A stellar piece of proletarian reportage from Minnesota’s Meridel Le Sueur. A year after the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike which saw a number of deaths, the just-elected Farmer-Labor mayor, and former Socialist, called out the police against workers striking the Flour City Ornamental Iron Company (whose owner was a member of the reactionary Citizens Alliance). After days of increasing confrontations, on September 11, 1935 police attacked thousands of pickets with running battles killing two and wounding dozens. Meridel Le Sueuer reports from the shocked, confused, and angry mass meeting called in response and the next day’s drama as resolute pickets return. Within weeks the workers would win a 40 hour week and a modest wage increase. A giant step in making Minneapolis a union town.

‘Minneapolis Counts Its Victims’ by Meridel Le Sueur from New Masses. Vol. 17 No. 1. October 1, 1935.

‘WHAT can we do now?” a Farmer-Laborite said in despair at the mass meeting held to investigate the Farmer-Labor mayor of Minneapolis, who the night before had allowed pickets at the Flour City Ornamental Iron Works to be fired upon, killing two and injuring fifty. “Fifteen years work to build up a labor party gone to pot. What can we do?” This woman has known what it was in North Dakota to feed her five children all winter on wheat middlings and nothing else. Like thousands of other rank-and-file farmers and workers in the party she has fought for years to build a party that would by education and the vote prevent monopoly capital from quashing the rights of workers and farmers.

They now have a Farmer-Labor governor. Last year in August he called out the militia to break the truck drivers’ strike, when the chief of police, Bloody Johannas, supported by the Citizens’ Alliance, fired point blank into the backs of strikers, killing two workers, wounding over forty. For two and a half months the city of Minneapolis has been in the power of the Farmer-Laborites, with a Farmer-Labor mayor, Thomas Latimer, and a majority in the city council. These men were elected by the militant rank-and-file members of the party over the opposition of the conniving Farmer-Labor machine.

And yet despite this political “victory,” on the evening of September 11 at eleven o’clock, with the Farmer-Labor party in the saddle, masses of unarmed workers were fired on while picketing the Ornamental Iron Works. Two were killed and scores injured, including women and children. The events that led to the shooting are these:

On July 2 picketing began at three ornamental-iron companies to secure a unified wage scale and recognition of the union as a bargaining agency for its members. The picketing spread. On July 20 Flour City secured a temporary court order barring pickets from interfering with workmen.

Mayor Latimer, who before becoming mayor was a chief fighter in the Twin Cities against injunctions, now found that being mayor was “different.” He gave the Flour City plant a police guard of twenty-one men.

On July 26, to the surprise and horror of Farmer-Laborites, forty men entered the plant under police guard and Mayor Latimer’s personal supervision. It seems Latimer had met with the employers and decided there was no strike! A disturbance developed as scabs left the plant that night under the guard of fifty cops; the grand jury began an investigation under supervision of the Citizens’ Alliance.

On August 24, behind locked doors, in the mayor’s office, reactionary labor leaders, the Civic and Commerce Association and the Farmer-Labor mayor planned to “collaborate.” The reactionary labor leaders were out to work with the employers who were determined to keep Minneapolis open shop, using the “liberal” mayor as a go-between. These employers were of the current virulent temper, determined to “control their own plants,” “not to be run by unions,” fancying themselves as “benevolent capitalists.’ Each strike revolved around recognition of the union.

After this secret meeting and the appointment of a labor board by the mayor consisting of four reactionary employers and three reactionary A.F. of L. leaders, the A.F. of L. leaders issued a public statement denouncing as rackets the splendid strike struggles now being conducted by a number of A.F. of L. unions for improved living conditions and the right to organize. The report concluded: “It is agreed to uphold the mayor in the event he found it necessary to use firm police measures to prevent illegal picketing.” This statement was followed by one from the Citizens’ Alliance which “notes with a keen sense of gratification, encouragement and hopefulness, the reported statements of leaders of state and local organizations.” The truth is the mayor fell for this horse trading, agreeing to work with A.F. of L. bureaucrats to “cleanse the labor movement of its militants if the Citizens’ Alliance would cleanse itself of its “racketeers.” Needless to say after this the Citizens’ Alliance had the mayor in its pocket. It was the development John Strachey, when he was in Minnesota, prophesied for the reformist party, in the light of what happened to the British Labor Party–class collaboration instead of class struggle, due to the individual ambitions of reformist leaders once they got into office and the lack of control by the rank and file over its elected leaders.

To continue the march of events: On Sept. 6, Mayor Latimer allowed the Flour City, with the aid of armed guards, to house scabs within the factory in order to fulfill an order from the United States government. The union protested to the mayor that a city ordinance against housing of persons in industrial plants was being violated. More investigation followed while the Flour City temporarily enjoined the city from enforcing the housing ordinance.

