[Music] In the gloom of mighty cities
midst the roar of whirling wheels,
we are toiling on for hours yet untold.
And our bosses hope to keep us ever thus beneath
their heels and to coin our very life blood into gold.
We must find a way by which every member of society
can share in the benefits of industrial progress and wealth,
and employ the government
to work together for the common good.
There are very few farmers now who are in the
position to start their sons or daughters
off with a farm.
What a tragedy!
Haven't we enough common,
ordinary horse sense
to set about building a better social system than this?
People need jobs, equality, education.
The least powerful person in the country,
understanding collective bargaining,
can become the most powerful.
And that is what politics is all about.
Farmers and laborers, rural and urban working people,
saw their dreams for a better life
slipping through their fingers.
They reached out and joined hands with neighbors
and coworkers, forming social
and political ties to create the Farmer-Labor movement.
[Music] But we have a glowing dream
of how the fair the world will seem,
when everyone can live their life secure and free.
When the earth is owned by labor and there's joy and peace
for all in the commonwealth of toil that is to be.
Their alliance challenged a political system,
corrupted by the corporate monopolies of the day,
and created a revolution in Minnesota politics,
one that reverberates today.
The Farmer-Labor movement was both a political party
and a grassroots social movement.
The key to its success was this connection between
politics as we normally understand it
and social movement organizing, all directed toward a vision
that put the needs of the majority
over the interests of the wealthy and the powerful few.
The movement created the most successful
alternative to the two-party political system
in United States history.
Farmer-Laborites brought three
Minnesota governors to office,
elected four U.S. senators,
nine U.S. representatives
and a host of local political leaders.
No other third party has held as much power for as long
as the Farmer-Labor Party did in Minnesota.
The party vied with the Republicans
to govern the state from 1917 until 1944,
when it merged with the Democrats to create the DFL,
the Democratic- Farmer-Labor Party,
the only state party in the nation
that acknowledges farmers and workers in its name.
Farmer-Laborites challenged economic
inequality and monopoly power.
Although many of its more sweeping reforms were blocked,
Farmer-Labor Party achievements ranged
from founding state parks to implementing
public relief programs and a progressive income tax.
The Farmer-Labor movement had a national impact too,
prompting federal agriculture,
workplace and unemployment policies.
Farmer-Labor principles continue to influence
Minnesota's civic culture: an educated citizenry,
strong voter participation,
social movement activism and a belief in government
for the public good.
How did the movement grow and bridge economic,
ethnic and urban/rural divides among its members?
And how did the Farmer-Laborites' goals
and struggles parallel challenges we face today?
Looking at the lives of individuals involved in
the Farmer-Labor movement helps us answer these questions.
[Music] From the packing plant in Austin
to the co-ops in Fargo, in the city and the country,
wherever you may go.
Through the wild and windy weather, through the
sun and sleet and rain, comes a whistling through
the country this Farmer-Labor train.
Socialist William Mahoney edited St. Paul's Union
Advocate newspaper and led the Labor Assembly.
He believed an independent party was the workers'
best strategy for changing society's
unfair income distribution.
We must organize the workers into a solid
economic and political force.
Susie Stageberg was born on an Iowa farm.
She taught in country classrooms and Sunday school.
Her Lutheran faith informed her political activism.
As editor of the Red Wing Organized Farmer,
Susie had credibility with rural voters.
She persuaded farm activists to join workers
in the new political movement, earning her the title,
Mother of the Farmer-Labor Party.
We all prosper or suffer together.
Workers and farmers need a new political party
with a program and candidates all our own.
In 1924, Mahoney and Stageberg brought together
a coalition unique in the history of American politics.
More than a political party,
the Farmer-Labor Association
was the grassroots core of the movement,
designed to educate, organize and represent
the two great producing classes,
the farmers and the workers.
[Music] She's a rolling from the farm fields
onto Red Wing's river shore.
The Association, through its member organizations
and local clubs, developed platforms reflecting
farmers' and workers' interests.
Then they made sure their elected Farmer-Labor Party
officials honored those platforms.
Members of other political groups, including populists,
socialists and communists, joined the movement,
often debating, and sometimes clashing,
over its direction.
The direct model and catalyst for the movement
was the Nonpartisan League,
that arose in the neighboring state of North Dakota.
[Music] When the lawyer hangs around,
while the butcher cuts a pound,
the farmer is the one who feeds them all.
Wheat farmers in North Dakota could not make ends meet.
The flour milling industry was really guided by
and directed by and all the profits were funneled toward
these Minneapolis companies.
And that left these farmers in the lurch.
Squeezed between high loan rates from commercial banks
and low payments for their crops from
grain elevators and flour mills, farmers suffered poverty
and they faced losing their land.
[Music] And they take them by the hand and they lead them
from the land and the middleman's
the one who gets it all.
Flax grower Arthur C. Townley
and others convinced thousands of North Dakota farmers
that it was time to elect their
own political leaders.
Farm families organized the Nonpartisan League
in 1915 and nominated candidates to run for
state offices within the Republican Party.
By 1918, North Dakotans elected a Nonpartisan League
governor and a majority in the legislature,
and these leaders made good on their platform.
They established a state-owned flour mill,
grain elevator and bank,
enterprises that still operate today.
