Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [156]
LIKE MOST EVERYONE ELSE IN MY FAMILY, I had now adopted some executed men as personal heroes. My picks were Boston’s Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and Salt Lake’s Joe Hill. All these men were executed—at least officially—for the crime of murder. But they were also killed because they had challenged the nation’s conventions of power and authority.
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who were also anarchists, and who advocated the overthrow of the U.S. Government. The Boston Police hated them, and in 1920, they charged the two with a pair of robbery-murders. The trial was blatantly partisan, and numerous authors, poets, and journalists around the world protested the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was to no avail. On August 22,1927, Massachusetts electrocuted the two men, despite substantial doubts about their guilt— doubts that have only grown over the decades.
Joe Hill was an American songwriter and poet. In 1913—the year my mother was born—Hill moved to Salt Lake from Los Angeles, where he worked with the radical and controversial Industrial Workers of the World to organize the state’s laborers. Utahans did not care for the union movement, and they treated its advocates roughly. The unionists struck back—sometimes violently. In early 1914, Joe Hill was arrested for the murder of a storekeeper and his son. The storekeeper, John Morrison, was a former policeman who had been a strikebreaker, and who had reportedly killed several members of the IWW in gun battles. Hill was convicted, and despite pleas from numerous prominent Americans— including President Woodrow Wilson—Utah was determined to put the poet to death. It would be the most famous execution in Utah’s history until that of my brother, sixty-two years later. Like my brother, Hill chose a firing squad as the mode of his execution, saying: “I’ll take shooting. I’m used to that. I have been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it again.” When the time for his death came, Hill himself gave the riflemen the command to fire.
Learning the stories of these men forever changed something in me. It made me hate the people and the structures that used their power to keep others under their control. It also made me understand that any state that had the power and the will to put a man to death was indeed a malevolent place.
But my radicalized sympathy for the downtrodden only went so far. I may have been reading Frantz Fanon, Upton Sinclair, and Eldridge Cleaver and writing school papers about the Miranda ruling, but I almost never bothered to visit my brother Gary, who had now been in prison for five years. This is not an easy admission to make. It is, in fact, probably the one misdeed in my life that I feel the most regret and guilt over. It didn’t help matters that in Oregon at that time inmates weren’t allowed visitors under age eighteen. Gary and I exchanged a few letters over the years, but I always felt a bit bad writing him about what I was doing in school or about friends and pastimes, because to Gary those were things and events that existed on the “outside.” Later, during our few visits, we both struggled to find some common base. But I was young and outside; he was growing old, inside. And the distance hurt.
I had no idea what his life was like. Also, the few things I heard didn’t make me want to know more. In the fall of 1968, there had been a serious riot at Oregon State Penitentiary, and Gary had taken part in it. I heard a story about how he had taken a ball peen hammer and thrown it at the head of an old enemy in the prison yard, and then beat the fallen man in the head with it. The man went on to live the rest of his life