ON the day before the strike of truck drivers paralyzed the life of the city, and eight days before a citizen army hastily recruited was to battle openly with pickets in the market place, life in Minneapolis exhibited its usual reassuring normality and bustle. Mr. Totten Heffelfinger, nephew of Yale’s All-American guard, who was to declare before 2000 business men in a few days that a “mass movement” might be necessary to save the city, sat quietly at his desk studying prices on the grain exchange. Mr. Arthur Lyman, for many years attorney for the Citizens’ Alliance, found himself considering an invitation to the council meeting of the Minnesota Diocese of the Episcopal Church. The meeting was to be held in Rochester in a few days. No one could have told Mr. Lyman in those quiet days that his last-minute decision to exchange the office of diocesan delegate for a deputy’s badge was to cost him his life on a curbstone in the Minneapolis market. Of those closer to the dispute, Mr. Neil Cronin, chairman of the Regional Labor Board, entertained and expressed the highest hopes that “differences” in the trucking industry could be adjusted. Universally, the newspapers exhibited optimism.
Even among workers, betting was prevalent that the deadline would pass without a strike. Shrewdly the employers had raised wages in key companies and for key workers’ groups. It was a fair guess that the drivers who had been picked out for wage favors would be divided from those who had not. The Employers’ Committee, who were principals to the dispute did not alarm themselves, and only attended meetings of the Regional Labor Board when they chose. Accused of this by the Labor Board itself, they denied it vigorously, and asserted that on the occasions of their absence they had been unable to assemble their members. Strike or no strike, they had no intention of recognizing the right of the union to speak for their employees, or of granting any of its principal demands. As Mr. Strong, founder of the Citizens’ Alliance, said to me, “I can conceive of dealing with a conservative and responsible labor leader, but certainly not with any of the A. F. of L. leaders in Minneapolis, or with the leadership of Local 574 [the truck drivers’ union].” Mr. Strong’s remarks, reflecting the principles dominant among Minneapolis employers, indicated that a responsible labor leader might turn up in the next world but not in this one—or in Minneapolis. Among the workers, plenty knew there’d be a fight but few anticipated its bitterness or scope. A few persons, however, as they say in Minneapolis, “knew what the score was.” For the most part they were on the union’s organizational committee, and had taken part in the negotiations. They had in fact been “keeping score” for over a year. “We knew,” one of the leaders said to me, “that the bosses would never recognize the union. Their record proved it. Nor would they grant the workers any concessions unless we forced them to do so. We prepared at the very beginning for a fight which we knew was inevitable.” Here is one key at least to all the events of the summer of 1934 in the city of Minneapolis. At no point before or during the strike, as the record shows, did the union leaders “kid themselves,” or miss the implication of their actions. At several points the employers did, at all points the government negotiators succumbed to this human weakness. Somewhat more personally Karl Skoglund said to me, “We discussed very carefully the May decision. Only by all the sections of the trucking industry acting together did we have a chance to win anything for any one of them. We knew very well that would tie up the city. And although what we were striking for was the right of collective bargaining guaranteed to us by law, we knew that if we failed the Citizens’ Alliance would succeed in pinning prison sentences on all of us. It was a real decision.” It was. Once made, there could be no turning back. And there was none.
Prestrike negotiations, like the diplomatic parleys on the brink of war, are conducted in part “to prevent the war” and in part to win allies for a potential battle. The public, a useful ally, leaned favorably to the employers’ charge that “the sole issue in this strike is the closed shop.” That issue, “like the domination of Wall Street,” automatically wins applause from the public gallery. The employers were ahead. Then shortly before the strike the union abruptly withdrew the closed shop and substituted the most modest demands, and the truck owner’s diplomats lost their moral footing and never got it back. The union asked that the employers sign an agreement binding themselves to abide by the provisions of Section 7A of the NIRA. That was a hard one to beat. They asked for no discrimination because of union membership, and for seniority in layoffs and hiring. The Regional Labor Board promptly indicated its approval and the public saw no reason whatever for civil war in Minneapolis. But the employers refused to accede to these demands. From then on the diplomats of the coal heavers, the piano movers, etc., were ahead in the peace parleys.
