Minneapolis

 

 

===========

Nineteenth Century Minneapolis

 There is a reason St Paul became the Territorial and State Capital; Minneapolis did not yet exist. Minneapolis owes its existence to a long and convoluted history that starts with federal Fort Snelling founded in 1819. Ft Snelling was built on the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. Eventually a civilian settlement developed on the east side, a settlement called St. Anthony was officially settled by Franklin Steele in the winter of 1849-50. He built a sawmill—St Anthony’s initial economic base—then a dam for power. Several others followed, along with a grist (flour) mill, and by 1851 it was a thriving little settlement in the Territory of Minnesota. In 1855 St Anthony, with about 3,000 residents, incorporated into a city. But St Anthony, is not, as the reader might guess, Minneapolis.

 

On the west side of the river, private developer John Stevens platted a township in 1854. He aligned his grid in to match that of St Anthony across the river. In 1855 after experimenting with several names, including my favorites All Saints and Winona, and decided upon Minni (adapted from the Dakota word for water) and polis (you know, the Greek thing). Minneapolis became a town in 1856, and a city in 1867. Minneapolis and St Anthony fell in love and merged in 1872. It might not have been true love. In 1869 the St Anthony’s (fragile limestone) falls suffered a serious collapse and both St Anthony and Minneapolis issued debt to do what could be done to stabilize the falls on which they were dependent. Apparently the love affair started with bond issuance negotiations.

 

Gilded Age Development of Minneapolis’s Economic Base(s)

 

Minneapolis first agglomeration was sawmilling, or lumber cutting, powered by the St Anthony dam. Serving a local market, the sector expanded and by 1856 produced an estimated 12 million board feet of lumber which by 1869 exploded into 91 million.—and then it took off increasing to 960 million board feet by 1899. (Wikipedia: Minneapolis) No less than thirteen sawmills operated and from these firms developed the city’s first business elite—and its initial reserves of investment capital.

 

The development of Minneapolis city-building flour-milling sector/agglomeration serves as an important case study in both city-building agglomeration but also how the sector profit life cycle/entrepreneurism evolved in a sector where intensive development/use of agricultural technology, agricultural resource depletion, changing logistics, oligopoly, unionism, and synergy with municipal/state/federal policy systems played out over Minneapolis dominant long-term agglomeration.

 

Minneapolis (Minnesota’s) flour-milling agglomeration starts out with its agricultural reality that “winter (grown) wheat was not productive in Minnesota because of its climatic harshness. Spring (grown) wheat, despite its many attractive qualities, lacked suitable technology in the 1860’s to mass produce it congruent with market demand. Minneapolis/Minnesota was seriously disadvantaged despite an early and widespread development of over 500 flour mills (state-wide) (Lass, p. 158) that drew from its abundant production of wheat. Those small-scale mills produce for the local market, and lacking suitable technology could not compete on the national markets (a fact compounded by the lack of railroad access during the 1860’s).

 

Enter Cadwallader Washburn. Cadwallader was one of the seven Washburn brothers. The family traced its origins straight back to a great-grandfather (several times over) who was founding Secretary of the original Plymouth colony. All were born in Livermore Maine. Brother Elihu settled in Illinois, becoming among other things an Illinois Congressman who sponsored, and protected an emerging and much-attacked, Civil War general who eventually commanded all the Union armies, won the Civil War, and shortly after became President. During Grant’s administration he became Secretary of State. Another brother, Israel became Governor of Maine, and was a founding member of the Republican Party and one of its chief Radical Republicans. They were Whig-Progressives to the core.

 

A third brother, our Cadwallader immigrated to Wisconsin, made a fortune in its lumbering industry, becoming a Congressman, and former governor—and a Civil War cavalry general for good measure. After the Civil War, Cadwallader became a Wisconsin Congressman and then governor of Wisconsin—all during the period of which we next describe. A fourth brother, William moved to Minneapolis and entered into its sawmill-lumber industry. He brought with him, his cousin and eventual son-in-law Dorilus Morrison also from Livermore, as a partner. BTW. It is an important note that the investment capital used to purchase and develop Minneapolis Mill (and its neighboring rival Pillsbury Mill) came from sawmill and lumbering agglomeration profits. The future of Minneapolis, Minnesota, add the flour-milling/processing industry would be led by these men. Collectively, they took over the Minneapolis Mill Company, founded in 1856, and built it into today’s General Mills.

 

Cadwallader[i], a major investor in Minneapolis Mill, was the inspiration for investing and promoting the technology leap that transformed the industry and put Minneapolis on the map. Somehow he got wind of an experiment by a small competitor in a Faribault mill. That experiment was conducted by a French engineer imported to the U.S. and in partnership with an American. The French had pioneered a “middling’s purifier” (don’t ask) and these two engineers installed their modernized version in the Faribault mill (1868) which was two years later destroyed in a flood.

 

Cadwallader, a Wisconsin Congressmen at the time, got wind of all this and hired the two, installed them in a secret locked room, which yielded a newer and better version which was immediately installed in Minneapolis Mill Company’s production line. The rest, as I am fond of saying, is history. The Washburn’s called it the “Patent Flour Process” and competitors, like next door Pillsbury who quickly got ahold of it, called it the “New Process Flour” (obviously the patent was of little help), and in short order Minneapolis mills were all using it. Needless to say, the French who developed all this were not happy either. So here is early cluster development and post-Civil War style innovation.

