by Philip Dray
The strike commenced on May 12 in the sprawling produce market area located in the narrow cobblestone blocks north of Minneapolis’s downtown. One of 574’s best strategic decisions was to immediately grant local unemployed workers’ union membership; as in Toledo, their addition to the strikers’ ranks greatly bolstered the union’s ability to put troops on the street. The local and its supporters had established a strike headquarters of their own, a converted garage on Chicago Avenue, where many in the Teamsters leadership took up more or less permanent residence. The large structure held a makeshift auditorium for speeches and rallies, a car bay where the union’s “fleet” of vehicles could be serviced, and a dining area offering food almost any hour of the day.
“The Dunne Brothers … organized the strike as none had been organized before in American labor history,” remembered Eric Sevareid, who covered it for the Minneapolis Star. “They had patrol cars of their own … a daily strike newspaper, loud-speaker broadcasts, a commissary, and medical and ambulance services for their wounded.”48 For its precision, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike would long be viewed, and studied, as a model of urban labor organizing. The leaders regularly submitted strike decisions for members’ consideration, a feature of Local 574’s makeup that would prove critical when its chieftains disappeared into the custody of raiding police.
Receiving up-to-the-minute intelligence by telephone from spotters manning watch stations on roads leading into town, the Teamsters effectively stopped all unwanted truck traffic in and out of the city using “the flying squadron,” a mode of rapid response in which strikers at headquarters stood by, ready to flock to any spot where employers were seen attempting to move goods. Local 574 also devised a clever strategy of sending legions of strikers into a specific area in staggered waves, thus frustrating the police department’s efforts to gauge the enemy’s strength. Sympathy stoppages were carried out by twenty-five thousand unionized workers throughout the city, especially carpenters, bricklayers, and electricians from the local building trades. The Teamsters won the backing of the state’s farmers by permitting them to enter the city and deliver produce, although the union did force many gasoline stations to close. Unable to restock perishable goods, restaurants and grocery stores were shuttered; bakeries closed because they could not deliver their bread. When taxi drivers joined the strike and stopped picking up fares, hotels had to improvise ways to get stranded guests to the train depot. The city staggered under the effective assault on its commercial lifelines.
The first several days of the strike were relatively peaceful, but the tone changed sharply after an incident in which an agent provocateur who had ingratiated himself with the union, and who was soon revealed to be an alliance member, used a phony pretext to dispatch a group of male and female pickets into a police ambush in an alley behind the Minneapolis Tribune building. Their vehicles hemmed in by police cars, the unarmed strikers were easy prey for cops and vigilantes, who beat them with fists and nightsticks. At strike headquarters, where the union’s ambulance corps brought the victims, volunteers worked hastily to aid the bloodied pickets; several women had to be revived. “When the strikers saw them lying around with the nurses working over them, they got hold of clubs and swore they’d go down and wipe up the police and deputies,” Carl Skoglund recalled. “We told them no, the [Tribune] Alley was a trap. We’ll prepare for a real battle, and we’ll pick our own battleground next time. That night, all next day, and the next night, fellows began to collect clubs. They’d gone unarmed before that. Now they got sticks, hose, and pipe.”49
The anger over the ambush no doubt inspired the brutality the strikers showed the “special deputies.” The police might be contemptible, but they were simply doing a job; the deputies, who had volunteered for the assignment, were alliance members and other conservatives who “had expected a little picnic with a mad rabble,” recalled Farrell Dobbs. Some had come to the picket lines wearing football helmets for protection; one, Al Lindley, a former Yale athlete, wore a padded polo helmet. “Like the rest of his ilk,” said Dobbs, “he anticipated having a bit of a lark as he went about the business of clubbing down working-class sheep.”50 On May 21 the strikers strategically isolated the deputies from their police allies in the market. Using baseball bats and other weapons, the strikers chased the “socialites” into the nooks and crannies of the old produce stalls and warehouse buildings, beating them mercilessly even after many threw down their own clubs and made signs of surrender. The strikers had a score to settle with the cops as well, but were mindful that the police wore guns. In order to deny the officers the use of their weapons, the Teamsters sent a truck directly into police lines. Union fighters then leaped out and engaged the cops hand to hand, suspecting the police would not fire at close range for fear of hitting fellow officers. The day’s action appeared to have been won by the Teamsters, who bloodied the deputies badly and sent two dozen police to the hospital.
The next day, despite the police having assigned officers to remain with the alliance deputies to protect them and keep them from retreating, the strikers again overwhelmed the vigilantes, not only beating them soundly but chasing many out of the market area entirely. A truck carrying twenty-five deputies that had the poor timing to enter the district at the height of the melee was at once surrounded by strikers, who pulled the surprised volunteers from the truck and whacked them with baseball bats and homemade saps. Police who tried to intervene were themselves routed. One cop was seen hiding under a car, as strikers poked at him with their clubs. The deputies’ extensive casualties included the death of the prominent C. Arthur Lyman, counsel for the Citizens Alliance and the father of five. Lyman had been seeking refuge in a grocery store when his skull was fractured by a blow to the head; he died later at the city’s General Hospital.51 Another deputy, Peter Erath, was also killed.
