The Curious Cultures of Minneapolis and St. Paul
As we finish up on the Gilded Age, it is helpful at this juncture to reach back to our first chapter model, incorporate Gilded Age dynamics, and introduce the reader to future dynamics—demonstrating in the process a continuity that may be unexpected. The model calls attention to the importance of political culture in the formation and operation of policy systems. As case studies have been presented in this chapter (and in future chapters) the reader will be provided with detail sufficient to make some judgments about how and when political culture enters policy systems. In the next few chapters (on the Progressive Era), the foundations of our contemporary policy systems will be introduced and described. Before commencing that topic, it is necessary to pave the way by showing the reader how political culture enters into the formation/subsequent operation of municipal policy systems by recourse to a more comprehensive case study; the amazing difference between political culture and subsequent policy systems of St. Paul and Minneapolis—cross the river neighbors whose demographics and subsequent politics are regarded as almost identical by outsiders—but are not.
The “twin cities” have not been much studied by outside observers—when they have specific actors (Hubert Humphrey) or topics like labor unionism have been the focus. For this case study, then, we are indebted to two authors[1], one an academic, the other a journalist, whose love of their separate hometowns alert the outsider to what residents already know—the twin cities are far from being identical twins. In fact, one author (Iric Nathanson) states “Considering their different outlooks, Minneapolis and St. Paul seem less like twins and more like cousins who share a common lineage, but have made their separate ways in the world”[2]. He agrees with and incorporates the distinctive political culture of each city developed by Mary Lethert Wingerd. I also share Wingerd’s perspective. Despite being the same in many ostensibly key ways, the two cities have substantially different policy systems and processes.
Compared to each other the politics and policy systems of these two cities are, simply put two different systems. Yet they compare demographically (on the surface), politically both are union-dominated, and both have consistently elected Democratic Farmer-Labor mayors for nearly seventy-five years. Yet look below the surface and Minneapolis has a weak mayor form of government and St. Paul a strong mayor. So what’s the big deal? Aside from the obvious reality that the two do not share the same policy system or process by which policy decisions are made, the century-long, but intermittent efforts of Minneapolis to change its policy system have led to consistent failure, revealing fault lines that have produced serious policy differences between herself and St. Paul. Each has its distinctive economic base, one is 50% as large as the other, and union history is strikingly different.
The Curious Cultures: In the Beginning
Wingerd observes that “by the early twentieth century, the two cities had developed almost polar political configurations—St. Paul characterized as an Irish, Catholic, Democratic stronghold, and Minneapolis noted for its Scandinavians, Protestants, and Republican Yankee ‘progressives’. Yet the cities were not nearly so demographically different as the marked cultural differences would suggest”.[3] Demographically, the differences are subtle. By the turn of the 20th century, both cities were populated by significant numbers of Irish, although Irish and Scandinavians, neither being the principal ethnic group in either city. But St. Paul had more German Catholics than Protestant Scandinavians and Minneapolis housed Yankee Protestants. Simplistically, one side of the river was predominately Protestant, the other Catholic. The role of the Catholic Church would be critical to policy and politics in St. Paul; not so in Minneapolis. The conflict between Yankee Progressives and immigrants anchored Minneapolis policy system/politics for generations after the Yankees had departed the political scene.
In Catholic St. Paul the Catholic Church was a “player”, a policy actor in the municipal policy process—“at least as influential as any political party”[4]. Of particular importance was the penetration of the Bishop into the city’s power elites. In inclusion of the Church hierarchy into city policy elites meant the predominately Catholic working class participated in municipal decision-making early in the city’s history. In Minneapolis, however, “a small cohort of powerful capitalists—families of the original New England settlers—jealously guarded control of the city which had [become] the preeminent milling and manufacturing center of the Northwest. … They dominated politics, finance, and business and successfully dictated the terms between business and labor. As a result … class and ethnic tensions made Minneapolis a divided city, where claims of common civic community rang hollow”.[5]
Why did St. Paul elites allow meaningful Catholic and working class participation into municipal policy-making? Early German Catholic immigrants came into town with both skills and some limited capital; they were artisans and shopkeepers in the Old County. St Paul, already in intense competition with Minneapolis for population and economic growth, welcomed Germans as opportunity for growth–as opposed to the Minneapolis Yankee elite that strongly resisted interethnic business alliances, as well as social interaction. The later forced ethnics into a “separately functioning ethnic sub economics”[6]. Not so St. Paul business elites.
