The Wobblies March Again

In midtown Manhattan last week, 15 pickets walked round & round before the building that houses the New Republic. Their banners bore an almost forgotten legend: I.W.W. Most New Yorkers, if they remembered the Industrial Workers of the World at all, thought that it had long ago gone down history's drain. As a labor union and a militant revolutionary movement, it was all but dead (TIME, April 1, 1946).

But the Wobblies were on the march to keep a legend of martyrdom alive. That legend is woven around Joe Hill, a tough Wobbly organizer and songwriter ("You'll get pie in the sky when you die") who was put to death (by a firing squad) for murder in Utah in 1915. Wobblies charge that he was framed.

Last January, the New Republic had printed an article about Hill by Wallace Stegner, professor of English at Stanford University. It concluded: "Hill . . . was probably guilty of the crime [a coldblooded killing of two men] though I think the State of Utah hardly proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

The Wobblies served notice that they would picket the building until the New Republic retracted this slur on their hero. Said New Republic Editor Michael Straight: "I am both pleased and surprised that the I.W.W. was able to muster up the manpower to picket."

Five blocks away, members of the Harvard Club edged through a picket line of club employees and about 25 of their children. One of the moppets' chants: "Two, four, six, eight--Harvard Club negotiate."

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