The 1916–1917 northern Minnesota lumber strike was a labor strike involving several thousand sawmill workers and lumberjacks in the northern part of the U.S. state of Minnesota, primarily along the Mesabi Range. The lumber workers were organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and primarily worked for the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company, whose sawmill plant was located in Virginia, Minnesota. Additional lumberjacks and mill workers from the International Lumber Company were also involved. The strike first began with the Virginia and Rainy Lake mill workers on December 28, 1916, and among the lumberjacks on January 1, 1917. The strike lasted for a little over a month before it was officially called off by the union on February 1, 1917. Though the strike faltered by late January and had resulted in many arrests and the suppression of the IWW's local union in the region, the union claimed a partial victory, as the lumber companies instituted some improvements for the lumberjacks' working conditions.
The roots of this strike stemmed from a previous strike involving miners on the Mesabi Range that ended in a partial victory for the workers. During this strike, the IWW became involved and established a local union in the region called the Metal Mine Workers' Industrial Union No. 490, which was based in Virginia. Following the end of the miners' strike, Local 490 began to organize lumber workers in the region. At the time, the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company operated the world's largest white pine sawmill plant in Virginia, which employed about 1,200 workers, and they had roughly 2,000 lumberjacks on their payroll at any given time. Through late 1916, Local 490 continued to organize these workers, working alongside the Agricultural Workers Organization No. 400, a subgroup of the IWW that had been trying to organize lumberjacks in the region for the past year. By December 1916, more militant individuals within the union were calling for a strike against the company, though IWW higherups such as General Secretary-Treasurer Bill Haywood were wary of this, thinking that there had not been enough time to adequately plan and organize a successful strike. Nonetheless, on December 24, 1916, about 700 workers met to create a list of demands for both the mill workers and the lumberjacks that included reduced working hours, higher pay, better working conditions, and changes to scheduling. On the morning of December 28, with the company refusing to institute these changes, up to 1,000 workers, representing a majority of the mill's 1,200-person workforce, went on strike and began picketing outside the plant. At the same time, messengers were sent to the logging camps throughout the area to convince the lumberjacks to strike, and over 2,000 did so between January 1 and 2.
In its first few days, the strike was successful in partially shutting down Virginia and Rainy Lake's plant and several logging camps in the region, while a sawmill owned by the International Lumber Company in International Falls was also affected by a walkout. However, early on, lumber management began to work with local law enforcement agencies and public officials to break the strike. Strikebreakers were brought in from other areas of the state, while police arrested dozens of strikers and IWW leaders on questionable charges. Additionally, many local municipalities began to enact laws that outright banned the IWW from their jurisdictions, with members facing either expulsion or imprisonment. By mid-January, many of the local IWW leaders had been arrested, while striking lumberjacks began to abandon the strike. With the help of deputized sheriffs acting for the companies, many logging camps began to resume operations within a week of the initial lumberjack walkouts, and many mill workers began to return to work due to low strike pay. Finally, on February 1, the remaining leadership of Local 490 met in Duluth and declared the strike over.
The IWW was able to claim a partial victory in the strike, as lumber companies instituted some changes to address the lumberjacks' poor working conditions and low pay. However, the strike had severely damaged Local 490's presence on the Mesabi Range, and while the IWW had planned to launch another organizing drive in the area, U.S. involvement in World War I and the accompanying suppression of the IWW by state and federal governments hurt these plans. In 1917, Minnesota enacted a criminal syndicalism law aimed in part at the IWW, and in September of that year, an IWW individual in Minnesota became the first person in the U.S. to be convicted under such a law. During the 1920s and 1930s, organizing efforts among lumber workers in the area would be taken over by the affiliate unions of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization. Discussing the strike in a 1971 article, historian John E. Haynes said, "The resolution of that strike helped redefine the boundaries of permissible political and economic dissent in Minnesota, virtually erased the specter of strong IWW influence on the iron range, and served as a precedent for the state's treatment of dissenters during World War I".
