In an August 24, 2012, Minnesota Public Radio interview, Jan Klein, a descendant of white settlers killed in the US- Dakota War of 1862, described her role as one of the 85 people advising the Minnesota Historical Society about the content of the 1862 exhibit now at the History Center in St. Paul. Klein began with the goal of making sure that her white ancestors were not forgotten. However, as a result of seeing the final product, she had a revelation:
She says she had no idea of the starvation and other privations the Dakota endured that sparked the war.
“The kicker was, we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain. We did not pay them the annuities in a timely way. And there were white traders who pilfered money off the top claiming debts. I learned all this since I first got involved. I had no idea,” she said. “You might say, “Why didn’t they go to war against the government, why did they go to war against the whites, they did nothing to deserve? ‘But that was obviously the only way they could get their attention.”
She says her empathy for the Dakota people has grown. And she faults the federal government for failing to meet terms of its treaties with the Dakota.
She says the Minnesota Historical Society exhibit does a good job of explaining what happened to all sides including the white settlers in the 1862 war.
“I’m grateful that they used the story, because that was my goal … to get the word [out], that these were true, actual people that this happened to,” Klein said.
She believes the exhibit achieves that goal. Her hope now is for reconciliation among descendants of the individuals and families whose lives came together so tragically 150 years ago.
You are headed for the 1862 exhibit at the History Center in St. Paul, the exhibit of the hour, the thing to see in this 150th anniversary year. To get there you go to the third floor and reach a long hallway that leads to the exhibit. On the left you see a large open gallery with lesser-known, but interesting WPA paintings from 1934 of cities and farms. That gallery has a lot of open space in the center where you can stand and view the paintings from a distance, though the captions are small and mostly illegible unless seen from a few inches or so away.
However, 1862 is on your mind, so you resist 1934 and keep going. On the left as you go are images representing a few people, whites and Dakotas, with some text telling what they were doing the day before the well-known events of August 18, 1862. You reach a point where the hall ahead is blocked by the narrow exit of the exhibit you are about to see. The main part of the exhibit starts to the left, and you turn left to walk into a space that is smaller than the hallway you have just exited. This space is blocked in the center by an island that sends visitors one way or another through narrow passages on either side. In this section is the historical context, treaties, events, settlement, things that contributed to the well-known events of 1862.
There is a lot of text here which is good if people read it. Even though you do not intend to be picky you see a few errors or at least errors from your point of view. You disagree with one point on the 1851 treaty and with something else about the 1805 treaty. No one will notice these points, probably: The thing about exhibits with a lot of text is that it will only be absorbed fully by a few people; its effect for most people will be to impress them by its presence rather than its content. But the text is there for people who might say: “But you did not mention X.” The curators can say: “You missed X. It is over there in the corner by the rifle.”
Then you see the photograph of Alexander H. H. Stuart, who often signed his name A. H. H. Stuart. You can’t remember what the H’s stand for. The caption says he was one of the 1851 treaty commissioners, which you know is not true. The commissioners were Alexander Ramsey and Luke Lea, who signed the treaty that is hanging on the wall over there. Stuart was the Secretary of Interior, who sent out the instructions for the treaty. Does it really matter, you wonder. Mistakes are made when doing any history. It is wrong to seize on one thing to make it symbolize the whole. The exhibit can be wrong about Stuart but still be right about many other things.
There are panels about settlement in the Minnesota River Valley. Is there anything new here? Maybe not. But maybe that doesn’t matter, either. Everyone has to read about it, the curators believe. Every generation must confront it. This means the same stories have to be told again and again. This time the stories feel fragmented though that might be a good thing, because fragmentation—making the story less seamless—might lead to breaking up the old Master Narrative, the white people’s view of 1862 which was the main 1862 story for 150 years. Still there is a lot here and in what follows about the settlers. The curators made sure that the settlers were covered. No one can say: “But what about the white people?”
At this point it is clear that you are being shunted sharply right into a new section of the exhibit, past a large sign labeled War, through a very narrow passage into an even more crowded gallery that feels like a maze. Again there is a panel and a case in the center, followed by another with very little room on either side. On a busy day this place is crowded. There is little room for standing back and getting perspective, unless you want to see things through people’s hair and over their shoulders. What’s worse is that if you really want to spend time taking in the text you suspect that the lady in front of you is going to accuse you of spending too much time too close to her back.
There seem to be a lot of guns, four to be exact, a shotgun, a rifle, a revolver, and a musket, but maybe I missed one or two more. Gwen Westerman said in her presentation at the History Center on July 25 that the guns were at a child’s eye view which is true, though some of them are standing upright so that they are also at level of a tall adult too, as though they were standing guard over the gallery. This is a bit unnerving, reminiscent of a country museum in 1910, but perhaps that serves an evocative purpose. Many people like to look at guns, including boys, as I recall.
Now as you try to squeeze through the available space it comes over you that this exhibit arrangement is a complete nightmare. Then you realize that this must have been planned carefully. These narrow passages are what the curators intended. It is implicit in the way they approached the whole idea of the exhibit: 1862, they said, was something every Minnesotan had to confront. And they were going to make them do it. And part of that was not just having a lot of text and images, but also making the exhibit into an uncomfortable physical experience, a maze made up of narrow unavoidable historical passages, representing the inevitability of the events of 1862. If you survived you would be spit out the other side changed in some way. 1862, the curators must have been thinking, is Minnesota’s nightmare and we should treat it that way.
