Interview: Gibbs M. Smith A well known figure in publishing circles, Gibbs Smith is also an historian and published author. His Master's thesis on the case eventually grew into the best-selling book, Joe Hill, which has enjoyed multiple printings over the past thirty years. Continued from previous page... Q: Joe Hill is a man who is not at a loss for words. . .yet he falls demonstrably, determinedly silent at pivotal times. Can we ever figure out why? A: Why didn't he name the woman? That's the big mystery with Joe Hill. But, to me, it is impossible to answer, of course, but it isn't inconsistent, because Joe Hill had the ability to think of himself bigger than his person in life. He might have decided that the best thing he could do for the world is to play out the hand he was dealt in the situation. But I don't see Joe Hill as a cold-blooded killer. So why wouldn't the woman come and save him? That's the biggest mystery to me. Q: He refuses to testify at his trial, something the prosecution uses against him. A: Yeah. So why he was silent on that issue is something I can't answer. Q: Is he playing out a role? Is he in fact accepting the role of martyr, donning the martyr's robes? A: Yes. That's what I think. He realized -- he was a very smart man and he realized what was happening and that he could be useful to the cause he really believed in by playing that role. I think that became part of it towards the end. And there was also this -- the sadness I can sense in him of, you know, what was going to happen to him. But, still, why he didn't save himself or why a woman didn't come and save him, if there was a woman, I don't know. Q: The prosecution in the trial does use his silence against him, don't they? A: Yeah. I think the prosecution really is vicious the way they -- of course, a prosecution often is, but they use everything against him, and the silence is one of the things they use against him. And they put it to the public like, "Why wouldn't this guy save himself if he was innocent?" And that's a rhetorical question to the public of the day as well. And most people, I think, agree that if he were innocent, he would have tried to save himself. But I think that's misreading what he's capable of. And I think he is capable of becoming a martyr, and I think he did. Q: After his conviction, Hill's backers claim throughout the nation that he was railroaded by the copper bosses, that he was railroaded by corporate interests, that he was railroaded by the Mormon Church. There seems to be no evidence whatsoever -- excuse me -- whatsoever of a conspiracy at hand against Joe Hill. A: I don't think there was a conspiracy by those forces that you spoke of at the time. I don't think there was. But I think there was a climate, not only in Utah, but in the west, that the IWW was a threat to the status quo, to the power structure, and that any way to oppose them would be a legitimate thing to do, oppose them. Executing Joe Hill was consistent with opposing the IWW. Q: Shortly after his conviction, Hill's appellate attorney, Orrin Hilton comes to Salt Lake City and meets with Hill. And according to one account, Hilton makes the statement: "That Hill is a strange case. It's almost as if he means to become a symbol for a cause." Is this the first recognition we have that Hill sees that greater value he can play to the cause? A: I don't know if that's the first recognition, but Hilton was a labor attorney from Denver. And he was skilled at helping to defend labor -- labor interests in court. And I think Hill was a strange bird for him to deal with. He wasn't your normal guy. He was -- I think Joe Hill was smarter than Hilton, and Hilton was a smart man. I just don't think Hilton had the frame of reference to deal with a case like Joe Hill. I don't think he ever had one before or after. Q: Each side, after the conviction, is using Joe Hill as a symbol. The IWW is rallying national interest to raise funds for his defense. But also, on the other side, William Spry invokes Hill as an image of what must be fought and resisted as undermining the national experience and the Utah experience. So do we really come to a point where we lose Joe Hill the man and we're just dealing with Joe Hill the symbol? A: I think in a lot of ways we are. We're caught up in Utah history too. I mean, Utah hadn't been a state that long. It was a struggle to become a state. And in the Hill case the federal government actually intervenes to tell Utah, through the Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, "You've got this case and we -- we're worried that you might execute this guy and he might be innocent." I mean, the federal government is meddling in Utah's affairs again here. And so there's all this stuff that comes up. And I think Utah really hardened against President Wilson and his appeal on Hill's behalf. And I think the old statehood issue was part of it. I mean, there's just a lot of baggage connected. Q: Hill is given repeated opportunities to take his neck out of the noose. How does Hill respond to those offers? A: Well, I think they were playing a game of posturing in the press. I mean, I think the state authorities knew Hill wasn't going to change his pattern of silence. And so the notion of a dramatic pleading, I think, was simply self-serving. I think it was cynical. So I think the whole thing became kind of a symbol on all sides and people were playing roles, both Joe Hill and the other side. And by the time that -- it was like a vortex that wasn't going to stop once it got rolling. Q: Several intriguing individuals appear near the center of the Hill story. Let's begin with