SCARCELY two months were to elapse after the settlement of the May warfare, before another strike, even wider in scope than the first and more fiercely contested on both sides, was to break out. The defensive powers of the Citizens’ Alliance were enormous and the forces of the rebels not yet strong enough to conserve their gains without new battles. Irreconcilables among the truck owners chafed under the labor board stipulation and chiseled on agreements at all points. In the files of the union are 700 cases of discrimination by the employers following the first strike. Above all, the Gordian knot of the inside workers had not been cut by the ambiguous section written into the agreement by the governor. Jurisdiction over this strategic regiment of the rank and file was still in dispute. The union prepared for struggle in defense of previous gains and added the basic demand of an increase in wages. The employers, on their part, charging that the union, not they, had violated the settlement, “broke off relations.”
In the July warfare, in contrast to May, there was no question of a surprise attack by either side. Both leaderships, as well as the class forces behind them, girded themselves and mobilized hearti1y for the struggle. The secretary of the Citizens’ Alliance confided to me that “the employers had been caught napping in May.” They proceeded to mobilize in advance, and both in armament and strategy to profit from their mistakes and weaknesses in the past. The mayor and the chief of police went into conference with the Citizens’ Alliance. The old policy of “killing the strike by ignoring it” was kicked out the window, and hundreds of full-page advertisements and columns on columns of propaganda attacking the union appeared in the press. As has been indicated, the issues of the second strike were, as before, essentially unionism or no unionism in Minneapolis. The Citizens’ Alliance had not changed its spots, but they made no such mistakes as formerly in discussing the actual issues at length in the public press. On the propaganda front the employers hammered essentially on three points: (1) the union had broken its agreement, the employers had kept them; (2) this was because the leaders were Communists and primed to incite the misled truck drivers to a red revolution and the establishment of a Russian soviet in Minneapolis; (3) honest rank-and-file truck drivers were entirely satisfied with their conditions—hence the employers urged that they rise up and repudiate their leadership; (4) finally, the strikes were ruining Minneapolis. The last one had cost $1,900,000. The employers posed the question: Would the public again permit its streets to be captured by a handful of alien agitators?
The employers’ propaganda machine became a different animal from the sedate and arrogant Citizens’ Alliance of the old strike. Instead of the honest but naive statements which even to the disinterested public meant clearly no recognition of any union under any circumstances in Minneapolis, the Employers’ Advisory Committee now carefully distinguished “legitimate” and American-minded trade unions from the terrorist Communist-led Truck Drivers’ Local 574. The employers, like intelligent partisans, sought allies in the ranks of the enemy, and easily found them among the most reactionary leaders of the American labor movement. Under the appealing headline, “Must Minneapolis Be Penalized by a Strike to Satisfy a Handful of Communist Agitators Who Plan to Make Minneapolis the Birthplace of a New Soviet Republic?” they quoted Daniel J. Tobin, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters:
“Well, we are hearing from the Communists and radicals,” wrote Mr. Tobin. “We see from the newspaper that _____ ______ were very prominent in the strike of Local 574 in Minneapolis. All we can say to our people is to beware of these wolves in sheep’s clothing,” etc., etc., etc.
For purposes of propaganda, it was rightly considered unnecessary by the copywriter to recall that it was the Minneapolis branch of Mr. Tobin’s union, in its eighteen-odd years of respectability—prior to 1934—that the truck owners, ably backed by the Citizens’ Alliance, had intransigently refused to recognize.
Not a11 the truck owners or other employers in Minneapolis approved these tactics of the Citizens’ Alliance. They were too honest to do so. But they had formed an industrial union of their own in the face of a common enemy and they “stuck to their leaders.” From the tactical, propagandist viewpoint, the Citizens’ Alliance was certainly dead right. It is far easier to excite mass support in a struggle against Reds “who plan to make Minneapolis the birthplace of a new soviet republic” than to prove that inside workers should not remain in the union which they have joined. And it is certainly more effective to quote A. F. of L. labor leaders, including the international president of the union in question, against the strike than to show cause why 2 1/2 cents more an hour—the union’s demand—should not be paid.
So much for the propaganda front. Even a more important step in preparedness was the accumulation of munitions and armaments.
On Monday, July 16, the day the strike vote was taken, Chief of Police Johannes asked for a nearly 100% increase in his police budget. The budget included the cost of 400 additional men and the maintenance of a police school. The need for a school, Chief Johannes states, was illustrated by the May strikes, which he termed a “disgrace.” He asked for $7500 for the school and $33,200 for other equipment. “The police,” he said, “must be trained just like an army to handle riots.” Included in the budget were $1000 worth of machine guns, 800 rifles with bayonets, 800 steel helmets, 800 riot clubs, and 26 additional motorcycles.
The union countered the efforts of its enemy on both fronts, the propaganda front and the preparedness-for-war front. Mass meetings served this double purpose: “to spike the lies about our union in the boss press” and to mobilize deeper and deeper reserves from the Minneapolis working class. Needless to say, the May preparation of a strike machine, with headquarters, picket captains, squad cars, commissary, etc., was repeated—except on a larger scale. When the strike, which lasted thirty-six days, was settled, it was revealed that the leadership had organized their food supply and made other plans calculated to endure a forty-day siege. A remarkable strategic feature of the second strike was the union’s plan to win the farmers as allies. On the first day of the strike the union announced that all members of farmers’ organizations were free to drive their trucks to town and market their produce. Large numbers of farmers belonged to the Market Gardeners’ Association, the Farm Holiday, and other organizations and those who didn’t promptly joined. Thus a very practical basis for co-operation between farmers’ unions and labor unions was laid. The farmers set up their own market in a vacant lot to which retailers came, and the success of the new market was so great that it was continued after the strike. As in the May struggle, the Farm Holiday Association made substantial food contributions to the strikers’ commissary.