[Music]
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
The movement's focus on economic issues brought
people together across powerful racial
and ethnic divides.
African American farmers became
active members of the League.
Labor and civil rights leader Nellie Stone
Johnson was born to William Allen, a farmer,
and Gladys Allen, a teacher, in 1905.
She grew up on farms in Minnesota's Dakota
and Pine Counties.
My dad was a member of the Nonpartisan League.
I was very familiar with the League
and read many of the papers.
I was thirteen, doing the distribution of
literature to the farmers.
I just propped the material up on
the horse's saddle horn so I could read it.
Nonpartisan League gains inspired organizing
among farmers in Northwestern Minnesota and beyond.
Their goals and successes attracted workers
in cities too, despite traditional tension
between urban labor and rural farmers.
What brings these two groups together
is a streetcar strike that occurs in St. Paul in 1917.
When no one else stood with Minneapolis
and St. Paul workers during the streetcar strike,
the Nonpartisan League stood behind them,
donated funds and spoke out on their behalf,
and they began to see that their interests
were really not so different after all.
As a marker of this growing cooperation,
the farmer-oriented Nonpartisan League
moved its headquarters to St. Paul in 1917.
There, William Mahoney saw that the League model
could enable organized workers to strengthen
their political power too.
He founded the Workers Nonpartisan Political League.
Like the farmers' NPL, it wasn't a party
but a member-driven organization pushing for social change.
It soon had thousands of members across Minnesota.
Members of both branches of the Nonpartisan League
nominated the progressive congressman from
Little Falls, Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.,
as their candidate to challenge
the incumbent Governor Burnquist
in the Minnesota Republican primary.
In the joint rally that followed,
farmers and workers celebrated.
League President, Arthur C. Townley,
addressed the final session.
Farmers of Minnesota,
is there any hatred in your heart
toward organized labor?
No!
Those of you who pledge allegiance to the workers
of the city will stand!
Thousands of Minnesota farmers jumped to their feet.
Workers of the city, if you likewise pledge
your allegiance to the farmers of Minnesota,
please stand!
Immediately, the rest of the seven thousand people
in the auditorium were on their feet.
Hats sailed through the air.
Men and women cried.
The cheers were tumultuous.
The growing power of a united rural
and urban working people's movement was viewed
as a threat by big business and the party in power.
[Music] Over there, over there,
send the word, send the word over there.
League organizing took place during the height
of U.S. involvement in World War I.
The Republican administration,
aided by the Home Guard and mainstream "patriots,"
carried on a campaign of harassment, branding both farm
and labor militants as disloyal and jailing
leaders for sedition.
There were people hung in effigy and there were
actual people tarred and feathered.
It was a violent campaign.
[Music] Johnnie show the Hun
you're a son of a gun.
In 1917, the legislature set up a special Minnesota
Commission of Public Safety to suppress dissent.
Members of the Public Safety Commission
who directed it were mostly
corporate leaders from Minneapolis.
They saw this as an opportunity to extend
their power across the state and deal with a
number of the challenges to their power in
Minneapolis through violating what today
we would see as basic civil liberties.
John F. McGee became de facto leader of the Commission
that targeted groups well beyond opponents of the war.
The League worker is a traitor.
Where we made our mistake is in not establishing
a firing squad in the first days of the war.
We should now get busy and have that firing squad
working overtime.
The disloyal element in Minnesota is largely among
the German and Swedish people.
The Public Safety Commission, in trying to
take care of its perceived enemies across the state,
it brings farmers and laborers together.
They all experience this repression.
That really did cause people to think about
where their political loyalties really ought to lie
and who's going to be on their side.
[Music] Strong-handed son of the soil.
He is toiling hard from the cradle to the grave...
Miners on the iron range had experienced
repression for decades.
The Steel Trust sought to drive wedges between
ethnic groups to prevent workers
from organizing unions.
The repercussions for pro-labor views
or actions were severe, as miners like French Corsican
immigrant John Bernard learned.
In those days, the wages were mighty low.
The miners were getting two dollars and ten cents
a day for ten hours work.
So, I would say to these miners,
why don't you have a union in here?
But they had stool pigeons in the mines.
That's how I was blacklisted.
I was sent home.
Finns were especially engaged in organizing the mines,
and especially targeted for their activism.
The Finns were largely blacklisted from the mines.
But the thing was, you bought your food
and your stuff from the company store,
and the company store wouldn't give you credit
if you were on strike.
As a result of that, the cooperative movement
grew by leaps and bounds after the 1907 strike,
because this was a place that was geared for workers
and that would support workers, no matter what.
[Music] Come and let us work together.
Consumer cooperatives became an important part
of life on the range.
The Northern Cooperative League,
rooted in the radical Finnish tradition,
operated dozens of co-op stores in the region.
Everybody really relied on the co-op.
The whole feeling was if your community is strong,
you can survive.
If you're on your own as an individual,
you're probably not going to make it.
It's making sure that we own our community and that
that community serves the people of the community,
not corporate interests or someone else.
While mining communities supported consumer co-ops,
farmers turned to producer co-ops.
By jointly owning and operating storage
and processing facilities, farmers could reduce costs
and keep a larger portion of the income
their produce earned.
Farmers felt they were getting ripped off on quality,
quantity or price, they took it in their own hands,
formed a co-op, to get a fair shake.
