Joe Hill Quotes
If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Hill, Joe. "Workers of the World, Awaken!" Little Red Songbook, Industrial Workers of the World, 1914.
25,000 mill workers went on strike in one of the largest strikes in America at the time.
The unions that broke off were very successful at increasing union membership and made large efforts at organizing. The others were losing members for the most part and devoted most of their resources to politics to protect what they had.
This was a great victory for the Victor Berger wing of the party. They purged the violence advocates and communists from the party. Despite this, a few right wingers call any socialist a communist and a revolutionary.
Ironically, this view was also held by many of the capitalist “Captains of American Industry” who believed that all unions were revolutionist regardless of the views of the union’s membership or leadership. Even today, there are some who still equate trade unionism with communism and revolution. The majority of the unions and the left never believed that, but the extreme communists and extreme capitalists did than and some do today.
Mitchell had warned that the strike was coming (see {607760}). The strike lasted 29 days and ended when the miners received a 10% wage increase. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the dispute.
This quotation became a slogan of the miners. Lewis did not originate it. It has been referred to as early as 1902 in the bitter coal strike of that year. Generally coal mining strikes have involved more force and military than most labor disputes. While labor representatives maintain that force does not help, mine owners have believed that force is absolutely necessary. See Richard B. Mellon’s testimony to Congress in 1937--{563576}.
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, familiarly called the "Wobblies"). A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"), "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.