On the eve of the strike, the Regional Labor Board issued a statement “for the information of the public,” containing this sentence, “No conciliatory move of any kind whatsoever at any time was made by the employers—they even avoided meeting with the board on Friday and Saturday.”
The employers returned a statement which beneath the studied language of industrial diplomacy indicated a temperature well over the boiling point. After elaborately and resentfully denying “avoidance” of the board, they repeated the modest demands listed above and stated that the union refused to discuss wages and hours, “until or unless the employers signed a contract. . . with Local 574.” They added, “. . . we promptly notified your board that such demand was improper [italics mine] and would not be acceded to by the employers as there is no requirement of law that any employer enter into any written agreement of any kind or nature with any organization, whether a labor union or otherwise.”
Stripped of diplomatic trappings to the hard bones of class interests, negotiations to date had meant simply this: the employers were against the smallest atom of union recognition, direct or indirect; the workers were for any kind of recognition, direct or indirect. Reason the same in both cases. A follows B. Any recognition, even signing an agreement to do what they were legally bound to do anyway—respect 7A, meant “economic demands” later. The employers’ opposition to the union’s most modest demands, to which neither the public or the Labor Board had the slightest objection, was not an abstract prejudice, as it appears in the diplomatic parleys. It was based on the coldest calculation from their own experience, that in the long run any sort of union recognition means higher wages, and “interference.” Indeed, the employers deserve every respect as logicians if not as diplomats. The union’s modest demands were likewise based on the coldest calculation that any sort of union recognition is a beginning, and that only union recognition is worth a damn in securing—in the long run—better working conditions and economic security.
Given the thesis that union recognition is bad, the employers’ statements were sound, but their diplomatic White Papers were notably poor propaganda. They were far too honest. The “principle” they were fighting for was visible to the naked eye at a hundred yards. Had the employers been better diplomats instead of honest antiunion employers they would have concentrated on “racketeering in the union,” inconvenience to the public, Communism, or some other theme which would have distracted the public from the actual issues of the controversy. Better advised, they did so in the next strike.
The inflexibility of the truck owners in these days of negotiation was underestimated by the Regional Labor Board. (And by the governor and by the public.) Unlike the Citizens’ Alliance, its members failed to associate original sin with organized labor. They all hoped and expected a settlement. Only the union leadership had no pacifist illusions, and on the evening of May 12, in a mass meeting at Eagles’ Hall, upon their recommendation the truck drivers voted strike. The vote in Eagles’ Hall followed swiftly on the heels of the last joint meeting of the Regional Labor Board which, a few hours earlier, had been shattered to bits by the refusal of the employers to sign any agreement whatever with the union.
In the next eleven days the strike ran the whole gamut of class warfare in a sharp curve upward from steady picketing to a virtual general strike and the threat of civil war. The first three days found the city peaceful and paralyzed, picketing efficiency about ninety-five per cent. The Minneapolis Tribune listed the following “businesses hit by the strike”: general and department stores, groceries, bakeries; cleaners and laundries; meat and provision houses; all building materials; all wholesale houses, all factories; gas and oil companies, stations and attendants; breweries, truck, transfer, and warehouses; all common carriers. “Ice wagons, milk and coal companies, being unionized, are excepted.”
On the second day of the strike:
“With nearly 3000 picketeers blocking every entrance to the city and massed about the gates of every large fleet owner, they succeeded in halting most of the ordinary trucking movements. . . . In the central market [strategic concentration point for the union on account of lowest wages, and the practice of chiseling, admitted even by the Employers’ Committee] the tie-up was particularly effective. No trucks were allowed to come in with farmers’ loads of vegetables. . . . Newspaper deliveries Wednesday were made by police escort. . . . Large fleet owners were playing a waiting game.”