You keep thinking of the running of the bulls at Pamplona and how they are funneled down a long narrow street and people run in front of them to show their bravery, trying not to get gored. Here in the 1862 exhibit you might try to run away from history, but it would catch up with you, you would get gored one way or another. The curators would see to that. But perhaps they had something less violent in mind, such as the artist Marina Abramovic’s work Imponderabilia (1977, reenacted in 2010) where you had to walk through a doorway in which two performers, both completely nude, stood on either side. Embarrassing but perhaps not fatal.
The maze-like center part of the 1862 exhibit which records the battles leads to another right turn, mazelike, into the aftermath of 1862, followed by another sharp right turn into a space at the beginning of the exhibit containing the prequel to 1862. This space has a pillar in the center, and the room around it is narrow but not so confused as what you have just been through. Here is a lot of information about what happened to individual settlers and on the other side there is information on what happened to the Dakota en masse, the trials, the hangings, the concentration camp, Davenport, the exile to Crow Creek. Then the exhibit ends, with a board on the wall where the visitor is invited to put up a post-it note, with comments. No, not actually comments, just one word: “What single word would you use to describe your feelings after viewing this exhibit?”
One word? After all that, one word? After all we have been through, the detailed text, the disorienting, fragmented, painful experience of this exhibit, all you want to hear from me is one word? The curators wanted you to have a profound experience but were just not that interested in what you had to say afterward. It is as though you started to tell someone a long, life-changing story about actually getting gored by a bull at Pamplona and the person you are telling this to says: “Can you keep it short? I have stuff to do.” And in this case I suppose the MHS staff probably do have stuff to do. I think they are exhausted by the whole 1862 experience and would like to move on. But before they go, like the interviewer James Lipton, they just want to know what fruit you would be if you were a fruit.
That last thing is harsh and you can’t quite believe you actually said it. But the one word thing is especially jarring given the panel just before the post-it notes where the process of exhibit creation is described. Here’s how Daniel Spock, director of the MHS History Center Museum put it:
This exhibit is one of the products of “The US-Dakota War of 1862 Truth Recovery Project,” an initiative of the Minnesota Historical Society. The initiative was inspired in part by Healing Through Remembering, a Belfast-based organization that defines “truth through recovery” as the “uncovering and revealing of ‘what happened.’”
The term “truth recovery” might imply that there is a single unassailable truth about what happened before, during, and after the war. That is certainly not the case. There are now and have always been multiple interpretations of what happened, why it happened, and who was responsible. The process for creating this exhibit has led us to seek out these perspectives and we have learned invaluable things from many experts and descendants of those from all sides who experienced the war. Their generosity has shaped the interpretation you find here.
In presenting this exhibit, our goal is to inform, to inspire, and to initiate a public dialogue that will resonate far beyond the goals of this gallery—to redefine the Society’s role from that of an authoritative institution to one that fosters and facilitates public discussion, and debate.
Who can argue with telling the truth? It is a noble aim. The process through which this came about seems to have been an extensive one, with numerous conversations about many aspects of 1862 with many different people. In carrying out this process it is clear that the MHS staff did not limit those they spoke with to one word. Yet the result was similar. Having asked their consultants for complex reactions to 1862, over many hours, the exhibit has reduced that complexity in order to put it on the wall. No matter how detailed exhibit captions are they can never do justice to that process.
Any truth recovery project worth its salt would produce a complex record which would nourish generations of study and thought. But the need to put something on the wall in a constricted space has scaled down the result to an account of 1862 that is remarkably similar in content and emphasis as those of the past, though intensified emotionally through its constricted maze-like layout. You wonder where you can get a copy of the long report the exhibit staff wrote about the experience of working on the exhibit. That would be worth reading. You think about filing a Minnesota Data Practices Act request but then you remember that the Minnesota Historical Society is not considered a state agency so it is not subject to the law. Also you realize that a report may not have been written. Perhaps in twenty years someone will do oral history interviews with the staff and in another fifty years another exhibit will be created describing this exhibit.
You wonder what truth is displayed in the exhibit? Is there anything here that is “indisputable”? That word was one used by exhibit curators in the sifting of objects for use in the exhibit. The guns, for example, may have been indisputable in the sense that there may be no argument about their use in 1862. But of course the choice of displaying them is highly disputable and they have many meanings for many people today. How you sort out the meanings of guns and rope or anything else related to 1862 is not a simple task. It is not simply a case of reporting a few simple facts about them. But in the end, “disputable items” are much more interesting than indisputable ones.
No one questions that that there two 1851 treaties signed or attested to by the Dakota, but do we really, even now, know the meaning of those treaties? In fact, what the treaties accomplished in a legal sense, not to mention a lot of other senses, is still subject to dispute. Did 1862 begin on August 18, or in 1851, or was it centuries before? Was Henry Sibley the chief engineer of 1862 or did he have some help? These are all questions for discussion even if the materiality of certain objects may be clear. Ultimately no single word, or even simple caption can faintly suggest the complex nature of these disputable meanings.
Some of the one-word reactions written on post-it notes illustrate the discordant quality of trying to limit visitor comments to one word apiece. Can we all agree that “Intense” or “Solemn” cover 1862 nicely? How very like Minnesota, a place where citizens are expected to limit their emotions and where we all try to reach some bland consensus. Fortunately many visitors resist the instructions and give more complex and wordy answers. In the midst of “Solemn,” and “Tragedy,” someone wrote: “I am glad to see the record set straighter about the US gov’t perfidious treatment of the Dakota natives. Sadly the US gov’t still persecutes native peoples in the USA.” But perhaps many people would disagree with that statement event if they could unite behind the word “Tragedy.”
Now as you stand in this space at the end of the exhibit you are lost in conflicting thoughts but finally the press of business forces you through a last narrow passage labeled Memory, and you are back at the beginning, where on a busy day, perhaps you might be shunted through the maze again, unless you could escape into the pastoral and industrial world of 1934 down the hall.
