“CITY welcomes New Year with gayest, most carefree celebration in years,” ran a Minneapolis headline on the first day of the year 1934. Minneapolis entered her year of greatest tension and of civil war a city of substantial optimists. In the dark winters of 1932 and 1933, the gloomiest tales of bankruptcies and even of “impending anarchy” had swept the drawing rooms of the empire builders. One family, when gold fled the country and banks failed throughout the land, had gone abroad to await the collapse of the American economic system. That family was now back home enjoying the “normal recovery” which had actually begun. The depression had not hit Minneapolis manufacturers, it was said, as severely as it had a dozen other Middle Western cities. This was true. And now the increasing use of black ink over red in year-end balance sheets produced a definitely exhilarating effect. There were other reasons for optimism. Minneapolis had weathered the storm of the depression; but what’s more, she had weathered four years of the Farmer-Labor party which some of her citizens feared even more than the world crisis. Big business still feared it but had learned nonetheless successful tactics of self-protection. Most encouraging of all, the New Deal and its “crackpots” had operated for nearly a year, Capitalism had survived, and Minneapolis business in particular had enjoyed rather more of its benefits in the form of subsidies, and less of its “costs in labor unrest” than most cities. For the long future of the empire and the prosperity of its twin capitals there was more to hope than to fear.
As early as Thanksgiving Day, 1933, the new note of optimism could be detected, though it was unsteady and still mirrored the long “winter of discontent.”
“Thanksgiving brings new courage to many in the city,” editorialized a Minneapolis newspaper. “Of things worthy of a devout pause,” the writer continues, “Minneapolis found many, turkeys for example, an increasing number of jobs and a public spirit quickening to the thought that some of these things really ought to go, on occasion, to nearly all [italics mine] of the world’s citizens. Perhaps the most thankful of all were the sixty-one hundred men and women who have been assigned in the last few days to something they haven’t had for a long time—jobs—and the sixty-one hundred more who will join them the day after Thanksgiving.”
By the New Year, sturdier optimists mobilized reasons and dollars as the preface to a new day. After an evening of cheerful New Year’s Eve parties in the big houses on Lowry Hill and the bigger ones near Lake Minnetonka’ and hilarious celebration in the city’s cafes, the Minneapolis press martialed a substantial argument for all the city’s gaiety and quoted “everybody” on the upturn.
“. . . employment has increased twenty per cent in the past four months. . . post-office receipts better. . . farm prices higher. . . Christmas shopping up twenty per cent. . . . While Minneapolis and its trade territory have not measured any tremendous strides in the march toward old time prosperity [italics mine], conditions are definitely, unmistakably better than a few years ago.”
It is a comment on the mutability of human opinion that a year and a half before the leaders of Minneapolis’ business were to denounce with unanimity the New Deal, they led a paean of praise in 1934 for the government’s spending program.
According to the Minneapolis Tribune (January 8), “Leaders in business and industry in Minneapolis joined Sunday in an enthusiastic belief that the inflow of $626,753,343 (!) of Federal funds into the Northwest in 1933 to ’34 has had a definite effect already in starting the territory on its way back to old time prosperity” [italics mine]. “... the new crop of money, nearly double the entire farm income of the four states in 1932, will benefit the people of both towns and cities.”
Robert F. Pack, president of Northern States Power, praising the government’s program, said, “Its results are certain to be beneficial on a really impressive scale and. . . will give the Northwest a very definite start on its way back to sound business and farm conditions.” Mr. Owen, president of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, and a circle of other “leaders of business” echoed his enthusiasm. Horace Klein, copublisher of The Farmer and The Farmer’s Wife told one thousand members of the Minneapolis Implement Dealers Association, “Uncle Sam has plenty of money and wants to play poker. We all have good cards, let’s play the game with him.”
A January 12 editorial buoyantly asserted, “The C.W.A. has had many critics but few so hide-bound that they cannot admire the speed and precision with which the hastily conceived relief undertaking is being carried out. . . . Mr. Roosevelt’s program, in short, is working out exactly as he indicated it would.” Of all the enthusiasts for the government’s spending program, Mr. A. W. Strong, Republican and leading spirit in the conservative Citizens’ Alliance, who was to play a leading though losing role in the approaching summer of civil war, alone inserted a note of mild skepticism, allowing that the “benefits” from it all would be “at least temporary.”
