How Minneapolis Got That Way--The General Strike of 1934—From Strike to Class War Part II

 

The strike kitchen run and managed by wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts fed thousands daily and was part of a carefully planned and organized mass strike.

After the surprising and relatively easy victory which secured recognition from Minneapolis’s coal yards for little Teamster Local, drivers and warehousemen from other local industries flocked to the union clamoring to join.  The Trotskyist-led union responded with an intense, but necessarily secretive organizing drive. 

They went public on April 15, 1934 at a mass rally attended by 3,000 at a rented theater downtown.  In addition to rousing speeches by leaders Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, and Swedish born Carl Skoglund, the Central Labor Council made up of the city’s conservative AFL craft unions sent messages of Solidarity and Farmer-Labor Party Governor Floyd B. Olson sent a high ranking aide to read a message of support and encouragement—“It is my counsel, if you wish to accept it, that you should follow the sensible course and band together for your own protection and welfare.”  Workers in attendance voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike if the city’s powerful and rabidly anti-union Citizens Alliance, which represented the employers, did not agree to recognize the union and enter negotiations on a contract.

The Citizen’s Alliance flatly refused any dealings with the Teamsters.  After they formally rejected a union proposal, a second mass meeting of May 15 voted for an immediate strike.  All over the city drivers and helpers walked off the job in the early hours of May 16.

What would make this strike so different than any other mass strikes in American history was the detailed preparation that had been made before a single worker left the job.  First, many of the 100 or so members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) who were not members of the Teamsters were rallied to organize support from the city’s unemployed.  There were nearly 30,000 of them in a city still deeply wracked by the Great Depression despite the beginning of a modest recovery in the second year of the New Deal.  Organizers found their work well received.  An organization of the unemployed was founded which pledged support of the Teamsters and any strike.  Several large marches of the unemployed served notice on the Citizens Alliance that there would be no mass pool of scabs and strikebreakers.  As the strike progressed many unemployed workers joined the pickets, provided support, and even rose to leadership.  

Earlier Teamster support of the National Farm Holiday producers' strike paid off as the NFHA reciprocated when the strike was on in Minneapolis and donated  tons of food to the strike kitchen.  Trucks carrying milk,  eggs, and produce from NFHA members were alowed to operate and supply their own Farmers' Market for the duration.

The Teamsters also secured critical support from the National Farm Holiday Association (NFHA) an organization of militant farmers who declared a strike of their own in 1932 to which many truckers lent active solidarity by refusing to move milk, produce, and grain to buyers in the Twin Cities in protest of collapsed farm prices.  The dramatic strike attracted nation attention—and the fierce resistance of major forces in Citizen Alliance like Pillsbury, General Mills, and the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association which marketed butter under the brand name Land O’ Lakes.  The NFHA became an enthusiastic backer of the strike, raising thousands of dollars from their members for the strike fund and contributing tons of food to the strike kitchens.  In return the Teamsters let trucks belonging to NFHA members enter the city to supply their own Farmer’s Market for the duration of the strike.

Getting women, the wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts of strikers was hardly a new idea.  Mother Jones had done it in the coal fields, and it was a regular feature of major IWW strikes, including the bitter struggles on the Iron Range in which some of the union leadership cut their teeth in earlier years.  It had been long recognized that when the women were left at home to stew and worry about missing pay packets and listening to hungry children while their husbands risked injury or death on picket lines was a recipe for a strike that falls apart.  By enlisting them side-by-side with the strikers they became equally engaged—and often even more militant.  The Teamsters organized an active women’s auxiliary. 

Not only did the women organize and staff a modern industrial scale kitchen that at the height of the strike served as many as 10,000 strikers and their families in a single day.  The also staffed a well-equipped dispensary which after the strike took a violent turn resembled a combat field hospital patching up scores of injured workers a day.  They performed clerical and courier duties, organized their own demonstrations and marches, and pressured landlords to forgo evictions.  Some women served with the scout pickets who roamed the city looking attempts to run trucks and move goods.  Others even volunteered with the flying picket squads that were dispatched from strike headquarters when the scouts reported the need.

Teamster Flying pickets intercept a driver and counsel him.

All of this was made possible because the Teamster leadership rented a huge vacant garage as strike headquarters.  It was large enough to easily accommodate up to 1,000 people, most of them assigned to the flying picket squads that worked around the clock.  In addition to the kitchen and dispensary, the building accommodated a large machine and repair shop which kept a fleet of 100 trucks and cars of the flying squadrons in repair and eventually housed a daily newspaper that circulated 10,000 copies a day.  