The largest mass meeting in the history of Minneapolis was held on July 5, an affair which was organized to combine a street demonstration with a huge meeting in the Municipal Auditorium. It began with a parade of labor unions starting from Bridge Square. Alderman Hudson of Minneapolis, mounted on a white horse, led off as grand marshal of the parade! He was followed by a squad of twelve motorcycles, veterans of the May strike, and followed by the unions of Minneapolis each under its own banner. The truck drivers marched four abreast in formation, with a huge 574 banner in red bunting flying over their heads. The other unions included the building trades, laundry workers, garment workers, machinists, auto mechanics, etc. Some twenty farmers’ delegations were present, each with its own banner. In the air, zooming and at intervals swooping low over the parade, were two airplanes with “574” painted on their bodies. They belonged to sympathizers and were later used to take union speakers about the state and especially to the farmers in appeals for food. Banners carried the following slogans—the workers’ answers to the employers’ full page advertisements: “Down With the Citizens’ Alliance!” “Down With the Red Baiters!” “We Support 574,” “We Demand the Employers Comply With Their Agreement”; and finally the ominous and prophetic words, “Employers Are Preparing for the Worst Battle of Organized Labor in the History of Minneapolis.”
The last part of the parade only left the Bridge Square, a distance of eighteen blocks, as the vanguard entered the auditorium. Urtubees, a conservative and certainly an American-minded labor leader, and Roy Weir, organizer of the Central Labor Union, spoke. John Bosch, president of the Minnesota Farm Holiday Association, pledged the support of his organization to the strike. In general, the meeting denounced the Citizens’ Alliance and pledged solidarity with the “just cause” of the truck drivers.
It is estimated fifty thousand words, most of them at high temperature, were used by the employers over the radio; more than thirty pages in paid newspaper advertising, and some two hundred and fifty newspaper columns issued in denunciation of the proposed strike and the union leadership. Why did this barrage of propaganda fail of its desired effect? Partly, of course, because of such counter-actions as the mass meeting recounted above. But also because of (1) a personal relation between the leaders and the rank-and-file coal heavers and truck drivers; (2) the strikers’ own newspaper which countered each day the propaganda barrage with salvos of its own.
On point one take the case of V. R. Dunne, one of the arch-Communists and a revolutionist of record, whom the employers of Minneapolis held up to the truck drivers as leading them to bloodshed and destruction. (As mentioned above, the small group of Marxists in the leadership were Trotskyists. The employers’ insistence on “orders from Moscow” furnishes additional humor for those familiar with the relations between the followers of Trotsky and “Moscow.”) Probably four or five hundred workers in Minneapolis knew “Ray” personally. Scores had worked with him in the coal yards, talked with him, eaten with him, known his wife, his brothers, and his friends. They formed their own opinions—that he was honest, intelligent, and selfless, and a damn good organizer for the truck drivers’ union to have. They had always known him to be a Red; that was no news. Roughly the same situation existed in regard to the other leaders. Or if a worker who did not know the leaders personally was made a little jittery by the upsetting news that he had been led by the nose by Red vipers, he would check up on Dunne, Skoglund, or the others. Before long he would find an iron worker whose brother had worked with Skoglund, or a machinist who knew the Dunnes’ father and mother. Daily intimacy with their leaders—Bill Brown had been president of the union for twenty years—and word-of-mouth transmission, was found worth a hundred and fifty pages of paid advertising.
Another antidote to the employers’ White Papers was the strikers’ daily newspaper, The Organizer. For the first time in American history a labor union managed to print a daily strike newspaper. Not a weekly—that would have been next to useless—but a daily which leapt from nothing to a circulation of ten thousand in two days, which in most cases, anticipated each blow from the Citizens’ Alliance. It had two outstanding editorial characteristics: an unsparing and quite ruthless analytical style as applied to the issues of the strike, and a gay and ironic humor. Both literary attributes it succeeded in translating successfully into the truck driver’s own lingo, and he read it with avidity to the almost complete exclusion of the boss press. Its popularity was so great that it not only paid for itself but began making money for the union.
Before the strike actually broke, another element was introduced into the situation which deserves comment. When the first wave of strikes inundated America during the first six months of the NRA, the administration found it necessary to find a sedative for this largely unexpected ferment in American labor. It devised the machinery of government mediators and Labor Boards. Their record is an amazing one. Two nationwide automobile strikes, a general steel strike, a general coal strike, and innumerable lesser industrial disturbances involving many millions of workers, were scotched before they began. Only slowly did the workers discover that the agreements to which the government mediators asked them to attach their signatures left them precisely where they started. A whole group of men acquired nation-wide fame in the new profession, and were summoned by governors and presidents of corporations on a moment’s notice to give first aid to industry sick or dying or labor trouble. The highest in this profession were and are called “ace mediators.” It was two of these—the Reverend Father Haas and Mr. E. H. Dunnigan—who were summoned to Minneapolis to administer oxygen, if possible, to the dying negotiations between Local 574 and the truck owners, and to stop the strike.