But if there was not a dissenting voice in Minneapolis on Mr. Roosevelt’s spending program, business with a sounder and more sensitive class instinct had scented “danger” in the labor provisions of the NRA. “Although the effects of the NRA have been good,” said President MacFarlane of the Manufacturers’ Association of Minneapolis, “industrial unrest. . . has been a disturbing and expensive experience.” And with refreshing ingenuousness Mr. Charles L. Pillsbury, executive of Munsingwear, unwittingly laid his finger on one of the causes of civil war in Minneapolis four months before it happened, by saying that collective bargaining is all right, but “labor leaders have interpreted it to mean that collective bargaining can come only through belonging to a union.” This was to be the interpretation which not only Minneapolis labor leaders but tens of thousands of underpaid workers were to give to those provisions in the two years to follow. From this Mr. Pillsbury concluded that the NRA contained “real dynamite.”
Except for these occasional doubts, however, the city’s outward life was bustling and optimistic. “Color was the keynote in recent fashion showings of clothes for the South” to which many substantial citizens, after issuing their statements of optimism for the New Year, repaired to escape a freezing Minnesota January. In Minneapolis, itself, the issue which competed in discussion with government spending was the new liquor law, a vital matter after an age of drought and prohibition. The new temper of confidence made itself felt variously. On January 10, “Horseback riders at the Pastime Arena turned back the clock Wednesday night and made merry. . . . Sixty-five riders in costume went through a series of maneuvers before an audience that filled the huge arena.” But perhaps the subtlest and surest sign of renewed faith in life was the disappearance of “depression stories” in social circles. In 1932 it was fashionable to repeat anecdotes of “jumping suicides,” and to boast of poverty. In 1934 it was not. On the whole the members of the Citizen’s Alliance and other business men felt more confident in the restoration of a Golden Age to the empire than they had since the fall of 1929.
There was one dramatic eruption out of the historic past in the early weeks of 1934 which disturbed the civic pride of Minnnea polis citizens, if not their economic optimism. That was the sudden blazoning of the Twin Cities “as the crime center of the nation.” St. Paul became known to the outside world as the home of a vast kidnaping ring. This episode deserves a word of comment.
It is inevitable, I suppose, that in America under our loose social economy a second and third generation of men should arise inferior in constructive vision, with less economic good luck, but with equal passion for quick wealth to that of the first predatory giants of the nineteenth century. Not endowed with a progressive role in history, they nonetheless shared with the earlier looters of the country a sound belief that force, bribery, and theft, if they were ingeniously applied, would yield results. They differed from the empire builders in relying on these methods without legal coverage or without admixtures of more constructive elements. These men were, of course, the American gangsters. Some immigrants, some native-born Americans, the types in St. Paul and elsewhere possessed a determination not to be caught as “suckers” like the millions of rank-and-file empire builders.
Significantly, for a generation or more, they had operated with immunity in the city of St. Paul. In return for police protection within the city, they confined their looting to outside jobs. The first citizens of that city, the actual inheritors of the empire, displaying indifference if not actually denying their existence, were content to have them plunder its surrounding territory providing they left the capital and its inheritance intact. In 1934 this tradition of a pact between the underworld and’ the authorities which had kept crime out of St. Paul for a generation snapped—like so many others in that year of tension. The gangsters turned on their own hideout.
The nation knew of the broken pact only when Mr. William Hamm of St. Paul was kidnaped. Soon it was learned that a nationally known railway executive and the president of a St. Paul bank were “next on the list.” The United States Department of Justice hastily rushed investigators to St. Paul. On January 19, Edward Bremer of St. Paul, brewery magnate, was held by kidnapers and the newspapers carried an advertisement that the ransom money was ready for the kidnapers. On February 16, Attorney General Cummings “took an interest in the Twin Cities.” The press reported, “The Twin Cities, Thursday night, found themselves thrust into the national spotlight as ’breeding grounds for criminals’ and as ’the two cities in the country that really needed cleaning up.’” For the first time in a generation scions of the empire builders in St. Paul, under the aegis of a crusading editor and with a host of G-men, opened a heavy drive on the underworld. Kidnaping was too much! In the meantime Minneapolis resented her share of “unfavorable publicity” and declared it wasn’t her fault if the city across the river offered hospitality to the underworld.