Four phone lines were constantly monitored taking calls from the scouts reporting from the many pay phones that were in almost every establishment and in free-standing phone booths on many corners.  A call would come in, a courier would run the message to one of the dozens of flying squads waiting, and they would be speeding off in automobile or trucks within minutes.  When the strikers discovered the four phone lines were tapped, they quickly employed codes that changed daily.  The strikers also had a shortwave radio that was able to monitor all police calls.

All of this was up and running from the first day of the strike.  Regular pickets were maintained at all of the main freight terminals, especially in the critical Market District and forty roads into the city were monitored.  The roving scout pickets included many on motorcycles.  Employers were stunned at how completely effective the Teamster picketing system worked.  Virtually nothing was moving in the city but the trucks of the Farm Holiday Association and already unionized coal and milk delivery. 

The first days of the strike were as peaceful as they were effective.  Pickets and flying squads were unarmed and instructed to prevent trucks from moving by swarming them with scores of bodies.  The Citizen Alliance leaders seemed dazed by how tightly the city was shut down.

But the bosses made preparations as well.  They already employed a small army of spies and the usual plug-uglies who could always be hired to beat on workers.  They had a cooperative Police Department which swore many of them in as special police.  The bosses set up their own strike headquarters and their own flying squads.  As the conflict quickly deepened, they sent out a call for a “mass movement of citizens” to oppose the strike and began organizing their citizen army or militia.  Merchants, professional men, managers, other “respectable” white collar workers and their sons flocked to the banner.  They were well armed and equipped and put under the command of officers and World War I combat veterans, including some who held high positions in their companies and on the Board of the Citizens Alliance.

Seldom was the class war so stark, with the employers not just hiding behind the police and the usual hired thugs but fielding an ideologically driven army of their own kind.  With both sides now well organized an explosive confrontation was inevitable.  When it came it would change the face of the strike and the conflict.

Early on Saturday, May 19 one of the Alliance spies lured a flying squad made up of both male and female pickets with a false phone report that trucks were trying to unload newsprint at the loading docks of the two daily newspapers.  It was a well-planned trap.  When the flying pickets arrived on the scene, they were surrounded by a large body of police, special police, and citizen militia and were brutally beaten inflicting several serious injuries.  Abruptly the whole character of the strike changed.

At union headquarters strikers spent the weekend making saps, clubs, and cutting lengths of pipe.  They were preparing not only to defend themselves, but to go on the offensive.  The union learned that the Police and Alliance forces planned to seize the whole Market District on Monday and sweep aside the mass pickets who had blocked most of the warehouse docks.  Union leadership planned for a confrontation.

First they quietly moved up to 600 strikers to the Central Labor Council headquarters on Eighth Street, moving them in small groups at night.  They avoided detection.  Meanwhile at the headquarters garage, the flying squads assembled as a single force augmented by many other militants.  As many as 1000 were in the building waiting to attack.

Workers go on the offensive--Teamsters armed with clubs and pipes charged and scattered police.

Early Monday, May 21 as many as 500 Citizen Alliance special police and volunteers attempted to break picket lines at the Market.  Reinforcements from Strike Headquarters arrived, and a general club wielding melee broke out.  Photographs of the strikers assaulting police and volunteers with clubs shocked the country which had never seen workers physically fighting back before.  It was a pitch battle during which the pickets slowly drove their enemies to one side of the Market and then cut the Police off from the Citizen Army.  Then on signal, the 600 armed strikers poured out of the nearby Central Labor Council building, clearly an overwhelming force.

As the strikers expected, the panicked police began to draw their guns.   At that point a truck driven by a hand-picked striker and filled with the toughest, most reliable men barreled out of the union ranks and bore directly down on the police, who had to scatter.  The strikers in the back of the truck leapt from the bed and began wailing on the police, who could not now use their pistols for fear of hitting their own men. 

Fighting continued most of the day, but was not decisive on either side, although more than 30 police had to be treated for injuries.  The workers took casualties, too, which kept the dispensary busy, but not on the same scale.

On May 22, up to 30,000 strikers and supporters swarmed the Market District precipitating the Battle of Deputies Run.  At the end of a long day of street battles strikers had complete control of the streets.

