It seemed the only thing that Minneapolis had to offer was a giant pool of unemployed miners, lumberjacks, railroad men, and millers; over 6,000 flour millers were laid off between 1919 and 1929. New industries did move in: linseed processing plants, silk mills, and clothing factories. But wages had lagged far behind the increase in the cost of living, and these were not happy factory workers. A number of strikes rocked the city; the truck drivers' strike of 1934 saw two strikebreakers killed and 50 people wounded.
That fall Floyd B. Olson was elected governor on a platform that declared: "Capitalism has failed and immediate steps must be taken to abolish it." Olson had been brought up in poverty on the streets of Minneapolis, not unlike Kid Cann, and would always side with the poor. He was the first governor in the history of the United States to call in the National Guard to protect labor rather than crush it. Fortune magazine looked at the state of Minneapolis in 1936, and declared: "Violence and bloodshed are recurrent symptoms of what ails the Twin Cities... That labor should be cheap in Minneapolis was long taken for granted. It was true that labor had struck now and then and, encouraged by a radical Governor, had lately strengthened its organization. But that labor should tie up the city's food supply was treason. And that labor should set upon the sons of the founders with clubs and stones and kill one of them was unthinkable. Yet it had happened and it was a sign that the lusty, pioneering, growing youth of Minneapolis was over."
With the solid labor jobs--lumber, milling, mining, and railroads--gone or going, Minneapolis's long-established downtown reservoir of unemployed men seemed an ominous presence. Fortune concluded that unless a canal connected Minneapolis to Lake Superior, "Minneapolis may see the beginning of the Revolution."
There was, of course, no revolution. People voted with their feet. In 1950 Minneapolis's population peaked at 521,718, and since then over 150,000 people have left. The city's response was to demolish itself through urban renewal and highway construction. In the space of 20 years Minneapolis was transformed from a rich, lusty, thriving, and corrupt city to a modestly prosperous, moribund, peaceful one.
These days it's changing again. The population is growing. Unemployment is low. Crime is up. All this comes as a jolt to local sensibilities, shaped for the last generation or two by the self-image of a kind-hearted, well-intentioned, if sometimes chilly utopia. Doug Grow summed it up in an October 7, 1993, Star Tribune column a day after two particularly gratuitous killings: "We've wanted to cling to the notion that we live in a special place. We've wanted to believe that we live in a special urban setting, which may have some cracks on its utopian edges, but still works." In reality old Minneapolis's legacy to the present is as corrupt, as cracked, as carousing as any other town's. It was not a utopia in 1892, or 1942, or 1992. The notion that it was isn't based in history, but nostalgia.
And nostalgia, as Luc Sante wrote in his book Low Life, "can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community--qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's birth." Time to grow up?