For a time these scandalous items competed in public discussion with government spending and the new liquor law, but the business community concluded in the end, and correctly, that they were no cause for losing faith in the empire.
Several important items, however, had been left out of their analysis of the city’s economy by the New Year’s optimists. The first was the aftermath of the world depression on business, and on the living standards and mood of the rank and file. In 1932, eighty-six per cent of the manufacturing plants in Minneapolis were operating at a loss. In the same year cost of living in the Twin Cities had dropped twenty per cent but pay rolls had gone down thirty-five. By February, 1933, flour production and meat packing had dropped to sixty-five per cent of normal, although for the country as a whole food production had fallen but ten per cent. Minnesota’s mining index reached ten per cent of normal in May, 1932, and twenty per cent of normal in March, 1933. The building index touched twelve per cent in March, 1932. By the spring of 1934 unemployed and dependents constituted almost a third of the population of Minneapolis and Hennepin County.
A socially minded scion of the timber kings once told me he thought that Minneapolis’ destiny was to become the “greatest peasant capital in the world.” His words imply both a rural and an urban decline which, I think, is unwarranted by the facts; but however that may be, it is certain many Minnesota farmers touched or dipped below the “peasant level” in the depression years and their losses affected sharply the economy of the Twin Cities. Total farm income from 1924 to 1929 averaged about $370,000,000, but in 1932 it had dropped to $160,000,000. But net cash income fell much faster than gross. Unable to pare down the irreducible minimum of taxes and interest, net income fell from an average of $177,000,000 (1924 to 1929) to $11,000,000 in 1932. On a per farm basis, sixty dollars a year—on an average—for the farmer to spend on clothing, groceries, fuel, amusements, medical services, etc.
To the rank and file, these economic phenomena had been concretized tragically in the lives of individuals. Many thousands of families were on a subsistence dole. Of those still at work, there were textile workers supporting a family on six and seven dollars a week, skilled upholsterers receiving twenty-five cents an hour, warehouse men working for nine dollars a week. In the trucking industry toward the end of 1933, men supported families on twelve to eighteen dollars a week and put in from fifty-four to ninety hours a week for it. The influence of organized labor was at its nadir. Minneapolis had a national reputation among business men as being a one hundred per cent open-shop town. With the advent of the NRA, many workers who began to join trade unions lost their jobs.
Objectively considered, although the depression in Minneapolis was severe it was nevertheless not as disastrous to business nor as onerous on the working class as in scores of other American cities. But the second item that none of the New Year’s optimists reckoned with was the city’s decline before the depression. Beneath the surface of New Year’s confidence and recovery were all the contradictions of a dissolving empire which we have drawn together in a preceding chapter. Without the depression Minneapolis would have perhaps muddled on for another ten years, her problems mollified by amelioratives and sedatives and her contradictions irritating to her vitals but invisible to the world. The depression rapidly ripened these historic difficulties in a space of three years for an explosive denouement in the spring of 1934.
In 1930 the Farmer-Labor party, as we have seen, had won political power—of a sort. For any challenge to the business interests of the city this was a point of vantage on which the rank and file counted heavily and the empire owners in their year-end diagnosis largely ignored. A rather startling contradiction in the arena of class forces existed in Minneapolis between roe years 1930 and 1934. Labor by joining hands with the farmer had won a measure of political power. But meantime labor’s economic power lagged. The labor movement in Duluth and St. Paul was weak and Minneapolis had the reputation of being “the worst scab town in the Northwest.” Who, then, had put the Farmer-Labor administration in power? The farmer, of course, the small business man, and organized labor (what there was of it)—but also unorganized and potentially organizable labor in the Twin Cities. Here was a contradiction which did not escape the leaders of the rank and file in the spring of 1934. Significantly, Governor Olson in a mass meeting held in April in the Shubert Theatre urged the truck drivers to “organize and fight for their demands.” History does not record any other governor of a sovereign state committing a similar indiscretion.