Overnight more workers joined the fight.  And the Citizen Alliance had 500 more men sworn in as Special Police.  The next morning more than 30,000 showed up for a march on the market.  The march was peaceful until a merchant tried to move some crates of tomatoes and pickets threw them through his store window.  General fighting erupted again.  This time, armed with clubs the strikers drove the police and Citizen Army out of the Market and chased them through the city. By night the police had completely withdrawn from the city streets and strike marshals were directing traffic.  Two special police, including a member of the board of directors of the Citizens Alliance, were killed in the fighting.

The riot on May 22 became known as the Battle of Deputies Run.  A joint delegation of Teamsters, Central Labor Council, and Building Trades Council leaders offered Chief of Police Mike Johannes a 24-hour truce to allow negotiations to start on the understanding that no trucks would move during negotiations.  Governor Olsen and Federal Mediators urged authorities and the Citizen Alliance to take the deal.   Reluctantly the Citizen Alliance signed it.  But Johannes immediately announced that his police would attempt to move trucks as soon as the 24 hours expired.  The union responded by ordering a resumption of picketing.

The battle was on again.

Tomorrow—Escalating violence leads to a General Strike.

How Minneapolis Got That Way--The General Strike of 1934—Of Teamsters and Trotskyites--Part I

 

After Minneapolis Teamsters stuck city-wide in 1934 police try to move a scab truck using force against unarmed pickets.  Police and Citizen Committee thug violence and mayhem would soon both spread the strike defiantly and cause workers to take up clubs and brick bats to battle it out in the streets.

Note:  The epic story of the events in Minneapolis in 1934 is too much for one entry.  We will cover it in three parts.

Before 1934 Minneapolis, Minnesota was a conservative, anti-labor bastion.  A railroad and river transportation hub for the upper-Midwest breadbasket and a significant manufacturing city, the local elites organized in the Citizens Alliance in conjunction—or collusion—with local authorities long kept the city relatively free of unions except for some traditionally well-behaved craft unions, members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).  All of that began to change dramatically when a successful strike by Teamsters Local 574 closed down sixty-five of the city’s sixty-seven coal yards during the midst of one of the notoriously brutal Minnesota winters earlier that year causing the employers to capitulate and recognize the union in only three days.

Impressed, drivers, warehousemen, and dock workers in other industries flocked to the victorious union setting up a city-wide cartage strike which began on May 16.  Superbly organized, the strike effectively shut down the city with a system of peaceful and unarmed flying squad pickets.  

                                             

                                                            A Teamster Local 574 dues button issued during the strike.

The character of the strike changed dramatically on May 21 when a mixed flying squad of men and women pickets was lured into to a trap and severely beaten.  That transformed the walkout into a general strike with the support of even the Building Trades and Central Labor Council and workers in all industries, many of them unorganized, downed tools and joined the strike.  Strikers also armed themselves with saps, clubs, and lengths of pipe determined to battle it out with police and special deputies in a “citizens militia” organized by the Citizen Alliance.  Intensely violent confrontations erupted, and virtual open class warfare gripped the city for months before a stunning union victory.

At the heart of the strike were the Teamsters, nationally one of the largest unions in the AFL but gripped by the conservative leadership of President Daniel Tobin who opposed most use of the strike.  The union’s members had a reputation for solidarity in respecting the picket lines of other unions’ strikes.  But strict allegiance to craft unionism meant that divers, warehouse men, and dockworkers were divided into small locals by occupation and also by industry—ice deliverymen, milk drivers, movers, general cartage divers, etc. each in separate locals.  It was a perfect recipe for a weak movement.

In Minneapolis however, Local 574 had a somewhat unusual and loose charter from the international union covering general cartage, which new leadership quickly defined as all traffic that moved by truck or wagon.  In 1933 the local had only about 100 dues paying members and it represented workers at only a handful of employers.  But the new leadership changed that.

Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, and Swedish-born Carl Skoglund were all veteran unionists and former members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  They were conditioned to think of labor struggle as class war and had a commitment to industrial rather than craft unionism.  Elected to leadership in Local 574 they chose immediately to ignore the strictures against strikes by the national leadership and to make the local a union of all workers engaged in transportation, delivery, and support across industries.  When unorganized workers in other industries joined the fight they were readily welcomed in the spirit of the One Big Union in which they had all cut their teeth.

Local Teamster leaders were militant former IWW members, dedicated industrial unionists, and Trotskyist Left Communists.