Watching these events with deepening concern from the state capital in neighboring St. Paul was Floyd B. Olson, the popular Democratic Farmer–Labor governor and dedicated New Dealer. A kind of Scandinavian American version of New York City’s Fiorello La Guardia, Olson was popular with Minneapolis’s diverse ethnic constituency of Swedes, Poles, Jews, and Norwegians (he spoke several languages), and was, according to historian Irving Bernstein, “the farthest left of any man in high station in America.”52 He had personally given $500 to the Teamsters strike fund, and was said to appreciate the opportunity the strike presented to once and for all end the Citizens Alliance’s stranglehold on the city. Nonetheless he abhorred the lethal violence occurring in the market and had little choice but to mobilize the National Guard, although he resisted giving the order that would send troops into the streets.
The prospect of imminent intervention by the militia, however, and exhaustion on both sides at the strenuous combat already endured, helped create a temporary lull in the strike. On May 25 a concord was reached between Local 574 and the employers, allowing for recognition of the Teamsters and no blacklisting of men who had been active as strikers. But after a few weeks of peace the agreement unraveled. The employers insisted the deal would exclude “inside workers,” those Teamsters who worked as warehouse employees and did not drive vehicles. The union balked, and as of July 17 the strike was back on.
The Local 574 strikers had obtained the vengeance they sought for the ambush in Newspaper Alley, but the police harbored their own grudge over the bloody May 21 and 22 battles in the market. Graphic news photographs of the street fighting had run in the nation’s newspapers, mostly showing strikers taking the fight to the police and the alliance deputies. On July 20, police gave themselves the chance to erase that humiliation. By clever design they escorted a produce convoy into the market as if attempting to make deliveries; when, as anticipated, the lead vehicle was blocked by a truck carrying union pickets, police armed with shotguns suddenly emerged “as if from everywhere.” This time there was no hesitation about using firearms at close quarters, and strikers in the truck as well as pickets on the street had no chance a
s the police guns blazed; within moments seventy people were wounded, two mortally.
“The cops had gone berserk,” Farrell Dobbs explained. “They were shooting in all directions, hitting most of their victims in the back as they tried to escape.”53 Henry Ness, one of the strikers mowed down, clung to life for three days in a local hospital as his family and Teamsters brethren stood vigil. “Tell the boys not to fail me now,” he admonished those keeping watch at his bedside. The city came to a standstill the day of his funeral, as tens of thousands of union rank and file from the area heard Ness eulogized as a hero.
Governor Olson, fearful of further reprisals in the wake of the July 20 bloodbath, determined to put an end to the carnage. “If it is necessary to assume military control, I will make the city of Minneapolis as quiet as a Sunday school,” he announced, threatening martial law.54 He did send National Guardsmen to disperse a protest march at city hall, where demonstrators furious about the police shootings were clamoring for the heads of Mayor A. G. Bainbridge and Chief of Police Mike Johannes. When strikers vowed to defy any martial law edict, Olson on August 1 ordered a surprise 4 a.m. raid on Teamsters headquarters, taking dozens of people into custody, including most of the strike managers, and imprisoning them in a stockade at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul. The union vowed to carry on with the strike even if shorn of its leadership.
Olson then made a series of shrewd moves aimed at calming the waters. He released those Teamsters held at the fairgrounds and allowed them to resume use of their strike hall; at the same time he ordered a raid on the Citizens Alliance headquarters, something that would have been unthinkable a year before. After consulting with President Roosevelt, Olson also softened the alliance’s influence by bringing pressure on two leading local financial institutions, First Bank and Norwest Banco; both helped finance the local alliance chapter and both were in debt to the federal government on account of Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) loans. Olson communicated to their executives diplomatically but directly that Washington desired their cooperation.
As in many protracted strikes, sheer fatigue was probably accountable for nudging both sides toward resolution, aided by the leverage Olson had brought against the alliance’s backers. Like the coal strike of 1902 and the New York garment workers’ uprising of 1909–1910, the outcome of the Minneapolis labor crisis came to rely in part on the willingness of wealthy stakeholders who, while remaining out of the thick of the fight, nevertheless had substantial motivation to avoid permanent disruption to commerce. In August, Local 574 and the employers agreed that workers at each trucking firm would vote as to whether the Teamsters would represent them; at almost all the large local trucking firms the union attained victory in these elections.
As in San Francisco, a disciplined local had ignored the guidance of its national union and won a tough labor ground war against determined and unscrupulous foes. The omniscient authority of the Citizens Alliance had been ended; Minneapolis was no longer “a citadel of the open shop.”55 As for the Teamsters, the local’s success at defending, as part of its fight, the rights of broader categories of warehouse workers marked the beginning of the union’s expansion. Over the next generation the IBT’s outreach, sometimes guided by Farrell Dobbs himself, would come to include over-the-road truckers, dock loaders, and various other ancillary occupations, making the Teamsters an ever more formidable labor force.
