I grew up in a working-class household. Dad was a janitor engineer at Cleveland Elementary (now Lucy Laney) in North Minneapolis. He participated in the 1951 janitors’ strike.  He used to say, “What labor fought to win, labor must fight to keep,” echoing the sentiments of his beloved Minnesota Farmer Labor Governor, Floyd B. Olson.

I didn’t see my life reflected in my studies until my last undergrad semester at the University of Minnesota, when I took Sara Evans’ US Women’s History course. The first day, she lectured on Native American women. It was the best thing I had ever heard. Then she talked about the Lowell Mill girls. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about workers. All the classes I had taken were about monarchs and revolutionaries, not ordinary people. By the end of the semester, I decided I would study where class intersected with gender. 

—Elizabeth Faue

 

 

19th Century Minnesota Roots

I come from a mixed marriage: Norwegian Lutherans and German Lutherans.  

One side of my mom’s family came from Norway in the 1840s. They were the younger siblings who didn’t inherit the farm, who came to re-create what their parents had in Norway.  In Woonsocket, South Dakota, on land that had belonged to Native Americans, they grew wheat, corn, and flax for weaving, and had a few sheep, goats, and cows. It was a subsistence-plus existence. Their kids went to school. Woonsocket was a rail hub in the 1880s, but people began to leave after a drought in the 1890s. What had been crop land became grazing land. My grandmother Myrtle hated Woonsocket. After going to normal school in Madison, South Dakota she moved to Minneapolis. 

The other side of my mother’s family came in the 1890s, to Crawford County, Wisconsin. My great-grandfather was a cabinet maker. He moved his family to the Twin Cities so he could ply his trade. Soon after, my great-grandmother was killed in a fire. Their son traveled the midwest as a harvest hand. I believe he was a Wobbly.  During World War One, he drove an ambulance.  After the war, he came to Minneapolis and married Myrtle. My mother was born a year later.

My father’s family were “territorial pioneers” of Minnesota.  Henry Faue was a “Freiegemeinde” or Freethinker — a religious liberal. His family  founded a congregation in Medina, Minnesota and built their own cemetery, which is still there. Henry Faue enlisted in the Union Army in 1864. My great-grandfather inherited Faue family land, but was a “wastrel” and lost it all.  His son Louis, my grandfather, was thrown out of his father’s house when he was quite young.  

Grandpa Louis was a legendary carpenter. He built a dining room table with 800 separate pieces of wood, fitted together into a mosaic.  He was manager of a cooperative creamery in St. Michael until the agricultural depression of  the 1920s. After that he fixed machines for creameries and dairies.

 

Parents in North Minneapolis 

My father Vince, was born on Bryant Ave N. He didn’t go to high school. My mother, Yvonne lived in a tiny house not far from Victory Memorial Drive, close to Camden, until her father got his veterans’ bonus and they moved to 43rd and Sheridan, two blocks from the Norwegian Victory Lutheran Church, where my grandfather was a charter member. (I think it’s a Baptist Church today.)

My parents met when she was fourteen and he eighteen. He thought she was the world. Shortly thereafter he went into the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps).  He was drafted in 1940.  Before he was shipped off, he got permission to take three days and get married.

Dad became part of a reconnaissance unit in North Africa — a half-track gunner in the First Armored Division led by General Patton. He hated Patton. After 30 months of combat duty the Army stationed him in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at an army hospital, where he made prostheses for injured soldiers. My mother went to live with him there. When the war was over, the army offered him a permanent position.  He said, “Hell no.” 

Dad had PTSD, though they didn’t call it that.  He wouldn’t go camping. It reminded him of the army. He supported his government, but never liked war. We had no gun in the house. No toy guns either, until my younger brother Greg came along. My older brother became a pacifist. Greg had a romance with the military, and joined the Navy.  When he was serving in the first Gulf War, Dad had his post-war nightmares again.    