But all of them were also Communists.  In fact, they were leading members of the Party’s Left Opposition which recently split after the purge of Leon Trotsky and founded the Communist League of America (CLP) which would later become the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SLP).  The prominence of the Trotskyists in the leadership of the strike, which soon included young Farrell Dobbs who had joined as a rank-and-file coal driver in 1933 and quickly rose to prominence during the strike, has always colored views of the history of the epic struggle in Minnesota.

It would cause many labor historians sympathetic to the role of Communist Party militants in the development of industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) to downplay the Minneapolis General strike in comparison with other important militant strikes in 1934—the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike let by CP member Harry Bridges and the Toledo Auto Lite Strike led by the independent socialist American Workers Party.  Many AWP members later that year joined the CLP, but others switched to the CP giving it some bragging rights in the Toledo struggle.

The Teamsters look on the Minneapolis strike as the pivot point in their history, transforming them into a modern, militant union and eventually leading to their domination not just of local delivery services, but cross-country trucking.  The Trotskyist leadership developed in Minneapolis was key to the spread and success of the union with new locals growing up side by side with SWP chapters.  But by the early ‘40s Teamster national leadership purged the Trotskyists and most other radicals including Dobbs, who had become young Jimmy Hoffa’s mentor and right-hand man.  After that they rewrote their history of the Minneapolis strike to minimize or erase the Trotskyist leadership.  

Farrell Dobbs was a young rank-and-file driver during the 1934 Minneapolis strike and later rose in Teamster leadership, was purged and a Red, and became the head of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party,  His history is controversial and frankly partisan, but it is the best detailed day to day account of the struggle and a major American working class classic.

After emerging from prison for violating the Smith Act, which made it illegal to “conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States Government,” Dobbs became a major figure and eventually leader of the SWP.  His histories of the Minneapolis strike and the spread of the union, Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power tried to build a mythology around the Trotskyist leadership and resulted in a backlash by other labor historians.

Of course, conservative historians have always discounted the significance of the virtual rebellion in Minneapolis or characterized it as evidence of a Communist conspiracy to incite violence and subvert order.  It is in their interest to minimize, if not erase, such a major event from the public memory.

Whatever you think of the Trotskyists, the story of the Teamsters and the Minneapolis general strike is important to working people and replete with valuable lessons.

Tomorrow—we begin to examine all of the events in detail.

A.J. Muste—Evolved from Calvinist to Socialist, Labor, and Pacifist Hero

 

When A.J. Muste died at the age of 82 February 11, 1967 most of the young Civil Rights activists in the South, student protestors on campuses nationwide, and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators crowding the streets had no idea who he was.  But the frail old man spent the last two years of his life standing a lonely silent vigil in front of the White House holding a flickering candle almost every day in all kinds of weather and in his spare time building a coalition of anti-war groups, the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, that was organizing massive marches against the war in Washington, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.  He had been an icon of the American Left, pacifism, Socialism, labor movement, and civil rights for over 50 years. 

A long, unlikely journey had taken him from an impoverished childhood in the Netherlands, to one of the most theologically and political liberal arts colleges in the U.S., to playing a key role in dozens of dramatic causes and movements that represented resistance to oppression and injustice.

The Dutch port of Zierikzee, Muste's family home, by Max Clarenbach.

Abraham Johannes Muste was born January 8, 1885, in Zierikzee, a small port city of located in the Southwestern province of Zeeland in the Netherlands.  His father was a coachman for a family of Zeeland’s hereditary nobility.  But times were tough in Holland and opportunities for the working class limited so the family sailed for America where his wife already had relations in third class accommodations in 1891.

The mother became seriously ill on the cramped and rugged voyage and was detained at Ellis Island for deportation as unfit.  She was kept in the dispensary for a month but finally made a full recovery and was released to join her family.

The family settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a magnate for Dutch immigrants.  The mother’s four brothers were already there and working in various small businesses.  Father got work and the family joined the local Dutch Reform congregation a dour and strict bastion of Calvinism that was the anchoring center of both the community and the family.  Even by the standards of American Protestantism at the time when modern Fundamentalism was in its infancy, it was one of the most conservative even reactionary denominations and congregations in the country.

The mostly working class Dutch were treated as cheap labor fodder for local industry including furniture manufacture, wagon making, and foundries using the taconite ore delivered from the Minnesota Iron Range via Lake Michigan.  But unlike other ethnic immigrant workers, the Dutch were mostly docile, loyal to their employers, and firm believers in the Protestant work ethic.  In politics they were staunch Republicans who despised Democrats and radicals of any kind.