THE RESURGENCE OF UNION ACTIVITY brought new focus to such basic questions as how organized labor would confront racial disparity within its ranks, and whether trade or industrial unions offered the best means of flexing workers’ power. The Communist Party had made the organizing of black workers a priority early on, much as it had the unemployed. Perceiving African Americans as a nation within a nation, the most abused sufferers of class prejudice who, when liberated, would help spur society’s transformation, Communist organizers reached out to black locals in Northern industrial cities such as Detroit but also ventured bravely into the Deep South, a region historically inimical to labor organizing. They formed Unemployed Councils and staged protests in Birmingham, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and other cities and towns, in addition to publishing a regional party news sheet called The Southern Worker. Biracial demonstrations initiated by the party in the heart of the former Confederacy were almost suicidal in their audacity, angering local whites and bringing about numerous attacks on labor organizers—at least two were killed in Florida—as well as an overnight resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile the Communist-allied International Labor Defense distinguished itself by taking on a number of high-profile legal lynching cases including, most famously, the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young black men wrongly accused of raping two white women aboard a freight train in Alabama in 1931. In 1935 the party was instrumental in the creation of the National Negro Congress, which sought the easing of the effects of unemployment and an end to Jim Crow segregation.
One of the great stories of black labor advance during this era was that of A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Pullman porters were among the best-paid black workers in America; the job’s mobility, the company’s reputation for quality service, even the impressive Pullman uniform, granted men fortunate to have such jobs an envied status. But work conditions were rigorous. Many employees were on duty as many as eighty to one hundred hours per week, yet there was no ladder of promotion to better-compensated positions such as conductor, which was reserved for whites; nor were the porters paid for overnight off-train layovers, during which they were left to absorb the costs of meals and lodging. And because the porters relied on tips for the lion’s share of their income, they had no choice but to endure the routine condescension of white passengers and the indignity of being addressed as “George,” an allusion to the company’s founder, George M. Pullman. Employees who became disgruntled or attempted unionization were banned from service.
When five hundred porters gathered in 1925 to found the brotherhood, they elected Randolph, a Socialist writer, editor, and labor organizer, as their leader precisely “because he was not a porter [and] the company could not discipline him, fire him, nor find his car untidy.” Pullman counterpunched by forming a company union, even though the Railway Labor Act of 1926 theoretically prohibited such company-rigged employee organizations. For almost a dozen years the porters waged two significant battles—to eliminate the company union and win recognition from the AFL. Finally, in 1935, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won a federally mediated election over the company union, and in 1937 struck a collective bargaining pact with the Pullman Company, the first such achievement between a black union and a major corporation. The victory was a particularly meaningful effort because New Deal labor reforms largely excluded jobs in which blacks were prominent, such as farmwork and domestic labor, a denial so egregious that black newspapers had taken to calling the NRA the “Negro Removal Act.”56 After several years in which AFL president William Green moved forward, then back, then dithered some more on the matter, the porters also eventually won federation standing and affiliation.
Having come reluctantly to at least a partial accommodation on race, the AFL was soon confronted by another difficult question—whether federation workers were best served by being organized in trade unions or along industrial lines. Trade organizations were in effect the descendants of the guild and apprentice-journeyman systems of labor tradition, and were represented by mostly skilled workers organized around a specific expertise. Industrial unions were those organized by an entire industry, an early example being Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union, which gathered together the unified might of all rail brotherhoods.
The leaders of industrial unions such as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and John L. Lewis of the UMW had begun to resist the hegemony of the established AFL trade unions. The rise of mass production industries, which tended to make craft traditions obsolete, suggested a larger role for industry-wide unions, a view supported by statistics:
craft unions within the AFL had grown little, about 10 percent annually, in recent years, whereas new industrial unions were coming on line at a rate of 130 percent. Industrial organizing, Lewis argued, would better keep step with management’s growing clout. “Great combinations of capital have assembled to themselves tremendous power and influence,” he remarked. “If you go in there with your craft unions [the bosses] will mow you down like the Italian machine guns will mow down Ethiopians in the war now going on in that country.”57
Rapid adaptation to new conditions had never been a hallmark of the AFL. Many older AFL members, if anything, saw the growth and mechanization of industry as more reason to adhere to the fixed AFL structure, not change it. President William Green insisted trade unions would always enjoy an advantage in bargaining with employers, and be better suited to ward off the vagaries of the economy or government interference. But Lewis grew impatient with such views, believing the AFL’s practice of lumping unskilled workers into preexisting craft unions left workers in large industries less unified, with less ability to leverage against management. He reminded Green and others that labor’s “fundamental obligation is to organize people.”58
