Joe Hill (53 page)

The case of the State of Utah versus Joseph Hillstrom brightens and darkens like a day when wind brings clouds across the sky and the threat of rain thickens only to be burned away again. In the Wobbly hall there is a week of something almost like relaxation, almost like confidence. Hilton has gone to Washington to confer with Minister Ekengren; the moguls who have interested themselves in labor’s singer go about their ponderous inspection of the records. Still dredging in an attempt to strengthen the conviction, the police dig up the arrest of Joseph Hillstrom in San Pedro in connection with some streetcar robberies, but since they can prove only that the police held Joe for a few hours for questioning, their net gain from the maneuver is a hornet’s nest of counterattack from the Wobblies who resent the attempt to smear Joe’s character.

The letters still pour in upon the governor and warden and the Supreme Court judges, but the threatening tone of many of them
diminishes somewhat, as if their authors were waiting to see what happened. Lund, waiting too, moves to a less expensive hotel and measures out the days that for him tighten and grow tenser as the reprieve wears away. He has not seen Joe; by now Joe is allowed no visitors at all.

He is troubled by the inconclusiveness of the reprieve and the thought of what will come after it. “What evidence can we get?” he keeps asking Ricket. “What is there to show Wilson and Ekengren? Has Hilton got anything new, or do we have to depend on technicalities again?”

All he gets is a shrug, an intense black stare, a twitch of the nervous cheek. “The records of the stinking District Court ought to be enough.”

“Those have already been reviewed three times.”

“Sure, but not with the whole United States including the President looking over their shoulders. They know they can’t get away with this cover-up now. They’ll find some way to crawl and save their faces, but they’ll have to let Joe loose eventually.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“Wait and see,” Ricket says. “If they try to push this legal murder through they’ll get the surprise of their life. This thing grows like a snowball. Look at that!”

He waves his hand at the desk heaped high with letters and papers. It seems to Lund that the contemplation of how big the thing has become brings a glitter to his eyes. The state may finally execute Joe Hill, but a wonderful and world-wide protest will have been stirred up. From this little
IWW
local have gone out appeals and denunciations and cables that have brought out a solid front of support from Melbourne to London, and pulled in the unexpected great of the world. Lund suspects that Ricket looks with awe on the thing he has started. For that matter, Lund does too.

But he waits uneasily, because it is clear that there is no new evidence, no fresh approach, and he is afraid that the investigation by the Minister and the President will only corroborate the investigations by the Superior Court and the Supreme Court and the Pardon Board and the vice-consul. There is nothing new; there is only the plea, made in spite of Joe Hill’s own expressed wishes, for clemency and pardon, and the insistent threat of violence.

He waits, and on October 16 the Pardon Board meets again, and
again it finds no ground for clemency. Joe Hill is sentenced for the third time, and the execution set for November 19. When Lund tries to obtain permission to see him, the warden is abrupt.

“I told you you could come in the last night. But until then nobody sees him, and he can thank his friends for it.”

So the preacher goes back to his hotel and counts his money and thinks out his personal problems and writes his father asking for a loan. Having come this far with Joe, he will stay to the end, for the end is now inevitable.

Once, sometime during the days and weeks of waiting, Lund was stopped on the street by a crowd that overflowed the sidewalk and spread out across the car tracks. The eyes of the crowd were turned upward to the stone face of the Salt Lake
Tribune
building, and looking up with them Lund saw outside the second-story windows a great board, like a child’s game but of enormous size, shaped like a baseball diamond. All around the board were little tabulations, a scoreboard marked off by innings, places for the indication of balls and strikes, outs, hits, runs, errors, sacrifices, and an opening past which rolled one by one the names of players as they came to bat. The scoreboard read

He had forgotten. The World Series.