When young A. J. turned 11 years old in 1896 he and the rest of his family became naturalized American citizens.  

The Hope College campus as it looked around the time Muste attended.  The still highly conservative Calvinist college does not brag much about it illustrious radical graduate.

The family prospered moderately, enough to send their bright son—the star pupil of the church Sunday School to the strict Calvinist bastion of Hope College in near-by Holland, Michigan.  A.J. graduated early at the age of 20 in 1905 as class valedictorian after taking a year to save money teaching Latin and Greek at another mostly Dutch institution,  Northwestern Classical Academy in Orange City, Iowa, he headed east to Dutch Reform’s most prestigious institution for the training of ministers, New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

That city, if not the institution he attended, was Muste’s first exposure to life outside of the confining cocoon if the Dutch community.  For the first time he was exposed to people of different backgrounds and faiths.  It was an eye-opening experience.  Even more so were the additional classes he took in New York City in philosophy at New York University and Columbia University.  There he attended lectures by William James whose work on the varieties of religious experience was revelatory and met John Dewey, who became a friend and important mentor.

He was beginning to doubt the assured inerrancy of his Calvinist upbringing, but not his underlying Christian faith.  Under the influence of the Social Gospel movement, however, he began to see the teachings of Christ to be a call to service and support for the poor.  None-the-less, Muste thought that he must remain true to his call to the ministry.  Upon his graduation from New Brunswick, he married his old Hope College sweetheart and took up the offer of the prestigious pulpit of Ft. Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, perhaps the most liberal congregation in the very conservative Dutch Reform denomination.

While enjoying his dream of being a pastor, Muste continued his studies at the neighboring Union Theological Seminary, one of the most liberal theological schools in the country and the center of the Social Gospel movement.  Not only did Muste’s theology become more liberal, but his exposure to broad reading of radical books and commentary deeply affected him.  So did his friendship with a young Presbyterian, Norman Thomas.  Together they moved to Socialism.  Thomas graduated in 1911 and moved to a Presbyterian pulpit in Harlem serving mostly Italian immigrants.  Both of the young ministers worked and voted for Eugene V. Debs in the election of 1912.  Muste graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity magna cum laude in 1913.

                                    Muste as a young minister.

But his old faith was shattered.  No longer able to affirm the strict Calvinist Westminster Confession of Faith, Muste resigned from the Ft. Washington pulpit in 1914 and left Dutch Reform behind him.  In 1915 he accepted a call as an independent Congregationalist to the Central Congregational Church of Newtonville, Massachusetts.

Curing that stay the horrific industrial scale bloodshed of the Great War in Europe haunted him.  He rapidly completed an already begun journey to committed pacifism.  He joined the new Fellowship of Reconciliation shortly after its founding in 1916 and was soon demonstrating against America becoming involved in the conflict. As the drumbeats of war intensified Muste participated in a major anti-war march in the summer of 1916 and began to be a featured speaker at public rallies.  Some of the members of his Newtonville congregation began to resign in protest.  While others stood by their minister, America’s entrance into the War in April 16 was accompanied by surge of jingoistic patriotism and churches were pressured by the Wilson administration to restrain or silence pacifist preachers.  Muste took a two month leave of absence that summer to discern his future.  By December he knew that he had to leave and dedicate himself full time to opposing the war.

He volunteered at the Boston chapter of the newly formed Civil Liberties Bureau, the legal-aid organization which defended both political and pacifist war resisters.  Both he and the Bureau were overwhelmed as the Wilson administration drove aggressively and extensively against “draft dodgers,” those who supported them, and anti-war dissenters. 

Later in 1918 he and his wife moved to Providence, Rhode Island, a hot bed of dissent where he as accredited as a Quaker minister and served the Providence Meeting House.  The Quakers were the primary movers of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, so the move was easy for Muste.  He turned the Meeting House into a center for dissent maintaining a virtual radical library in the basement.  Sunday sessions of the Meeting became a safe haven for pacifists, radicals, and arty bohemians to and safely expound their views.

When the war ended, war time repression did not end—it intensified during the Red Scare in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a wave of major strikes across the country.  On behalf of his continuing associations with the newly re-named American Civil Liberties Union and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Muste was a busy activist and prolific contributor to the radical press. The turbulent times also called Muste to a new field of action—labor.

This newspaper article marks the beginning of the 1919 Lawrence Textile Strike which was Muste's baptism by fire in the labor movement.