Mr. Dunnigan’s personal participation in the 574 negotiations was so unique not only in his own experience but in that of the average strike of NRA days, that it is worth recording in the words of Farrell Dobbs, who might perhaps be readily conceded as the ace negotiator for the truck drivers. The narrative again illustrates that native truck-driver skepticism which as much as any other quality won the strike for them.
“Mr. Dunnigan showed up in 574 headquarters on the day he arrived by plane, having first slipped in a few moments with the bosses. He burst into headquarters cocky as hell, with a black ribbon on his pince-nez and four cigars showing in the pocket of his coat. While he was waiting to see us, he saw my wife and a nurse checking up on medical supplies in preparation for the July picket line. They sorted out the surgical instruments and made an inventory of the bandages, splints, and medicines needed. This gave him his first education in Local 574.
“Finally, when the meeting was over, he was asked in. He presented his credentials and told who he was. He told how many strikes he had settled, and how as soon as he hit town he always went to the workers first; that he had found nine times out of ten they were right, and the employers wrong. You know, the stuff an ordinary worker would fall for if he didn’t know what the score was. Finally he gave us his proposition—that the union make him their representative in all negotiations with the bosses. We said, ’All right, you take our demands to the employers and see what you can do.’ He looked at us. ’Of course I’ll have to have some latitude for bargaining purposes.’ We said, ’No, we’ll do the bargaining ourselves. See what the bosses say and report back to us, then we can tell you what to do next.’ Mr. Dunnigan left in a huff.”
The meeting which voted the strike was held in Eagles’ Hall and broke up about eleven-thirty when the membership moved in a body to strike headquarters. It was locked! A final gesture of the employers to balk the strike. The truck drivers battered down the door and took possession. Squad cars of roving pickets got under way before morning.
The history of class warfare, like the history of conflict between nations, often repeats itself. The pattern of the first ten days of civil warfare in July repeated the pattern of May but in a broader circle, embracing wider and wider classes of population, and at a higher level of conflict. Thereafter the calling of the National Guard destroyed the old pattern and introduced new forces and contradictions into the struggle.
If in the first day or two of the May strike—the period of peaceful paralysis—the city was calm before the storm of Tribune Alley and the Battle of Deputies Run which followed, the first days of the July strike were calmer still before a far bloodier and more violent storm. The news accounts of the first two days of civil war in July are almost ironical in their triviality. “Strike Front Quiet. . . Two pickets were arrested when police caught them stopping small trucks driven by two men who said they were going swimming.” Or two days later: “Strike pickets late Wednesday night in the market district conducted machines and drivers to Temple Garage. . . where contents of the truck, canned peas, were unloaded. The trucks and drivers [from a nearby town] were then escorted out of the city. None of the drivers were harmed, nor was any damage done to the machine. . . . The peas were left at the garage.” But meantime the Employers’ Strategy Committee had gone into session with the chief of police to plan an offensive far more deadly than the betrayal of pickets by a stool pigeon and the beating of women in an alley.
Just as the Battle of Deputies Run is inexplicable without the Tribune Alley incident which preceded it, so Bloody Friday is inseparable from the “hospital convoy” of Wednesday. Wednesday’s episode, from the strikers’ viewpoint at least, was comedy or perhaps farce; Friday’s, tragedy of a grim order.
On the afternoon of July 19 a small knot of passersby gathered about a handful of photographers and movie cameramen in the market district. Surprisingly enough, they carried in their hands newspapers which gave a full and dramatic account of an episode which was about to take place. The paper’s headlines announced that the first truck loaded with goods for the hospital had successfully gotten through picket lines under heavy guard. In a moment or two the truck itself arrived—a five-ton one, adorned with banners which said “hospital supplies,” containing a few hundred pounds of canned or bottled goods. Guarding it were eleven squad cars manned with 44 police holding shotguns in their hands. They informed the bystanders that they had been instructed to shoot if attacked. Meantime, at the strike headquarters V. R. Dunne called Police Chief Johannes on the phone and asked him what it was all about. The hospital council of Minneapolis had just been thanking the union for making possible “full and regular delivery service to all hospitals.” Has 574 ever interfered with hospital deliveries? Dunne asked Johannes. The chief admitted they had not, and finally agreed, at Dunne’s insistence, to send a messenger and to call off the convoy. Somehow the messenger got lost. The convoy lumbered on impressively, with the movie men taking its picture, to the Eitel Hospital.
Entire strike headquarters roared all evening over the incident, and the Organizer, the strike paper, appeared with the headlines: “Johannes Rolls One (1) Truck—150 Cops Convoy 150 Pounds of Freight in a 5-Ton Truck.”
But the employers and the police chief who had planned the episode were in deadly earnest. They had confidently expected that the truck would be attacked, that the pickets would be shot down, that under the wave of public wrath against “the interference with supplies for the sick” other goods could be moved.