Virginia Snow Steven, the daughter of an LDS Church president, who rises up as almost this angelic presence in the case of Joe Hill. Where did she come from? A: She, as you pointed out, was the late-president of the Mormon Church's daughter, Lorenzo Snow. She was an art instructor at the University of Utah. She -- she's typical of people since then. People just understand what Joe Hill stood for in some cases, both in our generation and in his time. And she was one of those who did. There were people who are still rising up and they say Joe Hill stands for something in our society that is important. And she was one of the early ones who did. She said he was innocent. He may or may not have been innocent, but she also understood that he stood for something. That is, the injustice in our society. There's a certain class in America always who has not been dealt a fair deal, either racially or economically, and she was the defender of the underdog. And Joe Hill, throughout his time and our time, is a symbol of the underdog who isn't dealt with justly by our society. And that's the important thing that Joe Hill stands for in American history. He's a symbol of the class or the group, no matter what generation we are in, there are some that our society doesn't deal with justly. Caesar Chavez, who dealt with the -- organizing the farm workers understood that and used Joe Hill as a symbol himself to organize people. Samuel Gompers used it even as the AF of L/CIO president. A later labor leader, Walter Reuther, in our own time, used it. So he's a symbol for America of the injustice that happens to a certain group in our culture, in our society. And that is what Virginia Snow Stevens understood, in my opinion. Q: And what did she do? How did she get involved? A: She became vocal in terms of her support for him and her pleading for justice and wanting a new trial, wanting some fairness in this trial. And it was not a fair trial. It was not a trial where, under standards today, anyone would have been convicted, based on the evidence they had. Regardless of his lack of explanation for the gunshot wound, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. So Virginia Snow Stevens lost her job at the University of Utah. She paid the price. And she -- by losing her job, she involved the University of Utah in a big bunch of trouble over this that almost threatened the accreditat ion of the University. Q: Let's consider another important woman in the last months of Joe Hill's life and that's Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. A: Well, she was alive during your lifetime and mine. By then, she had become a very prominent member of the Communist Party of America. But at that time, she was a strong leader of the IWW. Joe Hill wrote a song dedicated to her and about her, really, the Rebel Girl song that has become quite well known. She was a remarkably strong orator, she could harangue a crowd of working stiffs and inspire them. She was a tough organizer with a modern, feminist sensibility. Q: There also seems to be a relationship that develops between her and Joe Hill. A: I think so. Maybe even romantically even. I don't think they ever had a physical romantic relationship, but I think there was a strong emotional connection. Q: A figure that appears in the struggle for Hill's life appears in the nation's capitol. W.A.F. Eckengren appears time and time again, the Swedish minister who seems to be quite active. A: Well, he's in a different world than Joe Hill. During the time of Joe Hill's struggles, Eckengren is often in Bar Harbor on a vacation in Maine. I mean, he is an aristocrat. He is of a whole different class than Joe Hill is. And so while Joe Hill is one of his duties as a political representative of his government, the sympathy between these two couldn't be further, in my opinion, from their class difference. Eckengren's frame of reference and the people he dealt with were the opposite of that of Joe Hill. He's doing his duty but not leaning into it. Q: Let's consider the governor of the state of Utah, William Spry. He's a very important player in this. A:I think his -- his role is to defend Utah's honor, in his view. Again, we've just come out of the statehood struggle, and Utah's trying to legitimize itself in the eyes of the nation and be respected as a state. And they don't want the federal government meddling in a case where it's purely a Utah case. And so there becomes this whole thing of, you know, "Is Utah a state or not?" And he's going to prove we are and follow through with the execution. Q: Woodrow Wilson. Constantly seems to be talked into doing what he does. How does Woodrow Wilson become involved? A: We all know Woodrow Wilson is an idealist. I mean, he led us into the war to end all wars. He really was an idealist. He believed that there was perfectibility in mankind. And so he could be appealed to on idealistic grounds, and he was. There's an innocent man, perhaps, being executed. This is consistent with Wilson to try to save someone in that situation. And Wilson, as I see it, is a very good man. I mean, he -- he was kind of like Jimmy Carter of our time where he really wanted to do the right thing. Q: And then, in the White House wings, you have a man named Joseph Tumulty, the private secretary and political advisor to Wilson. A: He's a very shrewd guy, like all presidents have around them. And a president can -- is usually a shrewd person too, but in Wilson's case and in some other cases, the president could stand above the fray. But Tumulty was in the fray elbowing and doing his job. And he was well aware of the political gain for