To the historian in retrospect, the “Battle of Deputies Run” as an episode in class warfare, appears clearly as a two-battle and not a one-day engagement, in spite of the fact the second battle was the more sensational and has received the widest fanfare of publicity. Monday’s battle was the more interesting and well ordered as a strictly military engagement between two forces of armed men. Tuesday’s battle, though it completed Monday’s work and in effect ended the war except for minor engagements, was tactically speaking, both a rout and a riot.
A story of the Monday battle as seen from the viewpoint of a union leader follows:
“We built up our reserves in this way. At short time intervals during an entire day we sent fifteen or twenty pickets pulled in from all over the city into the Central Labor Union headquarters on Eighth Street. So that although nobody knew it, we had a detachment of six hundred men there, each armed with clubs, by Monday morning. Another nine hundred or so we held in reserve at strike headquarters. In the market itself, pickets without union buttons were placed in key positions. There remained scattered through the city, at their regular posts, only a skeleton picket line. The men in the market were in constant communication through motorcycles and telephone with headquarters. The special deputies [citizens’ army] were gradually pushed by our pickets to one side and isolated from the cops. When that was accomplished the signal was given and the six hundred men poured out of Central Labor Union headquarters. They marched in military formation, four abreast, each with their club, to the market. They kept on coming. When the socialites, the Alfred Lindleys and the rest who had expected a little picnic with a mad rabble, saw this bunch, they began to get some idea what the score was. Then we called on the pickets from strike headquarters who marched into the center of the market and encircled the police. They [the police] were put right in the center with no way out. At intervals we made sallies on them to separate a few. This kept up for a couple of hours, till finally they drew their guns. We had anticipated this would happen, and that then the pickets would be unable to fight them. You can’t lick a gun with a club. The correlation of forces becomes a little unbalanced. So we picked out a striker, a big man and utterly fearless, and sent him in a truck with twenty-five pickets. He was instructed to drive right into the formation of cops and stop for nothing. We knew he’d do it. Down the street he came like a bat out of hell with his horn honking and into the market arena. The cops held up their hands for him to stop, but he kept on; they gave way and he was in the middle of them. The pickets jumped out on the cops. We figured by intermixing with the cops in hand-to-hand fighting, they would not use their guns because they would have to shoot cops as well as strikers. Cops don’t like to do that.
“Casualties for the day included for the strikers a broken collar bone, the cut-open skull of a picket who swung on a cop and hit a striker by mistake as the cop dodged, and a couple of broken ribs. On the other side, roughly thirty cops were taken to the hospital.”
The Minneapolis Star gives the following account of the same episodes in Monday’s battle:
“Two brief but heated clashes between police and a yelling throng. . . resulted in dispatch of nearly one thousand special officers [the citizens’ army] and regular police to the area.
“Although the truck operators had announced they would move perishables, no attempts were made [italics mine] after the first outbreak near the Gamble Robinson Company, 301 Fifth Street, N.”
This was the strikers’ first offensive described above.
“Clubs, pipe, rock, and in one instance a knife were used by the crowd after police watched two truck loads of strikers enter the district and unload. A third truck drove up, bearing the sign, “All organized labor help spring the trap. Rid the city of rats!”
“The men jumped from the truck at Third Avenue, N. Some hundred police armed with sawed-off shotguns. . . attempted to halt the advancing group.”
This is the honking truck of shock troops mentioned above.
“Advancing while approximately 1500 others turned up, the pickets dared the police to halt them. An arm rose, wielding a club. One policeman went down.
“Other police leaped into the battle, using their night sticks in retaliation. Rocks hurtled through the air. Half a dozen police dropped. One policeman was stabbed on the back of the neck with a knife. Strikers and others in the crowd fell to the ground. The crowd then retreated, taking with it its injured.
“Several of the injured police were taken into packing houses for emergency treatment, and later to various hospitals.