What will be your Memory of 1862? The Minnesota Historical Society is seeking to avoid its traditional role as an arbiter of history, but no matter what it does it helps create memories, consciously or unconsciously, through its exhibits and other activities. The 1862 exhibit will do the same. Those who want a more complex history to be told will always want to avoid the nightmarish quality of this kind of historical maze which is, in fact, a remnant of the views of past generations about 1862 in which every new fact was used to reproduce the same historical consensus. Those who want a more complex history to be told will always prefer that history be seen in a larger historical room, where there is more space for context and for reflection. And they will find the 1862 exhibit unsatisfying, even if they might praise the exhibit including a nuance here and a complexity there.
Perhaps the MHS exhibit staff is right, 1862 is a nightmare from which Minnesota has never escaped, and that if we ever want to wake up from it we have to bravely pass through repeated retellings of it. But instead of leading to a sense of awakening, this exhibit seems more than anything to continue reliving the nightmare.
Obviously this is just one opinion about the 1862 exhibit. Others are welcome, but, please, use all your words.
It’s easy to find the Mill City Museum. Just look beneath the Gold Medal Flour sign on the west side of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. As I approached, in 2005, the old limestone walls of the Washburn Crosby A mill containing the museum within their shell, I could feel the goose bumps starting. This was where it all began. On Wednesday night Sept. 23, 1903 close to 1,500 Washburn Crosby Co. Employees walked out, past a notice that “All employees of this mill leaving their positions are discharged and are no longer in the employ of the company.” Executive William Dunwoody vowed to “fight until the finish”. The company would never negotiate with a labor union. Minneapolis would never be the same.
As I crossed Second Street toward the museum entrance I could almost hear the pounding of the hammers erecting a huge stockade fence around the milling district as over a thousand pickets shouted “scab” and threw the occasional brick. It was immediately clear that Dunwoody and company president James Stroud Bell intended to end the evil presence of unions in the mills. In order to neutralize the surprisingly effective shutdown the company outfitted a vacant Pillsbury oatmeal mill to house and feed over eight hundred nonunion replacements that were smuggled through the picket lines in heavily guarded carriages. In a battle of attrition the under-funded union gradually crumbled. On October 8, 1903, an unnamed miller told the Minneapolis Tribune that the “backbone of the strike is broken, and there will be nothing more doing in the way of strikes for some time.” Although a few strikers would be rehired “the orators, organizers and agitators were not wanted.” This would be the policy in the mills for the next thirty three years. A faded Gold Medal Flour sign on the east side of St. Paul, photographed in 1981 by Bruce White
Ridiculous, you say? Not at all. On April 11, 1919 the National War Labor Board ruled that the Minneapolis mill companies had to bargain collectively with organized employees. Two weeks later Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby set up a new committee system. Employees would elect representatives to meet with company directors to discuss any issues involving their work. Employees were also sent an “Industrial Creed” that announced that “Labor and Capital are partners, not enemies.” The Minneapolis Labor Review recognized a company union immediately and expressed great surprise “that suddenly the great milling corporations are taking a deep interest in their welfare.”
Jean Spielman, organizer for Local 92 of the flour mill workers union, explained the nature of the deception to large labor rallies. The company committees would advise the company but had no power whatsoever. Faced with an educated and skeptical workforce, Washburn Crosby created The Eventually News (meaning that someday it would actually report the news?) to promote employee loyalty. In addition to sports and holidays, however, the paper reported on the joint conferences between executives and the committees. The paper was a dismal failure. In a July 1920 election only 321 Washburn-Crosby employees out of 1,400 voted for committee representatives. Pianos and tanning parlors had received a stony thumbs down.
The Gold Medal Flour sign above Mill City Museum in Minneapolis
John Crosby had had enough. The con job had failed, it was time for the dirty tricks department. The Marshall Service of Kansas City was hired to plant undercover detectives in each plant at a cost of $10,000 per year. The agents rapidly befriended union organizers and officers. Once inside Local 92 they relayed lists of union members to Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby. While the companies slowly found excuses to fire union members the fourteen agents discredited union leaders and encouraged conflict among various factions within the union. The coup de grace came in August of 1921 when one of the detectives was elected secretary of the union. The Marshall Service inquired if the mills wanted the union completely destroyed or wanted its agents to control it in a weakened state to forestall outside organizers. The millers enthusiastically endorsed the second option.
But these weren’t the only detectives in the flour mills. The Citizens Alliance, heavily funded by Pillsbury and Washburn-Crosby, started a Free Employment Bureau in 1919 to supply Minneapolis industries with nonunion workers. To get a job selected workers were required to report on union activities at their job sites. Very crude, according to Luther Boyce of the Northern Information Bureau. Boyce’s more “professional” agents had infiltrated the Industrial Workers of the World and sold his intelligence to the millers and to other industrial subscribers. There were also the forty six agents of the Committee of thirteen that were funded by the same companies and the…. You get the picture. Was one of the mill girls a spy? Perhaps a better question would be, would the mills allow any workers to cavort without keeping an eye on them? Very unlikely. Not exactly the happy family reported in The Eventually News or presented in the museum exhibit.
I stumbled slightly as a college-aged foreign exchange student bounced off my shoulder on his way around a cool looking piece of mill machinery. I’m a sucker for antique machines, particularly when the long belt drives are running. I followed him to two small antique roller mills standing placidly as if waiting for a power belt to engage. It’s hard to imagine such small machines revolutionizing an industry and feeding a nation. My eyes strayed toward the small kids frolicking in the water lab and there, down at knee level on a small display board was Jean Spielman! I couldn’t believe it. I had to crouch down to read the 1920 quote, “It is a sad commentary upon civilization that an industry flourishing to the extent as the flour milling industry is, that the workers are the most underpaid next to the steel industry. The twelve hour day is still a fact in many a flour mill in the U.S.” Below this industry spokesman William Edgar insisted that wages in the mills had “advanced steadily since the outbreak of war.”
