pie in the sky

The popular story

Most idioms arrive anonymously, worn smooth by centuries of use. ‘Pie in the sky’ is the rare exception: a phrase with an author, a date, and a political quarrel attached. The story usually told is that it was coined in 1911 by Joe Hill, a Swedish-born labourer turned songwriter who had thrown in his lot with the Industrial Workers of the World, the militant union whose members called themselves Wobblies. Hill, the story goes, was tired of Salvation Army preachers who told hungry workers to endure their poverty quietly because glory awaited them in heaven. So he wrote a song mocking that bargain, and the mocking phrase stuck.

It is a tidy origin tale, the kind that invites suspicion. Phrases attributed to a single clever wit often turn out, on inspection, to have been floating around for years. So the question worth asking is not whether the story is charming but whether the record actually supports it.

What the record shows

Here the tidy story largely holds. Hill’s song, originally titled ‘Long-Haired Preachers’ and now usually called ‘The Preacher and the Slave’, was printed in the fourth edition of the IWW’s ‘Little Red Songbook’ in 1911. He set his words to the tune of the Salvation Army hymn ‘In the Sweet By-and-By’, a deliberate theft, since Army bands used that very hymn to drown out union speakers on street corners. The refrain delivered the sting: workers were told they would eat by and by, in that glorious land above the sky, and that after a life of labour and prayer they would get their reward only once they were dead.

The Oxford English Dictionary records this song as the earliest known use of the phrase, which is as firm a footing as etymology offers. We are not reconstructing a guess from scattered hints; we have a dated, printed, attributed text. That is why the verdict here is ‘attested’ rather than ‘likely’ or ‘unproven’. The satire was unmistakable: Hill was not promising heaven, he was ridiculing the promise, accusing the preachers of offering dessert in the afterlife instead of bread in this one.

The verdict

‘Pie in the sky’ is genuinely attested, with an origin that can be named, dated and sourced. That makes it unusual and worth taking seriously. The one honest caveat is the word ‘coined’. Hill did not invent the vocabulary he used. By 1911 American slang had long treated ‘pie’ as shorthand for something sweet, easy or handed out, as in ‘easy as pie’, and the word already carried a whiff of political patronage and bribery. Hill’s achievement was to fuse that imagery into four unforgettable words and fix them to a tune people could not stop humming. Crediting him with the phrase is fair; crediting him with every ingredient is not.

What we don’t know

Two uncertainties remain. The first is the precise year. Most sources, following the OED, settle on 1911 and the fourth edition of the songbook, but at least one labour folklorist has suggested Hill was singing the line as early as 1910, before it reached print. Oral phrases rarely leave a clean first date, so a year’s wobble is normal.

The second is when the modern meaning took hold. In Hill’s mouth the phrase was specific and barbed, aimed at religion used as a sedative. The broader sense we use today, any rosy prospect unlikely to come true, developed later; figurative newspaper examples are easy to find by the late 1930s, including a 1939 report of businesses hoping to eat ‘pie in the sky’ from wartime orders. Dictionaries disagree a little here too: the OED points to a usage in the mid-1920s, while popular histories lean on the wartime examples, so the drift from protest slogan to neutral idiom is itself only loosely dated. Exactly how the political jab softened into everyday idiom, and how quickly, is harder to pin down than the origin itself, and that imprecision is worth admitting rather than papering over.

How it’s used today

The religious quarrel has drained away entirely. Today ‘pie in the sky’ is reached for whenever a plan, promise or forecast seems gorgeous on paper and hopeless in practice: a politician’s uncosted pledge, a start-up’s revenue projection, a friend’s scheme to retire at forty. It frequently appears as an adjective, hyphenated, in phrases like ‘pie-in-the-sky thinking’ or ‘pie-in-the-sky schemes’. The tone is dismissive but rarely cruel, more an eye-roll than an accusation. Few who use it know they are quoting a murdered union songwriter needling the Salvation Army, which is perhaps the final irony: a phrase coined to puncture comforting illusions has itself become a comfortable, well-worn figure of speech.