How far the Farmer-Labor governor of a capitalist state was to be able to help his truck-driving constituents in the midst of open civil war is another question. One rank-and-file truck driver was to tell him to his face that “he was sitting in the middle” and that middle was a “picket fence.” But that is part of a later story.
In the spring of 1934 the Citizens’ Alliance of Minneapolis appeared to all observers to be one of the most powerful and efficiently organized employers’ associations in the United States. Neither the business men, the workers, nor the “average citizen” had any doubt of it. It had long been criticized as reactionary and stupid but it had outlived its critics. In the primary matter of maintaining the open shop in Minneapolis it had a record of almost unbroken success. With a permanent and well-paid staff, a corps of undercover informers, and a membership of eight hundred business men, it had for nearly a generation successfully fought and broken every major strike in Minneapolis. Its former president, Mr. A. W. Strong, boasted to the author of this book. that through its influence even the building trades in Minneapolis were for a time largely open shop. If in the days of prosperity and a relatively expanding economy the Alliance had successfully smashed union labor, it was likely to defend that conquest with even greater ardor in a time of shrunken markets and diminishing profit.
Although rank-and-file leaders knew the strength of their antagonist, here again the economics of the empire played a trick on the New Year’s optimists. A successful challenge is never made against a ruling group while it is historically young, powerful, and progressive. One remembers the commonplace of history that feudalism was not overthrown until it had ceased to be either progressive or functional. The sons of the empire had neither the actual power nor that sublime confidence in an economic mission which had been theirs in the Golden Age. Consciousness of unassailable power for a generation with a slow decay of its substance left them not as persons but as an economic group both arrogant and a little stupid.
In the spring of 1934 two strikes in the trucking industry broke out in Minneapolis. As a distribution center dispensing her own and other cities’ manufactures to an agricultural empire and receiving food products in return, transportation is a strategic key to the city’s commercial life. And in the third decade of the twentieth century an important share of that transportation went to the motor truck. The strikes of truck drivers, which succeeded in paralyzing the whole commercial life of the city, were to constitute the first major challenge for a generation by the rank and file to the empire builders.
Private thoughts and acts of individuals are conditioned if not controlled by historic trends. But individuals also embody trends themselves and occasionally change them. As historians are fond of pointing out, the most trivial of personal episodes may have a place in “the history” of empire. One morning in the fall of 1933, Karl Skoglund, a coal driver, was told by his employer that unless he stopped talking about a union for the truck drivers of Minneapolis he would lose his job. Skoglund was the typical Scandinavian immigrant whose life we sketched briefly in a preceding chapter. As the reader knows, he had a strong predilection for unions and by 1933 had become both a labor organizer and a political revolutionist of record. In spite of the inference, Karl had not been too successful in organizing the truck drivers in Minneapolis. But—
“After that I said to myself, I got to put on my fighting clothes and organize a union here. If I don’t, I lose my job in about a week. Even if you are a revolutionist and know what it’s all about, you’re apt to put things off. Well, right now I couldn’t, or I’d be out on my ear.”
With such immediate and personal impact, general economic forces were driving other individuals into action in the trucking industry of Minneapolis. The primary impulse arose from low wages and long hours, but this impulse had been strengthened by the advent of the NRA. Workers by law were declared to be free “to join unions of their own choosing.” The prehistory of the first successful revolt of the city’s rank and file can be conveniently enlivened and filled in by turning to Bill Brown, who drove a truck in this strategic industry between 1919 and 1933. “For some reason or other the teamsters’ council gave me the job of international organizer in 1933, so I decided to work with a few men in the union who knew how to organize. They were the Dunne boys, who were working in the coal yards at the time, and Karl Skoglund. Conditions were lousy and there was plenty of sentiment for the union. When the bosses threw our demands into the waste basket, we went to the teamsters’ council for permission to strike. I said, ’Hell, if we lose, we’re no worse off than we were. This is no union we’ve got now anyway, but if we win it will be like a red flag to a bull. The workers will come to us and we can organize the whole damn industry.’ So they gave us permission. I wrote Daniel Tobin, international president of the union, for an O.K. Two days after the strike was over, he wrote back that we couldn’t strike. By that time we’d won and had a signed contract with increased pay.”