On Sept. 10 police used tear gas to rout pickets and 1,000 spectators.

On Sept. 11 guns were fired from armored cars into a picket line of two thousand, with over three thousand spectators, two killed, many wounded.

THE strike committee interviewing Mayor Latimer was told that it is one thing to be radical when you are in the ranks and another thing when you are mayor subject to capitalist laws and injunctions. “Then,” said the workers, “there is something wrong with your theory of political power.” The mayor was buffaloed by fear of the grand jury, impeachment, indictment for malfeasance if he ignored the legal traps set by the Citizens’ Alliance. He found himself operating under a capitalist law that he was not ready to oppose.

The workers cannot understand what has happened to Tom Latimer, friend of labor, Socialist for years, fighter of injunctions, who had promised in his campaign speeches that “police shall not be used to break strikes and we guarantee that no Farmer-Labor administration will use the police against peacefully striking workers.” Standing on the dark street September 11, Farmer-Laborites could not believe that they were seeing the fruits of their political “victory.” They said, “There is some mistake. Tom must know something we don’t know.” Yet there we were, standing in the street packed with militant workers, with armored cars patrolling back and forth and a hundred policemen, most of them from the identical gun squad that fired into the truckers last year, who have been heard to say time and again that they would “get” the strikers. Men were also on the picket lines with the buckshot scars of last year on their flesh. Despite the so-called radical platform there was the sign and symbol of the Citizens’ Alliance: armored cars filled with gas bombs, guns, plowing through the naked brave mass of unprotected workers who stood and moved together, a thick sturdy mass around the vine-covered factory representing the feudal barons of the Citizens’ Alliance.

By ten o’clock the crowd had swelled, the scabs looked uneasily out of the glass windows. The police cars kept coming in. The picket line wound like a dark rope, closely woven and strong. The workers still said, up to the barking of the guns: “Tom Latimer is going to protect us. He knows something we don’t. Maybe he knows that the company is bringing in thugs to attack us…He knows something we don’t…and the speech was cut short by the barking of guns, firing into the naked flesh of workers.

The cops went berserk, night sticks flailed, they spotted the strikers they knew from last year and went after them, even newspaper men were not safe. A group of pickets skilled in strategy of the barricades from last year’s fighting waited until the tear gas settled and then came in with rocks, pathetic weapons against armored cars and guns. They stoned the cops and the firing increased. A woman getting off a street car was shot a block away. A boy coming from a church social was shot in the chest and died instantly. A man putting out the milk bottles on his back porch was shot. There was bedlam for two hours, women screaming, street skirmishes, people shot picking up the wounded; the streets of Minneapolis ran blood under a Farmer-Laborite regime.

MINNEAPOLIS labor the next morning was torn between anger and dismay and grief. The phones were ringing all over town. What has happened? It is impossible. It is incredible. Statements were issued. Mayor Latimer said there would be an investigation and if the police had fired without provocation they would be dealt with! He got out a warrant against Tetlaff, Vice-President of the Flour City and then to show he was for both sides he got out warrants for four strike leaders for inciting to riot. This liberal fair-play is amazing. Last year Governor Olson under the same guise raided everyone, even his own party head-quarters. Bloody Johannas after all was only on one side.

Vice-President Tetlaff said he had nothing to arbitrate and no responsibility to carry for the riots of the night before. “Must a reputable firm which has been doing business for forty years be compelled to keep its doors closed because a gang of agitators does not want our employes to work?”

The grand jury sat, to investigate some more.

The mayor brilliantly asked for two hundred more police, which added to the workers’ wrath.

Martial law was threatened. General strike was threatened.

The Iron and Ornamental Iron Works at last was shut tight.

Farmer-Labor Alderman Scott suggested that an ad be put in the paper, for sale of six “slightly-used armored cars.” His motion was defeated. The armored cars will be repaired for future use.

The mayor said he had to keep within the law, didn’t he? The police were for protection! And he said privately to friends that nobody knew the heat he got!

The Women’s Auxiliary of the Farmer-Labor Party called a mass meeting to “learn the facts.” Labor already knew the facts: its own government had fired on it. Hell broke lose at this meeting. Mayor Latimer peeped from behind the other speakers on the platform white as a ghost. His constituents cried out for him, in hope still: “Get up there Tom, you’re not yellow, are you?” The Mayor came forward and started speaking, drowned out time and again by the uproar of the workers. He said: “I have been in office two and a half months. I have been before two grand juries. I have to obey the law…” A groan went up. Suppose a man was tried for malfeasance by the Citizens’ Alliance, wouldn’t he be the chief citizen of Minnesota by that token? “Ah God!” said a woman, clenching her big hands on her arms, “Isn’t there a man left in the states?” The mayor repeated, “I have been before two grand juries. They say I am fighting on the side of the workers. I suppose you will say I have been fighting on the side of the employers…” There were boos and shouts, “Ah the poor, poor creature,” the woman moaned, “Ah the poor baby.”