 

As important was the middling purifier, a major second innovation was necessary to allow for it to work its production wonders. The issue was the sandstone millstones that ground the grain could not withstand the pressure and disintegrated with the particles mixing with the flour. Cadwallader’s research team swung into action (1873). Traveling to Budapest to uncover European trade secrets, they imported a Hungarian engineer with experience in Hungarian interspersed steel rollers that ground flour into eleven different grades of flour. Replacing the limestone, steel rollers used less power, lasted much longer, and increased flour yields.

 

The combination of the two “borrowed” and improved European innovations provided a geographic advantage to other Minneapolis firms, and the city’s flour mill industry took off and the city was soon entitled “the Mill City” and became the nation’s leading milling center by 1882.Its professional baseball team was known as the Minneapolis Millers. In that year, Minnesota Mills flour was awarded a gold medal for its spring wheat at the Miller’s International Exhibition in Cincinnati. This is the origin of General Mill’s, now trademarked, “gold medal” logo still in use.

 

Anyways, between 1870 and 1890 Minneapolis flour production increased from 200,000 barrels annually to 7 million[ii]. Cadwallader passed away in 1881, and was then lauded “as the man who had found milling a trade and left it a science”. Minnesota benefited greatly. In the same period (1870-90) the city’s population grew from 438,000 to 1.3 million. Minneapolis increased from 13,000 to nearly 165,000—and by 1900 to over 202,000. On the other hand, St. Paul the older and the capital, grew from 20,000 to 133,000 in 1890, and by 1900 only 163,000. That rivalry would play out in the relations and politics between the two cities.

 

Several consequences followed from the growth of Minneapolis flour mill agglomeration. Not the least consequence was the profits gleaned from flour milling were invested in Minneapolis/St Paul financial and insurance companies. The production of flour also required its storage, and the financing necessary for grain producers and flour mills to hold grain and flour in storage to take advantage of favorable pricing. New firms, jobs/occupations were created and Minneapolis became not only a regional center, but attracted farm machinery firms in particular, to what became an agricultural manufacturing and finance nexus. Even new sectors were created such as the production of “flour bags” that replaced wooden barrels produced elsewhere. And the flour milling agglomeration also evolved during the 1890’s (into bread, spaghetti, and most important of all—cereal) as shall be discussed shortly.

 

Emergence of Minneapolis flour milling agglomeration dramatically affected the national railroad industry as well. James Hill and his Northern Pacific network of railroads laid track that opened up Seattle and from there to Portland Oregon. Hill became a national railroad baron and carried St Paul with him. Minneapolis/St Paul assumed economic leadership over much of today’s Mountain Rocky states (North and South Dakota, Wyoming). These were also heavy wheat producing states. This proved crucial to Minnesota in that the seventy percent land use to produce wheat exhausted the soil quickly, and even during the height of flour milling growth, acreage devoted to wheat declined consistently and rapidly as farmers need to leave fields to fallow and to diversify (crop rotation) their crop production.

 

One of the diversification experiments proved quite fruitful to Minnesota agglomeration-wise, although it took several decades to bear its fruit. Abandoning spring wheat allowed many farmers to move into “year-round dairying”. Cows were bred to birth in the fall and the University of Minnesota Agriculture School in 1891 embraced research and experiments in dairying. It also discovered a Danish-farmer co-op near Albert Lea and advocated that model to other dairy-farmers. By 1921 the dairy co-op movement had grown exponentially and the Minneapolis Cooperative Creameries Association was formed. It marketed its products under the “Land O Lakes” logo in 1924[iii].

 

William Washburn sought a faster, cheaper access to foreign markets (and the East Coast as well), so he joined with Hill to construct a new railroad (the Soo Line) to Sault St Marie in Upper Michigan. When it was completed in 1887 it freed Minneapolis from expensive shipment through Chicago and its railroads by allowing grain to be shipped across the Great Lakes to Buffalo, augmenting its renaissance as the transshipment capital of America. Buffalo’s pioneering innovation, the silo, also prospered enormously. As Minneapolis Mill got to know Buffalo, they opened up a flour mill in 1903. The importance of Buffalo to flour mill production and logistics—and to Minneapolis–however, lay two decades in the future and will be discussed later in this chapter. (p.238)

 

A small detour will compete our discussion of the Gilded Age flour mill agglomeration: a brief description of another of its famous flour mill firms: the C. A. Pillsbury and Company founded in 1872. Pillsbury, born in 1827 was native to New Hampshire, but a Yankee who could trace his heritage to 1640 Newburyport. Pillsbury came to St Anthony in 1855 and ventured into a number of small firms until 1869 when he teamed up with his nephew, Charles Alfred Pillsbury, a Dartmouth grad. Together they amassed a $10,000 in cash and bought one-third of struggling Minneapolis flour mill down the street from our friends William and Cadwallader. Neither had any milling experience.

 

It was Charles that managed the mill and in three years it turned a profit, in large measure by ingeniously acquiring the technology pioneered by Cadwallader. The Pillsbury Company is named after Charles, and he wasted little time to build in 1882 “Pillsbury A” the world’s largest flour mill. A progressive, Charles initiated one of the nation’s first profit-sharing plans, local cooperatives, and invested in the electrification of Minneapolis streetcar system. An investor at heart, even more than a miller, he moved into grain elevators, banking, railroads, and land in the Mesabi iron ore range. He sold C. A. Pillsbury and its five mills, second only to the Washburn-owned Minneapolis Mining, to an English financial syndicate in 1889, staying on as its general manager until his death in 1899.In 1923, the Pillsbury family reacquired ownership of the mills and company and in 1935 it was reorganized and renamed as Pillsbury Flour Company. Its greatest success and notoriety came after 1950 and we will pick up that tale at that point.