After the strike the union leaders described these days as follows: “We had very little trouble in the first few days except from outside trucks coming into the city, and from the gasoline stations. There were many finks among the gas-station attendants, who after being persuaded to close down, would open up an hour or two later. We determined to see that they kept closed and on the second day sent out a hundred picket cars for the purpose.”
Residents describe the sight of one angry group of pickets lassoing the station pump of a stubborn strikebreaker and hauling it bumping down the street. But except for clashes at gas stations there was little show of violence on either side.
The sheriff described the situation to me as follows: “They had the town tied up tight. Not a truck could move in Minneapolis.” To the average citizen, “Minneapolis seemed like Sunday,” and in a Sunday mood he was disposed, since the provision markets still had food to sell, not to get excited. Workers at factory windows stopped work to give the picket cars a cheer as they passed by. The farmers alone at this period were fighting mad as their loads of vegetables and produce were turned back by pickets at the city’s gates. This story of the farmers’ role in the truck strikes is highly significant and we will return to it again in this narrative.
There were two primary reasons for the strike’s effectiveness in these days of peaceful paralysis of the city’s life. The first was that several of the largest truck companies had deliberately ordered their trucks off the street—awaiting a more strategic moment for open battle. The second was the military precision of the strike machine. “If the preparations,” writes the Tribune on May 16, “made by their union for handling it are any indication, the strike of the truck drivers in Minneapolis is going ’to be a far reaching affair, covering all the city and all its business and industry.” [italics mine]
The heart of the strike mechanism was the headquarters at 1900 Chicago Avenue. Here several hundred men from the cruising picket squads ate and slept and were dispatched with military precision to the “front.” And here the picket strategy was literally mapped out and put into motion.
The “Strike Headquarters of General Drivers’ Union Local 574”—emblazoned in foot high letters on a banner before the headquarters—was an old garage hired a few days before and remodeled to fit the strike machine. It served as barracks, commissary, hospital, auditorium, squad-car assembly and staff headquarters for the strike committee. The brain core of military operations was the dispatchers’ room, formerly the front offices of the garage. Men stood all day at four telephones which poured forth information to them and registered calls for strike help from every corner of the city. Picket captains were under instruction to phone every ten minutes from a known point, such as a friendly cigar store in their picket district, or a bar, or a striker’s home. “Truck attempting to move load of produce from Berman Fruit, under police convoy. Have only ten pickets, send help.” Or, “Successfully turned back five trucks entering city at — Road North. Am returning Cars 42 and 46 to headquarters.” The messages were in all cases written down by the man at the phone and passed to the dispatchers, V. R. Dunne and Farrell Dobbs. All disposition of pickets was in their hands, hourly decision on strike tactics theirs, all instructions to picket captains written by them. The actual mechanism for dispatching cruising cars to the front was as follows: a messenger took the selected car numbers from dispatchers to a man at a microphone; he called out, “Calling Cars Number 2, 7, and 9. Proceed!” The cars rapidly assembled their pickets from reserves of strikers in the building. Night or day, never less than 500 men hung around headquarters. A dispatcher’s window opened from the garage office onto the runway before the main exit; and as the squad car passed the window, the picket captain received written and secret instructions from the dispatcher. None of the motors were started in the garage, to keep the building—which after all was a hospital and a dining room too—free of carbon monoxide. The pickets pushed their own squad car till it reached the street, when the switch was turned and the motor started. Picket captains alone received the written destination and instruction for the squad cars, and reported back to the dispatcher after each operation was over. This was a precaution against stool pigeons.
After three days police tapped the telephones and thereafter strike information came in and went out in code. Police radio instructions over the air “Arrest rioting strikers corner Seventh and Nicollet,” etc., were in turn picked up on a low-wave-length radio at strike headquarters.
In addition to phone calls, the dispatchers depended for tactical information on a motorcycle squad of five who cruised the streets day and night, reporting trouble. They carried strict instructions to engage in no picket battles, themselves, with police, finks, or special deputies—no matter how hot or critical they looked—but immediately to request headquarters to send aid. Pickets guarded some fifty roads entering the city with instructions to turn all trucks not having union credentials back where they came from.
