Labor Day means that summer is over. Sad as I am to say goodbye to warm weather and a relaxed schedule, I count myself lucky that I enjoyed lots of vacation time during this lovely time of year. Which makes me very different from working women in Minneapolis at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1909, most young women in Minneapolis had no chance to relax or enjoy the “open air” during the short summer months. A group of female reformers associated with the Young Women’s Christian Association resolved to address this problem. They established a tent colony on the shores of Lake Calhoun that allowed girls to experience the “joys of camp life.”

Those lucky enough to get a berth at this camp got on the streetcar downtown. They rode for thirty minutes until they reached Dean Parkway, disembarking at what was known as Mendoza Beach. In 1912, the Minneapolis Park Board made this section of Lake Calhoun into a resort-style beach; it enhanced the swimming area and constructed a state-of-the art beach house with changing rooms, lockers and showers.

Calhoun Baths, 1913. From the Minnesota Streetcar Museum.

To maintain propriety at this new public facility, the park board required all female swimmers to don a regulation jersey swimming suit that included full length tights under a snug tunic. (And this impossibly cumbersome outfit drew howls of protest from social conservatives in the city, but I digress).

This was more than a decade before construction started on the towering Calhoun Beach Club. Though inside the city limits, the beach house was surrounded by fields and woods. The result was a streetcar summer resort for the people.

Water Toboggan at Lake Calhoun. From the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Across the street from the beach house was the YWCA camp. Five canvas tents provided sleeping quarters for thirty-five girls, who slept on cots and ate in a communal dining tent. Campers stayed for a week. They spent their vacation in bare feet, wandering the woods or wading in the water. They rowed, swam, hiked and read. They ate dinner. They roasted marshmallows. One newspaper report asserted that they started each day at dawn with “dew baths” in the adjacent woods.

Women at summer YWCA at Lake Calhoun. YWCA Collection at the Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

But I wonder. My guess is that the campers would have welcomed the chance to slumber uninterrupted. Every other week of the year they got up early to work in the city’s factories. The girls at the YWCA camp were part of the huge population of young working women struggling to make it on their own in the city. By the early twentieth century, Minneapolis had more single working women than almost any other community in the country. And long before the iconic Mary Tyler Moore fixed Minneapolis in the national imagination as a home for independent women, these women were forging a new kind of path for their sex.

Single women in search of economic opportunity had been drawn to Minneapolis from all points on the map. But the city was an especially powerful magnet for women from the surrounding rural hinterlands, who left farms in search of financial and social independence impossible in small towns.

Employment opportunities were plentiful but hardly lucrative for women in the city. Some young girls resigned themselves to domestic service. And some lucky women typed letters or took dictation. But most female wage-laborers did piece work of one kind or another in the factories near the Mississippi River. They sewed cloth bags for flour and mattress covers. They stitched shirts. They steamed laundry. They wove luxurious and stylish blankets for travelers on the Pullman Palace railroad cars.

The products were different but the same grim conditions prevailed. These young women labored ten to twelve hours a day in workshops that were humid and dusty and dark. They had meager lunch fare and no time to eat. They were hot in the summer and cold in the winter. They made barely enough to pay for room and board. Often their wages fell short.

Workers at North Star Woolen Mills, 1905. From the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Sleeping on a cot in a canvas tent with seven other women was heaven by comparison.  Even when it rained.

Campers at Lake Calhoun summer camp. From the collections of the YWCA, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

In 1914, the camp moved from Dean Parkway to a more secluded location at the intersection of 28th street and Upton Avenue. The camp remained in operation in this location until 1919, when the YWCA was given land outside the city on which it built a more permanent facility.

Sources: YWCA scrapbook, Box 12, YWCA Collection, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota; Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

In August, 1936, Minneapolis lost a native son. “One arid afternoon, the people buried Floyd Olson under the trees by a lake,” journalist Eric Sevareid remembered. “When the news hawkers shouted the announcement from their corners, the noises of the street died down and their voices with the shocking sentence were unbearably loud and distinct in the unnatural stillness. I saw a streetcar motorman get down from his car and walk back from the newsstand with tears streaming down his cheeks. Many thousands had a feeling that someone in their family had died.”

Mourners outside Memorial Auditorium in downtown Minneapolis, August 26, 1936. Image from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Mourners massed in the Municipal Auditorium to commemorate Olson’s legacy. A more intimate group gathered at Lakewood Cemetery to lay him to rest in a glass-topped coffin.

