Attacks on 1916 Immigrant Miner Families in Northern Minnesota

During the height of Operation Metro Surge, my Filipino husband barely left the house. Although he was born in the United States and is an accomplished scientist, his brown skin made him a target for Trump’s thugs. I thought about my grandmother, whose immigrant family was also the target of state-sanctioned goons in northern Minnesota in the early 1900s.

Decades after her death, I can still see her, propped up in her ratty velvet gold chair, knitting needles clacking, laughing and spinning tales that would last longer than the beautiful scarves and mittens she created when she wasn’t cooking. But there were some things she could not talk about.

Grandma was the first in her family to be born in America. Her mother, siblings and most of her ancestors were born in Slovenia. Her father was from Croatia. Her parents were gifted musicians in the old country, but after arriving in Ely at the turn of the century they were considered “next to nothing,” Grandma would tell me. 

Her father labored in the mines. Her mother opened their house to take in unmarried miners. My grandmother spent her childhood cooking and cleaning for miners in the boarding house. It was so much work, she told me, that she married the first man who asked her, “just to get a break, you know?” She was 14 years old. Grandma would go on to have 13 children, including two sets of twins, so I’m pretty sure she never got that break. 

When I asked if raising so many children was difficult, my grandmother did not demur like some women. “Of course. You know, the men, always complaining about their unfair working conditions. They complain about the shift work. But we women, we work every shift. When the babies cried at night, it was our shift. When the wood needed chopping, it was our shift. When the men needed feeding it was our shift. We had the day shift, the night shift.

“My mother always said, ‘Women hold up three corners of the house.’ But during the strike, we held up four.”

The strike? What strike? 

“I can’t talk about that,” she said. “It makes my heart hurt.”

She was talking about the Northern Minnesota miners’ strike of 1916 — a strike that I would later research in depth and that would anchor my historical fiction novel Under Ground.

In 1916, 37 languages were spoken in the Iron Range town where I was raised. Immigrants were recruited from across the globe to work in the iron mines that made 80 percent of the steel in the world. Conditions for the miners were dangerous. According to Minnesota’s Iron Country: Rich Ore, Rich Lives,” when men tried to organize in unions that year, sometimes the company would roll boulders down the shafts, killing or maiming the workers. Conditions for the women and children in the mining locations were deplorable. 

At that time, most labor unions were not open to immigrants or Black people. The exception was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies. The Iron Range miners organized in secret against U.S. Steel. They organized in secret. Some of the leaders were women. When the governor declared it illegal for men to gather in groups of three or more, the women took over. 

The strike was brutal and violent. Company thugs authorized by the state government terrified the immigrant strikers and sexually abused their wives. Minnesota Governor Joseph A.A. Burnquist authorized aggressive state crackdowns. It was so traumatic, many people on the Iron Range, like my grandmother, rarely spoke of it. 

When I was researching my novel, I found a few Iron Rangers who told me stories of what their parents had experienced. Those interviews still stick with me. The stories were full of unwarranted shame. There were muffled tears. Trauma doesn’t have a timeline.  

The miners were eventually starved into returning to work. However, because the company lost so much money, they were terrified of the workers waging another strike. It is not strikes themselves that lead to better conditions; it is the fear of strikes. It is knowing that the people can, and will, rise up against seemingly insurmountable odds.

The following year, the immigrant miners of Minnesota’s Iron Range got nearly everything they asked for: including an eight-hour work day, pay days twice a month, and an end to a corrupt system that paid them by the cartload and not by the hour. 

Thinking of my grandmother helped me get through Operation Metro Surge. Minnesota experienced so much trauma this year, personally and economically. Just as in 1916, there are businesses that will never recover, and trauma that will span generations. I am not so naive as to think it is over; people are still getting racially profiled and kidnapped in our state. And it may ramp up again in November. But resistance matters. The big actions matter. The little actions matter. 

It helps to know that women know how to stand up to corporations, to evil, to injustice.

 

Megan Marsnik (she/her) is the author of Under Ground, a historical fiction novel that chronicles the struggles and triumphs of Katka Kovich, a young woman who emigrates to northern Minnesota from Slovenia and becomes embroiled in the immigrant labor uprising and miners’ strike of 1916.  She recently retired from teaching, after more than 30 years at Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

Related Resources

Under Ground by Megan Marsnik

Rebel Girls: Women in the Mesabi Iron Range Strike of 1916

The 1916 Iron Range Strike Against U.S. Steel

Excerpt: The recent immigrant status of many of the strikers added to the tension in the range towns. A Hibbing clothing merchant complained, “It’s a fine state of affairs when American-born men are prevented from working by a bunch of foreigners.” Strikers’ News recognized the contradictory attitudes of Americans toward foreign workers: “It is true that there are many foreign-born among us, but — strangely enough — we are entirely welcome when we are willing to submit to industrial serfdom. Only when we demand our ‘rights to life, liberty and happiness’ so gloriously pictured as American, do we become undesirable foreigners. If we work cheaply at first … we are cursed for cutting down the American standard of living. When we awake to our possibilities in this country and organize to demand more we are told, ‘If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back to your own country?’”

Riot, Revolution, Repression, in the Iron Range Strike of 1916

More sources on the Iron Range strike from the Gale Family Library

 

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