When the mayor left right after his speech and was getting into his car, someone ran after him and struck him a blow in the mouth and he stood baffled, the blood spurting from his lips. A month ago when he escorted scabs into the factory a worker collared him at the City Hall, “You so and so,” he said, “I spent half my wages to elect you…if you betray us…” Someone hustled him away, the mayor turned white and ran into the city hall. The city hall is now guarded by police and every one is questioned as he goes in and out.

After the mayor spoke the Farmer-Labor aldermen tried to speak. They brought all their brogues and their quick tongues, but the workers were through with that now. “No politics now,” they screamed…”never mind the politics now…” They urged the crowd to be calm and it rocked blackly below them, seething and frightening. They must consider all sides. The house below rocked, they were only on one side that was clear. The blood of the aldermen ran thin with fright now. “Never mind the white-wash,” the workers cried, “don’t alibi.” Boos and jeers stopped the meeting time and time again. The little bevy of white-collared aldermen on the platform got nervous, the dark roaring crowd seemed to creep up upon them, pressing with a physical might. You could smell them, feeling them rising gigantic upward in the hot auditorium.

Representative Bennett was at first cheered, because he had introduced the Lundeen bill into the state senate and was later booed when he said that we must have “calm judgment and deliberation, and we must not condemn the mayor for one mistake. I have known him for many years; I am sure he is a sincere man…” A chorus of boos for ten minutes. No one could stop it. A tall sardonic man rose up from the rear. “When you make a mistake with a bullet,” he said, “I suppose you’re sincere. I shot you sincerely…” A great hiss of laughter rose sardonically. Bennett was nervous. “I’ll finish,” he said to the chairman, “if it’s the last thing I do.” But he didn’t finish…The crowd roared after him. “You’re through, Bennett…You’re through. That’s all of you…”

A leader from Local 574 spoke. “The blame for last night’s tragedy lies at the mayor’s office. Latimer tore down last night what it took workers fifteen years to build. The Farmer-Labor Party is dead unless it expels the bureaucracy from its ranks.” Hussman of Local 1313, the striking union, spoke; “Don’t criticize the whole party, don’t give the other side the chance they have been waiting for to split the party wide open. Place the blame where it belongs and then carry on solidly to win for labor.” Other speakers…”We told voters that once the Farmer-Labor party gained control no longer would police clubs descend on the heads of workers and there was no proviso nullifying this principle if political jobs were in danger…”

There was something frightening in this meeting, chastening and frightening to the individualistic, bureaucratic aldermen who have gone mad for power and jobs. But the great mass of militant workers in the darkness of the hall, listening to no more words of enchantment, at last understanding the real power on the barricades, in groups running on dark streets with guns behind them, in the mass experience of hunger, of solidarity, a physical power, at last gleaming below them.

This was not the time for “impartial facts”–at such a time the cry of impartiality plays directly into the hands of the enemy. There was in it a bone-and-blood reality that was single, passionate, no longer tricked by the word. The aldermen left hurriedly. The sponsors of the meeting adjourned and left. It was very curious, the slow closing in, the singing, shouting, the lean bitter faces, the blood-shot eyes of picketers, the cry, the fierce movement from the dim auditorium, the aldermen rising full of assurance, aplomb, words, stuttering, halting, then flushing, then standing without slick talk, baffled, frightened by the steady roar coming from below, that was frightening, terrible and single as the Mississippi slowly filling from its many tributaries, slowly swelling to a glut, a roar of terrible intention and ferocity.

THE meeting was turned over to the workers. Harry Mayville, strike leader of the Communist Party, said, “The Farmer-Labor Party isn’t dead but like a carrot it has started to rot at the top. The top must be chopped off and thrown into the political junk heap.”

Another mass meeting was announced for the following night at the Flour City Works and “we will be our own police and not a window will be broken.” There were slow words spoken, the slow steady organization of a militant movement. “I’ll Hundreds of workers leaned forward: new plans, new intentions, a mass funeral for the dead boys. “We must beat back the efforts of the employers, through the misleaders, to frame the workers…”

…”save the Labor Party…the Labor Party must be saved. Make them live up to their promises…Now they are not a bit better than the administration before them. The mayor wants to be on the Supreme Court. We have no business with such monkeyshines. We want food. We want what the ticket promised, 35-percent increase in relief, lowering of food prices, protection of workers in strikes…”

A mass march the next morning, don’t let up, the slow strong pressure…They will do something. A woman says, “I never saw the workers like that. I never saw it. Why they came in singing…something will happen…”

Talk going on…national guardsmen mobilized at the armory already…”By God and by Jesus,” says an old Swedish iron-worker with knots on him like a tree a hundred years old, “if our leaders bring in the militia against us…” his silence is a bad threat. Talk continuing…”Mobilizing the militia…Governor Olson to carry on the dirty work of Latimer…” A dark crowd outside, men in groups like a titanic twister whirling up from the ground. Women stand uncertain, listening…Groups congeal, move, congeal again. A whirl of men close-packed at the door swirling blackly in strong talk and out from their midst explodes: “General strike…general strike…”

Friday morning, the city tense, a low hum sounded in the street where the unemployed were massing; you could hear it up Nicollet Avenue. It made the women shoppers stop uneasily.