This somewhat personal monograph of the president of the truck drivers’ union touches on most of the organizational essentials of the prerevolt period. The men to whom Brown turned for organizational help, the Dunne brothers and Karl Skoglund, became the leaders and strategists for the rank and file in the wider and more significant revolts that followed the first skirmish.
The coal strike itself, except for the briefest newspaper mention, was successfully ignored by the New Year’s optimists. In their own best interests this was a mistake. They should have studied its leadership, its method, its final objectives, and above all its “militancy.” For in microcosm, it embodied all the elements which in the civil war of July no one in the Northwest found it impossible to ignore. First of all, preparation had been surprisingly detailed and painstaking. A map of the coal yards of Minneapolis was prepared, and mimeographed instructions were issued to picket captains before the strike. Within three hours sixty-five coal yards out of sixty-seven, covering an area of ten square miles, were closed up “as tight as a bull’s eye in fly time.” This had been Skoglund’s and Dunne’s work, but it was the rank and file coal heaver who thought up the original tactic which won the strike itself. That was the militant use of “cruising picket squads,” a tactic which in later years came to be copied in labor struggles throughout the United States.
To the five or six factors touched on in this chapter which pointed toward a rank-and-file revolt and offered a basis for its success in the spring of 1934 and which were omitted in the diagnoses of New Year’s Day, there should be added another: the type of leadership which was brought to the approaching civil war. Several of the union leaders were members of the Communist League of America (Trotskyists). If no attempt was made, during the general truck drivers strike which followed, to establish a “soviet in Minneapolis” as the employers charged, certain definite traits characterized the strikes—beginning with the successful coal skirmish—which can be laid to the revolutionary training of the leaders:
1. Militant picketing—termed by the employers “lawlessness.”
2. Skepticism in all negotiations—based on a frankly working-class point of view—of the good intentions of the employers, the police, or the government.
3. Infinitely painstaking preparedness for any action undertaken and speedy audacity in its execution. This, as much as any other factor, irritated the Minneapolis employer. Nearly any business man will tolerate a revolutionary—popular tradition to the contrary—if he is impractical and Utopian. The quality that was to render the union’s leadership intolerable to the truck owners was its efficiency.
4. And lastly, the ability to distinguish between a city-wide strike and a revolution. It turned out that it was the employers and not the union leadership who were constantly confusing these two distinct social phenomena.
Bill Brown, the president of the truck drivers’ union, had made a sound prediction in the spring of 1934. The success of the coal strike meant that workers flocked into the union by thousands. In the face of the blossoming of union buttons on the overalls of truck drivers—three thousand by April—the representatives of the empire builders, inside the trucking industry and out, held a strategy meeting at the West Hotel. It was the first of its kind since their decisive victory in the teamsters’ strike eighteen years before. The session was distinguished by buoyant confidence, a reliance on old-time Citizens’ Alliance tactics, and a complete refusal to compromise with the union. A Citizens’ Alliance representative stated that the 1916 drivers’ strike had been smashed at a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars and had been well worth it. This present affair could be flattened out locally and with little expense. But to the employers’ disgust, when the owners met with the drivers’ representatives to feel them out, the latter insisted on discussing three points only: Who did the employers represent; the demands of the union; what did the employers propose to do about them? The raising of the first question at a meeting designed to prove, if possible, that the union represented nobody, irritated the truck owners. The conferences—there were two in all—followed an old Minneapolis pattern and ceased.
At a mass meeting shortly after, the rank and file of the major industry of Minneapolis voted to strike unless their demands were met. With the possible exception of the half dozen strike leaders, no one in Minneapolis realized that this was to mean the first serious challenge in a generation to the status quo of the empire.