“Most strikes are lost,” said one 574 leader to me, “because the strikers lose touch with the strike. They sit at home watching the food give out and reading newspapers telling them the strike is lost anyway. Lack of chow and the lies of the boss press finally drive them back to work. We never let these things happen in the truck drivers’ strike.”
Between four and five thousand persons ate at strike headquarters and slept in or near it for the strike’s duration. Fourteen or fifteen hours of the day they were on the picket line, while at night they listened to the news of the strike, the status of negotiations, the bosses’ latest move, etc., which were reported in detail over the microphone. It is hard to find a strike in which the two strike fundamentals, food and morale, were more carefully provided for by the leaders than in the truck strikes in Minneapolis. The main interior of the garage became an auditorium, with a platform erected for speakers and musicians. About two thousand men and women assembled nightly inside, and as high as twenty to twenty-five thousand in adjoining streets to listen to the loud speaker.
In an elongated near-extension were located a kitchen, eating counters, hospital, and auto-repair shop. The kitchen was the car-wash section of the garage, whitewashed now and with a dozen stoves and boilers and a sink in it. A crew of 120 women under the direction of two chefs from the cooks’ and waiters’ union worked in two twelve-hour shifts for eleven days. Food was served day or night. It was estimated that at the peak of the strike as many as ten thousand people, men, women, and children—most strikers brought their families—ate in strike headquarters in a single day.
The hospital—located in another wing of the garage—served the strike not only in the obvious sense of first aid to the wounded, but it played what might be called a military part in the class war. Anyone familiar with strikes knows the role that hospitals are called upon to play in breaking a strike. The most militant and active strike leaders are those most often attacked by the police and most often injured. Taken by ambulances to the city hospital, they are invariably held for police questioning and jailed till the strike is broken. To the employer this is a legitimate use of city institutions. To the striker it is strikebreaking. In this fashion an ordinary strike loses the pick of its fighting forces through a system of hospital incarceration. But in the big truck drivers’ strikes in Minneapolis the loss was avoided. Of the hundreds of strikers’ hospital cases in the May strike only two went to a regular hospital—and one escaped. The others were treated at strike headquarters, where two physicians and three trained nurses sympathetic to the strike were in constant attendance. Equipment included surgical instruments, and out of the scores of cases treated no case of infection developed before or after the strike.
In addition to treatment of wounded pickets, it was equally necessary to the strike’s efficiency to keep the hundred odd trucks and squad cars in repair. A machine shop at headquarters with fifteen auto mechanics looked after this job. As evidence of the strike’s popularity, $15,000 in applications were received in the first three days of the May strike. This sum and more was spent in the eleven-day warfare. A donation of $2000 was made by the milk drivers’ union to the strike and lesser sums from other unions. Governor Olson contributed $500. Food and gasoline consumed the major portion. It was a common charge of the Citizens’ Alliance that the union’s money was squandered by the strike leaders in riotous living. In point of fact none of the actual strike leaders—the Dunnes, Skoglund, Dobbs, etc.—were put on the union payroll until the conclusion of both strikes, and then at the going truck drivers’ wage of $26 a week.
Commenting on the building above described, the Tribune remarks: “The strike headquarters. . . are everything but a fort and might easily be converted into that should occasion come.” Occasion never did, but the union took heavy precautions against raids by the police or vigilantes, which were daily threatened. One man was made captain of the guards, so to speak, and maintained two to four guards on duty in shifts at each door of headquarters. By him were designated other workers who policed the interior of headquarters, watched for stool pigeons, kept order, and broke up fights. Four watchmen kept a day and night vigil on the roof of headquarters and were equipped with tommy guns.