During that hot summer week, the city gave itself to bereavement. But not everyone was as sad as the motorman–or Sevareid– to say goodbye to the 44-year-old governor of Minnesota.  The populist politician was reviled by many who saw him as a ruthless demagogue who had served at the behest of the city’s crime bosses.

During the darkest days of the Great Depression, Olson had come to embody hope for Americans seeking real economic and political change in the United States. A compelling orator and charismatic personality, Olson was a masterful coalition-builder. Most important to young  people like Sevareid who wanted fundamental transformation of the political and economic system, he was not afraid to call for dramatic action in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse. “I am not a liberal,” Olson declared to the Farmer-Labor convention in 1934. “I am what I want to be–a radical.”

The son of Scandinavian immigrants, Olson had grown up on the near North Side of Minneapolis, surrounded by Jewish and African-American neighbors.  He was trusted in the neighborhood as a Shabbos Goy, a person employed by observant Jews to light candles and do other household tasks on the Sabbath, when they are forbidden to do any kind of work. Olson’s father had steady work on the railroad that kept his family out of poverty. But his home was located in a quarter of the city viewed by many as a terrible slum. In fact, the year after his death, his block was bulldozed in one of the city’s first effort to clear urban blight; this became the site of the Sumner Homes, the first federally funded housing project in Minnesota.

Birthplace of Governor Floyd B. Olson, razed for Sumner Field Homes. The city published this image in the newspaper to show that  “even governors’ birthplaces can be fire hazards.” Image from the Special Collections Department of Hennepin County Library.

Olson spent a desultory year at the University of Minnesota. Then he drifted around the continent working as a longshoreman, miner and harvest hand. He returned to Minneapolis to study law and by 1920 was Hennepin County Attorney. Over the decade that followed, his career as the county’s top law enforcement man bore the stamp of his formative years in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minnesota.

Olson was keenly aware of the dangers of the Ku Klux Klan, which was attracting a popular following in Minneapolis in the early 1920s. He used his position as Hennepin County Attorney to expose the secret white supremacist organization. Olson’s successful crusade earned him the sustained support of the city’s Jewish community as well as emerging African-American activists like Lena Olive Smith, who would later lead the city’s NAACP.

But for those Minneapolitans who believed that North Minneapolis “provided most of the city’s criminals and crooked politicians,” Olson’s northside roots made him suspect. The County Attorney was guilty by association with a part of Minneapolis known for its gambling houses, brothels and after-hours tippling spots. His critics pointed to this personal history when they blamed him for the growth of crime and corruption during the first decade of  Prohibition. They turned a blind eye to geography (the city’s proximity to Canada helped to make it a center for the illicit liquor trade).  Instead, The Chicago Tribune–under the leadership of Robert McCormick–argued that the “career of Floyd B. Olson as prosecuting attorney of Hennepin County between 1920 and 1930 parallels the growth of organized crime.”

Olson was no advocate of Prohibition. And to be effective in Minneapolis politics in the 1920s, he needed to be able to work with its powerful criminal elements. But his most troubling flaw, in my opinion, was his opposition to a free press. He worked to silence those who linked him to the city’s underworld. And he even made a personal appearance at the Minnesota Supreme Court to champion a law that gave the state right to suppress publications viewed as undesirable. He argued that “freedom of speech is not an absolute right”; this logic was rejected by the United States Supreme Court in 1931.

The ruling did little to protect reform-minded writers; three Minneapolis journalists were murdered between 1934 and 1945. Critics castigated Olson for refusing to pursue the killers in the first two cases.

Olson’s political career was ascendant when he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer at the end of 1935. Already serving as governor, Olson was on the cusp of winning a seat in the United States Senate. Many Americans held him up as the great hope for a dark decade, the person best suited to challenge Franklin Roosevelt as a third-party presidential candidate. Olson’s death punctured this vision. “I walked out into the parched, lifeless streets with a numb feeling of dismay,” Sevareid remembered. “Could one never win? How weak we were, when so much had depended upon one human being.”

Image is from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Olson could be remembered as the Paul Wellstone of his time, a populist political maverick silenced by tragedy at the apex of his influence.  But Olson remains a cipher to me. It is impossible to predict the kind of leader he would have become with the end of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. This is food for thought during a drive down Olson Memorial Highway, through the neighborhood that helped to shape the young politician into one of the most complex figures in Minnesota political history.

Material from this post was taken from Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1976):. 71-72; George Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Marda Liggett Woodbury, Stopping the Presses: The Murder of Walter W. Liggett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); “Murder in Minneapolis,” The Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1936; “Lena Smith Among Governor Floyd Olson Supporters,” Twin Cities Herald, November 12, 1932; Floyd B. Olson House, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, 1914 West 49th Street, Minneapolis, December 31, 1974.