In the massive textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, site of the long and legendary IWW led Bread and Roses strike of 1912, the AFL United Textile Workers (UTU) and Central Labor Union, negotiated a shortened work week from 54 hours to 48 hours. The unions negotiated by agreeing to a concession of a corresponding cut in wages, which were already below the cost of living.  In response the workers, including many veterans of the 1912 conflict, spontaneously walked off the job on February 3, 1919.  Without the support of their union and with the local IWW presence reduced to a tiny branch and the whole union under heavy persecution due to the Red Scare, the workers called on three ministers, the Boston Comradeship, for assistance and to be the public spokesmen for the multi-ethnic strikers—Muste, Cedric Long, and Harold Rotzel.

These men were described in the press and in many historical accounts as the leaders of the strike, which is not quite accurate.  From their experience in 1912 the strike committee was effective in coordinating picketing, setting up strike kitchens, and running democratic meetings.  But the ministers, especially Muste, presented an articulate face to the press, much needed since the strikers spoke a cacophony of different languages.  Muste also brought his Fellowship of Reconciliation background to urge non-violence and train strikers to avoid clashes with company thugs, police, and the National Guard which was mobilized in response to early battles at the mill gates.

In fact, mill owners, Governor Calvin Coolidge, and local officials were eager to deploy deadly force to break the strike and teach the workers an intimidating lesson they would not soon forget.  On February 21 a group of about 3000 strikers meeting in an open area near a garbage dump,  were attacked by two squads of police who beat and arrested strikers and injured several unaffiliated bystanders. Courts upheld the charges brought against the unarmed strikers.  Muste began serious training in non-violence to prevent even more deadly confrontations.  In May the City received an anonymous donation of a machine gun which was deployed ostentatiously loaded with live ammunition and set up to rake the mass picket lines.  Muste trained the strikers to pass by, ignore taunts, and even to turn smiles on the gunners.  While the use of mass deadly force was averted, there were still regular attacks on picketers using truncheons, rifle butts and even bayonets.

Muste himself, now singled out by the authorities as a key troublemaker, was seized on a picket line and beaten insensible.  In jail he was denied medical treatment for his serious injuries and held for a week before his disturbing the peace charges were dropped.

Public sentiment began to swing toward the strikers, but both sides were near exhaustion as the strike wore on into late spring. 

The UTU, which had completely abandoned the workers when they rejected their deal, now re-entered the picture initiating secret negotiations with mill owners without the strikers’ knowledge or consent.  The union secured a 48-hour work week a 15% wage increase, more than the 12.5% increase the strike demanded. The mill owners accepted the terms since they were in needed to resume production but refused to negotiate directly with the strikers.

The workers were exhausted and starving.  Strike relief funds raised earlier from Boston liberals were long gone.  Reluctantly, they were prepared to end the strike.  Muste was about to make an announcement to the press when Coolidge called him in an announced the UTU secret deal as fait accompli.  Muste then insisted that the strikers would remain out unless there was a non-discrimination pledge added.  The bluff worked, the equally desperate owners agreed to the additional demand.  An end to the strike was announced on May 20 and the strikers returned to work.

It was one of the very few victories for labor in a year when most major strikes were crushed across the country including the Boston Police Strike, Steel Workers Strike, Chicago Packing House Workers Strike, actions in the coal fields of West Virginia, and IWW strikes in the Arizona copper mines and logging camps of the Pacific Northwest.  Muste was hailed as a labor hero and thrust into the national spotlight for the first time.

Disgusted with the UTU even during the strike Muste took time to travel to New York to participate in a convention of radical textile industry trade unionists—most of them Jewish, to plan the creation of a new, militant union.  The result was the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA).  Based on his triumph in Lawrence, Muste was elected Secretary of the fledgling union shepherding it through the growing pains of its first two years.

That required moving to New York City.  When he left that job in 1921 Muste became the first Chairman of the faculty at Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, where he remained from 1921 to 1933.  He had become an acknowledged leader of the labor movement which he continued to influence by his writing.  

Muste broke with his old friend and mentor John Dewey over trying to recruit Senator George Norris of Nebraska to head up a new labor oriented political party.