A very short note beneath these quotes explained that the flour packers struck for higher wages in 1917 and soon afterwards most Minneapolis mill workers joined Local 92. And that’s all folks. That’s the one and only mention of a union in the Mill City Museum. Without any further discussion the museum visitor can only conclude that Washburn Crosby was forever more a union shop. Of course, one year later the union was a mere shell controlled by company spies. Upstairs the gift shop sells copies of MillCity, a book that was produced to complement the museum. Here we learn that “By 1921 the union was in tatters. . . .” Why did museum curators decide to eliminate this simple explanation? Jean Spielman and the members of his union knew what was going on in 1921, so why is this knowledge denied the museum visitor in 2005? Spielman wrote that “the stool pigeon is to be found everywhere a union is contemplated among the employees of a mill.” Washburn Crosby and the Citizens Alliance may have defeated Spielman but they certainly didn’t fool him.
It was time for my Flour Tower tour. I wound my way between a huge harvest table and several General Mills product displays. One featured the 1991 Twins World Series wheaties box. I wedged myself into the top corner of a huge freight elevator above a twitching, squirming bunch of school children. The wooden slat doors slapped together and the elevator started slowly rising. Each floor had been cleverly designed to represent a floor in a working mill. With a loud whirring noise the belts began to move, the machines came to life. A collective ooh escaped the from the kids. This was very cool.
We finally stopped at the seventh floor where the doors opened to reveal the mill manager’s office, recreated in great detail. Right down to the production schedule and engine schematics. The back window filled with panoramic views of the Minneapolis milling district as a sonorous voice told us “the mills stood at St. Anthony Falls in their corona of flour dust like blockhouses guarding the rapids of the river.” The screen dissolved into golden wheat fields as a pompous Chamber of Commerce voice asked, ”Where is a market to be found for all this flour? The answer is, the world is our market.” The jaunty westward ho sound of Copeland’s Rodeo played in the background.
A Gold Medal flour sign on the east side of St. Paul, photographed in 1981 by Bruce White
It was just like one of those old industrial propaganda films I used to watch in grade school. I’m embarrassed to say that I was the nerdy kid that knew how to thread the 16-mm projector so I saw a lot of these hideous things. Forty years later I discovered that many of them had been produced by the National Association of Manufacturers public relations department under the direction of Harry Bullis of General Mills. The same Harry Bullis who started his career working on The Eventually News. In both cases, the propaganda was intended to promote free enterprise and suppress unions and radical political movements.
On the way back down the elevator stopped at several different floors where mill equipment was whirring away. The voices of real workers told us about production quotas, returning servicemen taking women’s jobs, unsafe working conditions and finally the day the plant shut down with no warning. Real workers with real problems, this was good stuff. On the final floor the designers had simulated an engine fire that flashed and roared. After an extremely loud dust explosion the set went dark. Several small children in front of me sobbed in terror.
The flour tower deserves its various awards. The realism of the sets and the sincerity of the workers voices was riveting. But what did the workers do about all these problems? Did they join a union and negotiate for improvements? The curators never seem to grasp the concept of a working class. They found the workers, but they treat them all as individuals. Their only unity is their function in the complex machinery of the mill. They are never allowed to join together, to become a working class, to join a union. As I stepped off the elevator it hit me. It wasn’t just the newsreel, the entire museum was a sort of industrial propaganda stage set. With a little modern public relations thrown in.
How and why had the antiunion activities of the Citizens Alliance and the struggles of Minneapolis workers to organize unions been rejected by the museum curators? Fortunately in 2005, I was writing an article for a respectable local publication. Doors opened, before I knew it. I was getting a behind the scenes view of the flour tower and long interviews with head curator Kate Roberts and Minnesota Historical Society Director Nina Archabal, two very smart, smooth and enthusiastic supporters of the Mill City Museum. I was also given planning documents for various stages of museum development. In August of 2000 the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Center plan included a labor exhibit which included a hiring hall, a speakers corner and text on immigration, the Cooper’s Union and women workers—Unfortunately, no Citizens Alliance, and without them you can’t really tell the history of class struggle that created our unique Minnesota heritage. What happened to the labor exhibit? A round table discussion with selected scholars urged “the team to cut back the number of topics covered in the exhibits, and to focus interpretation on stories more directly related to the mill building.” The enlightened team now concentrated on the forces that fed Minneapolis’ emergence as the Mill City: Power, Production, Promotion and People. The four Ps. Caught in the strainer of this gibberish, labor was discarded.
I asked both Kate Roberts and Nina Archabal who decided not to have the Citizens Alliance in the museum and when it was decided. Kate couldn’t remember. It had been a long and very fluid process, and she couldn’t remember anyone ever talking about the Citizens Alliance. They, of course, knew all about the Citizens Alliance. MHS had financed a decade of research on the employers association and then published my own book A Union Against Unions. MHS Press promotional material says that the “Citizens Alliance in reality engaged in class warfare. It blacklisted union workers, ran a spy network to ferret out union activity, and, when necessary, raised a private army to crush its opposition with brute force.” In my conversation with her in 2005, Nina Archabal deflected the question, indicating that these were curatorial decisions. “The museum was Kate’s baby,” she said.
These were the people that had to know the answer, but they were suffering from collective amnesia. This was even better than Nixon or Bush in the logic department. How could you remember deciding something if you never even considered it? What did George W. Bush call this? Disassembling.