Dad became one of the charter members of the
Twin Cities Milk Producers Association,
set up to counteract the middleman.
With all the cheating going on, it didn't take
much to organize those dairy farmers.
Rural producer co-ops and consumer co-ops in towns
and cities multiplied and formed alliances.
The New York Times reported that Minnesota
had more co-ops than any other state,
a distinction it still holds today.
Co-ops became a critical strand of the Farmer-Labor coalition,
some as organizational members of the association,
and as the source of ideas
for the collectivist ideology of the movement.
[Music] There is power, there is power in a band of
working folk when they stand hand in hand.
That's a power, that's a power...
Duluth was a labor town.
It had one of the strongest labor movements
in the country.
And then the Steel Trust arrived,
and gradually crushed the labor movement.
And so, in the first two decades of the twentieth century,
there was the crushing and then the beginning
of resistance and fight back.
I grew up in Duluth up in the hills,
a community we called Little Jerusalem.
There was an enormous amount of anti-Semitism.
The first time they called me a Sheeny,
they made me a communist.
Discrimination came not only from neighborhood kids.
Irene's revered third grade teacher told her class
that undesirables from other countries
were a blight on America.
From that time on, I never accepted authority
unless I tested it in the crucible of my own experience.
Well, it was only one short step there from
being conscious of my oppression as a Jew,
as a girl, to being conscious of the oppression of Blacks.
Right after World War I, three Blacks were hanged
from a pole in Duluth on First Street because
they were accused of raping a woman in the circus.
That made a tremendous impact on me.
Irene became an organizer and writer,
supporting Farmer-Labor ideals.
She was not alone in her outrage over the social order.
Voters took major steps toward reversing
corporate dominance of Minnesota politics.
1918 was kind of a pivotal year.
People launched the Duluth Working Men's Party.
A railroad engineer, Congressman Carss,
was elected to represent Duluth in Congress,
and that was the beginning
of the Farmer-Labor movement in Duluth.
[Music] She's rolling to Duluth
and all along Superior's shore.
It's a long time we've been waiting,
Now she's whistlin' round the bend,
rolling into Congress on that Farmer-Labor train.
The movement gained ground in elections
across the state, too.
Although Nonpartisan League candidate Lindbergh
lost the Republican primary to Governor Burnquist,
the coalition stayed together
and won a strong foothold in the legislature.
The 1918 campaign encouraged farmers
and trade unionists to build a new,
independent political organization.
Over the next six years, the two Nonpartisan Leagues
came together with other progressive groups
to form the independent Farmer Labor Association,
the educational and organizational center
of the movement.
The electoral arm, the Farmer-Labor Party,
grew larger than the Democrats and won more
offices every election.
[Music] Every man now has the ballot,
none you know have we.
But we have brains and we can use them
just as well as he.
In 1922, two years after women got the right to vote,
union organizer and Farmer-Laborite Myrtle Cain
was among the first of four women elected
to the Minnesota Legislature.
I introduced the first equal rights for women law
to be introduced in any state legislature.
These discriminations by race and sex all along the line
should be done away with once and for all.
Cain also pioneered a successful bill to challenge
the Ku Klux Klan, making it a misdemeanor
for members of groups to conceal their
identities in public with masks or robes.
The legislation was the first anti-masking bill
ever passed in the nation.
Fifteen other states followed suit.
The success and inclusiveness of the
Farmer-Labor movement flowed from the
organization's framework.
What the Farmer-Labor Party and Farmer-Labor
Association understood was this idea that in order to
have an ongoing successful movement
you need to have three things.
One is you needed to have a clear vision and program
that you are working toward that will actually
make a difference in working people's lives,
in farmers' lives.
And a set of values that underlines that program,
primarily the idea of solidarity.
Second, you need to have
grassroots organizing year round.
And then thirdly, you need to have a political vehicle,
a party.
So, the party is based on the organizing,
the organizing and party are all about the vision
and the platform.
Those three parts of the triangle,
actually, really to me,
constitute what was the unique contribution of the
Farmer-Labor movement.
It had a strategy of change.
[Music]
I don't want your millions, mister.
The Depression both undermined the lives of
millions and fueled hopes and militant action
to create a new society.
[Music] All I want is the right to live, mister.
Give me back my job again.
While much of the country was spinning in confusion,
Minnesota's Farmer-Labor movement was ready to
respond quickly to the crisis of the Depression
with an organization, a program and tested leadership.
In 1930, voters elected a substantial Farmer-Labor
delegation to the State House of Representatives,
and they made the charismatic Floyd B. Olson governor.
The Farmer-Labor Party does not
wish to confiscate the property of anyone.
What we want is to create an economic system
so that we can produce enough wealth to satisfy
the needs of all the people.
We want every man, woman and child
in the United States to have enough to eat.
We want every man, woman and child to have a decent
home to live in and decent clothing to wear.
What appeared radical in the 1920's seemed like
kind of the lifesaver in the 1930's,
when there was real doubt that capitalism was even going
to survive with 25, 30 percent unemployment.
The contrast between the response to the Depression
offered by the traditional parties
versus the Farmer-Laborites
was clear in a 1932 gubernatorial debate.
The state and national governments have engaged
in a wild orgy of spending.