Students return to school in the Minneapolis Public Schools today. These two photos celebrate the start of a new academic year.

At the top we have a 1925 scene from a “hobby fair” at Burroughs Elementary School, which was an opportunity for the children to share their hobbies with classmates. This image shows one girl painting while another decorates a cake. On the other end of the table, a boy was operating something electronic, perhaps a radio set? The jawdropper in this photo is the middle boy, who seems to be showing off his firearm collection. He appears to be demonstrating the operation of his rifle (which might be a toy, like the Red Rider BB gun in A Christmas Story). In any case, it shows that times (and policies) have changed in schools across the United States.

For those of you curious about the history of schools in Minneapolis, follow this link to learn about the origins of school names. Compiled in 1923 (when 70,000 kids were enrolled in the MPS–more than double the current enrollment), it’s a wee bit incomplete. But it’s still informative. Did you know, for instance, that Pratt School was named for the first Minneapolis soldier to die in the Philippines?

The second photo shows children in a singing class at Whittier Elementary school, also in the 1920s. This adorable image is notable because it shows a classroom with both white and African American children. Then as now, the Whittier neighborhood was one of the most racially diverse in the city. The school reflected its environs, bringing an economically and racially mixed group of children together.
The 1920s marked a turning point for race relations in Minneapolis. Immigration from Europe was declining dramatically. At the same time, thousands of new African Americans were arriving in the city from the South. In the decades that followed, the Minneapolis Public Schools would become increasingly racially segregated. Children attended the schools closest to their homes. And restrictive real estate covenants and discriminatory rental practices kept non-white residents concentrated in a few parts of town. Schools reflected these housing patterns, which were enforced by custom, intimidation and sometimes violence.

City leaders began to see school segregation as a problem to be addressed in 1967, when John Davis became superintendent in Minneapolis. Davis pushed integration at all levels, hiring African Americans as teachers and administrators and support staff across the district. And he began to work on creative ways to bring children from different backgrounds together in classrooms. Out of this desire came the plan to “pair” all-white Hale School with the all-African American Field School. The idea was to put the younger children from both schools at Hale and the older kids from both kids at Field.

First day of busing in Minneapolis, 1971. Monica Lash (left) and Molly Johnson (right) were two of the hundreds of children who were bused as part of the Hale-Field school pairing experiment.

The reaction to this plan–at least in some quarters–was less than positive. After the plan was announced in 1970, school board member Harry Davis remembered that he needed a police escort to get home and round-the-clock police protection while he slept. Mayor Charlie Stenvig–who had been elected in 1969 after tapping fears of racial violence in the city after unrest on the North Side–helped to rally opponents of busing, who jammed community meetings.

Despite this opposition, the city had little choice but to proceed with a sweeping integration plan in 1972, after federal judge Earl Larson decreed that Minneapolis had “intentionally and deliberately” kept students segregated.

Forty-five years later, Minneapolis schools continue to be segregated. And the district continues to struggle with how best to create diverse learning environments that meet the needs of all students.

Today, if we need to find inspiration to meet this challenge, we need to look at the sweet faces in the ninety year old photo from Whittier School.

Information for this post comes in part from Harry Davis’ autobiography, Overcoming. Images are from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Names matter. They serve as cultural signposts that articulate the social geography of a community. They declare who is remembered and who is revered.

And this is why the body of water now known as Lake Calhoun needs a new name. Or in this case, an old name that can help us understand the complex racial history of the land that became Minneapolis.

One of the jewels in the crown of the Minneapolis Parks, Lake Calhoun got its current name from a team of U.S. Army surveyors mapping the military reservation around the newly established Fort Snelling in the early nineteenth century. When they came to a lake that local people called Bde Maka Ska, which translates from Dakota to mean “white bank lake,” they paid no mind to established nomenclature. Instead, they designated the lake as “Calhoun” on their map to honor their patron, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. This move planted the American flag on the region’s cultural terrain. It also curried favor with a powerful politician who would ultimately serve in both houses of Congresses and as Vice President and Secretary of State. In this way, a South Carolinian was written into the landscape of a place he would never visit.

