“Local 574’s heroic struggle has become a national affair. Minneapolis has shown the country something new, and newspaper front pages everywhere carry our name.”

The Organizer, Vol. 1, Issue 37, Aug. 22, 1934.

***

“You can’t keep me locked up forever!” Jill shouted from the landing. “I’m almost sixteen years old—I have rights!”

Her Mama scoffed. “You have the right to go make your own living and find your own place to lay your head, but under this roof, the only right you have is to obey your mother.”

Jill slammed her door, taking vindictive pleasure in the crack of wood. If only Papa were here—he would have let her go with him to the union headquarters, to help at the commissary with the other women, to lend her strength to the fight. But he hadn’t been home for three day now, not since the first day of the strike.

Jill was used to her Papa being gone. At the warehouse where he worked unloading cars of fruit, the trains came and went on their own schedule. Papa and the other workers had to wait around for the late evening loads with no extra pay. His days seemed to stretch longer and longer lately, and the grocery budget wasn’t getting any easier for her mother to manage. Jill was getting worried about what they’d do when winter came and the heating and electric bills spiked. But more than that, she was worried about Papa. His back seemed permanently bent lately, an when she watched through her window for him to come home, she hardly recognized his shuffling gait. The past few months, the only thing that seemed to animate him was the plans for the strike.

He brought home each new issue of the strike paper, The Observer, and talked through all the issues with Jill, from how the union planned to take the unemployed under its wing to discourage scabbing, to the election of the 100-member strike committee. Jill saved each copy under her bed, studying them after school each day.

She spread the issues across her quilt now and sighed, imagining all of the work she could be doing at headquarters. The date on yesterday’s issue caught her eye: Wednesday, July 18, 1934. How could she have forgotten? Today was Thursday. And on Thursdays—

The front door creaked, and Jill cautiously peered out the window. Mama was striding down 38th Street toward Bloomington Avenue, on her way to her weekly shift at the soup kitchen.

Jill was on the next streetcar up Cedar Avenue, feeling an unfamiliar thrill rush down her spine. She was doing something all on her own, just because she knew it was right. Like the commuters and workers and even strikers with whom she shared the streetcar, she was free to go where she pleased and do what she liked. And what she wanted to do more than anything was join the union’s efforts.

The Local 574 headquarters on Eighth Street was everything she’d dreamed of. Union men bustled in and out of the building, shoulders squared and arms swinging with purpose. Papa was somewhere among them. She found a group of young women, a little older than her, at a long table near the front windows.

“Are you here to volunteer?” asked a woman in an ink-stained apron.

“Yes—I want to help,” Jill said eagerly.

“The other girls are rolling bandages and making sandwiches,” the girl said stoutly. “But if you’ve a steady hand, we could use help with the sign-writing.”

“I got an ‘excellent’ mark on my penmanship this year.”

The girl laughed. “That’ll do nicely. I’m Abigail. My beau is one of the striking truck drivers.”

“I’m Jill. My father’s part of the strike too—he’s a warehouse worker.”

“Thank you for joining the effort, Jill. We need all the help we can get.”

Abigail showed Jill around the bustling building. The front room was full of tables of smart-looking office women typing news and messages on rows of typewriters, girls like Jill writing messages on signs, and stout housekeepers peeling vegetables. The room behind that one was full of more tables, with a few groups of men or women drinking coffee, but mostly empty, waiting for the lunchtime rush. A smaller room off to the side held several makeshift cots and women in white hospital uniforms organizing supplies.

Finally, Abigail took Jill’s arm and led her to a row of cupboards on the far wall, expertly weaving around groups of animated men and precarious piles of signs and bulletins.

“You’ll need an apron and a marker pen,” Abigail said, handing Jill both items, “and then you can pull one of the sayings from the board.”

Jill examined the scraps of paper pinned to the wall. Hesitantly, she took the pin out of the shortest one, “Labor Stands United.” It was probably best to start with something simple.

“I wrote that myself,” Abigail said. “A lot of the early sayings were trucker-specific, but we wanted some slogans showing that all of the strikers are marching for the same things.”

“The right of workers to organize,” Jill said, laying out her supplies on the table.

“That and living wages,” said the young woman across from her. “Mary Louise,” she added. “My husband’s one of the legal staff for the union.”

Jill smiled, still finding it a little surreal that these women were accepting her among their number rather than sending her crawling home to Mama. As she settled in, focusing intently on the spacing of her letters, the sounds of headquarters buzzed in her ears and burrowed their way into her bones. Men shouted, debating next steps. The printing press whirring, spitting out the daily bulletins that would be delivered all across the city. Cyclists rang their bells outside, sometimes peering in through the window to bask in the energy of headquarters secondhand.