Background Miners' strike on the Mesabi Range
In mid-1916, miners on the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota launched a spontaneous labor strike. The range, situated about north of the city of Duluth, was a major iron ore mining region and part of the larger Iron Range. This strike began with a walkout led by Joe Greeni, a Czech immigrant, on June 2, and at its peak it involved several thousand miners, primarily immigrants. The labor dispute lasted for several months, but by September, with strike funds running low, numerous instances of violent confrontations between strikers and law enforcement officials, and many of the strike leaders imprisoned, miners began to return to work, and the strike officially ended on September 17. Despite the strike ending without a labor contract in place between the miners and the mining companies on the range, many of the companies began instituting changes to address the causes of the strike, such as increased pay and an eight-hour workday.
IWW presence in northern Minnesota During the strike, union organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) helped to organize the miners. The IWW, whose members are known as Wobblies, had been established in Chicago in 1905 at a meeting of socialists and miners from the Western United States. The organization was a radical anti-capitalist union that advocated for industrial unionism and the concept of the One Big Union. Over the next decade, the union had established a presence in Minnesota, organizing a local union of lumberjacks in Deer River in 1910 and participating in free speech fights in Duluth and Minneapolis in the early 1910s. However, the miners' dispute had caught the union off guard. Despite this, shortly after it began, the IWW established a local union in Virginia, a city of slightly over 10,000 people on the range, and helped the miners to coordinate strike actions and write a list of demands to the mining companies. The local union, Metal Mine Workers' Industrial Union No. 490, was based out of the Finnish Socialist Hall, a meeting hall for socialists among Virginia's community of Finnish immigrants. Many Finns in the area had been involved in the strike and were supportive of socialist ideals and the IWW in particular, and socialist halls such as the one in Virginia existed in many of the towns along the Mesabi Range, serving as centers for community life. During this time, Local 490 established many branches in cities throughout the range. Following the end of the strike, Local 490 remained as the largest IWW organization in northern Minnesota, with about 2,000 of the 10,000 to 15,000 miners who participated in the strike remaining members. The local union was led by secretary-treasurer Charles Jacobson, a long-time native of Virginia who worked as a miner.
Lumber industry in northern Minnesota
With the collapse of the miners' strike, many miners went to work in the area's lumber industry. Many lumber workers in the area also worked in mining during the summer months, and in late 1916, a significant number of lumberjacks had been involved in the miners' strike and were subsequently blacklisted by those companies. During their early years, the IWW had focused on organizing lumber workers primarily in the Western and Southern United States, and they had seen tremendous success in the Pacific Northwest, but they had only minor progress in organizing the industry in Minnesota and the larger Great Lakes region. However, starting in September 1916, Local 490 began to focus on organizing the 1,200 workers of the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company. The company was a concern, combining the Weyerhaeuser company's holdings in northern Minnesota, the Edward Hines Lumber Company's holdings in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the Cook and O'Brien Company's processing facilities in Virginia. The Virginia plant was at the time the largest producer of white pine wood in the world, producing an average of 1 million board feet of lumber per day.
Mill workers were receptive to labor organizing due to the long hours and low pay they experienced on the job. At the Virginia plant, the mill workers' schedules included 12-hour days and 7-day weeks, with an average pay of between $2.50 and $3 per day (equivalent to between $ and $ in ). These workers made on average about 25 percent less than mill workers in the Pacific Northwest, which had already largely been organized by the IWW, and their hourly pay was significantly less than the average Virginia laborer's during this time. In an 84-hour week, the average Virginia and Rainy Lake mill worker made about what an average Virginia laborer earned in 50 to 54 hours of work, and many worked 6 days per week. While there had been several sporadic strikes and attempts at largescale labor organization among mill workers in the Great Lakes region since the late 1800s, such as efforts from the Knights of Labor, the region remained relatively unorganized and with lower pay than in other regions.
Organizing efforts among lumberjacks