 

A final consequence of flour mill agglomeration was its dominance over Minneapolis’ jurisdictional policy system—and indeed the state of Minnesota’s as well. The Washburn brothers were political animals as much as entrepreneurs. Cadwallader occupied one or another Wisconsin political office throughout the post-Civil War period to his death. William, the operator and managing partner of Minneapolis Mill, became Minneapolis’s leading citizen, on the boards of many of her financial and transportation firms. Elected to Congress in 1879 he was later elected to the U.S. Senate and served there until 1895. Dorilus Morrison was elected as State Senator and then as Minneapolis first mayor in 1867—and later as its third. Rival John Sargent Pillsbury was a city council, state senator through much of the 1860’s and 1870’s. In 1876 (to 1872) he was Minnesota’s Governor. He also served continuously on struggling University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents, becoming its President in 1891. Today, I’m told, some refer to him as the “Father” of that University.

 

In 1881 Minneapolis business elite founded the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce. The name, however, was a major misnomer, at least in one sense. Chambers of Commerce during the Gilded Age were not similar to today’s Chamber in that membership was usually restricted to what we politely label as the city’s one percenters—the richest of the rich only. Minimally staffed the Gilded Age Chamber served as the point of elite policy-making, political and legislative advocacy, and often through informal subsidiaries called “civic clubs” (a sort of Gilded Age PAC) contested machine politics and supported  the election of candidates favorable to the business community—focusing particularly on the election of the Gilded Age’s “businessman-mayor”. It was the Chamber that liaison and coordination business and professional participation in the chief government EDO of the period, the board or commission. The New York City Chamber was the national model.

 

The Minneapolis Chamber did not fit that description perfectly. To be sure, it played many of the roles mentioned above, and was a major player in Gilded Age municipal and state politics. A considerable portion of its membership and its activities, however, was its subsidiary EDO, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX). MGEX’s prime purpose was to serve as a regional cash marketplace to promote fair trade, contract enforcement, and prevent trade abuses in wheat, oats, and corn. It was the MGEX that the farmers sold their harvest to storage or end-users. It was the “stock or commodity market” for the region’s agricultural producers and processer. It was the MGEX that in 1883 introduced the first futures contract for hard red spring wheat—which still trades today. It was only in 1946-7 that MGEX became MGEX and “spun off” the contemporary Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce.

 

A handful of powerful local families had created a vertically integrated agricultural cartel controlled through the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce—the official grain exchange … the Chamber had been established as a private corporation by act of the legislature, during the administration of [Governor] John Pillsbury …. Through a series of holding companies and interlocking directorates, its members controlled the entire process of marketing wheat in the region. They owned the line and terminal elevators, the commission houses, and the mills. They unilaterally determined the price of wheat and, moreover [indirectly] controlled the region’s banks, enforcing their dominance by setting the terms of agricultural credit …. The Chamber of Commerce booked no incursion on its control of the market. Not only were farmers or independent operators barred from membership; the chamber also refused to handle grain destined for sale outside its domain, thereby thwarting attempts at cooperative enterprises[iv].

 

The close identification of the Minneapolis Chamber with the flour mill agglomeration and the host of business corporations included in its economic nexus, further solidified the hold of Minneapolis Republican elites on the substance of Minneapolis politics and policy-making. It became the bastion of anti-unionism, and its ability to profoundly affect prices paid to farmers for crops, and access to storage facilities and even railroad rates and agricultural financing set the stage for an early Twentieth Century farmer’s movement that culminated in the formation of the Democratic Farmers-Labor Party, the dominant political party in Minnesota today. In the meantime, the hard-nosed Yankee business elite that dominated Minneapolis during the Gilded Age and into the 1920’s sharply polarized its political system and distorted its policy process, and policy-making. Reflecting much of the Yankee hubris toward immigrants that characterized Boston, Minneapolis, unlike neighboring St Paul, alienated its industrial workers to the point that unionization came early and so did violence and brutal strikes. Closed versus open shops became the dominant issue, and the simmering fire that underscored its politics.

[i] The technology innovation tale, and the early rise of Minneapolis Mill and Minneapolis flour agglomeration is taken substantially from William Lass, Minnesota: a History (2^nd Ed), op. cit., pp. 158-66

[ii] William Lass, Minnesota: a History (2^nd Ed), op. cit., p. 163.

[iii] William Lass, Minnesota: a History (2^nd Ed), op. cit., pp. 166-7.

[iv] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St Paul (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 138-9.

 

Minneapolis Mill and C.A. Pillsbury:Oligopoly and Flour Mills

 

Twentieth Century Minneapolis: A Proxy for Political Culture: Form of Government

The battleground of interest for this history started in 1900 Minneapolis when a charter reform initiative sought to change the form of government from a weak to strong mayor. The existing charter (for both Minneapolis and St. Paul) dated back to 1872; by the middle 1890’s population and economic growth required substantial governmental adjustment, and accordingly, the Minnesota legislature in 1896 had afforded “home rule” status to both cities. Minneapolis possessed the ability to change its form of government and modernize municipal and fiscal administration through local action (referendum). So, as would be expected both cities started down the “reform” road at the same time—little realizing at the time that each city would travel separate roads “that would continue to diverge for more than one hundred years …. The two cities would create quite different governmental structures for themselves—a difference which would continue up through modern times [to the time of this writing]”.[1] The first time out for both was 1898, and in both instances the reform referendum failed—they were too bold and included too many changes at one time.