“In issuing his orders to his men, Chief of Police Johannes told them, ’We are going to start moving goods. . . . Don’t take a beating,’ he said, ’you have shotguns and you know how to use them. . . . When we are finished with this convoy there will be other goods to move:“ “The Police Department is going to get goods moving,’ the Chief said. “Now get going and do your duty.’ ”
Was the whole episode, however, the chief’s own not brilliant but independent effort to carry out his duty? The day before, the press carried this item: “Members of the Employers’ Advisory Committee conferred at some length with Chief of Police Johannes and Sheriff Wall. . . . The Committee—not the police—“declined to reveal when the first concerted attempt to get trucks moving will be made, but nothing will be done until arrangements are made to insure the success of the movement.” [italics mine]
Though treating the episode as farce, the Organizer did not fail to draw serious conclusions. “The plan was to provoke a riot so that the cops would shoot down pickets, and Mayor Bainbridge and the bosses could howl for the militia to be brought out to move trucks.” With ominous concreteness the Organizer adds: “The names of the finks who loaded the fake cargo at Jordan Stevens have been turned in to the union by a Jordan Stevens worker”—the union had its sympathizers in almost every organization in the city, who with amazing swiftness checkmated the plans of the enemy—“along with the name of the scab driver of Johannes’ circus car. . . . Ten thousand copies of the Organizer sold on July 19.” .
Even to the employers and the police the episode of Thursday appeared as a dud. They followed it immediately with a second offensive—more carefully planned than the first—which was a complete success.
The pickets attempted to stop the movement of a scab truck. Heavily armed forces of the police opened fire and mowed them down. The truck was moved. This was Bloody Friday.
Unfortunately, in class warfare shootings are more delicate affairs than in ordinary battles. They depend on a special correlation of motives and emotions. Without that perfect correlation the battle, whatever the casualty lists of the enemy, is a failure. The “hospital supplies” idea might have saved them. Unfortunately that advantage was absent on Friday. Had the workers been armed, or had the pickets, first attacked the police, Bloody Friday might have been a “victory,” for the employers. Unfortunately none of those favorable accidents occurred. On the afternoon of Friday, July 20, a truck, accompanied by fifty police armed with shotguns started moving in the market. A second truck, containing ten pickets, arrived and cut across the path of the convoyed truck. The police opened fire. Sixty-seven persons were wounded, including thirteen bystanders; two died. The Battle of Bloody Friday took about ten minutes.
The first newspaper accounts, written by reporters rushing to their typewriters through streets covered with blood, and with the incidents of the shooting freshly in mind, reported starkly that the police had opened fire, first, before the pickets moved or even had gotten out of their truck; second, that they opened fire again when the pickets were running—forty-six out of forty-eight wounded were reported shot in the back.
Later editions of the Minneapolis press introduced three new elements none of which found mention in the first account: (1) it was stated that the police warned the strikers “several times” to disperse; (2) the police “repeatedly fired into the air at first”; (3) they only shot at the strikers after an officer had been brutally attacked and beaten by strikers.
I reproduce below the eyewitness account of a picket who was present and who wrote down his impressions at the time:
“For two hours we stood around wondering what was up for there was no truck in sight. Then as two P.M. drew near a tensing of bodies and nervous shifting of feet and heads among the police indicated that something was up. We were right, for a few minutes later about one hundred more cops hove into view escorting a large yellow truck. The truck, without license plates and with the cab heavily wired, pulled up to the loading platform of the Slocum-Bergren Company. Here a few boxes were loaded on. . . . At five past two the truck slowly pulled out.... It turned down Sixth Avenue and then turned on Third Street toward Seventh Avenue. As it did a picket truck containing about ten pickets followed. As the picket truck drew near the convoy, the police without warning let loose a barrage of fire. Pickets fell from the trucks, others rushed to pick up their wounded comrades; as they bent to pick up the injured, the police fired at them. . . . One young worker received a full charge of buckshot in the back as he bent to pick up a wounded picket.
“The rain of bullets then became a little heavier so I and three other pickets hopped a fence and walked back to headquarters. . . Pickets by the dozens lying all over the floor with blood flowing from their wounds, more coming in and no place to put them. The doctor would treat one after another who urged him to treat others first. .
“The Minneapolis papers printed hundreds of lies about what had happened but none was brazen enough to claim that the strikers had any weapons at all.”
Eyewitness accounts of any battle, as the historian knows, are notoriously contradictory and partisan. How much more so an eyewitness account by a partisan participant in the class war! However, fortunately for the purposes of this narrative, the storm of partisan public excitement was so great over the incidents of Bloody Friday that a public investigation was ordered by the governor of the state. The conclusions of the commission tallied dramatically with the record which newspaper reporters fresh from the scene had written for their first editions. They are as follows:
“It is very difficult to make a report of the shooting of the strike pickets which has not the appearance of bias against the police department, the conduct of the officers being unbelievable to a person of common humanity.”
Of the shooting, the investigators said in substance that a wholesale truck carrying merchandise which could easily have been put in the rear seat of a passenger car moved out into the street under armed police convoy. Pains were taken to let strikers know of the plans. Newspaper reporters and camera.. men were present.
“Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill.
“Physical safety of police was at no time endangered.
“No weapons were in the possession of the pickets in the truck.
“At no time did pickets attack the police, and it was obvious that pickets came unprepared for such an attack.
“The truck movement in question was not a serious attempt to move merchandise, but a ’plant’ arranged by the police.“
“The police department did not act as an impartial police force to enforce law and order, but rather became an agency to break the strike.
“Police actions have been to discredit the strike and the Truck Drivers’ Union so that public sentiment would be against the strikers.”