The city divided for and against the strike. For, some ninety-five per cent of the workers, or sixty-five per cent of the city’s population; vaguely sympathetic, neutral or against, the other thirty-five per cent. In another day or two, thirty-five thousand building-trades workers were to declare a strike in sympathy with the truck drivers. Ten thousand street-car operators considered a joint strike. On the second day all the taxi drivers in Minneapolis walked out in sympathy. And in another week, the Central Labor Union endorsed the strike. The majority of Minneapolis employers, possibly two-thirds, supported wholeheartedly the diehard stand of the Citizens’ Alliance; a minority, while against the strike, were likewise against the “inflexible and unreasonable” stand of the Alliance toward the issues. The majority of the farmers were against the strike—though not all. The Farm Holiday Association made substantial contributions to the union’s commissary.
The other side of the controversy likewise had its strike headquarters; in fact, in a few days, it was to parallel 1900 Chicago Avenue, with its own barracks and commissary and its own staff headquarters for a “citizens’ army.” At first, however, a suite of rooms in the Radisson Hotel sufficed the Employers’ Committee as headquarters. One of the active strategists in this other strike headquarters described his activities as follows:
“We worked night and day. I’d sometimes sleep on a cushion in the office. There was the whole question of publicity statements for the press, full-page advertisements to be written telling the truth about the strike. Then all day long business men would phone us, or rush in desperately for advice—a new problem for this factory or for that truck owner. The matter of keeping in touch with our membership [the members of the Citizens’ Alliance] telling them what to do in this or that emergency”—there were many. “And the negotiations with the governor, with the federal mediators, with the strikers, the preparation of briefs, the conferences with our own lawyers. In fact, for a time, the Employers’ Committee sat day and night in almost continuous session.” It was war, all right—between two economic classes, and with neither side offering the public much in the way of disguise.
While the two headquarters operated, each in its own way, negotiations continued—and came to nothing. Toward the end of the era of peaceful paralysis, Governor Olson summarized the stalemate in a published statement to the employers:
“The Union agreed this morning to withdraw its demand for a direct contract. By your letter you have refused to agree to the creation of a board of arbitration. It is not for me to pass judgment upon your action, but I confess I am grievously disappointed because of your refusal.
“. . . It seems inconsistent to me for you to state in one sentence that you will agree to bargain collectively with your employees [which the employers had done through professing adherence to Section 7A] and in the following sentence to state that you refuse to sign a written agreement with the Union. One who is willing to make a bargain is usually willing to bind it by written contract.”
He thereupon threatens the calling of the National Guard if an agreement is not reached:
“If that becomes necessary, the military department will take complete charge of the distribution of commodities, which the citizens of Minneapolis desire to purchase; it will commandeer such equipment and conscript such manpower as is necessary to bring about that distribution and maintain law and order. If these steps do not accomplish the end desired, further steps, consistent with military occupation of the city will be taken. . . In view of the public interest involved, I hope you will see fit to renew your negotiations with the strikers and reach an agreement over Sunday.”
An ultimatum—and as the governor’s statement would indicate the temperature of all parties (including the governor) was rising. Indeed on the fourth and fifth day the strike entered a new and ominous phase. “The city’s food supply,” writes the Tribune, “began to feel the pinch of the strike. . . a general shut down of bakeries is estimated to be only a day away. In groceries similar conditions existed. . . . The market gardeners have organized against the strike.” Having failed to establish their case with the Regional Labor Board, or the governor, the Employers Committee nonetheless sensed a shift of public sentiment to them with the drying up of the food supply. A “Citizens’ Committee of Twenty-five,” named at a mass meeting of business men was entrusted with seeing “that the city’s commercial transportation system [was] not indefinitely paralyzed by the strike, and to lay plans to move trucks through the picket lines if necessary.” The Committee of Twenty-five promised the bakeries heavy convoys of special police, and instructed them to show their public spirit and move food. The bakers took a look at the picket lines and left their trucks in storage. The employers’ strategy committee went into secret session. The moment had come for an offensive. With the governor and the Regional Labor Board pressing hard for settlement, with losses in business volume mounting into millions, with the city “faced by starvation,” a settlement would have to come soon, or it would be the union’s victory. But whereas in the first days of the strike, public sympathy had been with the union, it was now veering against them. The average citizen, whatever the merits in a labor dispute, does not stand by and see bread taken out of his mouth without protest. The “correlation of forces” as the military experts say, had changed. The union knew it; they also knew that the food supply was not as low as advertised. And they knew also that if the bakery trucks moved, and the market gardeners, on their heels, piano trucks, factory trucks, taxicabs, and everything else would move too. So they stuck to their picket lines. At the meetings of business men and other more neutral citizens as well, speeches began to be made about “Communists capturing our streets. . . . Minneapolis brought to its knees by a handful of agitators,” etc. The truck owners of the Citizens’ Alliance joyfully joined with their new allies in patriotic denunciations of the “Red Dictators” who are out to “starve our city into submission.”