Wilson by being somewhat involved in the case of Joe Hill. Q:Was the Hill case significant outside of Utah? We talked about the significance inside, but was it significant outside of Utah? A: Well, history has proven that's true. I mean, there's numerous cases where, in the last 50 years, 60 years, Joe Hill has been used and his case has been used to symbolize things. In literature, I can name a few offhand. In James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Joe Hill is mentioned. He always stands for something in every case. John Dos Passos in his Trilogy, he uses Joe Hill a lot. Wallace Stegner used Joe Hill. There have been songs written about Joe Hill. There's been movies made about Joe Hill. Joe Hill stands for something like Johnny Appleseed stands for something. He's a part of the mythology of America. In famous songbooks, like a songbook called The American Songbag, it was published since the 1940s, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" is included. In most songs dealing with American music, Joe Hill's songs or a famous song written about him is in it. So he's part of our culture whether people like it or not. Q:But what about in his own era of 1914, 1915? Do people in the United States care about what's taking place in Utah with the case of this man Joseph Hillstrom? A: They do. I mean, it's covered by all the major newspapers, the letters are coming in from every state in the country. I mean, it just was a nightmare for the officials in Utah every morning when the mail came. Piles of letters come in. It was like a floodtide. It was very well-known nationally. Q: How can we characterize the last three months of Hill's life? September, October, November, 1915. Was he fighting for his life or was he fighting to lose his life? A: I think he was in the vortex. He was playing his role. I sense a sadness about him. He really seemed like he knew what was going to happen, but he was determined to play his role well, and he did. In newspaper interviews, the things he said during those last three months were beautiful and useful for the cause. There's a famous mural that used to be in Salt Lake City down on Post Office Place in the first Joe Hill House of Hospitality and the mural depicted Joe Hill as Christ. Q: More than 80 years after the execution, the case and the man are still debated. Yet it seems we really don't know Joe Hill. Is it possible to know Joe Hill? A: No. I don't think it is today. The only way I have any sense of who Joe Hill was, was through these old Wobblies who I actually knew. So I was getting it secondhand through other people's eyes, and that is my best sense of who he was. I really believe that he had physical skills, unusual physical skills. Because that's what, often, these old Wobblies told me, that -- how he could run and get on a freight train and never get hurt. If they did that very long, they would get maimed. They would lose an arm or a leg or get battered in some way. Joe Hill never got hurt. That's what people said over and over to me. He never got hurt. I mean, that was an unusual ability. That's totally outside of the frame of reference for people today. I mean, very few people catch freight trains today. But that was very common then. And for Joe Hill never to get hurt, for Joe Hill to just appear at an important strike, like the one in British Columbian on the Fraser River, I mean he had the ability to sniff out the right place to be and get there and then disappear and then appear someplace else. He was this cat-like person who was light on his feet, never was hurt, always agile, doing and saying the right thing. He was kind of even like a Robin Hood character that just did the right thing and worked with a group of people that most people disdained. And he had his own value system. He had his own -- see, the Wobblies had this amazing morality about them. They worked and had their union offices on skid rows, where most people were degraded and most people were drunk, and most people just lived pitiful lives. But the Wobbly union hall was a place where you didn't drink, where there was a library, where people tried to use their minds to change society. I mean, it was like something that most people don't even understand today. It was an intellectual group of people who had the ability to discipline themselves to do the work in the most difficult circumstances. It wasn't just a bunch of screwball radicals. These people were serious and they were dedicated and disciplined. And they didn't like a situation where a person would just get drunk and become useless to the cause or to help change society. So there was a tremendous morality and discipline within that culture. Q: Was he guilty? With guilt or innocence, does it really matter? A: Today it doesn't. I mean, history has an interesting way about it. In individual cases everything matters. And the Morrisons did get killed by somebody. If it were Joe Hill, it's tragic, I mean, it's sad that somebody got killed. But in a larger sense, what Joe Hill has become, what actually happened in the murder case or the trial doesn't really matter. It's part of the material that made him into what he became, but what he became is what is significant now, in my opinion. And, again, what he stood for is someone who tried to right injustice in our society, somebody who could be used in every generation, no matter the situation, whether it's migrant farm workers or women not being respected in the workplace, whatever, Joe Hill can be used and is used to call out the injustice and to change it.                     About the Program || Joe Hill Home || PBS Home