The distinctive municipal economic bases contributed to forming different business elite cultures as well. Minneapolis Yankees embraced manufacturing and milling; their factories were located predominately within the city boundaries. As one Yankee-controlled industry expanded (originally the saw mills), profits were converted into investment capital in other industries (flour milling, for example), also located in the city proper. Capital investment from national markets and New England investors was available. Manufacturing (back then), by nature, was labor-intensive and the working class settled in nearby neighborhoods. Minneapolis’s rate of economic and population growth skyrocked as a consequence. The negative side-effect was this labor force needed to be “managed”, some say “controlled” to ensure firm profitability. It didn’t help that working classes were largely low-skilled, lower-status immigrant ethnics who believed a heretic faith. Labor (and religious) tensions within the policy confines of Minneapolis policy system was the price to be paid for superior population and economic growth. The dominance of Yankee elites lasted well into the twentieth century. In 1936 a Fortune magazine article noted:
… That although [Minneapolis] had become the nation’s largest Scandinavian enclave, ‘socially and financially, Minneapolis is still dominated by the New England families that settled it, and, with three or four exceptions, there are no Scandinavians in positions of importance outside politics”.[7]
St Paul, already the state capital, on the other hand was based on trade, finance, and transportation. “St. Paul served as the base of these [sector] operations and as financial headquarters, but the source of capital accumulation resided in trade and transportation networks that did not require the services of a large labor force”, did not depend upon city politics, and investment was mostly outside of city boundaries. For example, St Paul business elites owned the timber forests and sold their timber to Minneapolis saw mills[8].
St Paul business elites were deeply hurt early on by the Panic of 1873– that for them was almost a depression—driving many companies into bankruptcy. St. Paul merchants needed capital to sustain operations during these lean years; capital for these sectors was available only from local banks and lenders. “As they cast about for an infusion of cash, social snobbery and ethnic and religious prejudice were set aside in an effort to cobble together new business alliances”. St Paul elites allowed Jews and other ethnic entrepreneurs into their social and economic worlds. In short, the composition of the economic base and experiences in its formative years forged critical differences in business elite cultures of the two cities. These differences shaped the different rates of population growth, city development, and evolution of the economic base. They also profoundly affected the subsequent policy systems (and politics) that followed during the twentieth century.
A Curse be upon thy Neighbor
There’s no law requiring that neighboring cities must get along together. If there is, then Minneapolis and St Paul—the twin cities—evidently didn’t get a copy of it. As early as 1890, the hilariously funny census war betrays an already deep-seated hostility between the two. The census war was triggered by St Paul’s fear that the 1890 census count would result in a substantial population gain for Minneapolis, and in so doing provide credible support that St Paul’s glory days were over. So St Paul sent elements of its police department on an in-plain-sight noon “raid” of the Minneapolis census counts then in the process of being tabulated. The raid was successful, led to the better part of a year of fussing, and eventually the federal government had to redo the Minneapolis counts. The delayed results were as St Paul feared. So while Chicago was building its Great White City, Minneapolis recounted its citizens.
The threat of defeat in St Paul’s economic competition with Minneapolis didn’t set well in St Paul. The City had enjoyed in the 1880’s a substantial boom that flowed from its being the headquarters and supply area for a new transcontinental railroad under construction by THE St Paul business elite (and resident “robber baron”), James J. Hill. Hill was an institution in St Paul politics (he allegedly supported the Irish-led Democratic machine), society, and, of course business. Hill was a Bourbon (Conservative) Democrat, opposed to the Bryan wing, and reasonably sympathetic to the Republican policy positions (free trade). Hill had fallen in love with an Irish restaurant waitress, married her, and fathered ten children (she mothered them). Next to St Patrick, the Scot and Protestant Hill was the St Paul’s Irish most favorite saint. In return, Hill adopted them as his next of kin (after the dollar bill, of course). And now in 1893, Hill had completed a 1700 mile transcontinental railroad that stretched from St Paul to Seattle. St Paul celebrated for a week; parades, speeches, lots of prominent leaders on the speaker’s platform—that kind of “Music Man” type stuff characteristic of the period. Then the Panic of 1893, a really bad Panic, set it.