“Nearly an hour later, a second battle broke out at the corner of Sixth St. and Third Ave., N. One of the crowd tossed a club at Patrolman Wm. Mealey. Three policemen were lying on the ground when reserves pushed back the crowd. Several strikers were injured in this battle.
“The crowd cheered as the injured officers were loaded into an ambulance, and taken to General Hospital.”
At no time did the bystanders—the bulk of whom were not strikers—show sympathy with the police or the deputies.
“The crowd grew. At the same time, additional special police and special deputy sheriffs, one wearing a football helmet, arrived. One of the special deputies was Alfred Lindley, Minneapolis sportsman and mountain climber. He was dressed in polo jodhpurs, and wore a polo hat. The crowd jeered Lindley constantly. One picket reached out a club and flicked Lindley’s hat to the street.
“When reports of the disturbance reached Johannes, he ordered the night shift of regular officers back to duty. . . . Ass’t Inspector Georgan ordered the deputies to form a line and marched them back to headquarters. . . . This move brought cheers from the crowd.”
John Wall, the sheriff of Hennepin County, commented to me on these episodes. “It was a mistake,” he said, “to use men without uniforms. You see,” he explained, “the strikers regarded them the same as strikebreakers. But the chief of police was hollering for more men so we tried it.”
The events of the next day were to amply justify the sheriff’s analysis that the strikers regarded the deputized business men as “the same as strikebreakers,” and to them somewhat more detestable than the police who at least were paid for it. In fairness it should be said that a considerable number of the “deputies” neither anticipated or relished the role they were called upon to play.
Despite the ferocity of Monday’s battle, and the fact that the Union had succeeded again in halting the movement of trucks, and that many police and special deputies, as well as strikers and bystanders, were seriously wounded, the employers saw no reason for either halting or modifying the character of their offensive. Negotiations for a settlement of the costly and bloody warfare continued after the battle for fourteen hours up to three o’clock the next morning. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Regional Labor Board summarizes laconically the results:
“The employees demand that a written contract directly with the union be entered into. This the employers positively refuse to do.”
Employers’ strike headquarters in the West Hotel, in collaboration with the army which was still gaining recruits at 1327 Hennepin Avenue, still had its heart set on settlement “without the intervention of the union.” They prepared to throw even greater forces into the market place. Chief of Police Johannes, despite Monday’s slaughter, encouraged them. “It was a religion to Mike Johannes,” remembered an officer of the Citizens’ Alliance later, “to keep the streets of Minneapolis open.”
On the day of the Battle of Deputies Run, the newspapers reported, “By late today there will be nearly 1700 police including special officers—an additional 500 are being sworn in for active duty.” The strikers too were gaining recruits. Nearly every worker who could afford to be away from his job that day, and some who couldn’t, planned to be on hand in the market. No one had announced a second battle, but twenty to thirty thousand people showed up in the market place on the morning of May 22.
As Dobbs, who is strategically minded, put it to me a little regretfully, “A planned battle was almost impossible on that day.” The two sides were simply there in force, and fought it out. Men and women, boys and girls, crowded windows and stood on roofs above the armies waiting for it to begin. The news photographers were all ready, the movie men present, and a radio announcer for KSTP right in the middle of things to report the battle like a football game to listeners in all parts of Minnesota. The newspapers had reported that morning, “several large produce houses are . . . to move perishables into their warehouse; other trucking operations are resuming on a small scale.” This was the issue of the battle: Will they move the trucks or won’t they? And the crowd knew it. Will the strikers lick the cops and the business men or the business men and the cops lick the strikers? They were all waiting for the kick-off.
Finally it came—a trivial incident. Some petty merchant moving some crates of tomatoes—and a striker throws one of the crates through a window. The shattering of that glass was enough. The two sides joined battle, hand to hand, sap, blackjack, lead pipe, and night stick. It was actually over in less than an hour, with the police and the citizens’ army back in their headquarters, or hiding out, or in hospitals, and the strikers in control not only of the streets of Minneapolis but for the moment “of the situation.”
