The Lineage of a Minnesota 15 Activist

(l-r) Betty and Mary Katherine Finegan (submitted photo)

In the late 1930s, after hearing Dorothy Day speak in New York City about the Catholic Workers Movement, Elizabeth Finegan (Betty) and her older sister Mary Katherine helped start the St Joseph House for Hospitality in Rochester, New York. Eventually, they joined an artist community in Newport, Rhode Island, run by Adélaide de Bethune, a Belgian-American artist associated with the Catholic Worker Movement.

A stone-carving business nearby employed Carlos Cotton, who had graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Mary Katherine and Carlos met and eventually moved together to Minnesota, where they bought a farm; Carlos worked at Cold Spring Granite and did some carving for St. John’s Abbey on the side. One of his colleagues was Leonard Doyle. When Betty came out to visit, with no intention of staying, she met Leonard at a chicken dinner at the farm. He had arrived with a priest by bicycle, and Leonard and Betty “hit it off immediately,” according to their son Kevin.

Betty Finegan as a teenager in the 1930s

What sealed it for Leonard was her humor. At their second meeting, when Betty was knitting a mitten that wasn’t turning out well, she asked him, “You wouldn’t happen to know someone with a misshapen hand, would you?” Says Kevin, “And that was it, apparently.” They were engaged within ten days.

Their son Kevin would go on to marry Wendy Schoen. She was a cable splicer for the Bell System, a large group of telecommunication companies, based in Saint Cloud. In 1983, she went on strike as a member of the Communication Workers of America shortly before the conglomerate broke up.

From this lineage, now firmly settled into central Minnesota, was “raised a generation of activists,” according to Emmett Doyle, one of Betty’s grandsons — son of Kevin and Wendy.

Today, Emmett Doyle is one of the Minnesota 15 who have been indicted on federal charges of conspiracy against federal ICE officers. Although his family has been politically active for the better part of a century, he attributes his own activism to his older sisters, saying that his parents “didn’t really talk about their activist pasts until we independently started expressing ourselves.”

Doyle family in 1960s

A Bridge to Vietnam War Protests

Emmett and his father Kevin Doyle shared a story about Betty, who passed away in 2011. She had participated in Vietnam antiwar protests. On April 30, 1970, Nixon gave an address to the nation announcing the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. ground troops, a major expansion of the Vietnam War at a time when there was already large public opposition to the war. By May 4, Betty and many of her children were working in organized groups to protest and call for an end to the war and to the draft.

As Kevin recalls, on May 4: “There was a protest scheduled, starting at St. Cloud State University. The crowd was very angry and boisterous. The crowd began a march from the University campus to downtown St. Cloud to the Federal Building. When we reached Division Street — the main crossing of the Mississippi River in St. Cloud — the crowd sat down and blocked the entire highway, with traffic quickly building up in both directions. A trucker was furious and gunned his engine and warned that he was going to drive over anyone in his way. The crowd parted for a brief minute and let him pass, and then quickly blocked the road again.  A few police showed up. We were near the front of the crowd, when a young policeman noticed that his revolver had been stolen from his hip holster. Scared and not knowing who had taken his gun, he simply grabbed the first person he could, which was a young college student who happened to be in the front of the crowd.  The rookie had his arm around the student’s neck and was shouting for his gun to be returned.”

With the volitality of the moment at a height, Betty stepped forward and said, “Why don’t you take me instead? This man had nothing to do with your gun being stolen!”

As she continued to insist that the police officer let the student go and hold her instead, someone shouted that he had seen someone throw the revolver off the bridge into the Mississippi River. Kevin says a senior officer arrived and ordered the young cop to release his hostage, “and things cooled down. It made quite an impression on me, as a 14-year-old activist. Later that night, we found out that the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on unarmed protestors at Kent State, and had murdered four young people.”

Kevin shared another story about his mother, from the 1968 DFL county convention, when his bearded father was running for county chair of the DFL. He was running as a “dove” against a candidate who was pro-Vietnam War. She overheard a woman she did not know tell another, “I wouldn’t vote for that old goat if he were the last man in the world!” Betty Doyle wasn’t the type to let a comment like that go; she leaned in and quietly told the women, “That old goat happens to be my husband.”

Rooted in Pride

Emmett Doyle and his grandmother Betty in 2008

Doyle’s activist roots are a source of pride for him, and the parallels between his personal history and the accusations that he faces now from the federal government strengthen that connection. He recognizes the historic similarities between this case and the many social justice movements his family was involved in for decades.

His Minnesota roots also are in local music. Despite the current turmoil in his life, he says that he thinks performing is important because “music as an art form has a very unique ability to connect with people emotionally in a way that other delivery methods for the works often don’t.” While he was held in a cell by federal agents, he sang as a way to connect with people in cells that he could not see.

Many of his Tuesday nights involve open mic performances at the Chatterbox Pub in Minneapolis. He performed at an August Solidarity picnic, as well as in the Fringe Festival. His band, The Last Words, was a featured act at the Conspiracy to Rock benefit at the Cedar Cultural Center, which raised money for the Minnesota 15’s legal expenses.

Doyle says “it was very cathartic for a lot of our codefendants to be in a room with hundreds of people chanting in support of them.” 

MN Workers United promo

The Minnesota 15 have been accused of interfering with ICE operations in the Twin Cities this past winter. If convicted, Doyle is facing up to six years in federal prison. He and Minnesota AFL-CIO director Bernie Burnham see this indictment as a symbolic warning for anyone who publicly denounces Trump’s actions as president. 

In a response to a New York Times article on how the Minnesota 15 have been targeted by the federal government — with others to come, likely from labor organizations — Burnham said the federal strategy is “bringing back McCarthyism to paint unions and organizations that advocate for workers and families as threats to the nation.”

Doyle also stresses the anti-queer aspect of the indictment. [See a related story here.]

Doyle is confident in the legal support he has found, although he also says, “I’m not going to block off any hard commitments for the next eight years or so of my life.”

He also notes that social movements need “to not only value the people who are on the front lines, but to value the people who are doing the administrative labor, the care, and legal support for arrestees.”

He indicates this level of solidarity, between men and women, between those actively being oppressed and those who are witnessing it, is what gives him the most hope going forward. 

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