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OTD in 1916, packets containing bits of the ashes of Joe Hill were passed out to 150 people at an Industrial Workers of the World meeting at the West Side Auditorium in Chicago.
It was one year to the day after Hill, a songwriter and laborer, was executed in Utah for the 1914 murder of two Salt Lake City men, a crime Hill most likely didn’t commit. President Wilson, Helen Keller + others had called for him to be released.
The main evidence against Hill was a gunshot wound. He said he’d been shot in a fight over a woman, and because holes in his clothes and body didn’t line up, it seems like he had his hands raised, which you wouldn’t do if you were committing a murder.
Before the execution, Hill wrote his will in a poem: “Let the merry breezes blow my dust to where some flowers grow.”
His body was shipped to Chicago, home base of the I.W.W., and cremated at Graceland on Nov 29, 1915. His ashes were put in 600 packets, to be handed out at the auditorium + shipped to every state but Utah.
The first 150 were handed out on the anniversary of the execution, at the West Side Auditorium, at Taylor and Racine. It’s gone, but stood on one of these two corners.
Some of the packets of ashes were confiscated by the USPS, but others arrived as far away as New Zealand.
Here’s one of the most popular songs by Joe Hill (born Joel Hagglund in Sweden in 1879), The Preacher and the Slave. “Just work and pray, live on hay and you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
