Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  As they crossed the tiled hall Joe kept looking for Ricket, Carpenter, any of the boys from the hall, but there was no sign of any of them. Either the threats Coues had spoken about were all in the imagination of the law, or deputies and cops had scoured the place in advance. Otherwise some of the boys should have been in court today.

  On the cement steps of the jail he stopped and said to Hilton, “What’s the date?”

  “You mean today?”

  “Yes.”

  “August second.”

  “August second,” Joe repeated. Two months, less one day. One more month of summer and the first month of the fall.

  Like a parade they went in, waited for the unlocking of the steel door, marched through. “There are some things we should settle,” Hilton said. “You feel like talking them over now, Joe?”

  “Sure.”

  The chief’s huffy, sputtering voice said, “When you start planning that next move, you can tell the I-Won’t-Works to stay out of it. You can tell ’em from me that blackhand notes and bomb threats and all the rest won’t get you or them a god damn thing, see? We’re ready for ’em and if they start anything somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  “I haven’t any control over the IWW,” Hilton said. “If you want to calm them down, maybe you’d better revise Utah justice a little.”

  “All I want to say to you,” Barry said, “is that there’s enough justice in Utah to take care of any Wobbly that wants to start anything.”

  He turned on his heel. “Or any workingman without the means to defend himself,” Hilton said after him. “He’s got it bad,” he said to the sheriff. The sheriff looked as if his stomach pained him.

  “The governor’s been getting these threatening letters,” he said. “He’s probably been building a fire under the Public Safety Department.” His hand went into his sagging coat pocket and rattled the handcuffs there. “I know he’s been building a fire under me,” he said almost plaintively. “I suppose you guys have to make a noise and beat on the tubs, but if they don’t behave I’ll have to run the whole bunch out of town.”

  “I wouldn’t try,” Hilton told him. “Did you ever sit in on a free-speech fight?”

  Waving the guard ahead of them down the corridor toward the conference room, the sheriff said, “That’s what I can’t figure out. What in hell do all these outsiders know about it?”

  Hilton rapidly stroked the tip of his nose between thumb and finger, and blew twice to clear some tickling obstruction. He looked at the sheriff and a hint of his courtroom manner came over him. “They don’t have to know anything about it but the name of the man who’s been framed. You don’t seem to realize even yet that you’ve got a great man in your bastille.”

  “Well,” Coues said with his mild country-preacher air, “I’m willing to take your word for it. That’s fair, isn’t it? How about it, Joe?”

  “Fair enough.”

  The sheriff let them into the conference room and locked them in and went away. “Well, that’s that,” Joe said. “Two months to live.”

  “Forty years to live!” Hilton said. “They can’t do it to you. I honestly think that if they try to carry out this sentence there’ll be ten thousand Wobs in Salt Lake to prevent it. They’d take down this town brick by brick.”

  He sat down and spread his briefcase open between his feet and stooped to look into it, and his easy, big-toothed smile invited Joe to confidence. “Now listen,” he said. “The next step will have to be the Pardon Board. You’ll be called before them for examination, probably, and there are certain things you want to hammer on …”

  Joe listened, and tried to think the strategy important, but all during the twenty minutes of their talk he was wishing for the quiet and security of his cell.

  Utah State Prison

  Aug. 12, 1915

  Dear friend and fellow worker:

  Yours of August 5th at hand, and as you see I’ve been moved to the state prison. The appeal was denied and I was up in court the other day and sentenced to be shot on the first day of October. We were all very much surprised at the decision, because we thought that I would be granted a new trial anyway. But as Judge Hilton says, “The records of the lower court are so rotten they have to be covered up somehow.” I wanted to drop the case right there and then, but from reports received from all parts of the country, I think it will be carried to the U. S. Supreme Court. I didn’t think I’d be worth any more money. You know, human life is kind of cheap this year. But I guess the organization thinks otherwise, and majority rule goes with me.

