Farmer-Labor Forever

by Brandon Schorsch

History doesn’t just exist in books, buildings, and trinkets. History, as Bill and Ted learned on their Excellent Adventure, is not just “a bunch of old [white] dead dudes.” In the United States, this can be easy to forget, especially for those who have not found themselves pushed out to the margins through acts of genocide, enslavement, and colonization. Our schools, and private textbook publishers in particular, have pushed sterile narratives of history for decades — ones that imply history is a fixed order of operations. Film and television tend to gravitate toward singular characters, reinforcing the idea that history is made up of special people doing big things. That moment when living memory transforms to written record, when the last people who experience and witness events pass on — that is when many people begin to view something as historical. In short, history is delivered in the US as a neatly wrapped package of ‘things that happened,’ rather than a living creature that is constantly in motion.

The truth is, we make our own history. People make it every day. However, in our isolating environment of late-stage capitalism it can be difficult to see how seemingly small actions in our neighborhoods can make lasting and impactful history. Unless we are lucky enough to stumble across very niche books or articles, often in archives or college libraries, it can be even more difficult to see how everyday people make up the world around us. In our fast-moving world, while we work soul-sucking jobs and try our best to find time for friends and family, we can miss how the past influences our present in our places of work.

In 2014, I was working at a coffee shop as a barista having just dropped out of law school. One week before Christmas, our store and 14 others were closed with twenty-four hours’ notice. My coworkers all lost their jobs. They lost the health insurance for their families. Curious and angry, I looked up who owned the company. It was a private investment portfolio run by a family of German billionaires whose father and grandfather, while running the same legal entity nearly a century ago, financed the Nazi party and received huge contracts from the Third Reich. I began to learn that day that very few financiers of fascism abroad and at home were ever punished or separated from their ill-gotten gains.

Just over a year later, I moved to Minnesota. I was a bright-eyed youth excited about Bernie Sanders, and I began to knock on doors in my neighborhood in South Minneapolis. At the time, I was singularly focused on ‘get out the caucus,’ hardly knowing what a caucus was, let alone the significance of the system. On caucus night in 2016, my life was forever changed. While I had read about how people make history happen, I finally saw it. I saw 3000+ people wrapped around a school in 20 degree weather to caucus, discussing the issues and people on the ballot for their party in their region. This was more people than had voted in the same precinct’s most recent city election. Thousands of neighbors were talking to each other, sharing their hopes, their dreams, their passions, and realizing that there were people just a few doors down from them who cared about the same issues. I felt like I was witnessing magic. I had to know what made this possible.

What I quickly learned was that the caucus system in Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party owes its special structure to the Farmer-Laborites, not to Democrats. I began to dig deeper — what was the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party

Farmer-Labor Forever

Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party was the most successful third party in the United States in the 20th century, and since the original abolitionist Republican Party of the 1850s that ultimately made the near- century-old Whigs irrelevant in the span of a decade. The Farmer-Labor Party came at the tail end of 30 years worth of attempted third parties during the Gilded Age, a period of excessive materialism beginning roughly in 1877 and extending into the early part of the 20th century. Working people saw the Republicans becoming a party of industrial capitalists who had gained significant power during the Civil War and ultimately betrayed the goals of Reconstruction in favor of big business. Likewise, the Democratic Party was one of segregation and intense urban machine politics in the North. Attempts at new options outside the forced binary on the ballot occurred repeatedly in the period between the 1870s and the 1910s. These movements, while largely unsuccessful nationally, had regional successes in transforming state constitutions, winning victories like direct election of US Senators, women’s voting rights, and the creation of ballot referendum systems so people could vote on issues directly.

The Farmer-Labor Party started as an offshoot of the Non-Partisan League, whose greatest successes were next door in the Dakotas. Through the Farmer-Labor party, conservative German farmers on the plains, Finnish communists in the Iron Range, and industrial workers in the cities banded together and dominated state politics for a quarter-century. From 1919 to 1944 the Farmer-Laborites were not only running candidates in elections in Minnesota, but actively supported unionization drives, built support networks for farm families facing foreclosures, and functioned as a home for anti-fascist popular front politics in the 1930s. During their entire 25-year history they were always the #1 or #2 vote-getters, includingintheirfirststatewideelection.In other words, they made the Democrats the third party. From 1936 to 1942 they were so successful that the Democratic Party nearly lost its majority status. The entire system of local party units and caucuses that today’s DFL operates paved over a robust neighborhood activist network the Farmer- Labor party built during that quarter century.