Not to worry. While railroads across the nation fell into receivership, Hill’s Great Northern made profits galore. Recognizing an opportunity, with railroad wage rates collapsing, to cut operating costs and install productive infrastructure, Hill cut his Irish and Swede workers’ wages three times in three months. The workers, already unionized and represented by “craft”( skilled, occupational-based labor unions) called (the phone is now ) socialist labor organizer Eugene Debs and asked him to lead their negotiations. It turns out the “Big Four Brotherhoods” (the engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen craft unions), could pretty much stop operation of Hill’s new railroad—which they did in an 1894 strike.
Instead of going parabolic as most businessmen did, Hill caved, and in two weeks the strike was over. The effect, not only on St Paul’s unionism, but on the mentality of the city’s business community, workers, and general population was profound. A few months later the nation reeled under the impact of the Chicago Pullman Strike, the violence it generated, the federal troops required to end it—and the subsequent half-century war of corporations against labor that it unleashed. Hill, however, and his Four Brotherhoods engaged in “responsible unionism”, not the “industrial unionism” that was developing in other more manufacturing-dominated urban centers[9]. il
Hill also joined with owners of transcontinental railroads and fixed prices and confirmed routes, but preserving in the process price advantages that favored shipping to St. Paul. He was still, after all, a robber baron[10].
At this critical junction, in the midst of a prolonged Depression, clearly losing ground to its bitter and arrogant rival, Minneapolis, the short strike convinced not only the St Paul’s leading one percenter (Hill), but almost everybody else that the city could not afford to fight itself. It had to develop a political and policy process to get along with each other, make reasonable demands of each other, compromise, and support each other and see that St Paul prospered as much as possible. In essence, the one per centers, the business community, and the working classes ought to find ways to not only get along, but to help each other up the ladder. In its way, community perception of its competitive urban hierarchy had compelled the actors in the jurisdictional policy system to come together. We are all in the same boat, so let’s row together.
This type of thinking pervades chamber-style boosterism, but that more business/middle class “at large” mentality carried over to the working class in St Paul. Endemic to the period were campaigns to “buy local” and support local business—many of which were ethnic-owned and operated. Most importantly, however, St Paul craft unions bought into the approach and saw their viability being tied to the viability and success of the railroad. “(T)he city’s trade unions became deeply invested in maintaining a healthy economic climate in St Paul. The greatest threat to their well-being … was not from employer abuse but from forces outside the city that might eradicate their jobs and their community altogether … both sides [business and labor] understood that compromise was essential to keep the city’s increasingly precarious economy intact As the century turned, both business and labor were coming to regard St Paul as a city under siege”[11].
Faced with such hard facts, St Paul civic leaders were forced to discard metropolitan aspirations and focus their energies on a defensive strategy to keep the city’s position from eroding further—a project that would require interclass investment in civic loyalty. Boosterism was redirected at a new audience—the residents of St Paul—in a campaign to turn the city’s liabilities into virtues [this] logically demanded that St Paulites patronize local businesses, support the Democratic Party, and keep their dollars and their votes out of the grasping hands of Minneapolis.[12]
Critical to developing this mentality, and essential in translating it into policy over time, were policy actors that would play key roles in future St Paul policy systems: the Irish, the Catholic Bishop John Ireland, and the city’s labor unions. The inclusion of several of players into the policy process was made possible by the permeability of the city’s business class, and the, perhaps unconscious leadership of robber baron James J. Hill. This is as motley a crew of strange fellows ever found in anybody’s bed.
Hill’s affinity to the Irish[13], St Paul’s second largest ethnic group, meant that not only did Irish find work on his railroad, but an Irish middle class drawn from law and politics (an Irish-led machine that successfully incorporated multi-ethnic involvement). The Irish also were disproportionately involved in the city’s labor unions as well. The Irish became the “brokers”, the intermediaries that kept the working class within the “let’s all row together” civic culture. The Irish in turn dominated city politics, and many were elected to the mayor’s office.[14] In return, for their “reasonableness”, the moral values of the city’s business elite were not enforced on the working class by police[15], and reformist politics was tempered in its quest to impose efficiency in government policy. Also, anti-saloon politics in a city whose most noted cluster was beer brewing owned by German Catholics was not likely to be popular on several levels.
Bishop Ireland, a national leader at the time, “walked the tightrope”, preaching a sincere temperance to his Irish, and keeping the predominately Catholic member labor unions in the fold. Somehow he was able to maintain a consistent position that social justice required unions, and companies should negotiate fair wages and conditions with unions, but strikes were not the way to solve problems; he stressed arbitration. Ireland cultivated the moniker “the socialist bishop”. One of Ireland’s best buds was James J. Hill (but apparently not a best bud of his Irish wife). Ireland recruited ethnics to settle in St Paul and sent them residential developments in towns along Hill’s railroad line. Hill paid for the Catholic seminary (and other of Ireland’s endeavors). Through all this, the reader might sense the open lines of communication, and willingness of elites to engage in compromise with elites of dissimilar backgrounds. The price, of course, is inconsistent policy which disadvantaged some groups to be sure.