 

So both cities tried again in 1900. Basically, both reform efforts sought to meaningfully strengthen the power of the mayor, over municipal bureaucracies in particular, approving franchises, and limiting the power of the ward-based city councils. The 1900 St Paul referendum was approved overwhelmingly, winning in every ward and precinct of the city, only about 3,000 votes against it. In Minneapolis, the referendum was defeated, 57 to 43%, supported principally “in the [affluent] Southeast’s Second Ward and in the silk-stocking lake district wards but lost by large margins in the heavily working class North side and Northeast wards” – “an electoral outcome repeated throughout most of the twentieth century as one charter reform after another went down to defeat”[2]. There would be eight; the last in 1988.  In 2013, during the 2014 campaign where 35 candidates competed for the Minneapolis mayor’s office, MinnPost[3] ran an on-line article entitled “With Minneapolis’ weak-mayor system, does it really matter who gets elected?” The saga continues—so let’s explore deeper.

 

The 1900 Minneapolis charter reform certainly empowered the mayor, and substantially weakened the legislature—yet, six at large positions were added on top of fourteen ward positions. The papers and the business community in both cities was on board. Providing appointive powers to the mayors was regarded as critical in his ability to control the sprawling, largely independent agencies that characterized the Gilded Age. The sensitive Bureau of Public Works was the chief target. The principal opposition arose, not just the legislature, but from labor unions “who believed the [existing] council system gave them more political leverage. In 1900 local labor unions were engaged in a series of bitter battles, with a group of Minneapolis industrialists who formed the virulently anti-labor Citizens Alliance [which led advocacy for the charter reform]. In later years, these labor activists would take a hard line against charter reform, knowing that many of the reform advocates were the same men who lined up against the union at the bargaining table”[4].

 

A major factor also was the belief the reform would in fact “take the police department out of politics”—which, of course, was what the reformers wanted. In the charter reform police would be placed under civil service, and the chief would be a mayoral appointee (as well as the civil service commission). The use of police against unions, and a mayor elected by business reformers was deeply lodged in the front of voter’s minds. The entire reform seemed nothing less than a mayoral dictatorship. That change, and that word, would be prominent in each following charter reform campaign. A strong legislature, and politics, was a check on business elites.

 

In any case, Minneapolis charter reforms were reintroduced in 1904, 1906, 1907 and 1913. In 1920, a charter was approved which legitimized the WEAK MAYOR form of government. Later, in 1948, 1960, and during most of the 1980’s through 1988 Minneapolis witnessed very serious attempts to change form of government to a stronger mayor form. All were rejected. While the names changed, the underlying issues did not. In the last two decades, the city council and the mayor have forged some informal and semi-formal understandings which have increased mayoral power over policy and administration somewhat, but as the MinnPost suggested in 2013 Minneapolis remains a weak mayor form of government.

 

St. Paul has established in 1900 a strong mayor form of government, but in a 1914 charter reform adopted the commission form of government. The commission form continued through 1972 when a modified strong mayor, with chief administrative officer, was approved. In 1975 a seventeen neighborhood-level district government system was approved.

 

The Machinist Union, the Citizens Alliance—and Doc Ames

So while St Paul was figuring out ways to make its politics reflective of a common civic culture trying to get its various elements all rowing together—Minneapolis was taking a different tack. Our tale begins with the critical role unionism was to play in Minneapolis politics and policy. The Minneapolis manufacturing base and its Yankee business elite were the platforms from which its politics and policy were launched. By the turn of the century, unions were well developed in the city’s manufacturing firms. At the turn of the century Minneapolis’s economic base was hitting on all cylinders and prosperity and labor shortages were widespread. Unionization gathered momentum in this atmosphere and in 1900 the first local affiliate of the International Association of Machinists (one of the nation’s largest unions) was formed with workers from three foundries. The new Local 91 looked across the river and in St Paul, they saw an increase of some 31% in union members between 1900 and 1902 alone[5]—and there the “closed shop”[6] was predominant. In Minneapolis, unionism was also on the rise, but the open shop possessed a virtual monopoly among Minneapolis firms. Closed shops were infinitely more secure and powerful and Local 91 wanted to move in that direction. In 1901 Local 91 hit the streets, striking to set up, among other demands, of course, a closed shop.

 

The strike was quickly broken—crushed might be a better word. The rising machinist Local 91 was the darling of Minneapolis workers and a potential role model. Its dismal attempt to achieve a closed shop carried over to unions across the city: “the unions failing to carry their point were practically eliminated and never regained their former strength in the mills”. This devastation of Minneapolis unionism was further reinforced in 1903 when a three thousand man strike at the flour mills (today’s General Mills) suffered a similar fate as had Local 91.[7] That devastation was certainly bad enough for unions, but even worse was the consequence of Local 91’s initial strike that would continue to affect Minneapolis unions for the next forty years—the formation of the businessman Citizen’s Alliance.