That day of my first visit to Mill City Museum, as I walked back through the museum I noticed a plaque with the Mill City Museum motto written on it. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, what happened here continues to shape your world. Too True! The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance, forged in the 1903 mill strike, still exists in 2005. The organization was renamed Associated Industries of Minneapolis in 1937 and became Employers Association, Inc. in 1985.
How does this organization continue to shape our world? Through its labor relations membership services it still manages a war, albeit a more subtle war, against labor unions. In 1994 it led the court battle to protect the right of Minnesota businesses to replace union employees during a strike. This, of course, has led to the decertification of numerous unions. The 1939 Minnesota Labor Relations Law, written for Associated Industries by the lawyers of the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey and Whitney (which coincidentally has long done legal work for the Minnesota Historical Society), is still used to restrict union activities. The Taft Hartley Act, which was modeled after the Minnesota law, still suppresses the organization and spread of labor unions across the country.
And who belongs to Employers Association Inc.? As of 1997 the membership included General Mills, Dayton Hudson, Norwest Corp. In short, many of the companies that formed the Citizens Alliance in 1903, lost the Battle of Deputies Run in 1934 and rewrote U.S. Labor laws after the depression have now paid for a museum that just happens to totally ignore the legacy of class warfare that they created. And it gets even stranger. The primary fund raiser and, according to Nina Archabal, the inspiration for the entire museum was David Koch, President of the Minnesota Historical Society. Mr. Koch (who at least is not that David Koch, the well known funder of conservative causes) was formerly the CEO of Graco, an important donor and a member of Employers Association, Inc.
In the end, of course, responsibility is not the important issue. The Mill City Museum now exists beneath the Gold Medal Flour sign, inside the crumbling walls of the Washburn A Mill. But where are the men and women who struggled for economic justice while they built Minneapolis stone by stone? Many of them fought and bled on our streets in a desperate attempt to establish a decent life, a life beyond brutal servitude. Don’t they at least deserve to have their place in history? “Museums change,” Director Archabal told me, “new exhibits will be developed. If we discover that we’ve left something out we can go back and take another look at it.” The Working Class is waiting.
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Seven years after my first visit to Mill City Museum I went back to scour the mill city museum again searching for the working class. The museum exhibits have not changed. The new exhibits mentioned by Nina Archabal have not been developed. The Flour Tower extravaganza also remains unchanged. MHS curators presumably have yet to perceive any need for improving their award winning production.
However, to at least succeed in entertaining visitors in our oh-so-modern hyperactive world they added a frenetic wacky video by Minneapolis humorist and writer Kevin Kling, “Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat.” Determined to see everything I very reluctantly followed a large group of fidgeting children—squirming children are the mainstay of MHS museums and historic sites—into the theater. Apparently conceived of and made for either squirming children or adults with exceedingly short attention spans, the show careens through history with dizzying speed. Pop-up cut outs, Kling in an endless parade of period costumes, and the live shrieks of tethered children complete the disorienting experience. Although I’m a fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, I like my history slow, detailed, and serious.
As the 19th and 20th century flashed by I almost missed the best “bit.” Refocusing on the screen after a brief glare at the writhing grade-school child next to me, I was amazed to be watching a newsreel clip of the 1934 Teamsters strike. The voice-over mentioned the long years of struggle between the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and the union as National Guard troops scurried across the screen. The voice announced a union victory and then we were swept on to the next frantic event.
Perhaps in the world of museum speak this forty-second “bit” is considered an adequate presentation. This is, after all, an industrial museum and workers are well, just workers. They aren’t the founders of the city that are endlessly written about and glorified in history books and museums. In order to build great mills and buildings, however, the founders had to control what happened in the city. This is an important part of the Recipe for a MillCity. The founders of the city of Minneapolis spent vast amounts of time and money to control the laws, courts, police and to spy on and root out any threat to their domination of industry. They made Minneapolis into a city where the vast majority (workers) struggled to survive while the mill owners basked in a life of luxury. A city where employers profits necessitated the poverty of tens of thousands of hard working citizens. I’m afraid forty seconds doesn’t quite do justice to the complex history of industrial warfare in Minneapolis, a history that still has an impact on the lives of all working Americans.
It was a tense evening at the meeting of the executive council of the Minnesota Historical Society on November 11, 1901. An invited speaker had given a speech for the ostensible purpose of telling the ancient history of the state, but at the end of his speech had condemned the white settlers and the U.S. government for its treatment of Minnesota’s Native inhabitants and had prophesied disaster for the whites of Minnesota if they did not renounce such actions.
Despite these plain words, the speaker went home that night thinking that he had been too polite; he had failed to tell the whole truth. Writing in his diary he stated: “Several members of the Historical Society are related in various ways to the gigantic robberies which have been perpetrated against the Indians in the Northwest. Henry M. Rice and Henry H. Sibley, deceased, were extensively involved in shaping the policy of the government against Minnesota Indian tribes.” He had withheld these facts from his speech, giving only a mild and general condemnation of the treatment of Indian people, but had still received a negative response. As a result, he wrote, “I now pledge myself never again to suppress facts in history to satisfy the desires of thieves.”
While many in the audience that evening enjoyed the first part of the talk, others believed that the speaker had been too radical. The president of the society thanked the speaker for his remarks but asked him to revise and reconsider them before submitting them in writing to the society, which the speaker refused to do. At that point the society held its business meeting at which a number of wealthy and influential Minnesotans were voted life memberships in the institution.
Jacob V. Brower in 1904, from the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.