No succinct account of the battle was written or could be, least of all by the reporters with deadlines to meet who found it impossible to be in fifty places at once—or rather a hundred and fifty, for the battle with the deputies and police in retreat spread to all corners of the city. As late as ten o’clock that night the pickets continued to mop up, or to settle individual accounts in alleys and bars. Nevertheless the individual episodes were so lively and significant, and the individual emotions engendered so various and heated, that it is worth while recording a few from eye witnesses on both sides.
One of the leaders and organizers of the citizens’ army records his side of it as follows: “There came news that there was going to be trouble in the market district, and Colonel Watson [the military leader of the special deputies] agreed to help with these men. We had long conferences beforehand with the sheriff and with the chief of police; everything was mapped out and organized. I didn’t go to bed for three days at the time of the trouble. Well, on this day, we were ordered to be in the market place at four A.M. Everyone was divided into sections and it was agreed there would be a uniformed policeman with each section.
“Once in the market we were in touch with our headquarters constantly, with the sheriff and the chief of police. Our men, you understand, were not armed except with a small stick. Colonel Watson had refused to arm them, a good many having no military experience whatever. He was undoubtedly wise. Well, the police did not hold the crowd back. They simply held up their hands to their shoulders and allowed themselves to be pushed till the crowd entered the market. Then unexpectedly the police on duty were relieved and a new detail appeared, which as far as we can discover had no instructions whatever regarding our outfit. There were two or three trucks to be moved that day, to be convoyed. Well, after the trucks had been moved and had gone out, suddenly these strikers and bystanders rushed in, thousands of them, the police hung back, and you know the rest. The strikers were armed with lead pipes, baseball bats with barbed wire around them, and every other goddam thing. Arthur Lyman was killed and there were a great many serious injuries. Colonel Watson, Major Harrison, and a few others were in headquarters afterwards. And this crowd came around. They were ready to murder us. We armed ourselves with shotguns and side arms, and went out and stood there facing ’em. Well, when they saw the guns they stopped, and jeered at us. Finally we managed to push our way out. Another incident—a truck load of our men, citizens, were chased all the way from the market to our headquarters. We opened the door, drove the truck in, and shut the door. Our fellows were beaten up and bleeding and in a terrible condition.
“After the trouble in the market, I carried side-arms and arranged for special protection for my wife and children. I carried a gun in the office or anywhere I went for three months.
“When the battle was over we tried to keep the men together for a while, but they fell away. They refused to be exposed to the slaughter when the police offered them absolutely no protection. And besides there was no more need for them; the strike was settled shortly after.”
Here, on the other hand, is the battle as Dobbs saw it: “Some twenty thousand people jammed the market area. The actual spark which started the battle after several hours of waiting was a crate of tomatoes thrown through a plate-glass window. Instantly it became a free for all. Arthur Lyman was killed while running to cover in a grocery store—between the curb and the door. But it made no difference who it was provided he had a deputy’s badge or a club. Just to show you how dangerous it was to be a deputy, several of our fellows picked up the clubs from fallen deputies, and were immediately knocked cold by pickets. Our boys didn’t look in a man’s face—all they saw was the club. Hours after the battle deputies were getting theirs as far from the market as Nicollet and Twelfth Street.”