Hours passed, and Jill kept copying, moving onto new slogans like “Stand With Local 574.” She barely noticed when Abigail lit the gas lamps or when the women in the makeshift kitchen packed up their supplies.

She only looked up when a hand fell on her shoulder. Most of the women had left the table, but Abigail was standing behind her. “Take a break already. You’re no use to anyone if you write so much your hand falls off.”

“Besides,” Mary Louise added, sliding onto the bench next to Jill and passing her a sandwich. “Those are the very working conditions we’re protesting against.”

Jill held her shaking right hand steady with her left as she struggled to finish the last letters of “Better Working Conditions,” and reluctantly lowered her marker pen. She winced as she tried to straighten out her hand.

“Do you need to get home?” Abigail asked.

Jill hesitated, thinking of the firestorm waiting for her at home. “If I do, I won’t be able to come back tomorrow.”

Abigail and Mary Louise exchanged looks, and Abigail sighed. “I think it’s best—”

“Isn’t this the whole purpose of the movement?” Jill interrupted. “People having the right to choose how and where and for what purpose to devote their labor? I’m only trying to do the same thing.”

Mary Louise chuckled. “Let her stay, Abigail. We can send one of the errand boys home with a message for her mother.”

Abigail looked at the ceiling for a moment, then pinched her nose. “If I allow you to stay, you have to get some rest. Some of us women have bunks set up on the second floor. You can bunk with me tonight and then do another shift tomorrow, but after that, you’ll get on home. Deal?”

Jill nodded, barely keeping the grin off her face. She couldn’t wait to see what the morning would bring.

But in the morning, headquarters felt different. The air was charged, almost electric, and the hairs on Jill’s arms stood straight up from the second she came downstairs.

“There’s talk of bringing in the National Guard,” Mary Louise said.

“It’s more than talk,” said Abigail. “I heard there are thousands of guardsmen at Fort Snelling, waiting for martial law to be declared so they can bring military force down on the picketers.”

“As if the police aren’t doing enough damage all on their own,” Mary Louise scoffed.

Jill looked outside at the groups of men gathering, signs in hand, kerchiefs already wiping at brows as the July morning steamed. She still hadn’t seen Papa—she had tried to keep a low profile yesterday—but now she wondered if he was out there in the groups of men going to picket outside the loading docks.

Abigail deposited a stack of signs in front of her. “Alright ladies. I know we’re all aching like the devil, but we have a new set of messages today. We’re calling out the city and the governor for being useless sods.”

Some of the women cheered. Jill looked at her message: “Looking for Governor Olson?

Check big business’s pockets.” It was her longest yet, and it would take careful plotting to make sure it all fit.

She got the hang of it soon enough, but after only an hour of writing, she could barely grip the marker pen. She stood up to stretch, and that’s when she heard the sirens.

The first men to reach the headquarters were running, holding broken signs or clutching kerchiefs to their heads, trying to stem the flow of bloody wounds.

Jill and the other copyists rushed to the medical bay, helping to unroll bandages and fetch bowls of water for the nurses. After a few frantic moments, Jill looked up from her pile of bandages and found her Papa staring at her, his eyes wild.

“Jill? What are you—?”

“Papa, are you hurt? What do you need?”

“I’m fine, they didn’t touch me,” he said. He seemed poised to say more, but the next men were hobbling in, coming in groups of two or three, holding each other up. Jill and her Papa both ran to help some of the injured men to the medical bay.

The news that came was fragmented, but horrifying.

“They opened fire,” said a man with a goose egg the size of a baseball. “Fired their shotguns right at the picketer’s trucks and then came after the rest of us with their clubs.”

Jill was surprised to see a few women among the strikers. One of them held her arm at an awkward angle, and she grimaced as she came through the door. “Hit me with their billy,” she told one of the nurses.

The strikers who came back last of all were being carried. They were laid out on stretchers, and ambulances were soon racing between the headquarters and the downtown hospital.

The nurses who attended the wounded men began to murmur. Of the men with bullet wounds, almost all of them had been shot in the back.

One name began to ring through the air. Henry Ness was dead.

After several hours, things calmed. The men who needed the hospital had all been transported. The union nurses were cleaning the medical bay. The remaining picketers were subdued, and there were as many red-rimmed eyes as there were bruised ones.

Someone rang a bell. Union leader Frank Woodward climbed onto a chair at the back of the room, and everyone hushed.

Frank removed his hat.