Streetcar bells clanged, and cars pushed through the crowd that moved and packed and ebbed back again onto the tracks. Up on the ingenious board, by some intricate system of telegraphic reports and electromagnets and a sweating crew of technicians, the newspaper brought the game across twenty-five hundred miles and replayed it in the Salt Lake City street. Every player’s position was marked by a red and a white light; the pitcher’s mound was bald in the center of a green acreage, as in a real diamond; rows of small white lights ran along the baselines. At home plate a swiveled bat waited; on the pitcher’s mound a magnetized iron ball wavered and started toward home.

The bat swung, a light went on,
strike
, in the balls-and-strikes tally. The count was one strike and two balls. The ball rolled back to the mound, hesitated, started again for the plate. Again the bat
swung, and the steel ball rolled with dignity out past first base into right field, and in right field the red light blinked. A fly to the outfield. In the corner of the board yet another fight went on. One out.

Lund watched through half an inning, then another half, then through the sixth and seventh innings. The crowd stood good-naturedly in the street and good-naturedly got out of the way of streetcars and took its seventh-inning stretch and passed remarks and watched intently every time the ball moved, every time the bat swung, every time one of the intricate system of fights blinked on. If the white light went on at any position when the ball rolled that way, it was a hit. Then there was the delighted suspense of seeing the runner blink down the baseline, past first, on to second while the ball rolled around in center field, then past second and on toward third to an outbreak of yips and groans. A triple. Now he’s in the hole. Only one away. Let’s see him get out of this without a score.

They talked to the hitter, advised the manager, rode the pitcher. With great nimbleness, with an instant and infallible understanding, they kept all the complex fights in their eyes and minds. Excitement went with the frantic serial blinking when the next batter hit a fly to left and the baseline lights, hesitating for a moment, started toward the plate from third. The ball rolled in in a straight unhurried line, the runner was paralyzingly slow, there were eight lights, seven, six, and the ball already past the third baseman on its way in, and five and four and three and the ball almost home, and then the white light at the plate and a new light in the scoreboard under “Runs.” He had beaten the throw. Still another fight burned steadily a moment: Sacrifice.

Standing in the street with the sun on them they cheered and booed and groaned and laughed, awaiting the outcome of a game that seesawed and fluctuated and was tied up in the seventh and went on into the eighth and ninth still tied, and on into extra innings.

Lund waited with them. The noise of the crowd was like the noise of a real bleachers; he followed the lights like real players, real base hits. He even had a favorite: for some reason he was rooting for Philadelphia, though he had no notion why unless from pure under-dog sympathy. He assumed that the favoritism of others
in the crowd was based on things just as trivial: a onetime residence in Philadelphia or Boston, a liking for an individual player, a prejudice against New England. He himself intensely wanted Philadelphia to win.

And why? Here, twenty-five hundred miles from a ballgame between teams not ten of the crowd had ever seen play, men stood for hours in the street and for trivial reasons heated themselves with partisanship and delighted themselves with suspense. They threw their voices at the board, trying to influence it, and obscured the afternoon traffic with their planted bodies. And behind the board were technicians who worked like Fate but who took their orders from a telegraph wire.

Everybody he knew was taking his orders from a telegraph wire, even the ones who appeared as unchangeable as Fate. And the score of that game would not be affected by his partisanship, the technicians would not refuse to record runs when runs were scored, his bleacher enthusiasm could not make a fly ball fall out of the reach of an outfielder. The game was in the hands of the players; the rest of them were recorders and spectators. The events that ground their way along the magnetized board were events that the players themselves would shape.

Though it seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to remain a spectator he knew of no other thing that he could be.

But some were not content to be simply spectators. They wanted to influence the magnetic board, throw pop bottles and cushions, kill the umpire.

Ten days after Joe Hill was resentenced and his execution set for November 19, an “Open Letter to the Board of Pardons” appeared on trees and poles around Salt Lake City. It attacked Utah justice, the Copper Trust, the Mormon Church, the prejudiced public, all who had conspired to bring about the legal murder of Joe Hill, and it was signed by Judge Hilton. Chief Barry sent out a special detail which tore all the posters down. Next night more went up. Next day they came down.