I pledge to cut every appropriation 20 percent.
The present administration has lacked the courage
and foresight to cut expenses.
All I hear people talking about is their rising taxes.
I disagree that people are only talking of taxes.
The people of this nation today are talking mostly
about eating, and the farmers are talking about
getting the cost of production for their crops.
We're going to go to the Capitol and we're going to
change state policy.
We're going to talk about food,
schooling, healthcare.
And all of these things emerge through
Farmer-Labor organizing, and it also, I think,
opened up all of these opportunities for women to be
much more politically active and much more visible.
[Music] There is power, there is power, working women,
working men, when they stand hand in hand.
From its very inception, the founders of the party
believed in the equality of women.
They believed in and spoke out for equal pay,
which is way ahead of their time.
The Association adopted a quota,
unheard of at the time,
one woman to every two men on the State Committee.
Women developed their own organization within
the Association, the Women's Federation.
Federation women battled against
discriminatory wage scales.
They took on the Relief Department in Minneapolis
when it refused to hire young married women.
The Federation took on the Farmer-Labor Association too.
It advocated for policies that made family living
conditions and fair access to relief of equal
importance with workplace issues.
[Music] Touch the toil and sorrow in the soil
where the greenbacks never grow on what I borrowed...
The Farmer-Labor movement also supported community
efforts to relieve the rural economic crisis.
In Southwestern Minnesota, farms boasted fertile earth
that produced plentiful harvests
and well-fed pigs and cattle.
World War I brought high crop and livestock prices.
Land values and interest rates shot up too.
After the war ended, demand for farmers' products
and the prices they could get for them crashed,
but the high rates on loans they'd taken on
in the boom years stayed the same.
If you incur a debt, let's say corn is 80 cents a bushel,
and you try to pay for it when it is two cents a bushel,
it doesn't make any difference how hard you work.
You can't do it.
And farmers were losing their farms.
Since 1914, the Bosch family had farmed
a 300-acre homestead southeast of Willmar.
John Bosch was all too familiar with
the economic squeeze farmers faced.
To Governor Olson and John Bosch, Dear sir,
I'm writing you on account of our condition.
We haven't even writing paper to write on.
Now we've got to have work or some way
to keep our family alive.
It hurts to hear the children cry for bread
and we haven't got it to give them.
We need help immediately.
Trusting, I am yours truly, Mrs. E. W. Pagel.
The Pagels were among thousands of farmers
and rural workers who looked to John Bosch
and the Farm Holiday Association for help.
In 1932, John was elected State President of the new
organization, an offshoot of the Farmers' Union.
The Farm Holiday Association advocated
nonviolent collective action to save family farms.
Members demanded that prices for agricultural goods
be set above the cost of producing them.
Their first tactic was to strike, withholding dairy,
livestock and crops from the market to boost prices.
They dumped their milk,
they wouldn't sell their milk.
They tried to block the trucks that were hauling
livestock to South St. Paul.
They'd throw a spiked plank across the highway.
But coordinating thousands of independent farmers,
desperate for income from perishable foodstuffs,
proved daunting.
The strike had fizzled, the strike had failed.
And they called that off and they concentrated
on the mortgage moratoriums
and preventing foreclosures after that.
[Music] Come along,
all workers come along.
Help the union to grow strong.
While the Farm Holiday Association was organizing
for fair prices from companies that processed
animals they raised, workers inside the Hormel meat
packing plant were building their own movement.
Frank Ellis led the drive to unionize
the Austin, Minnesota plant.
His whole life had prepared him for the role.
Hell, I belonged to the Cook Waiter and Waitress Union.
Then I joined several different unions, and, whatever,
if there was a union I joined it because I learned
that in early life, you know, and I believed in it.
Frank's father was a farmer.
While plowing, he suffered a serious injury
and infection that paralyzed one of his feet.
Unable to farm, he went to work for a Swift & Co.
meat packing plant.
A grease pipe busted above him, and he started to
jump out from under that grease pipe and his foot slipped
and he fell into a sewer there and broke that
bum leg all to pieces and had to have it cut off.
And that killed him.
That's all there was to it.
No compensation of any kind.
See, I went to work at Hormel's over here in '28
down in Austin.
I ran a gang there at Hormel's for five years.
The work had become short weeks,
cut pay, and here comes the foreman to insist that you
sign a card saying that you'll allow them to take money
out of your pay to go to the community chest.
And as the story is told, one of the workers said,
"They expect us to help the poor people,
well, we are the poor people."
They started a sit-down strike and they occupied the plant.
This was in November of 1933.
It was the nation's first sit-down strike.
Jay Hormel and other business leaders had been lobbying
for Governor Olson to send the National Guard to Austin
to open up the plant, citing chaos in the streets.
Instead, Olson went to Austin
to see the situation for himself.
He saw disciplined, peaceful pickets
surrounding the plant.
He met with both sides at the Fox Hotel
and mediated an end to the strike.
And at the end of three days, Jay Hormel gave in.
And that union negotiated one of the most remarkable
union contracts ever.
They are going to get a stable wage every week
and they can't be laid off for 52 weeks.
Needless to say, workers around the state of Minnesota
and workers around the Upper Midwest heard about
this and were inspired by this.
This was the breakthrough.