He also turned his attention to politics as the old Socialist Party split with many radicals joining competing Communist parties and local organization badly damaged by the suppression of the Red Scare era including the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs for his outspoken opposition to the war.  Muste wanted to find a working class independent political party as real alternative to the binary Capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans.  He collaborated with his old friend and mentor John Dewey in the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA), which was groping toward establishing a Labor party.  But he withdrew his support in 1930 when Dewey tried to recruit liberal Republican Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska to head up the new party.  Muste avowed that any labor party must arise organically from the working class, not be imposed from the top down by a supposed savior.  It was a bitter parting of the ways between the old friends.

But his enthusiasm for a labor party brought him closer to the Trotskyists who had been driven from the Communist Party and for whom creation of a Labor Party was a critical step toward revolution.  In 1933 he founded a new organization, the American Workers Party (AWP) largely from supporters in the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) which he had founded back in 1929 to find an alternative to the conservative leadership of William Green and the AFL.  Since both groups were dominated by Muste, the Communist press took to calling the AWP Musteite.  They did not mean that as a compliment.

In 1934 members of an AFL Federated Labor Union (FLU)—William Green’s temporary hybrid industrial union structure meant to be broken up into craft unions once recognition was achieved—walked out on Auto-Lite in Toledo, Ohio.   It was part of a broader effort in the auto industry but the FLU structure was cumbersome and ineffective.  Toledo was also a stronghold of the AWP where they had organized a strong Lucas County Unemployed League (LCUL) mostly to prevent the unemployed from being recruited as strike breakers.  Getting little effective support from either the AFL or the local Central Labor Council, strikers invited the AWP to assist them.  National Executive Secretary Louis F. Budenz arrived in Toledo and was consulting with strikers in April.  Increasingly the AWP took a leadership role in the strike.

They ringed the plant with thousands of their Unemployed organization members to prevent access by scabs and delivery of supplies or shipment of products.  Auto-Lite obtained an injunction against the mass picketing which the AWP announced publicly that they would defy.  Unemployed League leaders Ted Selander and Sam Pollock and other pickets were arrested on May 11 and dozens more were arrested daily as Selander and Pollock were prosecuted in a well-publicized and lengthy trial.

Meanwhile the company recruited 1,500 strike breakers and hired private gun thugs to protect them.  They also stockpiled $11,000 worth of tear and vomit gas and stored them in the plant.    On May 21 the AWP leaders responded with 1000 on the picket line and re-enforced that to more than 4000 the next day 6000 on May 23.  It was Muste’s mass-nonviolence in effective action.

Frank Hubay was shot and killed during the Battle of Toledo in the 1934 Auto-Lite strike led by Muste's Amercan Workers Party (AWP).

Budenz and four picketers were arrested that day and an elderly picket severely beaten.  Infuriated the pickets broke non-violent discipline and began to pelt police with rocks and bottles.  They responded with fire hoses, which the strikers seized and turned back on them.  The Battle of Toledo was on.

Deputies and gun thugs began firing live ammunition from the roof of the plant and the air was thick with the sickening gas attacks.  Strikers and pickets responded by pelting the plant with rocks and bricks, breaking most of the windows and setting fire to cars in the parking lot.  Fighting continued for hours and two attempts to rush the plant were repelled.

The next day hundreds of Ohio National Guard troops arrived, most of them frightened teenagers.  That evening more than 6000 gathered at the plant in defiance of a fresh injunction as President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched Charles Phelps Taft II, the son of William Howard Taft, as an emergency mediator and William Green sent AFL organizer to try to regain control of the strikers.  Fighting and gas attacks resumed.  The Guard launched an unsuccessful bayonet attack and then unleashed a volley on the crowd killing strike supporters Frank Hubay and Steve Cyigon and wounding at least 15.  Ten Guardsmen were wounded by rocks.  Fighting spread over a six block area surrounding the plant.

Early on the morning of the 25 Auto-Lite agreed not to try and reopen the plant during the strike in an effort to stem the violence.  It did not work.  Later in the day company President Clement Miniger was arrested on charges reckless nuisance for allowing his security guards to bomb the neighborhood with tear gas.

Even the conservative Central Labor Union was so outraged that it threatened to call a General Strike.  Meanwhile strikers refused to accept a mediation deal worked out by Taft.  Troops made hundreds of arrests daily and controlled the streets at night by more bombing the neighborhood with gas.  Ted Selander was arrested by the National Guard and held incommunicado.  Taft ignored pleas from Muste to intervene to locate and free him. 

Violence subsided but did not end while Taft’s mediation efforts floundered and the company dug in on demands that the scabs it had hired, who had never even made it into the plant, be kept on as permanent replacements for the strikers.  The courts began processing the hundreds of contempt of court cases for breaking the injunctions and the ACLU’s General Council Arthur Garfield Hays came to town to personally handle the defense.  Muste barnstormed the country drumming up support for the strikers and made frequent trips to Toledo.