 

The Citizens Alliance movement was, in fact, national in scope, but the Minneapolis chapter really exerted a profound effect on subsequent city politics and her policy systems. In broad and general terms, much of the city’s Yankee manufacturing business elite got behind and joined in the Citizens Alliance. The core purpose of the Alliance was to preserve the open shop and destroy any attempts at a closed shop. Well-funded and staffed, the Alliance published newspapers, pamphlets, newspaper advertisements and publications of all sorts that decried unions, unionism and all its manifestations and workings. Minneapolis was proclaimed to be the “Open Shop Capital of the World”. Bishop Ireland, across the river, was not offered membership, nor would he have accepted it[8]. The Citizens Alliance, however, rode herd on Minneapolis unionism, virtually unchecked, through the mid-1930’s. The take away is that in stark contrast to St Paul’s civic compact, the Minneapolis business and working class were at war. This tumult underlay the businessman charter reform described in the preceding section.

 

But we are not done yet. The first few years of the twentieth century were pretty tumultuous years for Minneapolis. In fact, we are not yet done with 1901. In that year “Doc” Ames, reelected for his fourth term as mayor, took office. Ames, some sort of Civil War local boy had first been elected in 1876. Genial, well-liked, if hard drinking and loose living, he last was elected back in 1886—leaving office described by the city’s chief newspaper as a “stench, an offense against honesty, decency and … the ordinary safety of the common citizen”[9]. But in 1901 Doc Ames was back in office. Previously, a Democrat, Ames now hailed as a Republican merely taking advantage of a new Minnesota law that permitted crossover voting in party nominations of candidates. In effect, he won the Republican primary with Democrat votes. As mentioned earlier, he arrived in office with Minneapolis’s economy booming, and explosive growth in its population (between 1880 and 1900 Minneapolis population grew by 400%). Most of the new voters probably had no idea who Doc Ames was—but they were going to find out.

 

Doc maneuvered his brother, Fred, as police chief. Fred purged the department of honest cops (nearly half the department) and installed in their place a group with ties to the Minneapolis underworld. “Coffee John” Frichette, an owner of a restaurant frequented by criminals, became senior captain; Norman King, a professional gambler was installed as chief of detectives. The new police department was turned into “a collection agent for all forms of graft”.[10] In my day, these guys were “bag men”. Because these crooks fleeced businesses on the wrong side of town, the good citizens and Yankee businessmen were fairly unaware of what was going on. But as far as the Ames’ brothers and the gang were concerned, the “good times were indeed rolling”. Weak mayor politics continued as usual and the union war had to have diverted attention away from Doc.

 

But as they are supposedly “wont to do”, the thieves “fell out” among themselves, got greedy, quarreled, robbed each other—and then robbed the Ames’ brothers, getting them mad. In what will become a tradition lasting well over a half-century in Minneapolis politics, an outsider, in this case a local wealthy businessman, having been appointed to a grand jury (1902) found out what was going on. His name was Hovey Clarke and Clarke started, financed and preserved in what was a one man campaign to clean up the mess. A hit man was brought in from Chicago to take him out. He still stuck with it and finally issued subpoenas—and the newspapers finally got hold of it. Police were arrested, key witnesses skipped town heading for Duluth, allegations against the mayor who fired Fred, his brother the police chief—and then Doc Ames resigned himself in July 1902. Ames quickly left town, was captured, and returned to be tried. He was convicted but the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned it—and Ames returned to his medical practice, dying in 1911.

 

Doc Ames got labeled as a machine boss by Zink[11], and a Shame of the City by Lincoln Steffens. But the truth was, and is, there was no machine and Ames was not a boss. He was a criminal elected to office, who took advantage of a weak mayor form of government to institute a crime wave for personal profit for him and a few friends. With that the resemblance to Boss Tweed stops. The whole affair lasted about eighteen months. He didn’t finish his term in office and an “emergency mayor” was elected by the council to clean up shop. But in a harbinger of things to come, he largely failed. A business reformer, David Percy Jones started cleaning up the police department; in the course of his clean-up efforts, local crime kingpins dropped in to say “hi”. The mayor told them to take a hike, but it was clear that crime continued even with a new police department. Lincoln Steffens visiting Minneapolis to report on Minneapolis reform wrote another article ending with the warm and promising question of whether “a city can be governed without any alliance with crime?[12]

 

Apparently, in Minneapolis case, it couldn’t. For the next twenty-five years, crime in the city penetrated into city hall, and into the police department. The real culprit, at least to me, was the weak form of mayor that rendered mayoral (and even legislative) control over government departments an almost impossible affair. Grand juries, allegations of bribery, underworld figures growing in influence and affluence during Prohibition, all cast a mean-spirited shadow over the Minneapolis weak mayor policy system.

 

The Competitive Hierarchy, the Public Safety Commission, the Farmer-Labor Party —And, the Socialist Mayor

Ye gads, he’s not done with Minneapolis yet!

 

If the first years of the twentieth century were hard on Minneapolis, the last years of the Progressive Era were probably worse. It all started with serious disruption in the Minneapolis economic base. Several pillars of its economy, lumber, flour and grain milling, all took a tumble at about the same time. The forests up north were played out by the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1919, the last sawmill in Minneapolis closed. Refrigerated train cars and marine transport across the Great Lakes to Buffalo grain mills and transshipment east took its toll. But what really hurt was a farmer’s revolt on the plains of northern Minnesota and North Dakota.