 

Two Generations of Janitor-Engineers in Minneapolis Public Schools

My mother’s father helped Dad get a job working for the Minneapolis school system as a janitor engineer, providing advice as Dad rose through the civil service ranks. The two were similar: veterans, quiet men without high school degrees. They got along. 

School engineer is a job most people don’t understand. Part of the job is technical — stoking and maintaining furnaces — the kind of expertise you now have to go to college to obtain.  And part is social work. The school custodian is the one who talks to the kids who don’t have anybody.

 Dad started in a junior high — the hardest job.  He worked as third man, then second man. He did night shifts. When he got seniority, he settled at Cleveland Elementary (now Lucy Laney) in North Minneapolis, where he was his own boss and made good overtime.  

My grandfather was a Farmer-Labor club member in the 1930s and a founder of the Minneapolis local of the International Union of Operating Engineers.  The union’s slogan was “Janitors Carry School Houses on Their Backs.”  My grandfather and father both participated in the 1951 janitors’ strike. Dad used to say, “What labor fought to win, labor must fight to keep,” echoing the sentiments  of his beloved Minnesota Farmer Labor Governor, Floyd B. Olson. 

The job quality of janitor/engineer has eroded. There is continual pressure to privatize, create a two-tiered system with benefits and pay, and force speed-ups. The job today would not support the life we had.

 

Growing Up On The Northside

I grew up near Brooklyn Center.  It was a quiet, post-war neighborhood, built on the site of a former truck farm.  I had five siblings.  My younger sisters Anna and Debbie and I shared a room. I sang in the junior choir at Victory Lutheran.  I liked the music.  My parents were conventional believers. All of my sisters still attend a similar church. As a child, I thought about being a minister, but lost my faith after being confirmed. For a while I was a raving atheist. By the time I was 20, I decided that the reasonable approach was to be agnostic. It seemed more compassionate and respectful to not insist on having a monopoly on the truth. In the vein of my favorite ancestor, the Freethinking Henry Faue, I’m a Unitarian now.

By the time I was eleven, I had decided I was not going to have my parent’s life. During my preteens, my parents were grieving my older sister who disappeared for a few years.  They didn’t pay attention as my brother bossed his younger sisters around. I escaped into books about exotic lands.

My mother was an avid reader. My dad read the entire newspaper every day.  I had access to my oldest brother’s college books, classic children’s fables, two encyclopedias, and all the Reader’s Digest condensed books. I read the Digest version of Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Robert K. Massie. It dazzled me.  I was fascinated with Russia.  I studied the Byzantine Empire, listened to the music of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

 

Exemplary Teachers

It was difficult for me to get my needs met. At eleven, I told my mom I needed glasses.  She said, “We don’t have money for your foolishness.”  I went without glasses until 10th grade when my German teacher, Liz Borders, asked me to read the blackboard. 

Ms. Borders was mad at a system in which a student would not have corrective lenses. Her anger was empowering.  I went home and asserted my need. Mom said, “Money is tight. Can you wait until March?” When I finally got glasses, it was transformative.  I got my hair cut in a shag. I was a new person.

Ms. Borders wore turtlenecks and short plaid skirts and looked like Liza Minnelli. She would take us on hikes along the Mississippi, field trips to a German restaurant, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see an exhibit on Albrecht Duerer. I wanted to be her.  

I had a few other great teachers.  Francine Moskowitz — my English teacher in 7th and 9th grade. She took me to dinner, to a play, to the University  of Minnesota. She read my poetry and talked about ideas.  She was a big sister and mentor. Another teacher, Doreen Savage, read everything I wrote—poetry and prose—through high school and college.  She also paid most of my way on a school trip to England.  

 

Race and Class at Patrick Henry High School in the early 1970s. 

In high school, I was in college placement classes with the bankers’ and professionals’ kids. My father had a ninth-grade education. My mother had a high school degree but knew nothing about college. They didn’t  navigate the world outside North Minneapolis. At ten my mom had me making calls to billing companies and Sears and Roebuck. She was uncomfortable with the world.

