Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota Oral History Project

James H. Flower Narrator Tom O'Connell & Steve Trimble Interviewers February 19, 1977 Minneapolis, Minnesota [Note: There are other conversations going on in background of this interview, particularly between a woman and a child, so there were moments when verbatim transcription was impossible] JF: ...originally came to this country prior to the American Revolution,Minnesota on my father's side. My mother's ancestors came here in 1842 from Germany and settledin in Beloit, Wisconsin. The Flower family was kicked out of Tennessee in 1858, there was a large family of us then. It did not own slaves, I think there was 8 Flower boys and I don't 3 girls or something and they just didn't have any need for slaves to manage their little valley farm, but this didn't set good with their neighbors and [unclear] and they were expelled from Tennessee and that's how come they come to Wisconsin and the upshot of it was my dad met my mother and they were married I thinkSociety in 1898 and I was born in 1906, the third of six children. My dad was a foreman inProject Fairbanks [unclear] plant in Beloit, Wisconsin, a plant that made all kind of equipmentRadicalism like windmills, and [unclear] they made scales, everybody had a scale on the farm or every elevator had a Fairbanks scale, it was a big thing you know and my dad was a foreman in the punch press department and his good friend, best friend was foreman in the screw department, his name Historywas Frank Booster. They're sitting out on the bank of the old Rock River one Sunday afternoon, somehowHistorical or other they had got a hold of some socialist literature, this is 1908, theyCentury come to the conclusion that Debs was a good man. They didn't have brains enough in a plant where thereOral was no union or anything and nobody thinking about stool pigeons or anything like that and fellow workers who do you think should be a good guy for president, George or Frank or... But Debs was a good man, this lasted about two weeks when they were both called into the office and told we aren't having any goddamn Debs supporters here, we don't care whether you're foremanMinnesota or what you are, out, you're fired, you're through. But that wasn't only the halfTwentieth of it, they could not find a job outside of maybe some temporary construction work or something in either the town of Beloit or Janesville or Madison, any town within [unclear]_ they were blacklisted as they called it in those days. The result is that my dad had to step father in Minnesota, he was stump farming up here and Booster had a little money and relatives over in western Minnesota, and they both emigrated to Minnesota, those days you could do it you know, you bought a team of horses for a couple of hundred dollars and a plow and a drag and you were in farming, a couple of three dairy cows. So that's how come my dad came to Minnesota in 1909, it didn't take him long of course to understand that in spite of the fact that a lot of his Finnish neighbors were socialists and every township among the Finnish neighborhoods was started out of the Temperance societies that come to this country and they formed cooperatives and so forth. I didn't know for years that my wife's father was the founder of the first cooperative store in the state of Minnesota, Menahga Sampo. TO: Yeah. JF: Went around and collected $10 from this farmer and $15 from that farmer ‘til they had $170 or something collected and they bought a stock and started up a little store in Menahga, Minnesota. That....but this type of thing, I read, and hear my dad talking socialism, social ownership, great follower of Debs, I used to think he was crazy, you kept your mouth shut and worked hard and went to school and learnt your lesson you could become president of the United States and senator at least without any great crumble at all, you know and... TO: Do you have a big, did you have a lot of brothers and sisters? JF: I had two brothers and three sisters, one of my sisters is dead and one of my brothers, youngest brother of course is dead, an older brother lives in Denver, Colorado, and two sisters still live up at Menahga, Minnesota. We have a big family between the wife and I, we raised two families, in fact we raised half the neighborhood around here at times it seems. Well it was a peculiar thing, people like the Andersons who were notorious drunks and when they had threeMinnesota sons they'd go off and leave these kids and they'd be drunk for two weeks at a time and these kids wouldn't have nothing to eat so they'd come over here to sleep and eat and get their clothes washedin and the Mortons who had a big family down the street, down here, why Ruth and her sisters and those kids were half the time when I'd come in the house I didn't know whether, from work late at night you know from driving the cab, the first thing I'd have to do when I come in the door is put the flashlight on to see how many kids I had to step over in the kitchen floor to say nothing of theSociety living room floor and the upstairs floor, but they were all welcome and there's someProject of them come here this summer, one of them lived, one of the Johnson boys lives in Texas now and his oldest brother lives over Northeast, the one that lost the leg in Vietnam, they stuckRadicalism by, they call us father and mother, pa and ma how are you, they stop by every once in a while, people like that, it's nothing, they're not communists of course, I never raised my kids to be communist,History I never thought the day would come after I quit the Communist Party in 1940 when in complete disgustHistorical over what happened out at Cargill and Cargill said that yeah well I could takeCentury care of your black workers, we can use two of them on, to maintain the track and we're going to use threeOral shifts, the [unclear] plants going to run the three shifts and we'll have to have shit house attendants in each one of the toilets, that'd be room for nine more. That's what they offered the black, they couldn't work on the construction of the boats themselves and so forth and I took this to my Party and I said I want to make a major fight out of this, I want to really throw this thing wide open, first of all I'll start right out how Cargill got the Minnesota River bridge for nothing and got the landMinnesota out there for nothing and the policy that's carried on and everythingTwentieth they're doing is cost plus. Of course all of this, this of course [unclear] start the war... TO: The war effort, yeah.... JF: The same thing of course followed after the WPA strike, when I got the notice that federal grand jury's convening in St. Paul to investigate the actions of the WPA strike, that I am to bring with me the true and correct records as secretary of the Minneapolis Joint Strike Council. A great radical by the name of Walter Frank who ran for alderman and legislator and could spout Karl Marx and [unclear] much better than I could, Walter Frank insisted that we had to revise the minutes to change this and change that and then we had to burn all of my original and minutes and everything and take over the re-written, typewritten minutes and again I went and, to say that the Communist Party didn't know about what was going on is totally wrong because the head of the Communist Party, his wife was a member of the Stenographers Union and whenever I needed a stenographer, she wasn't working full time, as secretary of the Minneapolis Building Trades Council, she was my stenographer, so every word that I said and I always consulted with the Party, they knew exactly what was going on, but nobody said one word to me, so when Walter Frank said he wanted to take the records and burn them, sided by the Trotskyite Goldman who was a part of the committee from the Federal Workers section of 544, and by the way I asked Walter two years ago whether it was his idea or Goldman's to revise the minutes and he wouldn't answer me, he said aw let bygones be bygones and Kenneth Ingle set there and heard him say it, I went down and had lunch with him, Kenneth Ingle called me up and said Walter Frank's in town he wants to have lunch with you. I said okay Kenneth let's go down and have lunch. So we had lunch and I had told Kenneth what I was going to ask him, [unclear] Walter Frank had never admitted why, who put him up to this. The night before I [unclear] take them over to St. Paul, I kept all the records by the way, I put them in a box and I hid them, the original handwritten ones, ones I typed out and sent to everybody including Ernest Lundeen and Mrs.

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