 

The root of the last crisis made a farmer revolt inevitable at some point during the Progressive Age. While much has been made concerning the robber baron’s price fixing in the shipment of farm produce, it was a different monopoly that had sparked the farmer’s revolt. “A handful of power [Minneapolis] families had created a vertically integrated agricultural cartel controlled by the Minneapolis “Grain Exchange”[13]. The Grain Exchange, created by state legislation in the late 1890’s when Governor John Pillsbury (you guessed it!) was in office. Exchange membership was controlled by the Exchange itself, and was restricted to industry magnates (like the proverbial “Cattleman’s Club” of J.R. Ewing). The Exchange controlled just about everything grain-related through a series of holding companies and interlocked boards of directors. Effectively, the Exchange set the price of wheat, controlled the local banks, and through them was able to control lending to farmers. To add insult to injury the Exchange refused to ship grain to outside markets, thereby blocking farmer cooperatives that tried to do so (in order to get better prices). So powerful was the Minneapolis Grain Exchange that it was the dominant political and economic institution that controlled the state of NORTH DAKOTA—and much of western Minnesota as well. Before moving on, it must be reiterated that this cluster, controlled by the Grain Exchange, was a significant element of the Minneapolis economic base

 

Change came in the form of a political revolt in North Dakota. A brand new farmer-based political party sprang up, the Non Partisan League, united in a “hymn of hate” directed against the Grain Exchange[14]. It won the election overwhelmingly; its candidate for governor won 4-1, and seized control of the state legislature. The League arrogantly sought to develop North Dakota “for the benefit of its citizens and prevent exploitation” and called for the state to providing financing, grain storage and other critical services for grain farming and trade. Non Partisan League “organizers” quickly set up shop in Minnesota and started recruitment drives among Minnesota farmers. In January 1917, the League moved its headquarters to St Paul. The battle was on.

 

Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis, the brutal war of the Citizens Alliance (background) against the city’s organized labor while seemingly successful on the surface, radicalized Minneapolis workers. The IWW, AFL, and the Socialist Party were gaining strength and influence—not in the factory—but in the voting booths. When Minneapolis used its police force to enforce Citizens Alliance objectives to break strikes and prevent the open shop in 1916 violence broke out. On top of this, the fairly dysfunctional Minneapolis municipal government, riddled with bribery and corruption, negotiated a street car franchise (in which many in the city council owned shares) that outraged the consumer. On the heels of all these three major electoral forces, Minneapolis in November, 1916 elected a socialist mayor, Thomas Van Lear (and a number of socialist city council members as well). The Minneapolis Yankee business oligarchy, long unable to exercise control politically, now faced a municipal government dedicated to its destruction.

 

But as the readers knows, it was not necessary to fear Minneapolis municipal government—it was too fragmented, bureaucratized, and riddled with corruption and inefficiency/incompetence that the new socialist mayor could no more put through any effective program or strategy—even if he had one—which he and his followers, didn’t. The one power the mayor did have, appoint the police chief (remember Doc Ames) was to help labor (and Van Lear was the former president of the earlier mentioned machinist union), proved too little, too late. During 1916, previous to the election, a series of strikes over several months, had been so brutally crushed, and workers and union leaders fired, that Van Lear presided over a Minneapolis union movement in ashes—unable to take advantage of his control over the police department top leadership. It was of little matter because the Citizens Alliance turned instead to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office for its enforcement actions.

 

Van Lear lost the 1918 election (we were at war with Germany and Van Lear was German) and he was expelled from the Socialist Party. He moved to the Non Partisan League. His administration, for all practical purposes, a complete waste, unable to fashion any consequential program or policy from a municipal political system whose bureaucratic capacity, policy-making processes, and simple integrity were simply inadequate to the tasks at hand.

 

And now the Minnesota Public Safety Commission enters the picture. In April 1917, the United States went to war against Germany. Minneapolis, St Paul, and Minnesota were home to lots and lots of German nationality residents whose loyalty came into question. State legislation created the Minnesota Public Safety Commission to essentially watch for and control subversive activities by subversives. This is a public safety issue, and normally should not be included in an economic development history—except that the Commission would up having an economic development program of sorts. The Commission was poorly controlled by any political authorities, and was mostly directed by politically powerful state businessmen.

 

The subversive activity powers of the Commission were tossed at the unions, the farmers, the Socialists, and the Non Partisan League. The Citizens Alliance and the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association (the chamber) joined with the Safety Commission and together all sought to check the forces of disruption and change discussed in this section[15]. The Safety Commission even went so far to hire private detectives to scowl around and find enemies. For our purposes, in its near-to-last Hurrah, the Minneapolis Yankee business oligarchy was using its business organizations in alliance with the police powers of the state Public Safety Commission to maintain its control over the city’s economic base, and more importantly prop up the monopoly it enjoyed over worker wages and farmer prices. In these efforts, the Yankee business oligarchy were moderately successful. The unions in particular were kept relatively in check until 1934.

 

So the Republican and Minneapolis Yankee business hegemony continued in operation—checked but not overturned. Almost in desperation, the Minnesota Labor Association merged, in an improbable alliance, with the Non Partisan League in 1918. The new entity was called the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association; a merger of rural farmers and urban workers (Marx hasn’t stopped turning over in his grave yet). In 1921, the Association became a political party running candidates for office in 1922. The Farmer-Labor Party won seats in the Minnesota legislature-and in state elections won a reliable second place, beating out the beleaguered Minnesota Democratic Party. In 1924, it looked like its gubernatorial candidate, Charles A. Lindbergh (yep, father of famed trans-Atlantic aviator) was about to win—but during the election he passed away from brain cancer.