Over the twenty years that followed, John C. Calhoun established himself as the nation’s most passionate proponent of race-based slavery. While many of his contemporaries defended slavery as a necessary evil, Calhoun declared that race-based bondage was “a good.” In a 1837 speech he asserted that “never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”

Calhoun’s fiery oration likely would have met nods of assent among the officers at Fort Snelling. Many shared Calhoun’s southern heritage and had grown up in slave-holding families. And many of them owned slaves, since the U.S. Army provided a financial incentive for them to embrace the institution of human bondage. They drew bonus pay if they employed a “private servant,” a policy that encouraged them to buy and hold slaves at military installations across the country. Slavery was forbidden in the Northwest Territories, which included the land of the Dakota. But laws did not change the conditions for Courtney, Eliza, Mary, Louisa, William, Peter, some of the men and women we know labored in slavery at Fort Snelling.

Their stories are largely forgotten by Minnesotans, who think the bloody history of slavery hangs only around the neck of the South. But a group of Minneapolitans are challenging how our community pays homage to white supremacy. Mike Spangenberg started a petition on Change.org that calls on Minneapolis Park Commissioners to remove the Calhoun name from this Minneapolis lake. This petition builds on the efforts of Park Commissioner Brad Bourn, who has been demanding this change for years.

Spangenberg was inspired by this television report as well as the move in Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi to remove the Confederate battle flag from public buildings. This comes after the massacre of nine African Americans in a Charleston church by a white supremacist who posed with the pennant and professed his desire to start a “race war.” The flag was conceived during a fratricidal war over slavery. Southern whites embraced it again as a response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

If South Carolina can grapple with how the past lives in the present, so can Minneapolis. If the Palmetto state can discard a bitterly-contested symbol of white supremacy, Lake Calhoun can become Lake Bde Maka.

Peeling away the Calhoun appellation would honor the early Minnesotans whose names have been lost to history. Courtney, Eliza, Mary, Louisa, William, Peter would have likely decried any attempt to describe their conditions of labor at Fort Snelling as “civilized” or intellectually elevated. And restoring the original name of the lake provides an opportunity for Minneapolitans to recognize that they live in the homeland of the Dakota.

Native American historian and activist Kate Beane has spent years uncovering the story of her ancestors who lived on the shores of Bde Maka Ska in a village that was called Heyate Otunwe or Cloudman’s Village. Led by Mahpiya Wicasta, or Cloud Man, this settlement was an agricultural experiment that melded Native American lifeways with farming practices championed by American settlers. This was the place where the Dakota language was first systematically recorded on paper by missionaries Samuel and Gideon Pond. This 1835 map created by Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro clearly shows this community on the lake. Taliaferro’s drawing–which is part of the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society–also describes the lake as having “good fish of all description.”

Though successful in many ways, the village was abandoned in 1839. Hostilities between the Ojibwe and Dakota had flared. Inhabitants feared they were too vulnerable to attack. Any trace of Cloud Man’s Village was buried for good when the lake was transformed from an unruly marsh to a manicured urban playground. While there is a small marker to the Pond brothers, nothing indicates the historic presence of the Dakota people.

Defenders of the Calhoun moniker argue the name illuminates the sometimes uncomfortable history of the land that became Minneapolis. But we can do better. We can make our modern urban commons reflect the broader currents of the past. As we struggle to understand the origins of our racial disparities, we need signposts that can guide us as we explore the histories submerged in the city of lakes.

The Minneapolis Gateway District drew the eyes of the nation during the Great Depression.

It started with the 1934 Truckers’ Strike, which pitted the Teamsters’ Union against a seemingly invincible employers’ association. Led by Trotskyites, who employed all kinds of novel organizing tactics, the truckers triumphed. But their victory came only after blood ran in the streets of downtown, where strikers and employers battled hand-to-hand, beating each other with clubs and bricks.

This civil war erupted just a few blocks from the Beaux-Arts pavilion of Gateway Park, which had become a gathering ground for crowds of unemployed men during this economic crisis. Some men tried to sleep their way through the global economic collapse, crashing on benches or snoozing on the grass. Others talked and read the newspaper. Everyone imagined better times. Their days were punctuated by appeals from missionaries and radicals. The missionaries pleaded with Gateway denizens to sin no more. The radicals called on the men to recognize what they regarded as the gospel truth: global capitalism had failed.

One reporter from Fortune magazine who visited the city in early 1936 feared that this message would find its mark. In April of that year he concluded that it was from the Gateway Park that “the revolution” so feared by many Americans  “may come.”

The same conditions that attracted radicals and missionaries also proved magnetic for a crew of talented photographers, who saw this area of concentrated despair as rich with documentary possibility. Russell Lee visited the city in 1937. His colleague John Vachon followed two years later. Both men were working for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, part of what one historian has called the “alphabet soup” of Works Progress Administration agencies created by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal team.