My parents did not let their children down when it came to food, clothing, housing or basic education, but when I was emotionally troubled or faced worldly obstacles, they had no idea what to do. Those teachers, and my big brother Jeff, brought me through.

I was aware of class and racial differences in high school. I shared a lunch table with a group of Black girls in junior high. They were so much better read on politics, yet I don’t remember any African American students in my high school college-prep courses. My cohort was, and still is, segregated by race. Today, whenever there are reunions, Black students are missing from the list.  I never go to the reunions, but I always check the list. 

During high school, I took advantage of a free summer enrichment program: the Twin City Institute for Talented Youth, at Macalester College. You would specialize in the morning and spend the afternoon at a library, play, or workshop. I took Russian language and folk dance.  I loved it. T. H. White, in The Once and Future King, said, “Learning is the one thing that you can never lose.”  That was the three summers at Macalester for me.  I met Catholics who hated the Catholic Church, young Marxists, and deeply conservative people. The program brought public and private school kids together. All were college-bound. In my high school, less than a quarter of the students went to college.

 

Seeking an Exotic Escape in College

I had this Russian thing going. It was the 70s and we were talking Détente. I planned to major in Russian and journalism at the University of Minnesota, but during orientation someone said, “You like writing, I’ll put you down as an English major.” So I majored in English, but took Russian and Modern Greek.   I read Report To Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis and signed up to go to Greece with the SPAN program (Student Program for Amity among Nations); two summers studying everything Greek.

At 60 I am still a shy person, but it was much worse in those days. In Greece I learned how to talk. It was warm and beautiful. You could eat vegetables and bread and be happy.  One friend said I was a “butterfly emerging from her cocoon.” 

The biggest mistake I made was living at home when I returned. I  walked back into a family crisis.  It was not a good time. When I started graduate school I was depressed and confused.  Learning woke me up again.

 

 

Embracing Feminism and Returning to Labor Roots in Grad School

I had my first feminist awaking at fifteen when we were talking about the Equal Rights Amendment.  I forgot I was a feminist until I took a class from Toni McNaron on Virginia Woolf. It was eye-popping. I wrote my honors thesis on Emily Dickinson.  It was the beginning of women’s studies for me.

During my last under-grad semester, I signed up for a 17th century literature class. The professor—whose name I have blissfully forgotten—was rocking himself in front of the class. I was literally sick watching him. I told my coworker I needed to get out of his class.  She said, “How about US Women’s History with Sara Evans? I hear she’s good.”

I went to Sara’s class on the second day. When I  asked her for the syllabus, she smiled!  I had never seen a professor smile. I was somewhere new. Her lecture on Native American women was the best thing I had ever heard. I had taken many history courses. Other than Catherine the Great, there weren’t any women discussed in those courses. She talked about the “Manly-Hearted Woman” in Native American societies. Woah! 

When Sara taught us about the Lowell Mill girls, it was the first time I had heard anyone talk about workers. All the classes I took were about monarchs and revolutionaries — not ordinary people. By the end of the semester, I decided to go to grad school to study where class intersected with gender. 

Sara Evans was my grad school advisor. She invested in me. I had other mentors. Mary Jo Maynes, who taught European social history, had a capacious mind. Rus Menard was funny, skeptical, and systematic. He knew where the pieces fit together.  

 

Rewriting Minneapolis Labor History to Center Women 

My first book was an accident. I wanted to study textile workers in the South in the 19th century, but my committee persuaded me to write a dissertation on the 20th century and focus on something local.

The Great Depression was a period of labor activism. Minneapolis had this major truckers’ strike in 1934,. In that moment of organization, I knew I’d find women organizing, but oral sources were scant. Taped interviews with truckers and politicians (like Hubert Humphrey) at the Minnesota Historical Society, were not focused on women’s involvement or gender questions.

Women in the Twin Cities in the 1930s worked in industries where unionization was low. The huge Munsingwear plant on the near northside employed hundreds of women workers. It wasn’t unionized until the late 1930s, and the unionization campaign did not involve much organizing.  The Company negotiated with the CIO without much worker input.