Bill Brown, president of the truck drivers’ union, gives his experience as follows:
“I went down there with a couple of truck drivers who were supposed to be my bodyguards, but they kept seeing fights they wanted to get mixed up in, so that bodyguard stuff didn’t work very long. You know the market—well, imagine sixty thousand people in there. [Dobbs reports twenty thousand, but Bill’s imagination is at least three times Dobbs’ in a fight.] People upon the roofs, a radio announcer, guys with cameras. Everybody waiting for the kick-off. I happened to be quite near where it started. Somebody brought a crate of eggs or tomatoes or something out of a little store. And a little blond feller, I don’t know who he was, yelled, ’Hey, there’s a fink here, starting to move goods!’ That was enough. They busted everything in the place. Somebody took the crate and crowned him with it. I can see him now, standing there with the crate around his neck like a collar. Then the blond feller yelled: ’Come on let’s get ’em, and the crowd swept forward against the deputies. A picket captain yelled, ’Some of you guys get over on this side.’ So they completely surrounded ’em. The harness bulls [police] fell back but the crowd went after them. In an hour there wasn’t a cop to be seen on the streets of Minneapolis. About six o’clock I rode down Hennepin Avenue—about fifteen blocks from the market—there were no cops; our fellers were directing traffic.”
Another striker: “I seen one cop under a car, and a picket poking underneath with a stick to get him to come out.”
Another striker: “We brought a bushel basket of deputies’ and cops’ badges back to headquarters, and two polo helmets. One feller had a captain’s badge he was pretty proud of.”
Another striker: “Fourteen cops hid in the Armour cooler; they didn’t come out for almost twelve hours.”
The last tale may be apocryphal; I couldn’t say, but my informant is usually reliable.
At all events, it is known when the pickets returned to headquarters they decided that the officers regularly stationed on adjoining streets to watch over the union should be dispersed. The officers were “chased away” by strikers, and police headquarters did not replace them for the duration of the strike.
The list of wounded for the Battle of Deputies Run was a long one, on both sides, and two deputies from the citizens’ army were killed. One of them was Arthur Lyman, prominent Minneapolis citizen, attorney for sixteen years for the Citizens’ Alliance and vice president of the American Ball Co.
Those personally involved on the side of the employers remember the battle with some bitterness. The average middleclass citizen, however, took it somewhat as a sporting event, and admits when questioned that he thinks “the damn fools who Went out as deputies got what was coming to ’em.”
At the battle’s conclusion a truce of twenty-four hours was declared at the governor’s request during which the employers agreed to move no trucks and the union consented to cease picketing—except for “a few strike pickets to see that the truce is really carried out.”
Although the Battle of Deputies Run and the truce which ended it, as events proved, was the beginning of victory for the union, the employers’ strategy committee continued to run a temperature of fighting fever at the West Hotel. Three ideas, as far as may be judged by events, dominated their councils: (1) Throw greater and greater cordons of police into the field, and move our trucks—at any cost. (2) Arrest and imprison the strike leaders after tricking them into the West Hotel by promise of negotiations. (3) Yield nothing to the governor of the state or the Regional Labor Board, when we do negotiate. They were strengthened in their intransigeance by their closest and most militant ally, Chief of Police Mike Johannes. In the July strike, a public board of investigation was to find Johannes guilty of ordering unprovoked attacks on pickets which cost the lives of two strikers and the wounding of forty-eight, an episode which won him the epithet from Minneapolis citizens of “Bloody Mike.” In the May strike, even before the expiration of the governor’s truce above mentioned, Johannes heartened the warlike Citizens’ Alliance with the declaration, “Even if peace efforts fail, all normal trucking operations in Minneapolis will be resumed at nine P.M. today. . . . Any truck owner who wants to move his trucks can do so at nine P.M. with the full protection of the police department and the military forces. . . . I have asked the owners to move in fleets as much as possible to facilitate in protecting them.” The strikers countered by announcing a resumption of picketing at nine p.m. “to halt any attempted truck movements.”
Meantime a huge open-air mass meeting of strikers and sympathizers demonstrated the scope and depth of the strike’s support. Representatives of labor for whom a lifetime of “safe and sane” leadership had demonstrated to everybody their opposition to Communist agitators pledged their full support to General Drivers 574. Cunningham, president of the State Federation of Labor; Urturbees, president of the Building Trades Council; Roy Weir, state representative and organizer for the Central Labor union, and Lieutenant Governor K. K. Solberg praised the courage and endorsed the justice of the strikers’ cause before the victors of the Battle of Deputies Run.