On May 29 the Central Labor Council voted to continue preparations for a general strike despite the panicked opposition of William Green. 

Taft kept negotiators in 24 hour session as 20,000 workers marched through the streets of Toledo peacefully supporting the strikers.  Desperate to bring things to a close before a strike the FLU local and Auto-Lite announced a settlement on June 2 calling for 5 % wage hike, and a minimum wage of 35 cents an hour with recognition of the FLU and  arbitration of grievances and wage demands.  Most controversially it called for a system of re-hiring which prioritized scabs that had crossed the picket line over workers who struck.  That provision caused Muste and Budenz to urge rejection of the contract.

Battle weary strikers, however voted in favor on June 3.  The Governor recalled the last of the Guard two days later and on June 6 Auto-Lite, kicking and screaming all of the way, re-hired the last of the strikers.  On June 9, the threatened General Strike date another 20,000 marched in triumphant celebration.  The FLU went on to successfully organize other Toledo auto industry plants and in 1935 became United Auto Workers Local 12.

Although as a pacifist Muste was appalled at the violence of the strike, he deeply appreciated the wide-spread solidarity that made it possible.  It also gave an enormous boost in prestige to his AWP.

Later that year Muste cemented his ties with the Trotskyists when he merged the AWP with their Communist League of America to form the Workers Party of the United States.  He looked forward to a new era of Socialist advancement and Labor progress.

But it did not take long for him to become disillusioned by his alliance with the Trotskyists.  As he was drawn into their inner-circle he was appalled by their authoritarianism and particular their bitter rivalry with the Communists Party which repeatedly disrupted working class solidary as each side did everything they could to sabotage the successful organizing efforts of the other placing their narrow party interests over the workers they supposedly represented. 

In 1936 he broke with the Workers Party and publicly rejected Marxian communism of all stripes.  He reclaimed a Christian socialist identity and his pacifist roots.

Muste served as Director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple in New York City from 1937 to 1940 and lectured a Union Theological School and Yale Divinity School.

                                    Musty as Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).

In 1940 Muste became Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and pacifism became the center of his activism the rest of his life.  It was hard and unpopular to be a pacifist during World War II when he was called on to support and defend draft resistors and it was emotionally draining for someone who was also a committed anti-fascist.  But Muste persisted. 

During the war years young Baynard Rustin became his friend and protégée.  As Rustin rose to behind the scenes leadership in the Civil Rights Movement as a top advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., strategist of  non-violent civil disobedience, and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, he said that he never made a difficult decision without talking about it with Muste first.

In the post-war era Muste spent a lot of time opposing the spread of nuclear weapons.  In 1951 he organized a group of 49 FOR supporters to file copies of Henry David Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience instead of their IRS 1040 Forms to protest the use of tax dollars for arms. 

Despite his current opposition to Marxism, Muste came to the defense of accused communists during the second red scare of the McCarthy Era which drew charges that he was a Communist himself.  He stood up to intrusive FBI investigations.

In 1956 he cofounded the important left/pacifist journal the The Progressive to which he contributed for the rest of his life.  He defied his right wing critics in 1957 by leading a delegation of pacifist and democratic observers to the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party.  He issued a report critical of the CPUSA but in support of its right to free public expression and political activity.

Muste and the Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day during their campaign against bomb shelters and  Civil Defense preparations.

Muste was on the National Committee of the War Resistors League and accepted their 1958 Peace award.  In the late 50’s and early ‘60’s he collaborated with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker’s Movement in opposition to bomb shelters and Civil Defense preparations in New York City for giving a false sense of security from nuclear annihilation.

The Vietnam War re-energized his aging bones later in the decade.  In addition to his articles in The Progressive, personal White House vigils, and work assembling the Mobe, Muste was part of a peace delegation of the Committee for Non-Violent Action to Saigon and Hanoi in 1966.  He was arrested, roughly handled, and deported from South Vietnam but was personally warmly greeted by Ho Chi Minh in the North.

The veteran pacifist spoke out against the Vietnam War.

It was one of his last public witnesses.  At his memorial service old friend and comrade Norman Thomas said that Muste had made a, “remarkable effort to show that pacifism was by no means passivism and that there could be such a thing as a non-violent social revolution.”

That about sums it up.