About 5000 Twin Cities women worked in various aspects of the garment trade.  I found some sources on local women in the national ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) papers. The Minneapolis labor papers only provided bits and pieces.  I was frustrated.  I didn’t have enough for a book. Then two things happened.

1. I was reading labor papers, taking notes on cartoons for my own amusement.  There was no female representation in the cartoons. Social construction and solidarity in the labor movement were all based on male models. They were also racially constructed.  I wrote a chapter on these cartoons. 

2. I was reading two books: American City: A Rank and File History of Minneapolis by Charles Rumford Walker, and Mary Heaton Vorse’ s Labor’s New Millions.Walker was a proto-Leninist who believed a small group of men would lead the class to victory.  Vorse believed in the people and wanted the workers to get justice. Her vision was rooted in community where women and children played a central role. 

In Minneapolis in the 1930s, women were involved in the movement-building stage; but they were eased out when things became bureaucratized. One of the mechanisms by which this happened was the social and psychological casting of labor solidarity as masculine. This is why women can both be central and yet invisible and excluded in labor. This became the focus of my book: Community of Suffering and Struggle:  Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis 

Because I haven’t lived here since the book came out, I don’t know what effect it has had locally. I am friends with people at the Historical Society. Labor historian Peter Rachleff — now at the East Side Freedom Library — liked the book and taught it. I see it referred to on web pages about local strikes, women, and the labor movement.  

I’ve given talks at the Minnesota Historical Society, but have never been invited to commemorations of the Teamsters strike. Sometimes the labor agenda and feminist agenda conflict. A book that points out the discrepancies may not be welcome at a celebratory event.

My second book was a biography of labor journalist Eva McDonald Valesh, who was in Minneapolis in the 1880s and 1890s, a period of vibrant labor and working class culture in the city. Mainstream newspapers were sold to the working class, and they covered labor issues.  I got terrific stuff on the strike of women garment workers and the “Scandinavian Uprising,” the streetcar strike of 1889.  My most recent book, Rethinking the American Labor Movement, also talks about Minnesota workers.

 

Teaching Labor and  Women’s  History in Detroit

Since 1991, I have been teaching labor and women’s history at Wayne State University in Detroit, an institution of 28,000 students, most of whom grew up in Detroit or the surrounding suburbs. Like me, most are first-generation college students.  

The labor movement in Michigan was different than Minnesota. Minnesota has a mixed economy.  In Michigan everything is made or broken by the fate of the auto industry. When the auto industry falters, the economy cascades, as it did in the 2008 crisis. Today, the auto industry is doing well, and even the cities are doing better, but we still face real challenges.

 

The Flint Water Crisis in Context

The crisis of 2008 was acute in Michigan. Pervasive gerrymandering allowed Governor Snyder and the Republican-dominated legislature to win in 2010.  Snyder had been a corporate head, overseeing the lay-off of 30,000 workers.  As Governor he oversaw the privatization of the state. Public lands and resources were taken over in cities. Bridges and roads were left in disrepair. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sell off treasures at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Snyder cut corporate taxes,  appointed emergency financial managers  in Detroit, Flint and other cities. They made decisions without community oversight. The poisoning of Flint water showed complete disregard for the long-term effects on community.

 

Finding Home in Two Midwestern States

I have begun to call Michigan home. I found a vacation haven in Traverse City, 200 miles north.  It dawned on me recently that it was what Emily Dickinson called “the slant of light” there that made it feel like home. It is the same latitude as Minneapolis — 45th Parallel.  

I have thought about moving back to Minneapolis with my partner when I retire. I would love to be in a city with public transportation and green spaces and many people that I love. 

Update: Fall 2019: Elizabeth is researching community-oriented labor activism in the female-dominated fields of nursing and teaching, and still talking about eventually retiring to Minneapolis, enticing her partner with the wealth of community choirs in the Twin Cities. 

Minneapolis Interview Project.