In secret session, however, they became more concrete. They proposed to move a Tribune paper truck as a decoy to attract pickets, falling upon them with a heavy reserve of armed guards and police held at first in ambush. Once in action the guards and police could beat the pickets into a pulp at their leisure. To execute such a plan was not easy. The strike machine at 1900 Chicago Avenue refused to allow pickets to expose themselves to armed guards without the shield of numbers. They had actually withdrawn picketing from the Tribune alley, suspecting a trap. To carry out the plan, treachery was required inside the union. A stool was accordingly sent in by the Minneapolis police, and the plan carried off with success. Two or three truck loads of pickets, including women as well as men, under instructions from the stool pigeon were dispatched to the alley near the Tribune’s office. They were there surrounded and roundly slugged by the Minneapolis police force and by special guards. It was the first serious defeat suffered by the union. On the same day the Tribune appeared with the following headline:
Trucks Try Defying Pickets
Convoys To Be Protected
The offensive had begun.
The story of the “Tribune Alley Plot” from the union’s viewpoint was given me by Grant Dunne, strike leader and present in headquarters when the picket cars were dispatched by the police stool pigeon:
“A man came to us recommended as an active worker in one of the Farmer-Labor wards, who wanted to help the strike all he could. We took him in and he worked hard at all kinds of jobs. I used to watch him and think him one of our best men. He was there twenty hours a day, and always busy. Somehow he got onto the mike one night for announcing cars. And I heard him stop the speaking program and announce, ’Calling three cars’—he gave the numbers—then he said, ’This is a little job we have to do tonight, and some of you women pile in there with the men.’ There were always a lot of women around and looking for a little excitement; they got in. Then somehow, he or an accomplice got over to the dispatcher’s window and gave the picket captain instructions to go to the Tribune alley. Within ten minutes we got word that the three cars had been blocked into the alley and both the men and women unmercifully beaten with saps and night sticks. In another five minutes, the first car of the women showed up back at headquarters. Some of the women were unconscious.”
From this point the narrative can be taken up by Skoglund, who was present when all the wounded arrived, and remained with them through most of the night.
“I remember the night. They brought the women in, and the other pickets from the Tribune Alley, and laid them down in rows in strike headquarters. All the women were mutilated and covered with blood; two or three with broken legs; several stayed unconscious for hours. Saps and night clubs had been used on both the men and women. When the strikers saw them lying round with the nurses working over them, they got hold of clubs and swore they’d go down and wipe up the police and deputies. We told them no, the 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. You’d see men all over headquarters making saps and padding their caps for a battle. One picket would crack another over the head and say, ’Does it hurt?’ , And he’d say, ’Yuh, I can feel it. I’ll put in some more.’ That’s the way it went, the fellows were wild there for a couple of days.”
Dunne relates that the man who had urged the women into the picket cars appeared as usual the next morning. He was immediately seized for search and questioning. On him were found membership cards in half a dozen unions in Minneapolis, and in several Farmer-Labor clubs. “In his car we found a Burns detective badge and credentials. Begging for mercy, he confessed that he had worked for a time with the police lining up special deputies, and was afterward sent by the police as a stool to strike headquarters.”
[A full account of the use of espionage in this instance by the Minneapolis police and the Citizens’ Alliance was given by Grant Dunne before an investigating Committee of the United States Senate. See: “Violations of Free, Speech and Assembly and Interference with Rights of Labor,” Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, 74th Congress, Second Session. on S. Res. 266, p. 44.]