  Well, I don’t know anything new. Hoping you are successful in snaring the elusive doughnut, I remain,

  Yours for the OBU,

  JOE HILL

  2

  He noticed how they all watched him: the other prisoners, trusties in the corridors and yard with their careful voices and their sheathed eyes, the guards whose bored watchfulness sharpened with speculation. A kind of urgency and importunity walked with him and dignified the guards who walked with him, made contemptible and unnecessary the handcuffs on either wrist. They had him manacled like a madman, as if he were likely to spring at the Pardon Board and tear their throats out.

  Both Hilton and Soren Christensen were waiting in the outer office. One after the other, they shook his manacled hand and smiled hard and encouraging into his face; they appeared to be looking for the Pardon Board’s answer in his eyes.

  One of the guards unlocked himself and went away. The other motioned Joe toward one of a row of chairs and sat down beside him. Before them Hilton planted himself with a thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his vest. He looked like some school-history-book picture of Webster replying to Hayne. But a closer look showed that his eyes were darkly bagged, his eyeballs streaked and watery as if he had been up all night reading fine print.

  “Well, Joe.”

  “Ninth inning,” Joe said.

  “Many a game’s been won in the ninth.”

  “I suppose.”

  They fell silent; if there had been anything for the condemned and his defenders to talk about the presence of the guard would have inhibited it. With a sigh Hilton sat down and stretched his legs. After a moment he took the folded newspaper from his pocket and passed it across the guard toward Joe. The guard stirred, looked questioningly at the lawyer, and then sagged back, acquiescing in the fiction that he wasn’t there.

  The paper was rolled with the back page out. Hilton’s finger tapped at a headline and Joe read.

  GOVERNOR SPRY IS THREATENED

  More than 300 letters and telegrams, received today, protest against Hillstrom Execution. One from Hindustan. Warnings and Arguments

  More than 300 more letters from different parts of this and other countries were received at the governors office yesterday demanding that Joseph Hillstrom be not put to death for the murder of J. G. Morrison. Some of the letters are threatening in character, and many of them bear resemblance in phraseology and arguments.

  It appears that most of the letters were written …

  The second guard came back. His eyes jumped from the paper to Joe’s face. “Whose paper?”

  “Mine,” Hilton said.

  The guard took it from Joe and tossed it in Hilton’s lap. The lawyer shrugged and busied himself working at something between his teeth.

  “They’re ready,” the guard said. He led them into the warden’s office, where a group of men sat between desk and windows. Turning at the guard’s tug, Joe saw that Ricket and Carpenter were there too. Carpenter shook his clenched hands at him in a boxer’s gesture.

  And here, as he sat down and got a chance to look quietly, were the men upon whom he depended for his life. One by one he marked them down: a shaggy man with a senatorial haircut, a solid square one with his hair parted in the middle and a womanish red mouth, a thin old man, a much younger one who sat with his hands clasped on the desk and studied Joe directly and soberly. And the chairman, the governor, complete with gavel and briefcase. A man
ready with pencil and paper—apparently a stenographer—who sat just behind the governor. Joe wondered what the governor was thinking. He wondered what he thought about Joe Hill, for whom three hundred people every day wrote from countries as remote as Hindustan. When the governor’s eyes touched his he sat stiff and proud, a man more widely known and more fervently admired than any of the well-fed well-educated men who would judge him.

  The governor’s gavel tapped the desk lightly, his eyes circled from the two IWW’s around defendant and attorneys and the board itself, and came back to Hilton. “Mr. Hilton, you have a plea to make before this board?”