 

Lessons Learned from Gilded/Early Progressive Age St Paul and Minneapolis

The Twin Cities are certainly not identical twins. They do share common problems; their close proximity and settlement suggest a shared heritage. But they are each in their own space and one does not easily mistake the policy and politics of one for the other. It is easy to notice the impact of our three drivers of economic development policy. Their different economic bases affect their rate of population growth and the composition of their business elite. The receptivity of each city’s business elite toward diversity of membership, as well as willingness to accommodate their participation in policy-making stand out as important factors in differentiating the two cities. Apparently, proximity breeds a certain measure not only of competition, but contempt of urban centers to other cities. Most readers are well aware of boosterism, but the St Paul/Minneapolis competitive urban hierarchy underscores a deeper competition of competing metropolitan identities as well as competing attractiveness and prosperity.

 

Our policy drivers interact seriously with each another. Any one driver can dominate for a moment or two, but the real story is an almost endless chicken and egg series of one driver begets a response, which itself begets another response or effect in yet another driver. The competitive urban hierarchy driver taps into a variety of, for the lack of a better word, non-rational hopes, fears, and expectations of residents and economic/political leaders and appears critical in economic development goal-making dynamics. The struggle by Yankee-manufacturing business elites to dominate the policy system and maintain a low-wage, compliant labor force resulted in unions being denied a legitimate and function role within any policy system in place in Minneapolis. So the union struggle is positioned against that policy system as it seeks to influence policy and municipal decisions. In effect, Minneapolis is striving to minimize working class participation in its policy system—with considerable negative consequences.

 

St Paul, on the other hand, allowed ethnic entrepreneurs into the business elite, included the Catholic hierarchy into policy-making, businesses willing to adopt the closed shop, and the Democratic Party willing to include unions into its fabric all have widened participation in its policy system and in economic development policy-making. The civic compact to defend the city from Minneapolis metro growth and to look inward to assist St Paul firms and workers is the result. Knowing what lies ahead during World War I and the early Twenties, the issue for St Paul is whether that civic consensus can be maintained against a seriously changed external environment and an accelerated rise in unionism—but that is outside the temporal confines of this chapter. Change, however, is reality and whatever impact a political culture can exert on a community’s policy system and process is a creature of a volatile and dynamic set of interactions that are not permanently fixed and timeless.

 

Form of government in the transitional Progressive Age assumes an importance in policy-making that warrants special attention. Accelerated immigration, innovation and economic growth between 1890 and 1920 rendered the decentralized, fragmented, multi-accountable entities associated with Gilded Age municipal government obsolete and potentially dysfunctional. Minneapolis, in large measure because of its unwillingness and inability to enlarge group participation in its policy system, was left with a Gilded Age weak mayor system which proved unable to cope with the demands placed upon it—and which tended to allow corruption and crime into its processes. St Paul, however, did approve two charter reforms, strengthening the mayor and then changing to a commission form of government, which despite its inherent deficiencies, functioned sufficiently well to last to 1972. Crime would also play a role in St Paul’s policy processes, especially during Prohibition years, but municipal governance did not compare to that endured in Minneapolis. In any case, the two neighboring jurisdictions were far from being clones of each other.

 

A final observation is that policy system outputs may not yield the best sense of what is going on in municipal governance. Simply put, different policy systems can produce similar outputs, i.e. use many of the same strategies and tools. These strategies and tools, however, can seek to accomplish different goals, represent and are held accountable to different values and expectations, and be approved (or not) by a different processes which includes (or does not) a different set of policy actors and elites. In short, it is possible that the reader should be less sensitive to finding different policy outcomes, than to better understanding who, and why, and how those outcomes were determined. The value of a policy system approach lies not in its policy outputs (the what), then in “who”, “how”, and “why” they reflect.

 

Wrap Up and Segue Way

 

Forming a cohesive machine on top of a chronically changing mélange of neighborhoods and wards proved an increasingly impossible task. No single boss ever emerged from Boston’s[16] (or Buffalo’s) cacophony of ward machines during the Gilded Age—or after.  Boston’s Irish political dominance would be achieved in the twentieth century through charismatic Irish mayors “Honey Fitz”, James Michael Curley, and later Kevin White and Ray Flynn rather than through a city-wide ethnic political machine such as Tammany. The inability to integrate other ethnic groups into a machine put the final nail in the coffin of both very heavily Irish city machines. Tammany’s initial success was based on its ability to harness the Irish vote, and it worked for Croker, but by the turn of the century it needed an Irish Murphy to revolutionize Tammany and transform it into an almost unique (Chicago later would also accomplish this feat) multi-ethnic city-wide formal machine. The other durable machines-type, that of a state political party (example, Pennsylvania) rested more on sheer patronage and city workers supplemented by control of some ethnic wards by a centralized state political party.

 

So the inherent problem confronted by ward-based ethnic machines was that population movements, primarily immigration, dumped a number of diverse nationalities into the neighborhood fabric. With each passing year, more and more non-Irish moved into the neighborhoods. Each ethnic grouping or clusters of ethnics residing in a ward produced its own ward boss. Ethnic ward-based machines relatively quickly became characterized by ”a sizeable band of powerful ward and local leaders who have warred so vigorously and yet survived so stubbornly as to render impossible the single, all-powerful boss”.[17] This occurred in city after city, leaving in its wake neighborhood wards disproportionately controlled by ward machines and bosses, turning the city legislatures into forums for advancing neighborhood interests and autonomy.