And we start in organizing cooks, waiters,
waitresses, bartenders, barmaids, automobile workers
and truck drivers and what have you.
And we organized them to the Independent Union of
All Workers and we got them organized solid,
and when we were once organized, we was a power.
[Music] We're gonna roll, we're gonna roll,
we're gonna roll the union on.
The union staged sit- down strikes to organize
meat packers and appliance manufacturing workers
in Albert Lea, Minnesota.
The inclusive unionizing model spread to Cedar Rapids,
Mason City and Omaha.
This militant energy inspired activism
in the Twin Cities, too.
[Music] We're gonna roll the union on.
Labor organizing ramped up in Minneapolis
to challenge the U.S. capitol
of anti-unionism enforced by the Citizens' Alliance.
The Citizens' Alliance was begun shortly
after the turn of the 20th century,
primarily driven by big business,
the banks in particular.
And their goal was to keep unions out of Minneapolis.
In 1934, workers saw an opportunity to breach
the wall of employers' refusal to recognize unions.
The teamsters called a massive truckers strike.
Strikers fought Citizens' Alliance members
and police in hand-to- hand street battles.
Police shot roving picketers.
The violence cost four lives.
The Olson Farmer-Labor administration aimed to
keep order by detaining pickets and closing both
the Citizens' Alliance and strikers' headquarters.
The strike was finally settled when,
at the governor's urging, the Roosevelt administration
intervened by threatening to call back federal loans
made to Citizens' Alliance banks.
This strike, together with conflicts in California
and Ohio, catalyzed pressure to pass the 1935
National Labor Relations Act.
It made collective bargaining the law of the land.
The Farm Holiday Association sent food
to the striking workers.
Nellie's father, William Allen,
a member of the Association, joined in the support.
The old man was bringing potatoes and rutabagas
down to feed the Teamsters.
I don't even remember how many truckloads he brought up.
Farmers also brought food to striking Strutwear
Knitting Company workers, the majority of them women.
Women at the factory, who were not organized at all
in the hosiery workers, start to organize among
themselves and come out on strike, and then the
Teamsters basically halt all delivery to the factory.
So, the fact that the Farmer-Labor Association
is out there supporting what appears to be
a relatively small strike of hosiery workers
has a lot to do with their understanding
of the strategic pressure points in the Minneapolis
political economy, which will allow them to
open the city up to union organization
and to a much more progressive politics.
Nellie Allen had been fired in 1924
for talking about having a union at the elite
Minneapolis Athletic Club, where she worked
as the employee elevator operator.
The climate for organizing had changed
when she got her job back in 1934.
She organized the workers
who got on and off her elevator.
The corporate world, the power structure,
looked around and saw the Farmer-Labor Party
taking one office after another.
That played a role in helping us organize,
that there was a political group of people
supported by labor.
The growing threat of a tight union organization
made them treat us more carefully.
We also made it clear that whites and Blacks
would be treated the same.
The workers joined the Hotel and Restaurant
Employees Union as Local 655.
Nellie later used her union's position
on the Central Labor Board to push for hiring
Black teachers in Minneapolis.
Aunt Nellie was a very intense person,
and usually what she said,
these politicians went out and did.
[Music]
While supporting union strikers
and the Farmer-Labor coalition,
the Farm Holiday Association was using
its own collective tactics to halt foreclosures
across the region.
And so they had what they call a penny auction,
and they'd bid this stuff back in at pennies.
What am I bid for the cow? What am I bid for the cow?
Five cents for the cow!
And then they'd give it back to the farmer
after it was done.
Ten cents for the tractor!
But after a while, in certain counties like
Swift County and Lac qui Parle County and places like that,
there weren't that many sales held
because the Holiday had so much strength.
So, creditors began negotiating
with the Association instead of forcing families
off their land.
It was one thing to challenge the local sheriff's power,
quite another to defy federal authorities,
as the Farm Holiday Association did in Montevideo.
It was a day perfect for thrashing,
but within a radius of twenty miles around Montevideo,
there wasn't a thrashing rig going.
There was a scheduled foreclosure sale
and they shut down the thrashing and everybody
went to town. Crowded!
The town was full of people from as far as South Dakota,
Iowa, North Dakota. And the poor U.S. Marshal,
actually, I felt sorry for him.
He had a bodyguard, and he said, "I'm here with
the judge's order in my pocket,"
and he patted his gun.
When someone hit the marshal, I turned him around
and I told him, "There's about six thousand of us here.
You don't need to do that."
The marshal called the federal judge.
The judge said, "You can't do this, it's illegal."
Harry Hoglin says "We understand that,
but we're doing it."
They stopped the foreclosure.
Just after that gathering,
John Bosch got a call from Governor Olson.
Governor Olson told me he had a call from the president.
He called me to tell me specifically,
"He knows you and he thinks you're doing a tremendous job,
but you can't buck the federal government.
You're going to spend the rest of your life in the pen."
Well, I said, "Now Floyd, up till now we've hurt no one.
You'll put me in the pen if it takes ten thousand,
one hundred thousand,
it takes I don't know how many.
I'm not going to stay there.
If you want a civil war,
if that's what you're aiming for,
that's the way you'll get it."
Instead of arrests, the militant unified actions
of the Association on farms and in a mass rally
at the Minnesota Capitol gained
a state foreclosure moratorium.
