Remembering The Sacrafices Made To Unionize Minnesota Labor 75 Years Ago.

Reporting
Pat Kessler MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―

On a train platform at the end of the line in downtown Minneapolis, hundreds of people every day pass by a bloody battle site. It is the only place in Minnesota that publicly recognizes the Minneapolis trucker's strike -- a bloody, 2-day labor battle.

For many, it's an all-but-forgotten footnote of history. But what happened there 75 years ago -- July 20, 1934 -- may have changed the course of American history.

The trucker's strike was born in the Depression; 1934 was America's darkest Depression year. The unemployment rate in Minnesota was 25 to 30 percent.

Unions were rare or non-existent, but truckers in the Minneapolis Warehouse District tried to organize one. Labor historians say local businesses went to extraordinary lengths to stop it.

"It was ideological," said Hy Berman, professor emeritus of History at the University of Minnesota.

Business leaders opposed unions because "it's our business. It's ours to control. It's none of your business. Workers are to work, and to not question," said Berman.

In Minneapolis, according to Berman, local business leaders created the Citizen's Alliance with its own militia. Working with the Minneapolis police, they were determined to keep the trucks moving.

And on what came to be known as "Bloody Friday," thousands of striking truckers were just as determined to stop them.

Tensions were so high, WCCO Radio was broadcasting from the roof of a nearby building.

A "blow by blow account of what went on," according to Berman.

In the unusual live broadcast of the clash, the announcer sounds urgent: "Lines of pickets march up! They're going to stop the convoy of trucks! But police are ready with shotguns! They're chasing the pickets!"

News accounts reported Minneapolis Police and the Citizens Alliance fired on the crowd. Two were killed and more than 200 wounded.

But the bloody conflict on in that hot summer of 1934 on that Minneapolis street. In fact, for some union leaders it was just the beginning of several years of terror.

The 1937 murder of Tom Dooher's grandfather in Minneapolis has never been solved. Patrick Corcoran was a leader of the trucker's strike and a Teamsters Union organizer, back when union organizing was a dangerous job.

"He was found two houses down, laying facedown in the snow," said Dooher, Corcoran's grandson. "They slowed him with a blow to the head and then shot him in the back of the head."

As many as six union leaders were murdered after the truckers strike, according to Berman.

That included Corcoran, who lived with his family in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of Minneapolis and who was targeted by anti-union thugs.

"They would literally go through the front door, go into the dining room and pull him out yelling while my mother and her siblings and my grandmother were there," said Dooher. "Take him out, drive him around, beat him up and throw him back here on this curb and tell him to knock it off. And if he didn't, there would be more. "

Minnesotans were horrified by the violence in Minneapolis, which sparked widespread reforms we take for granted. Collective bargaining that led to 40-hour weeks and paid vacations, Social Security and the Depression-era work programs.

"This transformed the whole social politics and economic politics of the United States," said Berman. "And created the America that we know today."

In 1937, thousands of people attended Corcoran's funeral, spilling into the street outside the Basilica of St. Mary. Even though his family will likely never know who killed him, there's a legacy he might never have expected.

Dooher is now the president of Education Minnesota. With 70,000 members, it's the largest labor union in the state.

"His spirit lives on in me, and his spirit lives on in others," said Dooher. "They thought they were going to end the labor movement by killing the leaders, but someone else took his place."