Why Minneapolis was primed for resistance

The 1934 general strike nurtured community self-reliance and support for neighbors

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

By Guian McKee

Last Friday, businesses, schools, and other workplaces across Minnesota closed in a general strike to protest the Trump administration’s violent immigration crackdown in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, as well as the killing of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. Accompanied by a massive, nonviolent march in frigid temperatures through central Minneapolis, the general strike marked an extraordinary example of resistance to the authoritarian behavior of the administration.

It was an action that is deeply rooted in the political culture of the Twin Cities and in the nearly forgotten history of the general strike as a tactic for social action and protest in the United States.

Although they are common in Europe, the last general strike in the United States occurred nearly 80 years ago, in 1946, during a period of labor unrest following World War II. During the first half of the 20^th Century, however, the general strike was a frequent form of social activism, usually centered around the labor movement. The largest general strikes in U.S. history occurred in Seattle in 1919, in support of striking shipyard workers, and in Oakland, California in 1934, after police shot and killed striking longshoremen in the city’s port.

Minneapolis also experienced a series of general strikes in 1934 - a formative event that shaped the city’s political identity and the organizing tradition that has provided a powerful foundation for resistance to the recent actions of the Trump administration and its agents.

That year in the city, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck for recognition of their union, along with increased wages. The Teamsters soon formed an alliance with other unions, organizing not only demonstrations but also self-help efforts (many led by women) that included medical care, provision of food for strikers and their families, and outreach to the thousands of unemployed in the city.

Together, this alliance repeatedly shut down much of the city’s industrial core and eventually achieved the union’s goals, although only after police had killed two unarmed strikers. Labor organizing in the Twin Cities, much of it led by the Teamsters, surged in the aftermath of the general strike, while the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party emerged as a more progressive version of the national Democratic party. Liberal stalwarts such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Paul Wellstone were a product of this tradition.

More saliently for recent events, the general strike nurtured a social attitude in the Twin Cities that to this day emphasizes community self-reliance, support for neighbors (including immigrants), and grassroots organizing. Administration officials, in many ways, could not have chosen a better target if they sought to incite scenes of protest and engineer a conflict.

The general strikes of the last century almost always revolved around labor conflicts in a particular city. Violence, when it occurred, usually came from local police, or in some cases the state-controlled national guard or private security forces, but not directly from agents of the federal government.

Yet like the current crisis in Minnesota, these events always had a national context and often a connection to the president. The role and rights of labor in industrial capitalism, for example, remained an unsettled and bitter question during the first half of the century, and until the New Deal, presidents almost always took the side of management in its efforts to suppress unions. The 1919 Seattle general strike both followed the Woodrow Wilson administration’s criminalization of dissent during World War I and preceded one of the most aggressive campaigns of authoritarian suppression in U.S. history. Fearing Bolshevik involvement in actions such as the general strike and reacting to a series of anarchist bombings, the Wilson administration conducted raids against labor and radical organizations and arrested their members, many of whom were immigrants.

Like so much in U.S. history, local activism and conflict cannot be separated from the actions of the president.

So it is today in the Twin Cities. Donald Trump’s policies are the sole force driving protest. Last week’s Minneapolis general strike is very different from its predecessors in that it is not about a conflict between labor and business. Many small and medium-sized businesses, in fact, actively supported and participated in the strike, and local and state leaders have sided with the protestors. Labor historian Jeremy Brecher has characterized the action as a form of “social strike,” in which local (or potentially national) communities join together to withdraw their cooperation and participation in a government whose policies their members find intolerable.

Although the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants and its killing of U.S. citizens echo the authoritarianism of Wilson, the clear difference is that Trump actively sought out and created the conditions for the conflict in Minnesota. There are few precedents for such presidential behavior.

The Minneapolis general strike is not only, or perhaps even primarily, an attempt to win specific changes in federal policy. It is an expression of solidarity and strength by those opposed to Trump’s appetite for authoritarian repression.

Yet along with that sense of shared struggle, the strike – like all such actions – also reflects a seething discontent. It is a discontent felt by those frustrated with the administration’s abuses, absurdities, lying, and violence throughout the past year, born of an inability to stop what has taken place. And it is anger at the administration’s cruel treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status.

It’s a message, as well, first to the administration and its supporters, that pushing more will lead to a fundamental fracturing of the country that may not be reconcilable. It asks, quite plainly, whether the Trump administration actually wants to shatter the country in such a way. It is a message also to those in powerful positions who have sought accommodation: to the business leaders who have supplicated themselves before the president, the university leaders who have capitulated to his demands, and to all those have observed the crisis and asked how they could use it to advance their own career ambitions. All of this, the strikers say, has been disgraceful.

While the general strike thus represents a fear that the country has been broken beyond repair, it is also an expression of hope that, just as an exploitative industrial order could be transformed in the 20th Century, racist authoritarianism might be rolled back in the 21st. It reflects an optimism that those who still do not recognize the administration’s abuse of the constitution and its undermining of the best traditions of American democracy might yet shift away from the course of authoritarian destruction in which they are currently headed.

On Saturday morning, U.S. Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The time of the general strike, it seems, might well have arrived.

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and co-director of the Center’s Health Care Policy Project.