From its founding in 1903 until the mid-1930s, the Citizens Alliance of Minneapolis fought organized labor with vigor, determination, imagination, and money. It scored victory after victory. But the Great Depression, the New Deal, and determined labor organizers eventually defeated the alliance and established labor unions as fixtures in the Minneapolis and Minnesota economy.
In 1901 organized machine shop owners decisively defeated a strike by unionized Minneapolis machinists. This event—militant unions with national backing fighting aggressive business owners with national backing, while the businesses held the upper hand—set a pattern for the next thirty years.
In 1903 the machine shop owners’ organization, fresh from its victory, expanded its reach across industries and reorganized as the Citizens Alliance. Its goal was what it called an “open shop,” that is, the banishment of unions from all city workplaces. It soon enlisted over 200 Minneapolis manufacturers, millers, and banks, controllers of most of the city’s economy.
Alliance leaders attacked the union movement in many ways. They produced anti-union publications aimed at workers and the public, maintained a workplace spy network, and blacklisted pro-union workers. They set up compliant “company unions.” The Dunwoody Institute, endowed by an alliance member, trained thousands of non-union workers in skilled trades, to replace fired union members. When strikes occurred, alliance members responded consistently: they dismissed all strikers; hired replacement workers to keep struck firms open; and refused all negotiations. Struck firms got financial help from Alliance members. Alliance lawyers got state courts to issue injunctions against picketing. Members’ wealth enabled the alliance to overwhelm and outlast nearly all unions. Their connectedness to politicians, newspapers, judges, and law enforcement, meanwhile, gave them political influence that union workers could not match.
Between 1903 and 1917 alliance members defeated every strike against them. The alliance was so successful that its organization and influence spread to St. Paul and Duluth, which established their own, less militant alliances. Alliance members participated in, influenced, and got support from national business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers.
Despite all of the alliance’s strengths and victories, the growth of industry in Minnesota also fueled growth in the labor movement. Between 1918 and 1920, union membership in Minnesota grew by 70 percent. The alliance had grown to nearly 700 members and continued to expand its reach by creating new employers’ organizations in industries threatened by union activity. It created an employment agency that connected thousands of non-union workers with open-shop employers. It published regular newsletters informing employers of union activities and identifying union workers for blacklisting. The alliance maintained an extensive intelligence network in cooperation with the Minneapolis police, the Hennepin County sheriff, and private agencies. It also infiltrated most unions in the city with agents of its own. In 1925 the Alliance reported that “the open shop is more firmly established . . . than at any time in the history of the city.”
The coming of the Great Depression in 1930, followed by the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the creation of the New Deal in 1933, weakened the alliance, as private enterprise lost prestige and the public looked to the government for help. The National Recovery Act (NRA) of 1933 made union organizing, the antithesis of the open shop, a right protected by law. In Minnesota the election of pro-labor governor Floyd Olson (1930) also weakened the alliance. And the effective organizing of Minneapolis teamsters, led by the Communist-dominated Local 574, presented the alliance with an implacable enemy. Union membership in Minneapolis exploded, leading to the climactic Minneapolis Teamsters strike and general strikes of 1934, partial union victories.
Two more bitter strikes followed in 1935, at Flour City Ornamental Iron Works and Strutwear Knitting Company. Though the alliance was able to claim victory in both, these victories were violent, costly, and limited; in these conflicts labor showed furious strength and achieved toeholds in both factories. The alliance was no longer invincible.
The alliance was rocked in 1936 and 1937 when, in succession, major employers General Mills, Washburn-Crosby, and Archer Daniels Midland, Minneapolis wholesale grocers, signed union contracts along with Strutwear and Northern States Power. In November of 1936, Alliance leader and founder Albert Strong suddenly died. In December the alliance changed its name to Associated Industries of Minneapolis. The organization’s new constitution recognized the right of workers to bargain collectively and to strike. Though successor organizations to the Alliance continued to fight unions, the long battle for the open shop in Minneapolis had been lost.