“You’ve all heard the news about Henry by now. It’s a crying shame, there’s no way around that, but I hope all of you who knew Henry can take comfort in knowing that he wouldn’t have gone any other way. He fought for one Union in The Great War, and him and the boys sure as hell won that one. Now the only thing we can do for him is dedicate ourselves to winning this war too—for the union, and for Henry.

“I’ve spoken to his wife, and she agrees that we should give him the grandest send-off this city has ever seen. I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday for a funeral march down Washington Avenue, and tell all your friends. We’ll all keep praying for our wounded in the meantime, and hope none else join poor Henry.

“But there’s something else you oughta know,” Frank went on, replacing his hat. “The state has declared martial law. Do you all know what that means?”

Frank paused, but not a soul answered him.

“It means the government is ready for war. And make no mistake, it is an escalation of brutality and force that we have ahead of us, with the National Guard being called. But gentlemen—we have the advantage on the Guard.” Frank stared out at the sea of laborers, and when his eyes met Jill’s, she shivered in anticipation of the battle to come.

“The Guard is new to this fight, but we have been at war for weeks—nay, for months—nay, an entire lifetime of fighting for something more than a hard crust of bread for ourselves and our families! The Guard does not know that we were born into this war, a war that pits the exploited workingman against the class of leeches who think they have the right to rule over our labor like kings.

“But in this country, we bend our backs for no king!”

At these words, a cheer rose up, starting with the laborers nearest to Frank and rising until it hit the opposite wall. Next to Jill, Abigail and Mary Louise whooped until their voices grew hoarse. But Jill couldn’t make a sound.

After the fervor calmed, Jill picked up her marker pen and unrolled the next message she was assigned to copy. Stark words in black ink swam in her eyes. “Down With Police Terror Against Workers.”

Abigail sat down across from her and pushed a warm copy of the union’s newsletter, The Observer, into Jill’s hands. “There’s a message for you in this one,” she said softly. “Page 2.”

Jill opened the paper and found her name printed in the “News and Views” section: “Jill Hatch: Your mother says it’s fine to work at headquarters, but 24 hours straight is plenty. Come home and rest.”

Jill stared at the words, eyes stinging, until Abigail gently lifted the newsletter away.

“You’ve done your part, Jill. Go get some sleep.”

Jill took the streetcar down Cedar, and walked across 38th, and climbed the steps to her front door, and then stood there, unable to take another step. Her energy was depleted, her courage faltering. What had it all been for anyway? She had made signs until her hands didn’t work anymore, and she had laughed with the other girls, and cheered for the men picketing, and then a man had died, murdered in the streets of the city she loved.

The door opened, and Jill was in her mother’s arms, lifted and cradled and dripping in tears—hers and Mama’s. The two women collapsed together onto the front step.

“You’re safe now,” Mama said.

But Jill didn’t feel safe. How could she ever feel safe in this world where such horrible things happened to a man trying to stand up for himself, a man only trying to make a better world for himself, for his neighbors, for his infant daughter?

Jill shook her head desperately. “It’s hopeless.”

“Oh, darling,” Mama said, stroking her hair. They sat for a minute, and then Mama lifted her head and gripped Jill’s shoulders. “This is why I didn’t want you to go.”

“I know. I should have stayed home.”

“No—I was wrong. You did exactly what you were meant to do. You’re coming of age, Jill, and I can’t protect you from that any longer. Leaving childhood behind means seeing the world clearly, with all its scars. People are broken, and hurting, and sometimes the hurting doesn’t stop no matter how hard you work at it.”

“Then what’s the point of any of it?”

Mama shrugged. “The alternative is accepting the way things are, no matter how unfair or awful the circumstances may be. And that’s something that me and your Papa have decided not to abide by.”

For just a moment, Jill’s exhausted spirit flared, like a dying fire stirred by a morning breeze. But then the sight of Henry Ness’s broken body filled her mind, and Jill closed her eyes.

“It’ll take time. And rest. But you will be a better helper for seeing the world clearly and having the nerve to show up for it anyway. You’ll see.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m your mother.” Mama nudged Jill’s shoulder gently, and they sat together, watching the leaves on the ash tree in the boulevard lift and fall against the breeze, until Jill fell asleep. And her mother watched the leaves for both of them until Papa came home and carried his grown-up girl to bed.

***

“Every means of oppression was brought to bear. They shot our pickets down in cold blood. Two of them lie dead today . . . . They flung our pickets and our leader into a military stockade. They raided our headquarters. But they couldn’t break us.”

The Organizer, Vol. 1, Issue 37, Aug. 22, 1934.