The governor decided that a first-rate emergency existed and at the request of the mayor he ordered a mobilization of 3700 National Guardsmen, likewise requesting extension of the truce for another day. “The extension was agreed to after eleven men, representing ten unions including Local 574, appeared before the governor with a demand that the National Guard be demobilized.”
For the forty-eight hour truce and a day or two after, the battle shifted from hand-to-hand encounters in the streets to endless parleys in the Nicollet Hotel. But before the parleys opened a significant episode illuminated the temper and purposes of the contending parties.
The union negotiators, “taking no chances with the bosses,” proceeded to the peace conference with four picket cars in front of their leaders and four behind. The precautions were not without justification. Arriving, they found a hundred and fifty uniformed police, detectives, and guards flanking the peace palace. Walking up to Mr. Samuel Levy, attorney for the Citizens’ Alliance, who was “out in front” to welcome them, the union representatives quietly delivered an ultimatum: “We refuse to meet with you or discuss any settlement, unless you take the cops off our neck.” (That afternoon the papers reported this ultimatum verbatim in headlines.) The police and guards were withdrawn. It is significant that they had been sent to the hotel with warrants for the arrest of each of the union’s negotiators. Had the latter been of a more trusting nature and entered the hotel without protest, this last-minute ruse would have succeeded, the strike might possibly have been broken and the union smashed. Long experience, however, had taught the leaders that employers do not consider “diplomatic immunity” part of the ethics of class warfare. Later, on occasion, the union negotiators felt it wise to bring picket guards with them into the peace parleys.
The negotiations, once started, were conducted with elaborate impersonality. “We never saw the bosses during the whole time,” reports one union leader. “The employers were in one room, and we in another.” The Regional Labor Board, together with a corps of lawyers for the truck owners and a Federal mediator, volunteered to be the diplomatic shuttle between combatants.
Strengthened in their will to victory by the militant statements of the chief of police, the employers yielded nothing in the first proposal they shuttled to their employees. “So we just sat there,” explained a union leader present at the peace parleys, “and kept shooting their proposals back to the employers’ room. But after a while they began to come better.” Early in the game the employers agreed to reinstatement of all strikers, “if not found guilty of any crime.” For the union negotiators this meant “the opportunity to frame and convict on false charges any man whom they wanted to get rid of in the union.” It was a trick so far as the strikers were concerned which the Citizens’ Alliance had used in the past to smash unions in Minneapolis. They refused. The employers yielded. The negotiations moved on into the night. Between shuttles Miles Dunne caught a nap with his head on the telephone book, and V. R. Dunne curled up under the conference table. Now and then a press photographer came in, wisecracked a bit, and took everyone’s photograph.
Throughout, the nub and core of dispute was a matter of fundamental principle and strategy—for both sides—known as “recognition of the inside workers.” Why were these fighting words in the Nicollet Hotel, and worth another Battle of Deputies Run for either side? To the employers, the “banana men, the chicken pickers, and the pork picklers” who worked inside their warehouses were outside the jurisdiction of a truck union. But why did they care so much? They cared because their inclusion meant that a kind of industrial union would be set up in the trucking industry of Minneapolis. Without the inside workers, they would be dealing with a pure and simple craft union of truck drivers, weaker in bargaining power, easier to maneuver and smash. To the union the issue of “the inside worker” meant the same thing, a step toward industrial organization, a strong union. In addition they pointed out that the inside workers were exploited like the rest, that they were already in the union, and had struck with the others. The employers stood adamant. The union said, “All right, we give you an hour. Then the fight is on, truce or no truce.” This ultimatum aroused both panic and audible furore among the mediators, whose job after all was peace at any price—or nearly so—at this stage. The two labor representatives of the Regional Labor Board, Mr. Miller and Mr. Alexander, trained in a more respectful and less militant school of negotiation, protested and poured all the oil which their organisms could exude and muster on the militants. None of the oil was absorbed, and a little later the union representatives walked out of the hotel and back to 1900 Chicago Avenue. An hour or so later, the governor’s car and chauffeur arrived at strike headquarters with a message requesting resumption of negotiations. The strike leaders returned to the Nicollet Hotel in the governor’s car.
