In 1909, Eddie Newton composed "The Ballad of Casey Jones", which told the story of Casey Jones, a railroad worker who died preventing a railroad collision in 1900. The song very clearly portrays Jones as a hero whose sacrifice prevented a catastrophic disaster from happening. It became an extremely popular folk song.
However, in 1911, Joe Hill composed a parody called "Casey Jones—the Union Scab". In it, Hill puts the blame of the collision on Jones for crossing a railroad worker picket line, thereby enabling unsafe working conditions. A brief bit of research reveals that the parody was largely inspired by the Illinois Central shopmen's strike of 1911, over a decade after Jones' death.
My question is: was the idea that the real person Casey Jones was a union scab based on reality, or was it a complete invention by Hill to act as commentary on the contemporary labor rights struggle? I can't find anything to support the former, but if the latter is true, then it seems very strange that people would react positively to slandering a real life folk hero/martyr.
Jones was a real hero. There seems to be some question as to what exactly happened in the 1900 train wreck in Vaughn, MS, whether Jones ignored a flagman or there actually was no flagman signaling that three trains were on the tracks in front of him. But there is no doubt but that he did his utmost to stop the train and though didn't save his own life, saved the passengers'. And many thought that the railroad unfairly blamed him for the accident.
But the idea of Casey Jones as a scab ready to die at the direction of his bosses, breaking a strike even though his locomotive is coming apart, fits in quite well with the IWW's ideas about worker loyalty. Founded in 1905, the IWW was different than other unions. Those were limited to trades ( like the United Mine Workers ) and their goals were better pay and working conditions for their members. The IWW aimed at having every worker, everywhere, a member, and to achieve a workers' democracy- to run factories everywhere with worker-elected management. To achieve that, it advocated strikes and slowing down- kind of an early form of "quiet quitting"- to force control of industries into the hands of the workers and out of the exploitative hands of the owners. Instead of having him a hero, Joe Hill's Casey Jones was pathetic, dying doing his job- and then blamed for the accident as well.
Joe Hill wrote some great songs, many of which like this one were also sung in the folk revival of the 50's by the Pete Seeger and the Weavers, like "Halleluiah I'm a Bum". Despite never managing to achieve a worker-managed factory from their methods, Hill and the "Wobblies" attracted an amazing amount of attention- and hysteria- from businesses and local governments ( Hill was almost certainly framed and executed for murder). The IWW still exists.
Lee, Fred J. (1939). Casey Jones: Epic of the American Railroad. Southern Publishers, Inc.