  Hilton rose, the indefatigable, the undiscourageable, as he had risen before other tribunals and other boards through all the steps of Joe Hill’s fight for life, and Joe felt how all the past failures rose with him, how Hilton this time was at bay and perhaps without hope. His voice was harsh and his words angry as he went through the arguments that Joe knew now by heart. The arguments sounded to Joe’s critically tuned ear like inconsequential graspings at straws, the lawyer’s anger seemed general and unimportant. He was apparently denouncing the Pardon Board for the District Court’s errors in selecting jurymen. He was annoyed at the whole state of Utah because his client had been left for a time without counsel and had been forced by the court to accept the services of counsel who were not to his liking. Remote as a spectator, Joe listened while one of the board questioned Hilton tartly in the matter of counsel. Hadn’t Mr. Hilton’s client selected Attorneys Scott and McDougall himself, or at least had not his friends of the IWW defense committee selected them? And as for his being without counsel at one time during the trial, wasn’t that by his own choice?

  Hilton demanded a new trial. There were errors and decisions of the District Court that stank to high heaven of prejudice, there were irregularities enough to warrant ten new trials. The evidence on which Joseph Hillstrom had been convicted was entirely circumstantial, as the court records showed. And capital punishment, especially capital punishment upon purely circumstantial evidence, was a barbarity unworthy a civilized state. He asked a commutation of the death penalty against Joseph Hillstrom on grounds of a reasonable doubt of his guilt.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Hilton,” the square board member said. “Are you asking for a new trial, or for commutation?”

  “My client would prefer a new trial,” Hilton said. “If that is not your pleasure, commutation is the least that can be granted him.”

  He went on with his brief of the court errors, both in the District Court and in the Supreme Court, and Joe, watching the board members, most of whom were also members of the Supreme Court, saw their eyes wander, their hands cover their careful mouths. Hilton was getting nowhere. Finally he was interrupted again by the governor, who asked him why he had not filed a petition for a rehearing if he felt that the Supreme Court had committed errors of law. Hilton replied that the state of Utah would be forever blackened if it permitted the defendant to go to his death after a conviction on purely circumstantial evidence, and he cited a half-dozen cases in which the innocence of the accused had been established too late. The young jurist who watched Joe like someone trying to recognize a half-familiar face, turned his head to tell Hilton that in the opinion of the Supreme Court the evidence had been by no means all circumstantial, and that the identification of the accused as the man prowling under the arc light near the store and as the man who ran from the store after the shooting was direct and explicit.

  It had begun to rain outside. Across Ricket’s bulk Joe saw the streaked air beyond the gray window. The governor’s mouth was impatient or irritated. It occurred to Joe that he might be scared, and the thought was delicious as a cold drink to a thirsty man. He might be thinking of his family at home right now, exposed to IWW retaliation if Joe Hill were not pardoned here this morning. He might be scared for his own hide, and so might the rest of them. Three hundred letters a day, thousands of them altogether—and in the scared little bourgeois minds of people like these the IWW was a nest of dynamiters and desperate bomb throwers. Every IWW had his pockets full of blasting powder and home-made bombs. He knew from his mail that the accomplices of the McNamara boys were up for trial right now in L.A., and that bombs, perhaps planted by the cops, had been confiscated in a raid on the New York hall. No wonder the board members were sober. They were scared stiff. They had a tiger by the tail.

  A little reverie hooded him. He saw himself walking out of the Utah State Pen into the midst of an exulting crowd that marched with banners down Twenty-First South and jammed the streets of Sugarhouse and roared out the songs of Joe Hill as they hoisted him to their shoulders. He felt how their hands came grabbing for his own, and saw their faces by the hundred.

  And came out of it to hear the governor snap at Hilton, “Mr. Hilton, you have spoken this morning in uncomplimentary terms of the courts and justice of the state of Utah, and you have spoken slightingly of the integrity of the gentlemen present here. For some reason, perhaps for lack of anything better, you have adopted your client’s contention that he is innocent until proved guilty and that his refusal to take the stand and testify in his own behalf should not be held against him. I agree with you, it should not, and I think was not. That is the conclusion of those of us who have carefully reviewed the transcripts of the District Court. But you are acquainted with the law, as your client is not, and you should know that once a conviction has been obtained in that court, then the presumption of innocence is no longer valid. If you have evidence to establish your client’s innocence we are prepared to hear it. The burden of proof is now upon the accused. And let me remind you again, the powers of this board are limited. It cannot grant the accused a new trial. It can only commute his sentence or grant him a pardon, and it can do those only upon clear evidence.”

