"...Van Lear was Minneapolis' first Socialist mayor, elected on a platform of not only good-government reform (in other words, combatting the Swedish-American and Irish-American machine in the city, which appealed enormously to Norwegians and progressive middle class swing voters who had previously skewed Liberal) but also on a platform of tending to the veterans of the war returning in droves by November of 1916 from the front or discharged. By the Red Summer of 1917, as it came to be called due to the boiling-over political events on both sides of the Ohio, Minneapolis was awash in unemployed laborers whom Van Lear had made it a key of his political platform to help.
By the standards of Socialist candidates of the time, Van Lear was not particularly radical. He had been one of the party's most full-throated supporters of the war, in contrast with ultra-pacifist figures like Haywood who had with their stance driven themselves into irrelevancy. His program for urban reform looked more like that of men like former Cleveland Mayor (and Democratic Vice President) Tom Johnson than genuine iconoclasts like Milwaukee's Seidel or Seattle's Wells. Indeed, his main priority was growing the labor movement as a whole, butting heads with a city council narrowly controlled by the machine and its business allies and he refused to actively ban the IWW's activities in the city, or to prevent city unions from associating with it, which endeared him to Haywood.
The General Strike thus proved a crucial moment early in his two-year tenure as Mayor. Within a week of the first walk-off on June 1st, thousands of additional workers from all manner of industries had joined in on a massive sympathy strike, technically illegal under Minnesota law, even though they were technically only targeting General Mills specifically. For the first eleven days of the strike, the mood was peaceful and almost that of a festival atmosphere; children played under the supervision of their picketing parents, there were small cooktops brought out to make meals, and Norwegian and Finnish flags were flown alongside the American one and the red socialist banner as folk songs in native languages were sung. Van Lear made his critical choice on June 12th, when under severe pressure from the city council, especially its President, J.E. Meyers, he formally rejected a proclamation by the council demanding all strikers in Minneapolis immediately go home and attempting to compel the Mayor to deploy the police against the strikers. The next day, in a meeting with the head of the Minneapolis Police Association - one of the first cities where the police informally organized, if still unchartered and technically not a union - Van Lear made it clear that he would not retaliate against officers who joined the picket lines and would "look favorably" upon attempts to formally organize not merely as a chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police but as a genuine union after the strike if they would so please, a move that was popular with many of the rank-and-file but was vehemently opposed by the city council once word reached them of the meeting.
At this point, deep into the second week of the strike, sympathy actions had begun across Minnesota and even into northern Wisconsin and Michigan, now expanding to include Hormel Foods, another major agricultural producer in the region, as well as subsidiary mines in the Iron Range and Upper Peninsula that supplied US Steel or National Lead. Rail workers in Duluth went so far as to seize the railyards and declared that they would block all commerce coming in and out of the city until ARU members in Minnesota and Wisconsin were given a 20% pay raise to account for skyrocketing costs of consumer goods and agreed-upon wage controls during the war. The situation had rapidly spiraled out of control and was no longer simply a matter for Minneapolis; much of the Upper Midwest seemed ready to combust..."
- The American Socialists
"...politicians sympathetic to organized labor such as Wisconsin's LaFollette were hesitant to so openly embrace the strikes, especially as the incendiary Bill Haywood arrived in Minneapolis on June 20th to appear with the strikers and pronounced that the city was in a "revolutionary fervor" and suggested "the Lexington and Concord of the American laborer." The introduction of syndicalist organizing to the equation, and the considerably more radical direction that sympathy strikes were taking in Duluth and with dairy farmers hoarding their stock rather than sell it to Hormel across Minnesota, began to openly worry many leaders, and pressure fell instantly on Governor Charles August Lindbergh, a newly-elected Democrat who had been a long-serving Congressman and had been born in Sweden, making him the perfect profile for his state.
Lindbergh was a progressive Democrat whose sympathies had always lay with the outer bounds of policy ideas proposed by the agrarian wing of his party (he had supported William Jennings Bryan at the 1912 convention, for instance) but despite having represented a district in central Minnesota's farm belt had maintained good relations with the urban faction of the party, especially with "St. Paul Gang" which was regarded as the more conservative wing and was centered in the businesslike, professional state capital. As Governor, Lindbergh had entered office with an ambitious program of reform he had hoped to maneuver through factionalized but collaborative Democratic majorities in the state legislature, and he was loathe to see this agenda derailed by the strike. It was also the case that his sympathies were very clearly with the strikers, even as he stayed put in St. Paul and refused to "cross the river" to address the issue, maintaining until late in June that it was a matter for General Mills, Hormel and the United States Railroad Administration to solve with their employees. As such, he declined to intervene against Van Lear when the latter did not call out the police to crush the strikes as they grew increasingly rowdy and militant, and would also not call up the Minnesota National Guard to keep order.
Lindbergh's choice was probably wrong in the short term for him, though today he is well-regarded in Minnesotan politics for it. It was reflective of an increasing view amongst Democratic officeholders that held that the power of the state should not be brought about to bear to settle otherwise peaceful private disputes, and that the role of the government should be one of facilitator, arbitrator and negotiator, not enforcer. It was this thread that had brought about the Labor Board of Arbitration at the federal level in 1905 under President Hearst, and Minnesota's own boardmembers were hard at work trying to hammer out a solution, even as General Mills and Hormel dragged their feet as they were of the view that they would not negotiate until the strike ended (Minnesota law allowed arbitration to go on during a strike, not purely before or after one). Federal officeholders had different ideas, however, and the rhetoric emerging from Haywood and others in Minneapolis was starting to worry them. Accordingly, on June 28th, Attorney General Willis Van Devanter sought an injunction in the District Court of Minnesota against striking railroad workers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and after securing it turned around on July 2nd and requested an injunction against the rest of the strikers..."
- Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31