 

The overall municipal policy system, however, was left to integrate/contend with this neighborhood-legislative tilt, linking somehow with a variety of other developing institutions such as stronger mayors, independent commissions and the comptroller, and islands of professional competence developing in fledgling municipal bureaucracies. Most Gilded Age Northern and Midwestern Big Cities were not dominated by machines and bosses—rather, no institution or policy actor dominated the process for any sustained period (Chicago’s Carter Harrison being a semi-exception). The crisis of Gilded Age municipal policy systems was that its principal actors and institutions were in continual near anarchistic conflict, with no one compellingly in charge. That policy chaos was probably the reason most commentators and historians held such little respect for the period and its fledgling governance.

 

Corruption alone does not define a municipality’s political/policy system as a machine government (i.e. Doc Ames). Corruption was endemic in Gilded Age municipal systems for a variety of reasons of which the ethnic ward machines were arguably only one. Its fragmented, undeveloped administrative capacity, and bi-polar political control rendered it unable to perform well, honestly, and efficiently. Surprisingly, most Gilded Age Big Cities did not form city-wide, sustained, semi-formal machines that comfortably matched the conventional machine stereotype. For example, during the Gilded Age Albany, Cleveland[18], Detroit, Chicago,  New Jersey cities, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Portland (Maine), Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, Springfield Illinois, St. Louis and Minneapolis[19] did not develop a durable, boss-led machine. Tammany and the Pennsylvania state Republican Party were the most durable machines that survived the Gilded Age—and they were two different types of machines. The municipal policy systems they affected or operated within, aside from corruption and patronage, were not similar. The various and conflicting ethnic-based ward machines/bosses also survived the Gilded Age, and continued to impact the policy bias of Big City municipal legislatures for years to come. Reform in the Big Cities would prove to be rather incomplete and uneven.

 

In most of our Big Cities, the default governance, to the extent it existed, fell to the “businessman” (and/or Civil War soldier),“social reform” or “structural reform” mayor—with machines maturing into semi-responsible policy participants. As the Age wore on into the Progressive period, more and more mayors became career politicians and the mayor’s office accumulated, city by city, more power and visibility, while the power of city legislatures diminished. As the cities grew, the city bureaucracy, especially comptrollers and public works departments, grew as well. The victory of early twentieth century structural reformer (see Chapter 5) meant that if machines were to achieve dominance over the city-wide, jurisdictional policy system, they had to do so by controlling the mayor’s office. Post turn of the century city-wide machines would develop, but these machines tempered their reliance on ethnic wards and mixed it with control of patronage and municipal bureaucracies (following McManes Gas Trust model).

 

The post-twentieth century machine policy system, then, would prove to be quite distinctive from whatever was produced by the Gilded Age’s unstable, incoherent, undeveloped mélange of institutional actors and institutions. In this systemic context, the role and the centrality of chambers of commerce not only stabilized the Gilded Age municipal policy system, but provided a reasonable proxy for what we today consider as governmental action and initiatives. No surprise then, as far as economic development goes, this Gilded Age system institutionalized, for almost seventy-five years, something that Chapter 5 will call “chamber-style economic development”.

[1] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 16.

[2] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 16, and  p. 21.

[3] www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2013/08/minneapolis-weak-mayor-system-does-it-really-matter-who-gets-elected

[4] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 20.

[5] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 70-71; and , Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 90

[6] The closed shop required that all employees of the firm had to join or at least pay dues to the union—and the company would collect from the worker’s paycheck the dues and pay the union.

[7] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 90.

[8] After an initial flirtation, St Paul businessmen refused to established a Citizen Alliance chapter in St Paul; see Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., pp. 91-97

[9] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 43.

[10] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 44-45.

[11] Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: a Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930), chapter XIX (‘The Genial Doctor” Albert Ames”, pp. 334-349.

[12] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 45-52.

[13] The official name of our Grain Exchange was Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce—but it was not a chamber; it was a commodity exchange. The real chamber was named the Minneapolis Civic Commerce Association. We do not use the chamber name as it would only confuse the Exchange with chambers and chamber economic development.

[14] Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: the Non Partisan League 1915-1922 (Minneapolis, 1955).

[15] William Millikan, “Defense of Business: the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association versus Labor during W.W. I” , Minnesota History, Spring 1986, pp. 3-17.

[16] If Boston had a chance to develop a boss, it would have been Martin Lomasney, Boston’s” Mahatma”. A first generation Irish, and the subject of Lincoln Steffens commentary, Lomasney constructed a ward-based machine, and acted  as boss, but never was more than first among equals, and not infrequently not even that. He was the personification of the image of what a machine and its boss should be, however—a good boss, with days of honesty and considerable character. But he was a ward boss.  A boss whose Hendricks Club was the epitome of machine as social service agency. Lomasney survived so well and for so long in large measure due to his extending his ward machine benefits/services to all registered residents and all ethnic groups/races. See Leslie G. Ainley, Boston Mahatma  (Boston, Bruce Humphries Publisher). Lomasney never established anything like a city-wide machine over which he was boss.

[17] Harold Zink, Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930); see also, Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 105.

[18] Republican Robert McKisson tried to construct a patronage-driven political party in 1895 in opposition to Ohio’s state-Republican machine led by industrialist Mark Hanna. The effort failed by 1899.

[19] In Minneapolis’s case, “Doc Adams”, four term mayor, was a corrupt as they got—but he had no identifiable machine organization. San Francisco did have a machine government in the 1880’s (Christopher Augustine Buckley), but not in the 1870’s and 1890’s. A wonderful, at points entertaining summary of  “bosses” is provided by Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: a Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1930).

==========

policy system cut

 

 

 

end of policy system cuts

================