The “inside worker” Gordian knot had now been rewritten into a paragraph called Section 8, almost as famous in Minneapolis’ history as NRA’s 7A. And the governor assured the union that it included all the men over whom the union claimed jurisdiction. Ambiguously worded, the employers thought it didn’t. But the union, on the governor’s word, agreed to sign. Still cherishing their interpretation, the employers signed too. The agreement won by the union guaranteed in addition a minimum wage, reinstatement, no discrimination, arbitration for future wage changes, seniority in hiring and layoff. But above all a recognition of the union—not direct, but via a Labor Board stipulation, and capable of development, later on, into a series of direct contracts with the employers’ signatures thereon. It was a modest victory indeed, but it was a victory—and a beginning.
The union leaders walked out of the hotel to strike headquarters, where that evening a membership meeting ratified the settlement. That meeting of striking truck drivers was a boisterous and heated one. The rank and file of the union hotly debated the settlement. The leaders frankly presented the Labor Board stipulation as a compromise, “but on no fundamentals,” and urged acceptance with all the force they could muster. Some of the crowd were for no compromise and back to the picket lines. Had the leadership been what the Citizens’ Alliance had long been publicly protesting, “irresponsible’ agitators,” bent on bloodshed and a Russian soviet in Minneapolis, they would have called for an insurrection, and certainly gotten one, or at least a continuation of the strike. Instead, desiring a trade union and not a revolution, recognizing the need for recoupment and consolidation of actual gains as a basis for future struggle, the leadership urged acceptance.
“There’s no question,” Bill Brown, president of the union, said to me, “that we could have taken over the city after the Battle of Deputies Run. We controlled it. All that would have been necessary ’to seize power’ would have been to urge a few thousand strikers to capture the Court House. They would have done it.” He smiled. “Yah, sure, the union might have made me soviet mayor, huh? and Skoglund over there commissar of police.” He laughed. Then, “That’s just what the Citizens’ Alliance had been screaming for days that we wanted to do, make a Russian soviet in Minneapolis. But we happened to want a truck drivers’ union in Minneapolis. And some of our leaders were revolutionists enough to tell the difference between a militant strike and a revolution.”
The Communist party of Minneapolis, none of whose members were either in the leadership of the strike or members of the union, denounced the settlement violently as a sell-out to the Citizens’ Alliance; maintained that the leaders could have had a general strike if they had wanted but had sold out to reaction. Throughout both strikes the Communist party violently attacked the union’s leadership. The Communist party today still maintains that the union leadership was tactically wrong in not continuing the May strike till a better settlement could have been won. But the accusation that the leaders had “sold out” the union, and that they were followers of the most corrupt and reactionary racketeers in the labor movement, they regard now as a mistake. The party officially endorses the union as such today.
At the membership meeting which ratified the union’s modest victory, and ended eleven days of the fiercest class warfare in the history of the Northwest, an officer of the Citizens’ Alliance listened in. In an old slouch hat and a raincoat on the edge of the crowd, he followed with emotions which can only be guessed at the turbulent progress of the meeting. Later on he undertook to describe to me his impressions. “There were thousands and thousands of bums and hoodlums and Communists there. Agitators worked the crowd up to the highest pitch of mob fury. They shouted, sang, and yelled. It was really horrible. I felt like slipping away, getting out of Minneapolis onto a farm somewhere, and never coming back.”
The “mob” however had different emotions. They felt that Minneapolis in time might be made a tolerable place in which to live. The next morning that portion of it which had been organized into Local 574 went back to work under the modest terms of its union contract.