The day after Bloody Friday the governor charged that Chief of Police Johannes had broken a promise to Father Haas and himself that there would be a truce and stated, “The blood of those wounded and dying is upon the heads of the men who brought about the breaking of that promise.” In spite of denials on the part of the Employers’ Committee, Johannes naively revealed the identity of “the men” when he issued the following statement in his own defense:
“I agreed to take the matter up with the Employers’ Advisory Committee and see what action they wanted taken. I met the entire committee at the Hotel Radisson. They turned down the truce proposal. They said they would not accept any truce, and at the same time requested me to furnish guards for the trucks.” [italics mine]
Tourists who were in Italy during Mussolini’s march on Rome were later—in some cases many weeks later—to learn that during their Italian vacation one social order had been violently overthrown and another put in its place. They reported that they had noticed nothing unusual during their stay. It was only natural that during such a minor episode of social struggle as the police shootings of July 20 life for the average citizen of Minneapolis was unaffected and undisturbed. It was only later, when the social explosives ignited by the battle began to detonate, that individuals entirely remote from the controversy found themselves engulfed as partisans on one side or the other.
Meantime, city. life showed itself peacefully normal and unfluttered. On the day that Johannes’ men were firing over one hundred shots at the pickets on Seventh Street, “Maple Hill held its first sing of the year” with “two thousand people to take part in the songfest.” Shirley Temple in “Stand Up and Cheer” was at The Boulevard, and James Cagney in “Here Comes the Navy—A Romantic Comedy-Drama of Uncle Sam’s Jacktars” was packing them in at The State. The morning paper reported that the White Sox had beaten the Yankees, that Mrs. Franklin M. Crosby of Ferndale, Lake Minnetonka, had issued invitations for a party Tuesday at the Woodhill Country Club. It was to be in honor of Miss Ella Sturgis Pillsbury, debutante.
In the general news there was, however, a happening on Bloody Friday which gave heart and encouragement to the friends of that battle. The press carried an account of the breaking of the San Francisco general strike by “armed bands of vigilantes.” The Journal promptly suggested that similar methods be applied to Minneapolis. Bankers noted that “rail shares touched a new low for the year” and that “while Wall Street felt relieved over the ending of the San Francisco strike, that had been expected and did not influence the market.”
If the atmosphere of Minneapolis was normal on the day of the battle, twenty-four hours later it was not. It was as if a high voltage of electricity had been discharged into the social organism. Slowly as the news spread, was retold, embroidered, discussed, a new alignment of class forces appeared in the city. This process of invisible mobilization of emotions, prejudices, and opinions in the wake of an event is both the most interesting and, for our purposes, the real historical meaning of the event. Men and women react to happenings, and especially to violent ones, not only with the historic facts as data—they very seldom have them—but also with a whole complex of emotions and experiences. That is a commonplace of psychology. Bloody Friday moved through the minds of Minneapolis citizens touching pity, fear, and hope, class fear and class pride and, above all, the instinct of “group preservation.” It proved an invisible but infinitely potent mobilization of class forces. Above all it proved, even to the doubting, that a class alignment and a class battle did exist. In a word, coupled with the events that followed, it made Minneapolis people take sides either actively or in their hearts.
Some employers found their sense of decency and common humanity shocked by the “brutality of the police,” but there is no record of a single business man offering public criticism of the events of the day. In place of this the most impassioned defense of the “bravery of the police” was found in the press. In effect the Employers’ Committee took the event—as did the strikers—as a cue to widen their “mass base.” They turned to the Kiwanis, the Rotary Club, the Lions, and the civic and commerce organizations, or those organizations turned to them, to “endorse” the police and the events of Friday, July 19. The Civic and Commerce Association in a letter to the mayor said, “Our citizens cannot help but admire the bravery of our police force.” The Kiwanis in a letter to Joseph Cochran, chairman of the Employers’ Committee of Minneapolis: “While we deplore the loss of life, we commend the Mayor and the Chief of Police of Minneapolis for their determination to maintain the law of the land and protect lives and property.” Similar statements from Rotary and the Lions. The events of Bloody Friday, far from appalling them, strengthened their determination to continue and redouble the same tactics and won for the employers new allies in that determination. Two years later the secretary of the Citizens’ Alliance indicated to me frankly and without embarrassment that that had been the Alliance’s intention before the “unfortunate” interference of the National Guard. These were his words: “Nobody likes to see bloodshed, but I tell you after the police had used their guns on July 20 we felt that the strike was breaking. Mike Johannes—they call him ’Bloody Mike,’ but I don’t care—it was a religion with him to keep the streets open. And if the troops hadn’t come in and interfered, the strike would have been soon over. There are very few men who will stand up in a strike when there is a question of they themselves getting killed. And I say there are very few of us, in view of what Minneapolis is today, who don’t feel the strike would have been better ended that way.’” The secretary believed what he was saying, and there was emotion in his voice when he spoke these words. And from the viewpoint of the Alliance he was not only correct but possessed the courage of his convictions. If one believes passionately that unionism is a blight to an American city, it is romantic to count the cost of human life in annihilating it; and besides, the Citizens’ Alliance correctly sensed that this was no ordinary strike and no ordinary trade union. Under the pother about a soviet in Minneapolis and Red Revolution there was a good grain of class sense. It was a strike and a union which promised actually to change the lives of tens of thousands of persons in Minneapolis, to the employers’ detriment. And it did.