And at the urging of President Roosevelt,
Congress passed a law providing subsidies to
farmers in exchange for cutting production.
[Music] We built dams and bridges by the score,
just leaning on a shovel.
And lots of housing for the poor...
Chester Watson was born
on a farm near Aitkin, Minnesota.
He attended Carlton College and had formal training in music.
He worked in Hollywood as a film actor and singer.
Chester also took a job in California
as a probation officer.
I became discouraged because society
was creating more poverty, or through poverty,
was creating more delinquents than social workers
could take care of.
And so, I quit the job.
I had a hard time making my living back there,
and I can remember going for several days
on the road without having anything to eat.
And of course, this was my first taste
of being unemployed.
Chester returned to Minnesota, to Rochester,
where he worked as a social worker,
was active in the Farmer-Labor Association
and ran for Congress.
He was fired for helping get relief for wives
and families of men who had been jailed.
And it was during this time that unemployment got worse,
and we'd have boys up at the state reformatory
at St. Cloud for stealing a few chickens
from some neighbors in order to go to a dance
on a Saturday night, and cases of people
stealing hay to feed their cattle.
Chester was recruited as President of the Minnesota
Workers Alliance, and devoted himself
to the cause of the unemployed.
We had day-to-day struggles of people coming
into the office or coming to meetings telling us
what their situation was,
where they had been denied relief, medical care.
And we would take them to the relief office
and see if we couldn't get this case straightened out.
We had close to 40,000 people join the Workers
Alliance in the first year that I was president of
that organization.
We went to businessmen and we'd say,
look here, Mr. Merchant,
we want you to sign this,
asking for more WPA jobs from Congress.
If we can get work and are paid for this work,
we will be able to pay our bills at the grocery store,
to the dentist and the doctor,
and we'll be able to pay our rent.
And so, we had merchant after merchant that would say,
yes, I want you for customers,
and I'm very glad to sign this for you.
The Workers Alliance kept the unemployed associated
with the labor movement and brought together white workers
and Black workers in a common struggle.
[Music] When the earth is owned by labor
and there's joy and peace for all,
in the commonwealth of toil that is to be.
By the 1934 Farmer-Labor state convention,
the connection between grassroots activism
with the response of government bore fruit.
Floyd Olson fired up the convention when he declared:
Now I am frank to say that I am not a liberal.
I enjoy working on a common basis with liberals
for their platforms, but I am not a liberal.
I am what I want to be.
I am a radical!
I want, however, an orderly,
a sane and a constructive change.
[Music] Then we'll sing one song of the workers'
commonwealth, full of beauty, full of love and health.
The following day, Farmer-Labor convention
delegates passed the famous Cooperative
Commonwealth Platform,
a Magna Carta of American left wing politics.
It was the most radical sort of platform ever
passed by a major political party.
Its preamble said capitalism has failed
and we must replace it with a system called
the cooperative commonwealth.
It called for public ownership of major banks
and utilities and other things,
not for total public ownership.
For many middle-of-the- road Farmer-Laborites,
the platform simply went too far.
Agricultural co-ops were one thing, but the state
ownership section seemed to threaten
private ownership itself.
Olson won the next election for a third term
as governor, but the Farmer-Labor Party lost
its majority in the State House,
slowing the pace of progressive governmental reforms.
As Olson decided not to seek a fourth term as governor,
delegates at the 1936 Farmer-Labor
convention endorsed him for the United States Senate.
However, Olson was gravely ill.
On August 22, 1936,
he died at Rochester's Mayo Clinic of stomach cancer.
Many Minnesotans felt a personal connection
to Floyd Olson.
Two hundred thousand grieving people filed past
the much-beloved governor's coffin
in silent tribute.
Elmer Benson, a prairie populist from Appleton,
Minnesota, won the 1936 Farmer-Labor endorsement
For governor, edging out Hjalmar Petersen,
the former lieutenant governor who became
governor upon Olson's death.
Benson was a favorite of party progressives.
Sympathy for Governor Olson,
the popularity of President Roosevelt,
and support for the New Deal policies implemented
by the Farmer-Laborites brought landslide
victories for the party.
In addition to Benson's win,
the Farmer-Labor Party elected five congressmen,
a U.S. senator and a working majority
in the State House of Representatives,
its most impressive victory.
The margin of the electoral wins enabled
the Benson administration to put movement ideas
into practice and expand support for unions
and progressive farm groups.
The victories demonstrated the Farmer-Labor
movement's appeal across the urban/rural divide
and across traditional ethnic divisions.
John T. Bernard ran for office in
1936 on the Farmer-Labor ticket.
He ran for Eighth District Congress,
and he was an immigrant.
When John T. Bernard won that election,
he won 70 percent of the vote,
and he beat a Democratic and a Republican candidate.
He won across all ethnic groups.
And that had never happened before that.
[Music] If you want to join a union,
step in and come along.
We'll all be glad to have you,
we're many a thousand strong.
Join the CIO.
The Benson administration came into office
as the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations,
the CIO, focused on organizing
long unrepresented workers.
A cascade of campaigns to create
new unions was underway.
Governor Benson and the Farmer-Labor Party
were ready and eager to support this union
tide in Minnesota.
