Flames of Discontent: The 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike

On June 2, 1916, forty mostly immigrant mineworkers at the St. James Mine in Aurora, Minnesota, walked off the job. This seemingly small labor disturbance would mushroom into one of the region’s, if not the nation’s, most contentious and significant battles between organized labor and management in the early twentieth century. Flames of Discontent tells the story of this pivotal moment and what it meant for workers and immigrants, mining and labor relations in Minnesota and beyond. Drawing on previously untapped accounts from immigrant press newspapers, company letters, personal journals, and oral histories, historian Gary Kaunonen gives voice to the strike’s organizers and working-class participants. In depth and in dramatic detail, his book describes the events leading up to the strike, and the violence that made it one of the most contentious in Minnesota history. Against the background of the physical and cultural landscape of Minnesota’s Iron Range, Kaunonen’s history brings the lives of working-class Finnish immigrants into sharp relief, documenting the conditions and circumstances behind the emergence of leftist politics and union organization in their ranks. At the same time, it shows how the region’s South Slavic immigrants went from “scabs” during a 1907 strike to full-fledged striking members of the labor revolt of 1916. A look at the media of the time reveals how the three main contenders for working-class allegiances—mine owners, Progressive reformers, and a revolutionary union—communicated with their mostly immigrant audience. Meanwhile, documents from mining company officials provide a strong argument for corruption reaching as far as the state’s then governor, Joseph A. A. Burnquist, whose strike-busting was undertaken in the interests of billion dollar corporations. Ultimately, anti-syndicalist laws were put in place to thwart the growing influence of organizations that sought to represent immigrant workers. Flames of Discontent raises the voices of those workers, and of history, against an injustice that reverberates to this day.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface: Kitchen Table Politics Introduction: Workers’ Rights, Immigrant Voices 1. A Place Hard as Iron:Mining’s Divided Landscapes 2. The Seasonal Struggle: Labor and Politics in Northern Minnesota 3. Wobbly Firebrands: Organizing the Finnish Working-class 4. From Strikebreakers to Solidarity: The Slavic Worker Revolt 5. The Rhetoric of Revolution: Communicating the Strike 6. Flash Point: Dissent and Violence in 1916 Conclusion: Rising from the Ashes Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Gary Kaunonen is an independent historian of labor and immigration and a documentary filmmaker based in International Falls, Minnesota. He is author of Finns in Michigan along with two award-winning books, Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America in Michigan’s Copper Country and, with coauthor Aaron Goings, Community in Conflict: A Working-class History of the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike and the Italian Hall Tragedy. His documentary Northern Minnesota’s Labor Wars examines the 1916 and 1917 strikes in that region and their significance to World War I–era political deportations and repression.

Review :
"Based on the most thorough base of documentary evidence that any study of this strike has engaged, Flames of Discontent breaks significant new ground in exploring, narrating, and interpreting one of the most important strikes in Minnesota history. Gary Kaunonen weaves his primary sources together so effectively that his readers are transported to 1916 and feel that we are listening in person to workers' meetings, picket lines, and tavern debates."-Peter Rachleff, East Side Freedom Library, St. Paul "The events of this time have been soaked in nostalgia for a century, but Gary Kaunonen goes beyond the myths and conventional wisdom to dig out the raw emotion and surprising details of a strike that changed the American labor movement and the rise of the Middle Class."-Aaron Brown, author, instructor, and host of the Great Northern Radio Show "Gary Kaunonen is moving toward his mission to help working-class voices from the past be heard."-International Falls Journal   "Kaunonen has accomplished writing a bottom-up history of a major and relatively unknown industrial strike and thereby ‘posthumously restor[ing] agency to members of Minnesota’s working class’ (p. 3). In the process, he has chronicled an important chapter in American immigration and labor history, enhancing knowledge in both fields."-Journal of American History   "... perhaps most impressively, Kaunonen shows how understanding our past and how we got here can help guide us through the similar challenges we face today."-Middle West Review   "Using a combination of municipal records, personal recollections, oral history, corporate records, family records, newspapers, and secondary accounts, the book captures a sense of turn-of-the-century life in northern Minnesota’s mining communities. "-H-Net Reviews