But to return to the high-voltage days of July, 1934, Bloody Friday, far from dismaying the Employers’ Committee, heartened them to bigger and better battles toward what they called a “permanent settlement.” Confidential letters from the archives of the Citizens’ Alliance, subsequently published, revealed that they had no use for the Regional Labor Board or the government either; that they had defied them before, and were prepared to do so again. This view they only shared with other honest antiunion employers, and from their own premise they were quite correct. The Kiwanis said to the Employers’ Committee: “We hope you will not make the mistake of conceding anything that will make for only temporary settlements of the present difficulty.” The Rotary: “We urge you to agree to no concession, no compromise, that would make temporary rather than permanent industrial peace.” The Lions: “We do not feel there should be any compromise with Communist propagandists or agitators.” Note that none of the allies intimated that the employers might concede too little to insure “permanent industrial peace”!
I have said above that I thought the employers were entirely correct from their own point of view in their reactions to Bloody Friday. This requires qualification, or rather, explanation. Their class instincts were sound, their instincts as nonunion employers who had maintained the prerogatives of dictatorial control of their businesses in Minneapolis for thirty years, which were now being threatened, were sound. And who could blame any business man who had lived through the Battle of Deputies Run for having a few Red nightmares and wanting to shoot back? Arthur Lyman, Minneapolis business man, one of their own, had been killed by “those God damned truck drivers” in the May strike. One can appreciate their class instinct and sympathize with their emotions, but one cannot respect their intelligence. As a move for winning the strike, which after all was their objective, Bloody Friday was damn bad strategy. Subsequent events indicated, contrary to the hopes of the secretary of the Citizens Alliance quoted above, that the storm of protest that Bloody Friday aroused not only in the entire working class of Minneapolis but in large sections of the middle class, was so great that the process of cumulative slaughter, even if the employers had tried it, simply would not have worked. The strike was not “beginning to break” after Bloody Friday, as the secretary had said. His class hopes were deceiving him. The strike was coming alive.
The Central Labor Union, containing all the most conservative and “respectable” labor leadership in Minneapolis, promptly filed a petition with the mayor that “Chief Johannes be ousted.” The statement referred to him as a danger to the peace of the community. Farmer-Labor clubs, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and local trade unions hitherto indifferent to the strikers, passed bitter resolutions condemning Bloody Friday. Unfortunately for the Citizens’ Alliance, for each resolution of the Civic and Commerce Association or the Rotary, 574 acquired 100 new flesh-and-blood pickets for the front.
The Organizer summed up as follows, in words which while written at the moment in the fierce heat of class conviction were borne out objectively by the events of the next two weeks: “You thought you would shoot Local 574 into oblivion,” says the Organizer editorial, which came off the press Saturday morning. “But you only succeeded in making 574 a battle cry on the lips of every self-respecting working man and woman in Minneapolis.”
The invisible processes of mobilization in the thoughts of men and women culminated, so far as the workers of Minneapolis and their sympathizers were concerned, in the vast funeral cortege which accompanied Henry Ness, slain strike picket, to his grave. Ness, who had never left the picket car in which he arrived at the market place, had received thirty-seven slugs in his body from the shotguns of the police. Repeated efforts at blood transfusion failed to save his life. He died four days after the shooting. The workers of Minneapolis display a certain genius for public demonstrations. In the funeral of Henry Ness they outdid themselves both in drama and solemnity. Estimates of the crowd vary from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand persons. Some twenty thousand took part in the procession itself, which marched first from the funeral parlor, where a service had been held, to the strike headquarters on South Eighth Street, and thence to the cemetery several miles distant. Almost the entire labor movement of Minneapolis marched, together with several posts of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, of which Ness was a member. At the headquarters funeral orations were delivered over a loud speaker to a crowd estimated by the Minneapolis Labor Review at twenty-five thousand. The orations at South Eighth Street had a certain dramatic poignancy which did not escape the crowd, for the old garage in which strike headquarters was located, lay directly opposite the city’s most select social gathering place—the Minneapolis Club, to which the most distinguished members of the Employers’ Committee belonged. There were a few watchers at the club windows as Bill Brown and Albert Goldman delivered their funeral speeches over the loud speaker. Bill Brown broke down and couldn’t finish his speech, but Goldman proceeded in detail to tell the crowd whom they should hold responsible for the death of Henry Ness. He looked up at the Minneapolis Club as he spoke. A black flag was raised over headquarters, which remained for the duration of the strike.
The funeral procession moving toward the cemetery passed through residential Minneapolis, and completely halted all movement of street cars, automobiles, and other traffic. There were no police and no disorder through the line of march. Strikers had appointed their own corps of traffic cops. Chief Johannes, fearing the worst, had actually sent a corps of armed police to the court house and fortified it with machine guns. Along the march bystanders removed their hats as the procession passed, till it reached Twelfth and Hawthorne Avenue, where few sympathizers with Henry Ness or the strikers lived. On this avenue pedestrians were disposed to keep their hats on. At the cost of several hot arguments and the loss of a couple of hats they did so. At the cemetery a firing squad of regular army soldiers from Fort Snelling, in accordance with military regulations, fired the last volley over Ness’s grave. The dead striker was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and had served in the regular army for fifteen years, two and a half of which were spent in active service during the World War.
