Do we like Joe Hill?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A songwriter for working people with nothing harmful on the record, but a murder conviction that is contested and a gap in what we could verify.
Joe Hill was a Swedish-born migrant worker who became the Wobblies' favourite songwriter, the bloke who turned union grievances into tunes that a crowd could sing in a jail cell. He is remembered more for his death than for his songs, and that's where the argument starts.
In 1914 he was tried in Salt Lake City over the murder of a grocer and was convicted. The case was circumstantial: a Salt Lake attorney told the AP that, guilty or not, Hill didn't get a fair trial, pointing to a witness who could not positively identify him and a prosecutor treating his refusal to testify as a sign of guilt.
A 2011 biography by William Adler concluded he was probably innocent and pointed at another suspect, a view reviewers largely backed. A Washington Times review said the case was flimsy and that being a Wobbly was a big part of why he was in the dock. Others still think he did it, so honestly, nobody has closed this file.
On the harm check, there's nothing nasty here. His songs went after bosses and a church that told the poor to wait for their reward, and his union fought for the people at the bottom of the pile. We found no words of his own aimed at women, migrants, LGBTQ+ people or the planet, but the record we could open is thin, so that's what we can say.
What he did for others is the legacy. Pleas for his life came from the labour movement, and his ashes were sent to IWW locals across the US and scattered on May Day 1916. His line to organise rather than mourn is still a union rallying cry, and Utah's AFL-CIO declared 1990 the Year of Joe Hill.
Nothing new on him lately, and he died long ago. Where we land is that a man who may well have been railroaded for his politics gets the benefit of the doubt, but a conviction is a conviction on this page, so the score stays in the middle.