Ninety Years On, still with us in song

NINETY years ago, Joe Hill - an immigrant, working-class organiser, and songwriter whose songs have gone round the world - was killed by firing squad in the State of Utah, after what most people regarded as a frame-up trial.
He was born Joel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, to a devout Lutheran family in Gävle, Sweden. His father, Olaf, worked on the railways Both his parents enjoyed music and often led the family in song. As a young man, Hill composed songs about members of his family, attended concerts at the workers' association hall in Gävle and played piano in a local café.
In 1887, Joel's father died from an injury at work, and the kids had to quit school to support themselves. Nine-year old Joel worked in a rope factory and later as a fireman on a steam-powered crane. Stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis in 1900, he moved to Stockholm in search of a cure and worked odd jobs while receiving radiation treatment and enduring a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck. Two years later, his mother Margareta Katarina Hägglund, died after also undergoing a series of operations to cure a persistent back ailment.
With her death, the six surviving children sold the family home and set out on their own. Four of them settled elsewhere in Sweden, but the future Joe Hill and his younger brother, Paul, booked passage to the United States in 1902. He worked at odd jobs in New York before striking out for Chicago, where he worked in a machine shop, got fired and was blacklisted for trying to organize a union. He went to Cleveland, and was in San Francisco during the Great Earthquake of April 1906.
He was working on the docks in San Pedro in 1910 when he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and became secretary for the San Pedro local. He also began writing songs like "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones—A Union Scab." These appeared in the IWW's "Little Red Song Book". Joe Hill had a song for every working man or woman.
In 1911, Joe was in Tijuana, Mexico, part of an army of several hundred wanderin hoboes and radicals who sought to overthrow the Mexican dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, seize Baja California, emancipate the working class and declare industrial freedom. They held out six months before, divided and weakened, the last 100 rebels were driven back across the border by the Mexican army.
In 1912, he was active in a "Free Speech" coalition in San Diego resisting a police decision to close the downtown area to street meetings. He also turned up to support railway construction workers on strike in Brritish Columbia, writing more songs, before returning to San Pedro to assist a strike of Italian dockworkers.
The San Pedro dockers' strike brought Joe's first recorded trouble with the police. Arrested in June 1913 he was held for 30 days on a vagrancy charge. He said he had been "a little too active to suit the chief of the burg".
On Jan. 10, 1914, Joe showed up at a Salt Lake City doctor's at 11:30 p.m. asking to be treated for a gunshot wound. He said an angry husband had accused him of insulting his wife. But earlier that evening, in another part of town, a grocer and his son had been killed. One of the assailants was wounded in the chest by the younger victim before he died. Joe's injury therefore tied him to the incident. The uncertain testimony of two eyewitnesses and the lack of any corroboration of Joe's alibi convinced a local jury of his guilt, though neither witness was able to identify him conclusively and the gun used in the murders was never found.
The campaign to exonerate and save Joe Hill drew in prominent trade unionists and was supported by millions of people around the world. Even President Wilson appealed. But powerful copper mining interests were determined to stop union organising in the state of Utah. The Utah Supreme Court, refused to overturn the verdict and the Utah Board of Pardons refused to commute Joe Hill's death sentence.
In a last letter to former miners' union president and famous IWW leade Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill wrote:

"Goodbye Bill:
I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning, organize!
It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried?
I don't want to be found dead in Utah."

It seems Joe Hill did die like true rebel. A member of the firing squad testified that Joe himself had shouted the order to "Fire!"
http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/history/history/hill.cfm

But Joe Hill's body didn't lie mouldering in the grave. It was sent to Chicago where it was cremated. Joe had written a poem asking that his ashes be scattered around the world, that flowers might blossom. They were purportedly sent to every IWW local. In 1988 it was discovered that one envelope had been seized by the US Postal Service in 1917 because of its "subversive potential." The envelope, with a photo affixed captioned: "Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915," as well as its contents, was deposited at the National Archives. After some negotiations, the last of Hill's ashes was turned over to the I. W. W. in 1988.