The Northwoods has a deep and rich radical history. The resource extraction industries, like mining and logging, that have characterized this region's economy, has resulted in a harsh boom/bust type of economy that produced numerous labor union struggles and the creation of a number of socialist movements, as working people in this region have sought ways to fight back against the robber barons and their hirelings.
Following the coercive corralling of the indigenous population onto reservations, the robber barons proceeded to strip lumber, iron ore and other natural resources from the region in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tens of thousands of workers from throughout Europe and North America were recruited to come work in the mines and logging camps. Many companies intentionally recruited workers from a wide range of countries, to make it difficult for the workers to come together and form unions. For example, you could have a single mine with workers speaking Slovenian, Finnish, Slovakian, Italian, English, Ojibwe and Norwegian.
Many of these immigrant groups formed socialist federations that featured their own newspapers, meeting halls and various projects - like theater and dance groups. These groups were affiliated with the Socialist Party for the first two decades of the 20th Century. During this time the Socialist Party grew to become a major force in the region. Its candidate for president, Eugene Debs, visited the region in his red locomotive, and SP candidates were elected to local office from Two Harbors, MN to Ashland, WI.
The SP went into dramatic decline after World War I though in this region. This was largely because the bulk of its membership in the "foreign language federations" opted to join the new and more militant Communist Party in the early 1920s. This was particularly true of the Finnish Workers Federation, with set up an impressive network of workers' halls, cooperative stores and local clubs throughout northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They published a daily Finnish language newspaper out of Superior, WI (called "Tyomies") and even set up a cooperative park for workers outside of Hibbing, MN that still exists (the Mesaba Coop Park). The CP was able to briefly win the mayorship of Crosby and New York Mills, MN, as well as elect local councilors in places like Oulu, WI.
While earlier attempts to unionize the mines through groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had generally failed, beginning the 1930s there was a new, successful wave of union organizing that led to many of the factories and mines in the region being organized by the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Communist and other socialists played a key role in many of these organizing drives.
The Cooperative movement led by the Communists broke away in the early 1930s over disputes about money. A smaller network of Coop stores was set up by the CP called the Workers and Farmers Unity Alliance, but it failed to eclipse the much bigger Central Cooperative Wholesale, and eventually merged back into it. Over time the Coops became less and less political, and today the remnants of it (which are part of Midland) make no reference to their radical past.
The Communist Party saw many of its members drop away in the 1950s, particularly after the revelation of the crimes of Joseph Stalin. Another factor in their decline was the growing assimilation of the Finnish and other radical immigrant networks. But the biggest problem was the rampant anti-Communism that characterized the McCarthy era and afterwards.
The Socialist Party maintained a small presence up until at least the 1950s. The smaller Socialist Labor Party, which follows the ideas of Daniel DeLeon, had a small presence in the Duluth area until the late 1990s. And the Communist Party never fully went away, and to this day has a presence on the Iron Range, and in Ashland. In the 1970s, the Socialist Workers Party set up a branch on the Iron Range and for a number of years had a presence in the mines up there, along with a Pathfinder Bookstore in Virginia, MN. Their youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, had a presence at the University of MN-Duluth during the 1970s and early 80s.
While the previous radical movements didn't completely go away, by the 1990s you had to look pretty hard to find any of the remaining remnants. Partly for this reason, when a group of working class students in northern Wisconsin started looking for a political home in the mid-1990s, they ended up joining a group that hadn't previously had a presence in this region - Socialist Action. Socialist Action was a small, buy dynamic group of revolutionary socialists based in San Francisco. Its founding members had come out of the Socialist Workers Party. The Northland College students found Socialist Action on a new platform that the far left was just beginning to use - the internet. Northland College is a private school, and rather expensive. But it's focus on environmental issues does attract a broad range of students from across the country, including a small layer of working class students who had come together in 1996 and formed a socialist club. Alienated by the middle class pretensions of some in the environmental movement, this group was looking for a political group that understood the value of social movements, like the environmental movement, but that still firmly rooted itself in the workers' movement. In 1997 this group of students, after a number of meetings and exchanged visits, joined Socialist Action, and set up a student/youth group called Youth for Socialist Action.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the group put a lot of time and energy into organizing around Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner framed for the murder of a Philadelphia police office. YSA put on a series of successfully fundraising concerts, some of which attracted hundreds of young people. The group also did solidarity work on behalf of the striking newspaper workers in Detroit, in conjunction with the Ashland Trades & Labor Council.
After 9-11, Socialist Action threw itself into anti-war organizing. At this time the group began to expand geographically into the Twin Ports, and for a time to International Falls and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. YSA initiated a student anti-war network called Students Against War, that at it's height had chapters on 11 colleges and high schools across the region. And in the Twin Ports SA helped initiate the Northland Anti-War Coalition (NAWC) and in the Ashland area, Community & Students Against War (C-SAW). NAWC went on to organize some of the largest protests in the history of the region.
The 00s also saw SA and YSA get intimately involved in efforts to unionize Canal Park hotel workers, as well as other labor solidarity projects like the attempt to unionize Ashland group homes, the AMFA strike at the Duluth airport, the Spot Bar boycott in International Falls and the picketing of the Pickwick restaurant in Duluth. SA was also very active in the fight against the Arrowhead-Weston transmission line, and the feminist group, Militant Madonnas.
SA and YSA began hosting annual Camp Class Struggles, dozens of forums and panel discussions on current events, and a host of cultural events, from Red Poets on the Beach to our annual Marxmas holiday parties.
The 2010s saw the eruption of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the successful local offshoot - Project Save Our Homes - which used a variety of creative tactics to stop banks from foreclosing on a number of local homes. SA was also actively involved in the Homeless Bill of Rights campaign in Duluth.
Unfortunately in 2019, as a result of an ugly series of disputes in the national leadership, Socialist Action broke apart, and the local branch's two decades of organizing came to an end. This blog is set up by some of the veterans of those local efforts in hopes of rebuilding a socialist movement in the Northland. While for much of Lake Superior Socialist Action's history it was the only self-described socialist group in the region, today there are several - there is the Twin Ports DSA, Lake Superior Socialist Resurgence and the Communist Party of the Chequamegon Bay. We at the Northwoods Worker look forward to working with these new comrades, and hope that some of the lessons and experiences of the past decades will be useful going forward. The struggle continues!
>> The article above was written by Adam Ritscher.
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