Latest / Pionerd / War, Betrayal, and the Secret Buttons: Inside the 1917 Twin Cities Transit Strike
Transcript
- Intro: The War at Home On Saturday, October 6, 1917, Twin Cities transit lines came to a halt. Motormen pulled late-night owl cars into the carbarns and stepped off their platforms, leaving 450 miles of quiet track behind. By dawn, a transit system moving thousands of daily commuters sat paralyzed. Young Americans were being shipped across the Atlantic to World War I. At home, state officials branded any workplace protest as wartime treason. Yet for streetcar crews working twelve-hour shifts under frozen wages and soaring inflation, staying silent was no longer an option. To feed their families, they could no longer surrender their civil liberties to a state-backed corporate monopoly. They chose to stand together, risking their livelihoods, and shut down the transit system. Act I: The Nickel and the Cap Button Inside the corporate offices of the Twin City Rapid Transit Company (TCRT), president Horace Lowry managed a transportation monopoly. Every day, hundreds of motormen and conductors stepped onto heavy wood-and-steel streetcars. They worked 10 to 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, with no overtime pay or guaranteed day off, while wartime inflation pushed the cost of basic family necessities out of reach. By August 1917, the pressure reached a breaking point. Motormen began meeting in secret, contacting the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees. They asked for better working conditions and a modest three-cent-an-hour wage increase. When 32 workers met quietly on September 23 to organize, word quickly reached company headquarters. Horace Lowry moved aggressively to crush the effort. On September 25, he identified and fired twenty of the men who attended the meeting. To bribe the remaining workforce, Lowry offered a ten percent wage increase. The workers stood firm and rejected it because the offer excluded their discharged brothers. Lowry responded by firing 37 more union sympathizers. With every diplomatic channel closed, the workers chose to strike. At 1:00 AM on Saturday, October 6, streetcar operators walked off the job. Company leaders immediately called upon state power. Hennepin County Sheriff Otto Langum mobilized 600 already-deputized members of the Minneapolis Civilian Auxiliary, led by Colonel Perry Harrison and Major Henry Bellows. According to local police logs, these armed businessmen established field headquarters inside the Hennepin County Courthouse. Equipped with military rifles, the auxiliary units marched directly to the carbarn at Washington Avenue and 24th Street North, taking up armed positions to guard non-union drivers and protect corporate property. Act II: Mobilization and the War of St. Paul In Minneapolis, heavily armed deputies maintained a rigid order. Across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, where organized labor held political sway, local police refused to crush the strike. Peaceful picketing quickly transformed into open resistance as thousands of sympathetic citizens flooded downtown streets. On the evening of October 6, a crowd of 3,000 rioters converged at 7th Street and Wabasha Street. According to newspaper reports in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, angry crowds attacked passing streetcars, smashed glass windows, and disabled mechanical brakes. Protesters tore up paving stones and piled heavy debris across the rails. In the dark corridor of the Selby Avenue Tunnel, rioters severed trolley cables, stranding commuters and forcing terrified passengers to stumble out into the night. By 11:00 PM, the company shut down streetcar service in St. Paul. Minnesota Governor J.A.A. Burnquist took drastic action, calling in 500 federal soldiers from Fort Snelling equipped with fixed bayonets to patrol city streets. On October 9, the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, led by Governor Burnquist, stepped in to halt the crisis. The commission ordered strikers back to work while forcing the company to reinstate 49 discharged drivers. Horace Lowry complied on paper but immediately plotted his revenge. He formed a company union called the Trainmen’s Cooperative and Protective Association, issuing official blue buttons for workers to wear on their caps. Union members responded by wearing yellow buttons. The workplace divided instantly. According to local union records, passengers spat on nickel fares handed to blue-button drivers. Tensions reached a breaking point on November 25, when Lowry enforced a lockout of 800 union workers, who refused to strip off their yellow buttons. Act III: The Rice Park Explosion and the Four-Hour Strike Winter arrived early in December, locking the Twin Cities in sub-zero frost. On Sunday, December 2, 2,500 union workers and citizens gathered at Rice Park in downtown St. Paul. They listened to fiery speeches from labor organizers and Nonpartisan League attorney James Manahan. As the rally ended, frustration exploded once more into the streets. Protesters swarmed downtown transit corridors, targeting non-union replacement operators. According to reports in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, rioters injured fifty non-union drivers and overturned several trolley cars. In response, the company withdrew its streetcars and cut power to the trolley lines, leaving St. Paul temporarily without transit service. Governor Burnquist cracked down with immediate military force. He removed Ramsey County Sheriff John Wagener for failing to suppress the crowds. He mobilized Minnesota Home Guard units from across the state, bringing armed troops into St. Paul on trains from Morris, Crookston, Duluth, Red Wing, and Austin. Soldiers set up armed checkpoints in temperatures dropping to 25 degrees below zero. From Washington, federal officials watched the escalating home-front crisis with alarm. U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and AFL President Samuel Gompers urged Governor Burnquist to accept federal mediation. Burnquist refused, insisting on absolute state authority. Pushed to the brink, Minnesota State Federation of Labor President E.G. Hall called a Twin Cities general strike for 10:00 AM on December 13. Over 10,000 industrial workers walked off their jobs across Minneapolis and St. Paul. The urban core ground to a sudden halt. According to historical union bulletins, E.G. Hall called off the strike after exactly three and a half hours, when Washington announced that President Woodrow Wilson's Mediation Commission was officially stepping in to hold hearings in Minnesota. Act IV: The Illusion of Arbitration Inside the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, federal mediators listened to weeks of bitter testimony. On February 14, 1918, President Wilson’s commission delivered its final report. They recommended that the Twin City Rapid Transit Company rehire all union workers at their full pre-strike status and wages, calling for an immediate end to workplace discrimination. The workers believed they had won, but state authority stood in their way. Horace Lowry flatly refused to obey the federal recommendations. Governor Burnquist and the Public Safety Commission backed the transit magnate, declaring that national intervention infringed on Minnesota's state authority. Federal mediators possessed no legal power to enforce their own findings. TCRT began recruiting non-union replacement drivers from rural farming communities. The company union tightened its grip on the carbarns. On April 16, 1918, the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety imposed an industrial status quo order that severely restricted union activity, effectively stripping transit workers of their right to organize on company property. For over a year, union leaders appealed their case to higher authorities. They took their fight all the way to the newly established National War Labor Board in Washington, but on April 10, 1919, federal officials officially dismissed their case. They ruled that local transit disputes fell entirely under state authority. The legal battle was over. The strike had failed, leaving 800 families blacklisted, jobless, and abandoned by the state. Conclusion: Seeds in the Frozen Tracks Horace Lowry won his battle against the union, but he destroyed the public's trust in his transit empire. Over the next decade, disillusioned Minnesotans turned away from streetcars and bought automobiles, setting TCRT on a long, irreversible decline toward public takeover. Yet the sacrifices of 1917 through 1919 were not made in vain. That bitter winter forged an unprecedented alliance between urban trade unions and James Manahan's agrarian Nonpartisan League in Rice Park. From those frozen streets grew the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party, reshaping regional politics for generations and laying the foundation for today's Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. In 1934, Twin Cities transit workers stood together once more, finally winning recognition under the Amalgamated. TCRT eventually collapsed, giving way to public ownership in 1970. Today, when Metro Transit trains glide along Twin Cities rail corridors, they travel the very same routes where 800 workers once stood up for their dignity. Modern blue-and-yellow trains run for safety aesthetics, but to anyone who knows the story, those colors are a quiet, accidental echo of the union buttons worn on the cold night the streetcars stopped.