In the war in Minneapolis, both armies could now claim their war dead, and incidentally both veterans of the World War. On the office walls of the Citizens’ Alliance a framed parchment was hung: “In Memoriam to Arthur C. Lyman, who fought for his country abroad, and who knew how to fight and die for the same principles at home.” The Organizer, reporting the funeral of Henry Ness, had said: “The last speaker was Chaplain Nelson, of the Post of the National Veterans Association to which Henry Ness belonged. His invocation was a touching tribute to the intrepid soldier who had so fearlessly fought for himself, for his family and for his brothers—for his union.”
On July 23, a few days after Bloody Friday, the Federal conciliators published their plan of settlement and asked for prompt acceptance by both parties. The proposal in essence granted the union the right to represent the inside workers provided a post-strike election turned in the union favor. In addition, it asked a 2 1/2-cent wage increase per hour, and subsequent arbitration of all wage scales. The governor of the state promptly seconded the endorsement of the Federal conciliators and the United States Department of Labor and urged settlement of the strike in the “public interest,” adding that if the plan was not accepted, clashes would follow, endangering the lives “not only of the contenders but of neutral persons.” Unless the plan was accepted by noon of Thursday, July 26, by both parties, he threatened martial law. At nine A.M. on Thursday both the union and the Employers’ Committee went into session. By noon the union announced their acceptance, the employers their rejection. The employers, diplomatically, now found themselves in the tightest spot they had yet been called upon to occupy.
To the Federal conciliators the employers said: “We cannot deal with this Communist leadership. . . . This whole strike is the result of misrepresentation, coercion and intimidation.” They repeated through an elaborate series of counter-proposals their former stand on the inside workers. On wages: “To fix an increased wage scale by a vicious strike and then arbitrate from that point upwards only paves the way for a repetition of the same lawlessness.” In other words, strikes should never result in wage increases.
To the governor the employers said: “Under threats of martial law you are attempting to force a settlement which will leave the issue and the methods of the present strike wide open for repetition in the future. . . . We as citizens of Minneapolis demand to know whether you will support local authorities with military aid in the discharge of their duty, or support the efforts of the few to lawlessly obstruct the flow of normal traffic in this city.”
The governor replied in part:
“I do not agree with you that the plea for a living wage by a family man receiving only $12 a week is answered by calling that man a Communist.
“Neither am I willing to join in the approval of the shooting of unarmed citizens of Minneapolis, strikers and bystanders alike, in their backs, in order to carry out the wishes of the Citizens’ Alliance of Minneapolis. . . .
“This organization is controlled and dominated by a small clique of men who hate all organized labor and are determined to crush it. This sinister group repeatedly prevented a settlement of this and the former strike. This group restrained the so-called fruit and produce employers from agreeing, on the eve of the present strike, to pay helpers, platform men and inside workers a wage scale of 42 1/2 cents per hour. I know that many employers of Minneapolis are fair-minded and just but they are blocked from any group settlement of labor controversies by this clique. . .
“You have repeatedly informed me that a contributing cause of strikes is the low wages paid by the so-called ’chiseler’ employer. These ’chiselers’ are members of the Citizens’ Alliance. Have you ever attempted to hold them up to public scorn and contempt? Have you ever interceded in behalf of these low-paid employees? Your answer to these questions must be in the negative.
“You are constantly speaking in writing about the duty of the Government toward you. You must not forget that you also have a duty to the Government.
“You have already flouted the recommendation of the Minneapolis-St. Paul regional labor board, a governmental agency. If you had agreed to that recommendation there would have been no strike. You are undoubtedly preparing yourselves to flout the recommendation of the National’ Labor Relations Board, and the United States Department of Labor. These two agencies were created by law for the mediation of all labor disputes in the country. You can prevent disturbance in the city of Minneapolis by co-operating with your government instead of flouting it. The responsibility for what occurs in the city of Minneapolis, if this strike continues is entirely upon your shoulders.
“The agencies of government do not belong to you, as one would be led to believe from reading your communication. They belong to all the people and I propose to use the governmental agencies under my jurisdiction, including the national guard, for the protection of all the people of the city of Minneapolis and all people outside the city, including farmers, who desire to do business within the city.
“Respectfully yours,
“FLOYD B. OLSON,
“Governor.”
Before twelve o’clock noon on Thursday, July 25, the union had voted to accept the Haas-Dunnigan peace pact by a vote of 1866 to 147. The governor, after he had given the employers another twenty-two minutes grace and then had received word from Father Haas of the employers’ rejection, instantly proclaimed martial law.
What was it like? At first, not too bothersome. “No parking in the Loop” aggravated the average citizen most. No drinks after nine P.M.; night clubs and dance halls must shut down at midnight. No picketing of trucks. No trucks to move without military permit. Permits granted only for milk, fruit or other edibles. “Minneapolis put on Bread and Milk Diet,” announced the Journal in a scare headline. Hottest discussion at the time waged over whether Minneapolis could continue community sings under martial law, a mass activity to which the city was particularly attached. The high command ruled in favor of the sings. A day and night “walkathon” was in progress outside the city limits and the walkers were for a time desperately afraid the midnight rule would stop them from walking. Military authorities ruled the walkers could keep going by themselves but fans and spectators must disperse at midnight.
During this period the employers addressed a letter to the governor as follows:
“Your communication of July 26 was delivered to our committee only a short time before your proclamation of martial law. Your proclamation suggests it would be dangerous to answer your letter in kind.