The solidarity between farmers and workers
emboldened them to stand up to some of their most
powerful opponents in Northern Minnesota,
the lumber companies.
[Music] There's lumberjacks from White Earth
and folks in factories, garment workers in
Minneapolis and cooks in Albert Lea.
White Earth Ojibwe organizer Fred Lequier
was elected president of the Minnesota
Timber Workers Union.
He led it through the first of two strikes
in 1937.
We are the Minnesota lumberjacks,
the most exploited group of workers in the state.
The lumber barons in the Northwest have dealt
with us as ruthlessly as they laid waste
our great natural resource, the Minnesota forests.
Having witnessed massive fires on cut-over
timber areas, Farmer-Laborites saw
the need to protect the land.
That impulse of sustainable stewardship
became an important strand of Farmer-Labor policy.
A major plank of the Cooperative Commonwealth
Platform stated the necessity of safeguarding
the land for everyone.
Farmer-Labor Senator Shipstead co-authored
a bill preserving the Boundary Waters area,
the nation's first congressional wilderness
preservation statute.
Sixteen state parks were established during
Farmer-Labor administrations,
and the Department of Conservation was founded.
The lumber companies had taken to contracting out lumbering,
so, you've got small
operators working on thin margins.
Men are housed in these big camps in the woods.
There are several hundred of these camps across
Northern Minnesota.
And their complaints are not only about their wages
and their hours and their dangers on the job,
but they're also very much about the living conditions.
Crowded bunks with no ventilation, no showers,
straw to sleep on infected with bugs.
So, the lumberjacks organized.
They had found a voice in the CIO.
All of a sudden,
thousands of them rose out of the camps,
just like the trees out of the woods they came,
walking trees.
Irene was working at the Paull Law Office
when Joe Liss,
a Timber Workers Union steward walked in.
And he says, "Why are you sitting at that bourgeoise
typewriter and doing this bourgeoise work?
You belong down at strike headquarters.
We need someone to help us.
We don't have a stenographer.
We don't have anything.
And here you are.
Shame on you."
He didn't even know me, you know? [Laughs]
And so I said to Hank, "Hank,
they need me down in strike headquarters."
He said, "Well, then go."
So, I not only took away his secretary,
I took away his typewriter.
[Laughs]
Irene travelled around the camps talking to
timber workers in mess halls and bunkhouses,
writing down the stories they told her.
[Music] Such a lot of devils,
that's what the papers say...
Because the mainstream press was,
had this anti-worker approach to covering
the strike, they needed to reach people directly.
And they also needed to keep their own members
informed about what was going on.
They created a newspaper called The Timber Worker.
Irene Paull and her cousin, Sam Davis,
wrote and edited the paper,
which later became the regional CIO newspaper,
Midwest Labor.
Farmers had also been harmed by the timber companies.
They'd cut down all the forests and then they
resold that cut-over land to people
who came and settled as farmers,
only to discover that clearing all those stumps
and the sort of acidic soils of the pine forest
did not make for very good growing conditions.
And so, by 1937, a lot of people were losing
their farms, unable to even make a living.
They were really struggling.
And so, they saw the timber workers strike
as their own struggle.
And they started going and
reaching out to Farmer-Labor clubs
that were organized across the state to tell
their story and to ask for support,
and they overwhelmingly got it.
All of these letters that pour
into the governor's office.
Governor Benson made state relief
available to strikers and opened up
the Duluth Armory to those who had lost
their lumber camp housing.
Elmer Benson sent in a truckload of grapefruit
to striking lumberjacks,
and also used troops
to protect the strikers.
This is amazing!
This is the United States of America
where the Army always intervenes on the side
of the companies and suppresses
the labor movement.
And here the governor is sending in troops
to protect the workers?
Wow!
The timber workers won their two strikes.
[Music] They say they'll win the strike
and put the bosses on the bum.
In Albert Lea, Benson intervened personally
during the American Gas Machine Company strike.
He waded into a crowd of two thousand
labor supporters, confronting machine gun
armed law enforcement and deputies.
He ordered an end to the standoff.
Then he convened an all night meeting to
negotiate an end to the strike.
What made Benson beloved in labor-friendly cities
and Northern Minnesota made enemies among
big business.
[Music] But the banks are made of marble,
with a guard at every door.
On April 5, 1937, Fred Lequier,
Chester Watson and leaders of other Farmer-Labor
Association groups addressed more than
one thousand people at the State Capitol.
The crowd came to lobby legislators to pass
Governor Benson's relief bill.
Two hundred protestors peacefully occupied
the Senate Chamber overnight.
Governor Benson addressed the People's Lobby.
The great majority of the people,
95 percent or more, are ordinary,
plain, common folks.
These are the people that are producing the wealth,
keeping our government going.
And if we would use our common sense,
we would make this country the finest,
happiest place in the world to live in.
At the request of Governor Benson,
the occupiers left the chamber the next morning.
Republicans felt the People's Lobby had gone
too far and called for Benson's impeachment.
While the Farmer-Labor Party was at the height
of its power, many Minnesotans felt
excluded or alienated by Benson's staunchly
progressive approach.
Business owners complained.
"Floyd Olson used to say all those things,
but this son of a bitch Benson really means them."
Divisions that had been festering inside
the Farmer-Labor Association now burst out into the open.