Following the Tribune Alley episode and the open declaration of an offensive by the employers, the strike entered into a phase of virtual civil war. A mass meeting of two thousand business men had been held on the previous day in the Radisson Hotel, in which patriotic speeches were made in denunciation of the strike. Mr. C. C. Webber, who presided, declared that “the strikers are run by a handful of agitators, local and imported,” and that “our job is to see that we are not dictated to by a mere handful.” The merits of the dispute were not discussed. Totten Heffelfinger declared that a “mass movement of citizens” may be necessary to end the strike. “There may be five thousand men on strike in Minneapolis,” he shouted, “but not five thousand or ten thousand, or twenty-five thousand people can bring the citizens of Minneapolis to their knees!” It was this mass meeting which named the Committee of Twenty-five mentioned above, charged with “laying plans to move trucks through the picket lines if necessary.” The Committee met promptly and decided it was necessary to begin the movement of trucks on Saturday morning. At the same mass meeting the organization of a “citizens’ army” was begun. A Major Harris declared that he had had a “good deal of experience in handling mobs,” in similar situations, and it could easily be achieved “without any bloodshed whatever.”
This army of peace was rapidly recruited in the next few days. It was composed of doctors, lawyers, business men, insurance salesmen, clerks, and a few workers. It included scions of some of the oldest families, and the “socially prominent” of Minneapolis. Still another “strike headquarters” was established to house the recruits of the new army, consisting of barracks, a hospital, and a commissary at 1328 Hennepin Avenue. “It is planned,” the newspapers reported, “to keep the men there during the strike.”
I have talked with a good many of the members of this “citizens’ army” since the “war” was over. Some said, “We didn’t know we were to be used to move trucks. We joined solely to preserve law and order.” Innocent children! Others thought they were to be used to “convoy food trucks only.” Others knew they were recruited to “smash the truck drivers’ strike,” and entered into their duties heartily. Confusion about the objects of a “war” is true of recruits in any army. The Employers’ Committee, however, had no doubts as to the utility of their new allies. They would be used to convoy trucks, and when trucks moved, the strike could be smashed.
At 1900 Chicago Avenue, as well, great clarity existed as
to the issues of the coming battle, for a battle was on the order of the day, which both sides candidly admitted. Dobbs, strike leader, expressed it this way, “Both sides were preparing for a battle and we decided we would pick the battleground ourselves, this time. We selected the market where there would be plenty of room.”
The employers centered their attention on the market as well.
That great area of warehouses and market stalls, whose whole existence depended on trucks, was the natural heart of the strike. On Saturday, members of the new army deputized as special police assisted in the convoy of market trucks. And on Saturday the police and the specials gave the strikers a second defeat. Pickets were still unarmed and some forty of them were severely beaten by the police. The strikers, however, retired in good order, carrying their wounded. The union was not yet prepared for the test. For several days, however, the allies of
the trucking union had been growing. The whole labor movement of Minneapolis was now on the defensive. They sensed that a decisive defeat for the striking truck drivers meant the beginning of the end for organized labor in Minneapolis. Five or ten delegations a day of twenty to thirty men from all kinds of unions showed up at headquarters and said: “Use us, this is our strike.” The unemployed organizations came solidly behind the truck drivers, the building-trades union thirty-five thousand strong declared for them, and the Central Labor Union shortly after voted their endorsement of the strike. One striker described activities at headquarters on Sunday, May 20, as follows: “Nobody had carried any weapon or club in the first days of the strike. We went unarmed but we’d learned our lesson. All over headquarters you’d see guys making saps or sawing off lead pipe, with a hacksaw. The Clark Woodenware Company was manufacturing wooden saps for the deputized guards, but we highjacked the truck loads of clubs and brought them into headquarters. I remember one day an old man came into strike headquarters and asked if we thought the spokes of bannisters would be any good as clubs. We said sure, and by God in two hours he came in with an armful. He’d torn out both flights of stairs in his house and brought in the spokes.”