About ten the clot thickened, congealed, a dark strange stream of men started down Nicollet toward the city hall without a band, the only music from their own starved throats and the steady shuffle of their broken shoes. These marchers make the shoppers fidgety, the march of the unemployed…Now a band…I love a parade…but this. In the court house, grand jury meeting, investigation, talk, pussy-footing, one step forward, one step back…horse-trading, back-slapping, betrayal. Mayor Latimer looking out of the window having come down the corridor from the grand jury rooms. He is white and diminished, his mouth shows a cut where a fist has cut him. The many pictures taken of him the last few days show him always suspended in a door, half-coming, half-going, pausing, hesitating, turning around with frightened eyes. He is slow and stubborn and ambitious, I suspect. He’s a worker, come up painfully into the professional petty bourgeoisie. He is suffering. I speak to him a moment, “I’m misunderstood,” he says. His eyes shift, suffering and baffled. He is diseased with bourgeoise obliqueness, and a dislike of head-on collisions with the society he has tried to climb up into, full of physical hesitations, which make him want to be on both sides. He is torn psychically by his own career and a confused socialism.

THE petty-bourgeois element in the Farmer-Labor Party is learning something. Telephones ring, women talk excitedly, “The workers broke up the meeting last night…what is to be done…if you can’t trust a man like Tom Latimer? The trouble is we have no control over a man after he is once in office…Governor Olson has sent for Adjutant Walsh and is now drafting a special martial law proclamation. We do not need troops. Troops will be used as before to break up the strike…is that anything for a Farmer-Labor regime to be doing?…” No troops in Minneapolis. This is the demand of the people. Telephones ring, there is talk, uneasiness, people wandering downtown, eyes at the windows.

But at ten o’clock, without drum or fife, four abreast, comes the answer. Down Nicollet Avenue, silent with only the curious shuffle of half-bare feet, four abreast, farmers, workers, white and black, men and women, slowly marching between the crowds of shoppers, standing silent in a fright, watching from the sidewalks, from the windows, and there was a silence as if they moved directly behind the question. What will happen now? They carried signs…”We want bread, not bullets.” “We can’t live on tear gas.” “Kick out Latimer.” They marched slowly, the strong and ravaged faces of workers, flesh ruined by semi-starvation, the shanks hanging lean in pants that were slept in night after night at missions and flops, the lean chests and haunting eyes of men who have nothing to lose but their hungers, whose leader, twenty minutes later, in the face of the armored cars pulled alongside him, shouted, “I’m not afraid! Shoot if you like!…” and whose strike committee can say in the face of terror and bullets, “We are determined to carry out this fight. We are determined to continue to picket the plant until it is closed or until our reasonable demands are granted.”

Twenty minutes later the armored car drove amongst these unemployed workers vomiting tear gas upon them, not a bomb’s throw from Mayor Latimer’s office. The headlines on the street said “City Hall veiled in tear gas.” They might have said “Farmer-Labor administration veiled in tear gas.”

Minneapolis for the coming winter is a battleground. It has been shown now clearly that the employers will stop at nothing to keep the city open shop. The Strutwear Knitting Mills have been closed by militant action and the employers have shut their doors rather than bargain with the union. Strikes in progress at the present time involve over 1,800 workers in twenty-one plants and seventy construction jobs. The Fur Workers’ Union is leading a strike demanding that the thirty-five hour week be retained; 200 wood turners are striking and walkouts are threatened by filling-station workers, cleaners and dyers and the upholsterers’ union. The Farmer-Labor bureaucracy is playing ball with the Citizens’ Alliance.

The militia is in the armory. Petty-bourgeois politicians, ambitious office holders, horse-trading opportunists, wrangle in the City Hall while tear gas and bullets are loosened upon the workers; the threat of general strike is the reply of the workers, aroused and angry, threatened with coolie wages, relief cuts, starvation and the bullets of a savage employer class determined to break the unions.

The Communist Party is calling upon the rank and file to turn the Farmer-Labor Party into a class-struggle party instead of a class-collaboration party, with a leadership of militant and honest workers.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v17n01-oct-01-1935-NM.pdf