Especially damaging was the conflict between
the AFL craft unions
that had been at the core of the movement,
and the emerging industrial unions organized by the CIO.
Governor Benson strongly supported the new movement,
causing resentment among old AFL allies
like William Mahoney.
Conflict with left wing members led Mahoney to
leave the Farmer-Labor Party he helped create.
Communists had shunned the Farmer-Labor Party and,
at times, they were barred as members.
But through most of the movement's history,
communists worked alongside socialists,
populists and other members of the coalition
to improve the lives of working people.
By 1935, the on-again, off-again relationship of
communists within the Farmer-Labor Party
was reset.
To fight racism and fascism,
cooperation with progressives became
official Communist International policy
in what became known as the Popular Front.
Former Governor Hjalmar Peterson announced his
intention to challenge Benson in the 1938
Farmer-Labor primary.
The themes he sounded served both himself
and the Republicans and appealed to a growing
Silver Shirts fascist movement in Minnesota.
I abhor the communist teachings of overthrow of
government by revolution and the destruction
of the church.
I would rather be defeated without the support of
this un-American element than elected with it.
I will not bargain with those seeking
to lead us from the principles of our party
and our departed leaders.
I will not deal with men who do not recognize
that Christianity is the foundation of civilization.
The Republican Party had come around,
and so, by 1938, they were recognizing
the reality of the problems that the Farmer-Labor Party
had been addressing, and even accepting
some of the solutions that the Farmer-Labor Party
had been offering.
The Republican Party waged two campaigns in 1938.
One, led by gubernatorial candidate Harold Stassen
himself, took the high road.
The other, not acknowledged
but not repudiated by the candidate,
plumbed the depths of anti-communism
and anti-Semitism.
The Stassen campaign was saying that Benson
was run by international Jewish bankers.
Benson lost the 1938 election,
as did many Farmer-Laborites,
including Congressman John Bernard.
Now, after that election there's a three-way fight.
There's the Republicans, there's the Farmer-Labor
Party and the Democrats.
And the Republicans are the biggest vote getters
of those three camps.
So, that leads then to the idea that the Democrats
and the Farmer-Labor Party should unite so that they
can win the elections against the Republicans.
Farmer-Labor candidates for statewide office
continued to out-poll the Democrats,
but were defeated by the Republicans
in 1940 and '42.
With the U.S. entry into World War II
and an improved economy, popular support declined
for the Farmer-Labor Party's militant
anti-monopoly policies.
And the ideological gap with the Democrats
narrowed as the party had become more progressive
through FDR's New Deal platform.
Farmer-Laborite Nellie Stone Johnson met
Democrat Hubert Humphrey on campus
when she attended the University of Minnesota.
They became friends and allies.
Both sought to bring their two parties together.
But a lot of Farmer-Laborites
and Democrats were bitterly opposed to
combining the two parties.
And it was a tough negotiation because
there was suspicion between the two groups.
Finally, in the spring of 1944, fusion was effected,
and both sides thought when the agreement was made,
that they'd be able to really capture control
of the merged party.
Political unity within the DFL did not survive past
the end of World War II.
Farmer-Labor opposition to the economic and Cold War
policies of the Truman administration met head-on
with the corporate liberalism of
the Democrats.
A struggle for control of the new party raged
over the next four years.
The Farmer-Labor branch of the DFL
lost much of its influence.
[Music] Where's my seed for tomorrow?
Dig your hand down in the land.
Ultimately, the Democratic wing soundly defeated
the former Farmer-Laborites.
By May of 1948, Marian Le Sueur had enough.
She resigned her post as vice chairwoman
of the party, spelling out her reasons
in a letter to the party chair.
Why should we go further into an insane struggle
for power, pitting neighbor against neighbor
over false issues and name calling?
The Democratic Party has become a part of
the bipartisan party of the monopolies,
which are the enemies of the people everywhere.
Liberal concerns about Soviet strength
and domestic subversion, coupled with conservative
resistance to social change,
fueled the anti-communist suspicions
which led to McCarthyism.
Some Farmer-Laborites suffered
serious consequences:
questioned before a Congressional committee,
fired, blacklisted or harassed by the FBI.
The fear of being branded a communist
or a communist sympathizer discouraged
many from passing on their Farmer-Labor experience
to following generations.
Living memory seems to have been severed.
The Farmer-Labor Party ceased to be a separate
political force after the DFL merger,
but progressive ideas, policies and institutions
established by the Farmer-Labor movement
are still strong in Minnesota today.
They called us wild- eyed Bolsheviks.
Starry-eyed radicals was the kindest
thing they said.
Never, it's impossible, this is utterly
impossible, you know?
Social Security?
Unemployment insurance?
You see how the impossible becomes possible.
How do we stand up to corporate entities
that want to continue to extract
and do it with our allies,
the working people of the state?
I got the same pay that the men got,
and it's because of things that Aunt Nellie had
fought for, to make those unions happen.
Grassroots politics really made the difference,
shaped the policy and changed the world,
at least in Minnesota.
[Music]
We'll make America,
land all can love.
Organize her, unionize her.
Make the bright star of right shine above.
Make the railroads and the factories
and the farmlands all our own.
We'll make America,
our own sweet home.
We'll make America
our own sweet home.
Thank you.
[Applause]