“May we have your official military permission to make and publish such reply as your letter calls for?
“Yours truly,
“EMPLOYERS’ ADVISORY COMMITTEE.
“By J. R. Cochran, Chairman”
The governor answered:
“Dear Mr. Cochran: I have your communication of today in which you express some apprehension that the kind of letter you propose to write to me will infringe upon the laws of the state. Please be advised that you may write me in any terms you desire with complete immunity from any military regulation or the laws of the state with reference to libel. I solemnly warn you, however, to refrain from stating anything that will frighten the children of Minneapolis, for fear of the penalty that will fall thereon.
“Surely your group should have every opportunity to offer its defense, if any it has, for its failure to accept the strike terms proposal of Father Haas and Commissioner Dunnigan.
“May I suggest that in this communication your many collaborators discover some noun that you may use to describe those under-paid workers and perhaps describe me,—other than the terms `Red’ and `Communist:
“I shall look forward with pleasure to receiving your communication and to read the accompanying and supporting editorials of the Minneapolis Journal. I am sure that these two literary efforts will furnish an amusing interlude in the serious situation which confronts the citizens of Minneapolis.
“Very truly yours,
“FLOYD B. OLSON,
“Governor,
“State of Minnesota.”
As may be surmised, in spite of the temporary gaiety which the above interchange, and which “uniforms everywhere” and the novelty of the new order lent the city, no one, and least of all the governor, the strikers, and the employers, failed to appreciate that a profound change in the order of events had overtaken them. Instantly, for the first time in the history of the nation, organized employers deplored and protested the introduction of the militia into a strike situation. They regarded martial law as an effort on the governor’s part to force their acceptance of the Labor Board proposals, and not to break the strike. They were correct in their judgment of the governor’s intentions. At the very start, Brigadier General Frank E. Reed resigned, as camp commander with the statement: “I felt . . . that if I were not permitted to let trucks operate, I could not conscientiously act as troop commander. I therefore asked to be relieved.” Promptly the governor appointed his own Adjutant General, E. A. Walsh, as commander. “Military veterans could recall no other instance in which the Governor of a state has designated his Adjutant-General to command troops in service. The legality of the procedure is not questioned . . . but it is an innovation in the military annals of the nation.”
The employers’ bitterness against the governor and martial law knew no bounds. They were soon to refer bitterly to the soldiers as “the governor’s pickets” and to talk openly of impeachment.
On the other hand, it must have surprised members of the Citizens’ Alliance over their breakfast coffee to read equally bitter denunciations of the governor and martial law on the part of the union. The union’s problem with the governor’s pickets was a far more intricate one than the employers’. Martial law, whatever the governor’s intentions, promptly affected the strike in two ways. It reduced picketing to a shadow and under the pressure of business men at the permit office—fifteen hundred stood in line on the first day—put wider and wider categories of trucks on the streets in increasing volume. It increased chiseling. On the second day of martial law military authorities announced that “more than half the trucks in Hennepin County were operating with or without permits.” A few days later General Walsh himself put the figure at six thousand. At that point it needed no Marxist arguments on the mistake of depending on soldiers as pickets to convince a piano mover that the governor of the state of Minnesota— with the best of intentions—was breaking his strike.
The leadership promptly went in person to the governor of the state of Minnesota with a specific proposal that he halt all movements of trucks for forty-eight hours and that union representation be allowed to advise National Guard officers in an overhaul of truck permits. They added an ultimatum that if the proposal was refused they would defy the governor’s orders and military authorities by picketing all trucks with or without permits.
Class war in Minneapolis had reached a new high and was presenting unforeseen enigmas and contradictions to the first Farmer-Labor governor in America. Bewilderment replaced indignation in the news report of this encounter. “When Governor Olson walked out a half hour later he declined to comment. To observers there appeared to be an air of unreality about the whole meeting and the incongruity of strike leaders presenting flat demands to Governor Olson as the Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard which he summoned to the city to preserve law and order.”
The governor was rapidly becoming the center of the strike and exchanging the position he had held in the May negotiations of “being all things to all men” for the most hated man in Minneapolis. The average citizen began to note with alarm that martial rule was costing $15,000 a day. Business men read angrily that bank clearings were down “a million dollars a day under pressure of strike and military rule.” And the employers, far from yielding to military and moral pressure, continued to ’tell the Federal mediators that they would not deal with Communists “unless compelled to do so by the requirements of Section 7A of the National Recovery Act.” Let Bolshevik Mr. Roosevelt put that in his pipe and smoke it! To balance the workers’ ultimatum the employers prepared their own for the governor of the state by initiating injunction proceedings against Olson and his use of the militia.
If the employers’ ultimatum was to take a few more days before it would be put to the testing, the strikers’ was organized into action the next day. Declaring Olson’s reply to their demands “absolutely unsatisfactory and unacceptable,” they called an open-air mass meeting of twenty-five thousand on the Minneapolis parade grounds to “show them, militia or no militia, no organization can break this strike.” Bill Brown, himself a Farmer-Laborite and not one of the handful of “Marxist revolutionists” in the union, declared that “the Farmer-Labor administration is the best strikebreaking force our union has ever gone up against.” The truck drivers applauded wildly. When they left the parade ground they prepared to picket in the face of the bayonets of the National Guard and against the orders of its commander-in-chief.