The events of that evening in 1901 represent well the position of the Minnesota Historical Society in relation to controversial aspects of the state’s history. The role of the historical society in recording and recounting such events has often been contested. Though the institution is not a state agency, it has quasi-official status, one that it nurtures for its own perpetuation. As a result, the institution, whether it wants to or not, is viewed as presenting an official version of history, if not the whole truth. The problematic nature of the historical society’s precarious role is most evident when it comes to those topics perceived as “unpleasant,” where the truth does not cast a happy glow on the leaders of the state.
Given the polite nature of the 1901 newspaper articles which record the events it is hard to know how tense things were in the room that evening. However, based on the bare description of what happened, it is impossible to imagine such an evening occurring at a meeting of the executive council of the Minnesota Historical Society in the year 2011. Today the executive council is still a body composed of the rich and influential. And at least in the last twenty years during the tenure of the recently ex-director, annual meetings are routine, formalistic affairs with catered food, run with the precision of a Politburo gathering or a show trial. Controversy is never let in the door and if it gets in it is escorted out.
It may be that if the Minnesota Historical Society is ever to confront the controversies in Minnesota’s history, it will first have to confront the nature of its own organization as one begun to serve the interests of wealthy and influential whites, who sought to preserve history to celebrate and perpetuate their own points of view. In doing so the society must remember events such as the one in November 1901, when controversy came in the door and spoke.
It is important to know that the speaker that evening was Jacob V. Brower, a former legislator, an archaeologist, and a conservationist known for having fought for the creation in 1891 of Minnesota’s first state park, Itasca State Park. Brower was a friend of the historical society. Even after what occurred that night in 1901, Brower, with the help of his son, the legislator Ripley Brower, helped the society get a large appropriation from the state legislature. He saw plainly that while the institution of the society was flawed, the preservation of history was vital. But Brower was not a saint; he could be intemperate in the expression of his opinions; he sometimes dug into burial mounds. But his consistency in his view of history was admirable, especially in a time when corruption in government and business was often overlooked in writing history.
Brower had an unflagging interest in the burial mounds and other earthworks through which the ancient inhabitants of Minnesota had left their mark on the landscape of their homelands. But unlike others with an interest in such earthworks, Brower was convinced that these were placed where they were by the ancestors of the Dakota, not by some ancient people who later disappeared.
Having made that connection between ancient history and the contemporary world, Brower overcame the compartmentalization that plagues many historians and archaeologists. He could not and would not ignore the treatment accorded Minnesota’s Native people in the 19th century by colonization, settlement, and exile. And having taken that step Brower could not ignore that the Minnesota Historical Society and its rich and influential members were bound up inextricably in that very process.
In many ways November 11, 1901 was the last straw for Jacob Brower. He had just published, at his own expense, a book called Kathio, which recorded the history of Mille Lacs Lake, an ancient homeland of the Dakota people. While researching and writing the book, Brower had become aware of the treatment of the Mille Lacs Ojibwe, whose pinelands and reservation lands were in the process of being stolen by timber companies. Scandalized by what was occurring and the involvement of wealthy and influential Minnesotans, he began to view the history of the state in a different manner, connecting the events of 1900 at Mille Lacs with what had happened to the Dakota in 1862. Not all of these insights had been included in Kathio, but as a result of what occurred on the evening of November 11, 1901, Brower decided that he would no longer refrain from telling the truth, regardless of the consequences.
It is clear that Brower had not originally intended to speak plainly about the corruption in the treatment of the Native people in Minnesota. His remarks at the end of his speech were probably an afterthought, the expression of ideas that had been percolating with increasing intensity in his mind. At the same time those who came to the speech appear not to have expected what he said. Not used to hearing radical opinions, members of the historical society, who were joined that evening by many invited guests, had gathered to hear a “highly interesting and instructive paper on the earliest known history of the state of Minnesota.”
But the audience did not include just the rich and influential members of the society. Also present were two Indian leaders, Nishotah or the minister Charles T. Wright of the White Earth Reservation and Mozomoni, a leader on the Mille Lacs Reservation. They were both friends of Brower’s, men he had gotten to know while doing his research. Both men came from reservations under assault by timber companies allied with the most influential leaders in the state. With these leaders in the audience, along with members of the Historical Society who themselves or whose families were complicit in frauds against Indian people, how could Brower do anything else but tell the truth about what was happening?
Several St. Paul newspapers reported the events of the evening. The St. Paul Globe noted on November 12, 1901, under the headline “BROWER IS SEVERE,” that the audience seemed to enjoy the talk, but that some members recoiled at the remarks at the end. After speaking of the ancient settlement of the Dakotas, “the author condemned the white settlers and United States government in most severe terms for their treatment of the Indians, and in closing, prophesied that if the present policies were pursued some writers would some day not far distant be called upon to chronicle the downfall of the government because it had been so mercenary.”
Various members of the audience were upset that Brower, “in his sympathy for the Indians, had been led to too severe arraignment of the white settlers.” General John B. Sanborn, president of the historical society, objected to the tone Brower had taken. The Globe reported Sanborn stating that he was “somewhat inclined to consider that Mr. Brower had been too radical in some of his expressions.” Sanborn moved a vote of thanks to Brower “suggesting that the author of the paper be requested to reconsider and possibly modify some of his remarks before the paper was made a record of the society.” Brower responded stating that his paper had been prepared at his own expense and was not a record of the society and that therefore he would not amend it. And then the Society moved on to its business meeting during which a number of wealthy and influential individuals were elected to life membership in the organization.
Sanborn did not get the last word. Brower’s books are now a valued part of the Minnesota Historical Society’s collections. Even more important are his journals, where one can read today Brower’s own eloquent words about the events of that evening in 1901. These words continue to have great relevance today.
Jacob V. Brower journal, November 11, 1901.
