly thirty books include T-Bone Slim: Juice Is Stranger Than Friction, and From Bug-house Square to the Beat Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage, both published by Charles H. Kerr, and Penelope: A Poem (Surrealist Editions).
"In Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill has finally found a chronicler worthy of his revolutionary spirit, sense of humor, and poetic imagination. This is no ordinary biography. It is a journey into the Wobbly culture that made Joe Hill and the capitalist culture that killed him. But as Rosemont suggests in this remarkable book, Joe Hill never really dies. He will live in the minds of young rebels as long as his songs are sung, his ideas are circulated, and his political descendants keep fighting for a better day." -Robin D. G. Kelley, , author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
"This is an exceptionally important book in many ways, and Franklin Rosemont has done us all a great favor in writing it. The fine chapter on Hill's involvement in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the cove price, for no other study comes even close to offering so much information, so much rich detail, on that crucial moment in his life. There's no doubt about it: This is the best book ever written about Joe Hill." -Utah Phillips
"Extraordinarily interesting ... a tremendous achievement, full of insight into Joe Hill, carefully separating his life from his post-mortem elaboration, and substantiating all of it. Hill is not quite as alive a you and I, but almost, and this book has contributed to his long life." -Leon M. Despres
"A remarkable book, and badly needed." -Paul Avrich
"This full-length study . . . discusses for the first time the Wobbly bard's contributions to labor cartooning, wilder-ness radicalism, women's liberation, and the struggle against white supremacy. Far more than a biography, this book is a fundamental re-examination of the IWW, its rich and manysided culture, and its relation to such currents as romanticism, Futurism, the Chicago Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and surrealism, emphasizing throughout the significance of the Wobblies' multiple legacies for revolutionary struggle in our own time." -Ron Sakolsky, in Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the U.S. (2002)
"It's the right man by the right biographer at the right time. ... This magnificent, practical, irreverent, and (as one might say) magisterial book has sixteen chapters and more than 600 pages, profusely illustrated ... It is written in a direct, passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching style. It is a labor of love. Rosemont's book, like E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, has a job to do-making the class which brings to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. ...The Wobbly vocabulary of mutual aid that Thompson called for is not going to be found in theory, or in instinct, but it might be found in song. Here we need Rosemont and Joe Hill." -Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch
"It has been a long time since so much new material on Joe Hill and the Wobblies has been collected in one volume. All students of the IWW, labor cartoons and songs, radical humor, and the history of blue-collar countercultures in the U.S., will find this book indispensable." -Salvatore Salerno, author of Red November, Black November (1989)
"Extraordinarily interesting . . . a tremendous achievement." -Leon Despres
"Exceptionally important . . . The fine chapter on Hill's involve-ment in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the cover price. . . . No doubt about it: This is the best book ever written about Joe Hill." -Utah Phillips
"Blends the best of labor history with popular culture [and] debunks the many myths surrounding Hill. . . Rosemont's passion for IWW history and lore is compelling". - Julie Herrada, Fifth Estate
"Informative, fascinating, fun to read-a little like The New Yorker, with great cartoons every other page". -Tom Geoghegan
"In these 600-plus pages there is not one bit of tedious reading. This is an important book." - Industrial Worker
