Book adds texture to city's biography

Today's column was written before Tuesday's election. By now, we should have a good idea whether a charter proposal to revamp the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation passed.

Some have seen the proposal as a contest between good and evil. Detractors saw the amendment as a power grab by the mayor and most on the City Council. Supporters saw it as lifting the city's financial powers from the fog of an obscure independent board and into the limelight of greater accountability by having the council assume them.

But it's not a debate that should be viewed in isolation, as Iric Nathanson's new book, "Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century," shows. This book published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press puts the board proposal into a context of struggle throughout the past century over how municipal power ought to be shared.

A colleague of mine scanned the book last week and opined that it must be dull, given that it leads with a chapter on the city charter. On the contrary, that struggle defines much about how Minneapolis is governed today, with a strong council and a mayor whose powers are considerably weaker than those of his St. Paul counterpart. That power-sharing split also underlies the city's triumphs and stumbles through the century.

Nathanson begins his century with Mayor Doc Ames, an executive so venal that his take from illegal slot machines alone was estimated at $15,000 annually, somewhere north of $350,000 in today's dollars. This venality came in waves through the century, with the indictments of six aldermen in the late 1920s, the rackets of the Kid Cann era, and as recently as the past 10 years, with the imprisonment of three council members and a developer in a federal public corruption probe.

Nathanson also traces the events leading up to the 1934 strike called by Teamsters Local 574, a bloody spasm that was the first major breach in the control employers exerted over labor and City Hall. Connecting both the labor strife and the charter debate is an interesting thread on which Nathanson dwells.

He cites the 2001 work of historian Mary Lethert Wingerd, who attributes the differing political climates in the Twin Cities to their differing economic status. She suggests that the ascendancy of Minneapolis over St. Paul economically by the turn of the 20th century caused St. Paul's civic leaders to more willingly make concessions to the working class of that city. In contrast, Minneapolis power brokers held more tightly onto political and economic clout in their burgeoning city.

That not only led to labor strife but also stymied the attempts of those same civic leaders when they tried to reform the city's hodgepodge arrangement of municipal powers contained in the charter. They saw themselves as good government crusaders, but labor saw them as the enemy in a class struggle and stoutly opposed charter changes right down through Tuesday's election.

Nathanson also illuminates such important chapters in city history as the 1967 racially prompted burning of Plymouth Avenue stores, the city's halting and perhaps misguided Gateway Urban Renewal, the gradually accelerating revival of its dying central riverfront, and the long battle that led to laying tracks for the state's first light-rail transit line.

There is room for some quibbles over Nathanson's necessarily selective focus. One could argue that the Neighborhood Revitalization Program deserved a place in the transformative events that shaped the Minneapolis we have today. Or that the slum-clearing creation of public housing on an ancient but boggy north Minneapolis riverbed, and its subsequent and controversial replacement by the mixed-income settlement known as Heritage Park, deserved a chapter. In his chapter on how Minneapolis addressed its 1946 reputation as the nation's capital of anti-Semitism, a reader begs for more of the gut-level feeling of what it was like for Nathanson and his family to experience that shameful legacy as he grew up Jewish on the North Side and later in Linden Hills.

Nathanson's book grew out of teaching a college course on milestones in the city's history. He admits an inability to keep a detached view of the city, terming his approach more journalistic than traditional history. That's fitting for a vigorously involved Longfellow area resident who writes for that community's newspaper. He's also uniquely placed as a community organizer, an aide to former U.S. Rep. Don Fraser, and then a longtime city development agency employee who worked on some projects he describes. He still is active in housing and economic development issues at 69.

His book forms a welcome addition to the city's biography.

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438