I tonight delivered “Kathio” as an address before the Minnesota Historical Society. I regret exceedingly that many historic facts were suppressed from that book, but several members of the Historical Society are related in various ways to the gigantic robberies which have been perpetrated against the Indians in the Northwest. Henry M. Rice and Henry H. Sibley, deceased, were extensively involved in shaping the policy of the government against Minnesota Indian tribes. The great Sioux outbreak of 1862 was precipitated as a result of the operations of thieves among all the bands who wore official garbs and spoke by authority; they acted nominally for the Government but principally for themselves. As a resume of the causes which precipitated the Sioux Outbreak of 1862 would be distasteful to the Minnesota Historical Society of that event in “Kathio.”
Even with all those and many other facts suppressed the Society received coldly and with indifference the few references I have made to the manner in which the Indians have been cheated, wronged, and defrauded by the people of the United States.
Even the gigantic fraud perpetrated by Dwight M. Sabin, a United States Senator, against the Mille Lac Indians at Kathio, remains unmentioned by me today. But I now pledge myself never again to suppress facts in history to satisfy the desires of thieves. Sabin stole all the Indian pine at Mille Lac and W. D. Washburn was a party to the secret arrangement, but finally got left by Sabin’s sharp trickery.
All that is left out of “Kathio” Henry M. Rice went to Mille Lac and uttered gross deceptions to the Ojibway people and by fraud secured their signatures to the convention of October 5th, 1889, and today those poor people as a consequence are starving and in abject want, 963 of them.
All that history lays on my table–suppressed from “Kathio.” I curse such proceedings and I am ashamed of my own book which suppresses the facts to satisfy the demands of a society which stands ready to approve the manner of undoing the Indian tribes.
The John B. Sanborn who objected to my reference to the manner of cheating the Indians, is the same John B. Sanborn who married a niece of Henry M. Rice–and also–charged the Sisseton band a fee of $50,000.00 for services as an attorny; at least so reported, and I suppressed that fact. He collect[ed] the fee by Act of Congress.
Nothwithstanding all these suppresed facts the members of the Minnesota Historical Society turn a deaf ear to my appeal for justice to the Indian[s] of Kathio.
December 9, 1901
[An account prompted by another meeting of the executive council of the historical society in which several speakers, including General John B. Sanborn, were to speak on Indian history in Minnesota.]
The secretary [Warren Upham] and other members of the Minnesota Historical Society have gotten up an attempted demonstration against my statement of facts contained in my printed address delivered to the Society Nov. 11, 1901, entitled Kathio. They will find it hard to suppress or circumvent, or obliterate questions of historical fact contained in a printed book. The meeting to justify all acts against the Indians was a complete failure. Neither of the speakers announced were present at the meeting. A short paper written by Judge Flandrau was read. He cracked a few jokes and described a few old Indians and wound up by saying that the Indian had been as well treated as he in any way deserved. Flandrau was one of the men who contributed to the causes which brought on the Sioux Outbreak of 1862.
[Minnesota Historical Society press release. Commentary on this choice will follow in the weeks ahead.]
Current President of the New York State Historical Association and The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., will head state’s premier historical organization.
The Minnesota Historical Society announced today that its Board of Directors has named D. Stephen Elliott as director and chief executive officer, effective May 1, 2011. Elliott is currently the president and chief executive officer of the New York State Historical Association and The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“It is an honor to be chosen to lead an organization that is a national model for historical preservation and education,” said Elliott. “I have tremendous respect for the Minnesota Historical Society and the manner in which it has served the people of Minnesota for 162 years.”
Elliott has been the head of the New York State Historical Association since 2005. In that capacity, he was responsible for leading two related organizations with significant cultural collections: the Fenimore Art Museum with its world-class American Indian art and nationally important American folk and fine art collection, and The Farmers’ Museum, an outdoor living history museum of 19th-century rural life. From 2000-2005, Elliott was the executive director of the First Freedom Center in Richmond, Va. In addition, he served the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for 28 years in various capacities including vice president of education, administration and planning. He also has served on numerous museum, history, education and civic boards and currently is the chair of the American Association of State and Local History and the vice president of the Museum Association of New York.
“Steve Elliott is a proven leader in the field of history, with a strong commitment to education and public service, and a passion for history – an ideal match with the goals and vision of the Minnesota Historical Society,” said William Stoeri, president of the Society’s Governing Board.
Elliott follows Michael J. Fox, who became the Society’s director when long-time director Nina Archabal retired in January 2011. Fox joined the Society in 1987 and served as deputy director for programs before being named to the director post. To ensure a smooth transition in the Society’s leadership, Fox will remain on staff until his planned retirement May 31, 2011.
“My first order of business will be to listen and learn,” said Elliott. “In these challenging times, it is more important than ever to ensure that all of our citizens hold a deep regard for history and its lessons for the future.”
Elliott will relocate to the Twin Cities with his wife Diane Elliott, who is also a museum and theatre professional, and their teen-aged daughter. “We are looking forward to becoming part of the vibrant arts and cultural atmosphere for which the state of Minnesota is renowned,” said Elliott.
The Minnesota Historical Society is a non-profit educational and cultural institution established in 1849. Its essence is to illuminate the past to light the future. The Society collects, preserves and tells the story of Minnesota’s past through museum exhibits, libraries and collections, historic sites, educational programs and book publishing.
Without the free flow of information there is no accountability. Public servants, agencies, organizations, and businesses which can conceal the details of their operations from public scrutiny are free of accountability. This applies to many institutions in the United States and in Minnesota, including history organizations like the Minnesota Historical Society.
At the Minnesota Historical Society building entrance, looking along John Ireland Boulevard toward the State Capitol in St. Paul, December 4, 2010. Bruce White photo.