  Standing thoughtful, with bent head, Hilton delayed his answer, and Joe saw that he was silent because for the moment he was utterly stumped for something to say. He had never had anything to say to the Pardon Board. The tirade he had read for a half-hour had been a last-ditch, bluff, strong-arm method applied to the law. He watched Hilton rally himself, raise his head, start all over again.

  “In view of the irregularities and errors of law …”

  “Specifically what errors of law?” a judge asked sharply.

  “The calling of jurors instead of impaneling them in the regular way.”

  “The records do not show that, Mr. Hilton. The Supreme Court considered that claim carefully in reviewing your appeal.”

  “Nevertheless if we are granted a new trial I am confident that we shall be able to show …”

  “Let me remind you again,” the governor said icily. “You are pleading before the Board of Pardons. This board cannot grant a new trial if it wanted to. It is here to hear evidence, if you have any.”

  “Your excellency,” Hilton said, “I think you have the good name of the state of Utah at heart. I think you would not want to see that good name blackened by a cold-blooded judicial murder.”

  The governor leaned across the desk with his fists tight together. His cheeks tightened until an unexpected round knob of muscle bulged at the angle of his jaws. His mouth was small and hard. “Mr. Hilton, for the last time, we are here to listen to evidence, not vilification or threats. There has been altogether too much of both in this case already. If you have no real and actual evidence to offer, please sit down.”

  Jud Ricket was on his feet. “Mr. Governor …”

  The governor slammed the gavel on the desk, his jaws clamped hard, and Ricket eased himself down into his chair again. The young jurist who had been watching Joe so intently leaned and said something in a whisper. The governor listened with his eyes cold.

  “Mr. McCarthy has the floor,” he said.

  Now it was no longer possible to be a remote and curious spectator. McCarthy’s gray eyes pulled Joe into alertness, forced him to attend and concentrate. Joe braced himself against some weight of intelligence or power he felt in them, and
he realized that though he had been evading McCarthy’s glance, he had been aware of him all the time. Of all the board members he had been least upset by Hilton’s tirade; he seemed to Joe more dangerous for that reason. And he compelled the discussion back into personal channels. It was impossible to evade him any longer, or to dream while his fate was decided.

  “I want to ask a few questions directly of Mr. Hillstrom,” McCarthy said. “You understand that your case has become in the public eye something more than the trial of an individual on a murder charge. Your friends have represented you as being framed by certain industrial interests because of your activity as an IWW organizer.”

  Joe faced him, saying nothing.

  “I think I speak for the other members of the board as well as myself,” McCarthy said. “They will correct me if I do not. But I think the last thing any responsible official of the state of Utah wants is the death of an innocent man.”

  His eyes compelled such attention that Joe looked over them, at the part in McCarthy’s curly dark hair.

  “But no official can be moved by threats,” the justice said. “Your friends are ill-advised in the campaign they have started. They have already done your cause harm.”

  Joe shrugged. He knew his part; he knew how the lines must go. “I can’t help what other people think of Utah justice.”

  Something had been offered and refused. He felt in himself a kind of gathering such as he sometimes had felt before an intense physical effort. Straight as a stick, wooden-faced, he confronted the steady gray eyes.

  “I am aware of that,” McCarthy said, unmoved. “Despite what has been said about Utah justice, every member of this board is beyond thinking you guilty because your friends have made irresponsible threats. It is your guilt, or your innocence, that we are concerned with.”

  Just for an instant some obscure impatience seemed to flare in him. He drummed his fingers on the desk blotter. “Mr. Hillstrom, you have refused to testify in your own defense. If you wanted to throw doubt upon the decision of the court, I presume you have succeeded. I think you have also succeeded in embarrassing your attorneys and your friends, by asking them to defend you without the materials to make a case.”