The images created by Lee and Vachon are transporting. They document the lost world of the early twentieth century Skid Row. And they provide an unparalleled view of Minneapolis at a moment of profound crisis.

Photographers in the FSA were employed to support the research of the Resettlement Administration, which brought together economists, sociologists, statisticians and agronomists to address the problems of the rural poor. This team–which included well-known photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange–illuminated the poverty of Americans whose geographic isolation hid them from public view. Lange’s iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother” came out of this effort.

There are few cities documented by the FSA in this period. Lee and Vachon may have chosen Minneapolis for its connection to the agricultural economy, the central concern of the FSA project. Many of the men they photographed in Minneapolis had drifted into the city after failing to find work in the agricultural economy. Vachon was also raised in St. Paul.

The Vachon and Lee photographs are housed in the FSA-OWI collection in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. This gallery also includes some images from the same period that are from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society and Special Collections Department of the Hennepin County Library.

In honor of bicycle week, Historyapolis is going to pay homage to those who laid the foundation for our thriving cycling culture in Minneapolis.

In the 1890s, the United States was seized by what historians have called a “bicycle craze.” Minneapolitans were not immune to the seduction of two wheels. So in 1894, a group of young women decided to organize a cycling club that would take group “runs” to Cedar Lake and Lake Harriet twice a week.

Yet before they could embark on their first outing they had to settle a pressing question. What to wear?

The answer was provided by Abby Mayhew, pictured above, who can be credited with bringing physical fitness for women to the city. After arriving in Minneapolis in 1892, Mayhew started gym classes at the Young Woman’s Christian Association. She attracted both wage-earning women and their socially prominent sisters to her downtown gymnasium.

In the spring of 1894, she resolved to bring her female athletes, in the words of one newspaper account, “into the boulevards, country roads and upon the bosom of the waters.” The result was summer outing clubs for the growing membership of the YWCA. Thanks to Mayhew, Minneapolitans got accustomed to seeing large groups of women biking, rowing and playing tennis in the city’s parks.

This kind of physical activity was impossible without proper attire. So Mayhew designed a bloomer costume for lady athletes. This issue drew the fascinated attention of the city’s journalists, who made repeated visits to the YWCA to observe and sketch the costumes of the exercising women. And a reporter was on hand when members of the newly constituted bicycling club voted “amid the blushes of the fair members” to wear Mayhew’s bloomers “at each club run.”

Women in “Syrian garb” exercising at the YWCA, c. 1890s. Image is from the YWCA Scrapbooks, Social Welfare History Archives, the University of Minnesota.

The “Syrian garb,” as Mayhew called it, was both “attractive and sensible” though it was shorter than other bloomer costumes seen in the city since it clasped “well up to the knee.” But the would-be cyclists steeled themselves with the resolution that “union is strength.” They decided to “make their first essay at public appearance in this garb together. Being sweetly sensible girls of the right calibre,” the newspaper reported, “they will doubtless persuade man to show his gallantry by not staring or being otherwise rude.”

On a May evening in 1894, the inaugural run of the bicycle club attracted the curious but not the vulgar. Newspaper accounts marveled at the spectacle of “nearly 20 young women in bloomer costume, ready to mount their wheels. . .in front of the Young Woman’s Christian Association rooms on Nicollet Avenue.” Only “one solitary member of the party was without the divided skirt; the rest adopted the latest cut and set an example in a body.”

After their ride, the women wrapped up the evening with a social hour at the YWCA. This group was led by Captain W. Snow and her lieutenant Madge Elliott. This fearless band of pioneers included Mlles. E.E. Mills, Kittie Webster, Hattie Evans, Fowler, Nichols, Butman, Dunn, as well as sisters Chadbourne and sisters Peck. The matrons included Mesdames Blair, Hall, Witchie, Chator and Nash.

To these women, I say thank you for defying gender conventions to get on your wheels in public. Their trepidation may seem laughable to modern day readers who don shiny spandex and cycle to all corners of the city. But these lady riders were part of a long-running effort by women to claim public space. They likely did not identify as feminists. But they shared the feminist vision that women should be able to move –under their own power and in the company of other women–through city streets without harassment.

Abby Mayhew left the city three years later to head the physical education program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She returned to the Twin Cities upon her retirement in 1930, dying in 1954 at the age of 90. Perhaps all that physical activity paid off.

Images and text for this post is taken from the 1894 scrapbooks of the YWCA, Box 12, YWCA Collection, Social Welfare History Archive at the University of Minnesota.