Timber strike 80 years ago had an unlikely voice behind it

The 19-year-old from Duluth dropped out of the College of St. Scholastica in 1925 to work among Chicago's poor. That's where Irene Levine Paull bumped into Jane Addams, the renowned Chicago social worker in her late-60s who would win the Nobel Peace Prize three years later.

The encounter would prove pivotal in Paull's rise as a radical Minnesota labor organizer and writer. But not in the way you might guess. If Addams meant to pass the torch of social justice down to the next generation, the handoff wasn't smooth. The two failed to click, as Paull explained in a 1979 interview.

She described how Addams stepped down a circular staircase — "that wonderful old woman of an old period" — a onetime suffragist who performed charity among the downtrodden.

Addams asked, "What can I do for you my daughter?" Paull told her she "just can't bear" the poverty into which she'd immersed herself. "I have to do something about it."

Addams told her to go to back to college and get a social work degree. Paull cringed. She explained she'd quit college because she didn't think she "was getting anywhere."

She thanked Addams, but walked off feeling far from appreciative.

"I went away and I said, "Social work!" I had an aunt that did social work, and she used to go and peek into people's kitchen closets to see if they had oranges or if they had a chicken in their refrigerators … That's not where I'm going."

"They told of sleeping in airless camps infested with bedbugs and lice, with no bathing or washing facilities of any kind, with flies carrying infection from the latrine to the kitchen; of sleeping two in double-deck bunks, on a little hay covered with blankets encrusted with filth, with the stench of manure, sweaty underwear, tobacco smoke, rubbers, and spit; with wet socks, coats, shirts of eighty men or so strung on poles over the stove in their sleeping room to dry … where for twenty-five days' work a man could earn as little as $1.40."

With 4,000 lumberjacks going on a series of strikes in 1937, the lumber industry's buzz saws ground to a halt before a settlement that included timber producers promising eight-hour days, improved conditions, $70 a month and union recognition.

"The union gave them a sense of personal dignity," said Paull, crediting Gov. Elmer Benson's pro-union stance in a turbulent era for labor relations.

"All through the timber strike the workers could scarcely believe it possible that for once in their experience a governor had not turned tear gas and guns against them," Paull wrote to Benson — 80 years ago this Sunday. "It should be a thrill to you to know that because of you they have taken hope for the first time in their lives in 'political action.' "

Irene Levin was born in 1908. Her father, Maurice, was a Jewish cattle trader and the first in his family born after emigrating from Ukraine. Her mother, Eva, came from the same shtetl and sewed buttons in an overalls factory.

A feminist before her time, Paull recalled finding a garret-style Duluth apartment around 1930. "You should see the kitchen," she quipped. "It's perfect, just the place for a typewriter."

When she dropped out of college to "get experience of living," on Chicago's Halstead Street, her mother freaked out.

"I didn't send you to college so you should clean toilets," her mother told her. "Other people can picket!"

Her mother constantly asked: "Why can't you be a social worker like Auntie Ida?" Paull responded that she didn't want to look into peoples' pantries to see whether they had oranges and chicken, but instead would fight for their rights to have oranges and chickens.

Irene married labor lawyer and fellow pro-communist Henry Paull after returning to Duluth in 1929. They raised two children and she kept writing through the 1940s about workers' rights and racism. Populist folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger stayed with the Paulls on a 1941 Duluth tour stop.

She went on to champion civil rights and oppose the Vietnam War until her death in 1981. And despite Jane Addams' advice, she never did earn that social work degree.