Latest / Pionerd / The Hub of Hell: The 1935 Flour City Iron Strike
Transcript
- INTRO: The Hub of Hell and the Open Shop It’s late summer, 1935, and the air along 27th Avenue South hangs heavy with the scent of coal smoke, hot iron, and brewing conflict. South Minneapolis is a working-class landscape carved up by the tracks of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. Near the tracks stands the massive five-acre complex of the Flour City Ornamental Iron Works. Inside, skilled immigrant craftsmen shape bronze and iron into decorative fixtures for landmarks like the Foshay Tower, while mass-producing U.S. government armaments. Outside, the Great Depression grips the neighborhood in severe poverty. Factory workers face brutal hours and poverty wages, while an aggressive anti-union business syndicate vows to keep the city's workplaces closed to labor. As desperate laborers organize for basic survival, this industrial corner becomes a powder keg. The moral tension of a community is set to explode in the industrial blocks near 27th Avenue South and East 27th Street, a short distance from the Hub of Hell. ACT I: Steel Demands and Strikebreakers For over three decades, a powerful group called the Citizens Alliance held Minneapolis in an iron grip. They enforced an open-shop policy, using blacklists, industrial spies, and court orders to crush any attempt at union organizing, but the historic 1934 Teamsters strike proved that workers could stand up and win. Inspired by that victory, Machinists Local 1313 launched a campaign to organize 250 metalworkers across eight local foundries. Beginning July 11, 1935, the union organized a strike against local shops, picketing the Flour City plant on July 12. Company owner Walter Tetzlaff was a committed member of the Citizens Alliance. He viewed union organizers as dangerous subversives, personally confronting strikers at the factory gates with a revolver. When company spies turned over the names of union supporters, Tetzlaff fired them immediately. The union held its ground, presenting clear demands: a forty-hour workweek, an eight-hour day, and a twenty-five-cent minimum hourly wage with overtime pay. Tetzlaff refused to bargain. Farmer-Labor Mayor Thomas Latimer soon intervened, promising police protection to non-striking workers. On July 26, police escorted employees into the plant, touching off a violent melee that forced Tetzlaff to temporarily close the factory on July 28. On July 31, about fifty police officers helped strikebreakers pass through the lines once more. As they left that evening, nearly one thousand union sympathizers pelted them with rocks and bottles. Tetzlaff shut the gates again, but the conflict was far from over. ACT II: The Siege of 27th Avenue Inside the darkened factory, 26 people remained behind damaged, shuttered windows. The Minneapolis Labor Review reported that twenty of them were private detectives, while other accounts describe armed guards and replacement workers brought in from Chicago. Plant owner Walter Tetzlaff provided them food and cots, housing replacement workers directly inside the complex in violation of Minneapolis city housing ordinances. Outside, the street belonged to the neighborhood. Night after night, angry crowds marched along 27th Avenue South. Rocks shattered glass across the five-acre facade, sending the sharp sound of breaking windows ringing through the night. Tetzlaff refused to yield. After the September 9 demonstration, he demanded that Minneapolis police prevent further gatherings around the plant. The response was swift. Members of Teamsters Local 574 joined the picket lines alongside Machinists Local 1313 and local residents. By Tuesday night, September 10, the crowd swelled to over five thousand people. Over one hundred Minneapolis police officers converged on the scene in squad cars, motorcycles, and heavy armored vehicles. Tensions boiled over just before midnight. Police charged the crowd as armored cars fired tear gas, while the dense gathering brought streetcar traffic to a halt. Officers drove men, women, and children down narrow alleys and into a vacant field by the railroad tracks, making no distinction between picketers and neighborhood spectators. Gas clouds rolled through the streets, becoming so thick that local bars and businesses were forced to close. Driven from their own front lawns, angry residents regrouped in the dark. Hand-to-hand fighting erupted across the neighborhood as the crowd refused to back down. ACT III: Midnight Crossfire at the Hub Wednesday night, September 11, brought no relief. By nine o'clock, five thousand workers and neighbors filled the streets surrounding the plant. A double shift of police lined the pavement alongside armored cars. At eleven o'clock, police unleashed another barrage of tear gas. When asked later who initiated the chaos, Police Inspector Fritz Ohman admitted, "It just started. No one knows just how." Instead of scattering, desperate strikers rushed back into the cloud, urging the crowd to stand firm. Minutes later, gunfire shattered the darkness. Police used pistols, riot guns, armored cars, and tear gas as the confrontation erupted. Gunfire came from the direction of the plant and a vacant field near the railroad tracks, though investigators never established who fired first. Street fighting descended into urban guerrilla warfare. Stella Thompson was struck directly in the face by a teargas bomb as she stepped off a streetcar. In a later interview, thirteen-year-old Marjorie Hall recalled terrified neighbors fleeing onto her front steps near 26th Avenue while club-wielding officers pursued them. Neighboring resident Mrs. Ebert testified at a public hearing that over a hundred people sought refuge in her yard before officers opened fire, sending a stray bullet through her window and into her arm. Uninvolved bystanders paid the ultimate price. Twenty-one-year-old Melvin Bjorkland was killed while walking through the neighborhood after a church social, while eighteen-year-old Eugene Cooper was shot in the chest as he watched from the sidelines. The Minneapolis Journal described General Hospital’s receiving room as resembling a wartime field hospital, with twenty-eight people treated for injuries from gunfire, clubs, thrown objects, and tear gas. By two in the morning, the shooting stopped, leaving two young men dead on the bloodstained pavement. ACT IV: Political Fallout and the Shattered Mirror Dawn broke on September 12 over a city stunned by violence. The deaths of two innocent young men sparked immediate rage across the working class. Governor Floyd B. Olson moved to close the Flour City plant, backing the order with the threat of martial law. Mayor Thomas Latimer faced intense public condemnation. On the evening of September 12, a packed Eagles Hall of angry Farmer-Labor Party members denounced the mayor. According to historical meeting transcripts, Teamsters Local 574 President Bill Brown publicly condemned Latimer for turning municipal police against the very workers, who elected him. As Latimer exited the hall, an enraged ironworker struck him in the mouth before bodyguards rushed him to his limousine. The unrest spread to the streets the following afternoon. On September 13, thousands of unemployed workers and union members marched down Nicollet Avenue toward City Hall to demand welfare relief. Police met the demonstrators with tear gas, further inflaming public anger. A Hennepin County Grand Jury eventually exonerated the police entirely, claiming officers merely did their best against crowds seeking excitement. Federal officials threatened to shift Flour City’s government contracts to another foundry unless production resumed. Tetzlaff finally broke. On September 21, Tetzlaff and other ironworking employers accepted terms including a forty-hour week, wage increases, and overtime, though Tetzlaff still refused to recognize the union. Labor won important wage and hour gains, delivering another blow to the Citizens Alliance's open-shop system. The conflict badly damaged Latimer’s standing with labor supporters, and he was not reelected in 1937. CONCLUSION: The Tempered Iron of 27th Avenue Today, the five-acre complex at 2637 27th Avenue South no longer echoes with the heavy thud of metal fabrication. The former Flour City plant stands quietly as the Ivy Building for the Arts, housing local painters, sculptors, and creative studios. Yet history lives in these walls. The blood spilled on the pavement in September 1935 helped forge the modern middle class, securing basic workplace dignity for generations of Minnesotans. That sacrifice shattered a thirty-year open-shop monopoly and proved that ordinary working people could unite to shape their own destiny. The exquisite ironwork crafted inside this factory still adorns the Foshay Tower and the Cathedral of Saint Paul. It remains a permanent, silent monument to human resilience, reminding us that every right we enjoy today was built on the courage of those who came before us.