Labor Battles

The Farmer-Labor party not only competed at the ballot box, they were a reflection of a larger and more militant labor movement crescendoing across the country in the midst of the Great Depression. Unions like Teamsters 547 (also known as Teamsters 544) went from being a small union of self- organized drivers to becoming one of the largest unions in the state. Teamsters 547’s leadership served as crucial nodes in the 1934 Teamsters Strike, which was arguably a general strike of workers across numerous industries throughout the summer of 1934. On what is known as Bloody Friday, the Minneapolis police opened fire on the picket lines, killing two and injuring 67. Farmer- Labor Governor Floyd Olson deployed the National Guard, not to put down the strike, but to pull back the out-of-control Minneapolis police. Later investigations found that most of those injured were shot in the back.

The strike was a turning point in Minnesota’s labor movements as well as national ones, with the federal government finally passing the National Labor Relations Act. Prior to the strike, the Roosevelt Administration had tried to sidestep labor unions in an effort to maintain the tenuous Democratic coalition that included wealthy industrialists and agricultural magnates in the South.

Following the 1934 strike, the embarrassed and enraged industrialists of Minnesota began to look at how to break labor power. They formed a ‘union of businessmen’ called the Citizens Alliance; they created Minneapolis’ Aquatennial celebration to compete with the large memorial events that workers held to remember the fallen and memorialize their victory, and, as we are reminded in Brooks Turner’s work, these “Titans of Industry” began to work closely with budding street fascist groups like the Silver Legion of America (or Silvershirts) and many of these powerful figures continued to be political power brokers for decades after World War II.

Anti-fascism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The leaders of Teamsters 547, largely Trotskyites, saw the growing threat of fascism, as did other communists, socialists, Democrats, and Republicans (remember the parties were different back then). In a style of politics known as the Popular Front, these wildly different groups banded together to resist fascism at every corner. They worked as an electoral coalition to block fascist victories at the ballot box, built networks of Worker’s Defence Committees to run the fascists off the streets, and did this with a diversity of tactics. And it worked. Turner’s tapestry A Convergence (2022) documents my favorite story, in which the Silver Legion of America see their own leader, William Dudley Pelley, turn tail and run at the sight of hundreds of militant labor unionists blocking entry to his cult’s rally.

Seldom are these local battles covered in our news, on television, or in school books. National stories don’t fare much better, as many people only learned about the Silver Legion of America through Rachel Maddow’s recent podcast Ultra. While these histories are not at the forefront of popular imagination, they still impact us today. The cities that had the biggest Silver Legion branches in the 1930s have also been home to some of the biggest strikes and other large-scale resistance movements to street fascism, including cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. In the 1980s, all of these cities, including Minneapolis, were home to another wave of anti-fascist resistance in their punk scenes as Nazis tried to worm their way into countercultural spaces. And now again, starting in 2014 and continuing today, such cities have some of the most successful and continuous anti-fascist mobilizations.

Further, today’s public spaces are not only physical, they are digital as well. In the years following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, online anti-fascist networks did the legwork of finding and identifying the rally’s participants and organizers. These anti-fascists—digital successors to the 1930s Workers Defence Committees—did the real work of breaking the online fascist organizing spaces; law enforcement and courts came in years later.

While popular media may not cover these stories, communities remember. Even when we do not know the whole narrative, like the origin of Minnesota’s caucuses, these struggles leave echoes in our communities. Like messages in bottles, we pick up these templates for resistance from the past to carry them into our present, and when we are done, we pass them onto the anti-fascists of the future.

What you will see in Brooks Turner’s exhibition is just one set of stories. I invite you to explore your own hometown histories, to help pick up those messages of resistance and hope from the past and pass them along.

Works Consulted:

Allen, Joe. “It Can’t Happen Here?”, International Socialist Review, Sept. 2012, isreview.org/issue/85/it-cant-happen-here/.
Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Politics. Published for the Anchor Foundation by Monad Press: Distributed by Pathfinder Press, 1975.
Haynes, John Earl. Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Millikan, William. A Union against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and Its Fight against Organized Labor, 1903–1947. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001.

Brandon Schorsch joined Jewish Community Action, based in Minnesota, in January 2020 after several years working in progressive issue advocacy and electoral politics in the Twin Cities. Having seen multiple childhood friends become radicalized online in the early 2010s, Brandon had been personally researching hate/extremism for many years before working on JCA’s Combating Antisemitism and White Nationalism campaign. Over the last three years, he has developed/co-developed numerous trainings examining contemporary antisemitism’s origins, mechanisms, motivations, and intersections with other forms of marginalization and oppression. Through JCA’s programming, he has trained several thousand people and brought crucial analysis to dozens of community organizations, government offices, and religious congregations.

Brandon is a proud union member of OPEIU Local 12, a University of Richmond law school dropout. He was awarded his Masters in Public Policy, specializing in Elections Administration, from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Policy in 2022.