And so, by the turn of the century—and throughout much of the Progressive Era, St Paul was bushwhacking its own distinctive policy system and economic development path. How much that policy system and path was distinctive requires that the case study move onto Minneapolis. While some Minneapolis Gilded Age developments will be incorporated into the description, our focus will center more on early twentieth century developments that stood in very stark contrast to what was happening on the other side of the river.
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]”.[16] 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”[17]. 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[18] 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 the city’s 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 would soon form 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”[19].
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[20]—and there the “closed shop”[21] 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.[22] 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[23]. 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”[24]. 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”.[25] 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[26], 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?[27]
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 farmers revolt on the plains of northern Minnesota and North Dakota especially.
The root of the last crisis probably made the 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 farmers revolt. “A handful of power [Minneapolis] families had created a vertically integrated agricultural cartel controlled by the Minneapolis “Grain Exchange”[28]. 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[29]. 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 against the city’s organized labor while seemingly successful on the surface, had 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 the 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[30]. 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 almost looked like its gubernatorial candidate, Charles A. Lindbergh (yep, the father of the famed transatlantic 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.
[1] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001); Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: the Growth of an American City (St. Paul, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010).
[2] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 10.
[3] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 3
[4] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 6.
[5] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 10.
[6] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 36; Wingerd also observes that St. Paul served as the base of operations and as financial headquarters, but the source of capital accumulation resided in trade and transportation networks that did not require the services of a large labor force…”; Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p.34.
[7] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., pp. 34-35.
[8] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 37.
[9] In this sentence, I quietly asserted that the key to understanding St Paul’s unionism is that it was based on craft unions, skilled labor, whereas unionism in the manufacturing centers was based on unskilled labor predominant in industrial facilities—few of which were found in St Paul (most were in the brewing industry which accommodated unionism and served as a bulwark later against virulent anti-union business activities (Citizens Alliance) in St Paul). It was a fight that in past years pitted the Knights of Labor a
[10] Hill’s long-time friend, they both were addicted to conservation, attacked Hill as a “trust-buster” and brought suit against a Hill-owned trust (holding company) the Northern Securities Trust. The friend, President Teddy Roosevelt, won, but the trust break up did little to harm the fortunes of Hill, or the favoritism he displayed toward St. Paul.
[11] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 88.
[12] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
[13] Inadvertently, the city’s largest ethnic population, the Swedes, were considerably more moralistic than the Catholic policy actors, but they gravitated to the minority Republican Party .While that Party was dominant at state levels, it was rather impotent at the St Paul municipal level.
[14] A perilous enterprise, mayors with an Irish surname occupied the mayor’s office about two-thirds of the time between 1881 (the year Mayor Dawson, the first Irish mayor was elected) and 2015.
[15] The St Paul “fortress under siege mentality” fortified its non-Swede ethnic predisposition to not “control vice and maintain law and order within city limits. St Paul residents had long displayed a high tolerance for its vice economy—alcohol, gambling and prostitution. City merchants and wholesalers relied on such attractions … the production and consumption of alcohol were key elements of the local economy, and city coffers garnered significant revenues from saloon licensing fees [the second greatest source of the city’s own source revenues at the time]. Indeed the lax regulation of these vices constituted a de facto economic development program—Minneapolis tourism. See Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 112. In later years, a formal pro-vice program, the O’Connor System, named after its police chief would remain in place for thirty years.
[16] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 16.
[17] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 16, and p. 21.
[18] www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2013/08/minneapolis-weak-mayor-system-does-it-really-matter-who-gets-elected
[19] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 20.
[20] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 70-71; and , Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 90
[21] 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.
[22] Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City, op. cit., p. 90.
[23] 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
[24] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., p. 43.
[25] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 44-45.
[26] 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.
[27] Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, op. cit., pp. 45-52.
[28] 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.
[29] Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: the Non Partisan League 1915-1922 (Minneapolis, 1955).
[30] William Millikan, “Defense of Business: the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association versus Labor during W.W. I” , Minnesota History, Spring 1986, pp. 3-17.
Ron W. Coan 