Police and special deputies were now guarding every bank and public building in the city to forestall
IWW
dynamiters. Special guards were posted around the capitol and the governor’s home. One of these deputies was startled one afternoon by an explosion on the next corner. He ran down, found that somebody had set off
a cannon cracker, and came back to his post. Beside the sidewalk was a paving brick he did not remember seeing before. With his foot he pushed it over. It looked peculiar, as if it had been sawed in two and cemented together again.

A powder company expert took it apart later. It contained a nitro charge big enough to blow up the whole capitol, with an arrangement of sulphuric acid which was supposed to eat down through to detonate some giant caps. The deputy’s kick had spilled the sulphuric and spoiled the bomb.

After that the governor called in Ricket and was locked in with him for an hour. To reporters, when he came out, Ricket said nothing about what the governor had talked about. But the bomb, he said, was a phony, a dud, a plant set out there by the deputies themselves in order to make their jobs last.

There was a fifty-fifty chance that he was right. But the fear of dynamiters was by now even beginning to keep people away from shows. In secure parlors there was talk of vigilante action to clear the town of red agitators, and there were letters to the papers asking why the authorities permitted a whole city to be terrorized.

The Swedish Minister engaged a lawyer to go over the Hillstrom case (because of pressure behind the scenes from Joe’s father, or only because he would do his best for a Swedish citizen?). President Wilson was called on by Gurley Flynn and promised to make a complete investigation. In San Francisco Samuel Gompers presided over an
AFL
convention which memorialized the Utah authorities asking clemency or a new trial for Joe Hill. (Ricket was ribald and delighted over that triumph. Now, he said, the heat was really on Wilson. Gompers had to be listened to.)

By grapevine among the rank and file of the Wobblies the word was out that the Wobs were gathering in Salt Lake to free Joe Hill by force, if necessary. In Oakland, eight men grabbed a freight and started eastward. In Denver, stopped by ordinances against
IWW
street meetings, Wobblies crossed the street to a Salvation Army meeting where they sang Wobbly songs to Army tunes and later passed the hat for the Joe Hill defense. There were a half-dozen men reckless enough to march on Salt Lake. By now, an
IWW
street meeting in Salt Lake drew hundreds, and there was always bad feeling, heckling, a street full of cops, fights and
arguments. In the hall the baggage room was jammed with stiffs who had drifted in quietly, looking for trouble.

The game dragged on through the extra innings, the perfect autumnal weather darkened, the days shortened, the nights were cold. From any high point the smoke was like a dark gray quilt over the valley in the mornings, and on the mountains there was snow.

The city was in a state of siege. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll raid you and close the hall?” Lund asked Ricket. “I’m surprised they never raided you long ago. They certainly hate you enough.”

“They’re scared,” Ricket said. “The whole damn world has got its eye on what they do. They’re scared to make a pass.”

But one night Lund was reading in his room, wearing out another few hours of the waiting. The room was stuffy, the radiators knocking with pressured heat, and he opened the window an inch or two to clear away the smoke of his pipe. He sat half stupefied, despondent and tired and confused in his mind, thinking that his presence here, his whole involvement in the case, was absurd and useless, a sentimental concession to himself rather than any help to Joe. He had his own life to untangle. With the fundamentalists in control, there was no chance of his getting another missionary assignment. He might as well admit that he was out of the ministry. But instead of making decisions for himself, he sat bewitched in Salt Lake City waiting for a death that was postponed and postponed and postponed but never called off.

Through the crack in the window he heard street sounds, voices, steps, and then a sudden clamor of angry shouts. Someone yelled above all the noise, a cracking yell. Someone ran hard down the sidewalk; further up a police whistle shrilled. These days, a fight couldn’t start anywhere without a cop’s showing up in thirty seconds. But now a silence, a wild shout full of fear or warning that went up into a scream and was blown away by a shot.

Lund threw open the window and leaned out. The night was so smoky that he could see little except vague shapes of men running, halfway up the block. There was no more yelling, but a murmur of crowd sound began to grow, and within minutes a patrol wagon careened around the corner and clanged to a stop.