In 2005, in the case of Lille Ledbetter, involving discriminatory pay, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that she should have sued her employer within 180 days of being paid less than male employees in the same firm. Unfortunately Lille Ledbetter had no way of knowing that she was being paid less. After all, how many people are able to get their employers to tell them how much other people in their firms are being paid for comparable work? You might get this information eventually, but doing so within 180 days of beginning to work at the firm would be difficult. Effectively the Supreme Court gave Lillie Ledbetter’s employer a free pass from accountability, based on its ability to prevent the flow of information (something that Congress reversed through the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009).
Here’s another example. Recently the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case struck down a provision of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited all corporations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, and unions from broadcasting “electioneering communications.” The decision opened the door to non-candidate and non-party funding of election ads. Groups can effectively conceal the source of their own funding for broadcasting in favor of and against candidates unless there are specific laws passed to require them to disclose the source of that funding. Where’s the accountability for businesses or other entities that fund such ads if they can conceal their participation?
And then, there is the Minnesota Historical Society, a non-profit entity that, at the mandate of the Minnesota State Legislature, performs many public functions including operating a public state-funded library, a State Archives, and a network of state-owned historic sites, being a conduit for state funding of historical grants, and many other activities. The Minnesota Historical Society receives up to two-thirds of its operating budget from the State of Minnesota. Yet the Minnesota Historical Society is not subject to the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act.
If, as in the past, the state network of historic sites were operated by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, that agency would be required to release to the public information classified as public under the Data Practices Act. But since the Minnesota Historical Society–a 501(c)(3), the oldest such institution in the state–operates those historic sites, there is no requirement that information about those historic sites be made public, even though the sites are funded publicly. Though the State funds many of the Minnesota Historical Society’s activities, details about those activities are not required to be made public.
Many people are surprised to hear that the Minnesota Historical Society is not a public agency and therefore not subject to the state’s law about public information. It is nothing new, though the first public occasion on which Minnesota’s public officials ruled that the Minnesota Historical Society was not subject to this law was in 2006 when the matter came before the State Commissioner of Administration through the Information Policy and Analysis Division. The matter came before the Commissioner because of my own request for information from the Historical Society, which the director Nina Archabal had refused to supply.
The advisory opinion of the commissioner was simply that “The Minnesota Historical Society is not subject to the requirements of Chapter 13. Therefore, the Society was not required to comply with Chapter 13 in responding to a March 14, 2005, request for access to data.” The commissioner, or rather the lawyer for the Minnesota Historical Society, on whose brief the commissioner’s opinion was largely based, argued that the Minnesota Historical Society despite its funding, would have had to be mentioned specifically in Chapter 13 of state law–like University of Minnesota, which is mentioned in the law–to be subject to its requirements. If state agencies contracted with the Minnesota Historical Society to do all the state functions that it does, the society would be subject to the Data Practices Act. But because it carries out its state functions through the State Legislature, it is exempt from any requirement for public disclosure.
There are many issues involved with whether or not the Minnesota Historical Society should be subject to Minnesota’s Data Practices Act. There is some question about whether the State Legislature could make the Historical Society subject to the Data Practices law, given its 501(c)(3) status. However that issue appears to have been settled over one hundred years ago in a legal case which established that the legislature could apply conditions for its funding. If the legislature decided that being subject to the Data Practices law was a condition of receiving state money then the Historical Society could refuse both the money and the condition attached to it, but could not escape that condition if it chose to keep the money.
Others have suggested that the being subject the the Data Practices law would have a devastating effect on the Historical Society, making it more fearful and more political. In fact, it is not likely that being required to be more open about its activities or decisions would have a profound effect on most of the society’s activities. The most profound effect might be on those areas about which there is the most public desire for information: how the Historical Society makes its decisions. The Historical Board and the director it appoints are highly political already but also highly secretive in the way they make decisions. The combination of political maneuvering and secrecy often make for an unfortunate mix. Opening the doors to the board’s decision-making processes might make the institution less political, forcing the institution to reveal the reasons for its choices and the fact-based justifications for them.
My own own position in 2006 was that the Historical Society was or at least should be subject to this law only for those activities it carries out with state funding. But the Historical Society’s lawyer rejected the idea that the society was subject to the Data Practices law in any way, shape, or form, and the Commissioner of Administration adopted the society’s position. And it should be noted that it is likely that if the State Legislature determined to apply my suggested rationale to information regarding the society that the society’s lawyers might argue that the deliberations of the Historical Society’s board could not be subject to the Data Practices law because the board was a volunteer board and not funded by the state. The only way to achieve openness in the Historical Society’s board’s decision-making would be for the State Legislature to apply a blanket Data Practices requirement to all the activities of the society, as a condition of receiving state funding.
View from the steps of the old Minnesota Historical Society building, around 1959, looking toward the State Capitol, from which the Historical Society has long gotten the bulk of its funding. Eugene D. Becker photo, MHS, neg. no. 2247.
Currently the Historical Society is choosing a new director to replace Nina Archabal. Whatever the public wishes to know about this job search will consist of only the information the society feels that it is in its best interest to release. This is what the Historical Society’s last known information policy, which is very different in spirit from Minnesota’s Data Practices Act, says about the release of information:
The Society may deny or limit access to information if providing access would unreasonably harm the interests of the Society, whether because of the burdensomeness of the request, the practical difficulties of compliance, or the negative impact on ongoing operations of providing access to the requested information. . . .
There are many changes in store at the Minnesota Historical Society, but what the board of that organization has planned remains to be seen and will be revealed in such manner as the board believes is most beneficial to itself. Don’t bother asking. When it comes to the Minnesota Historical Society we are all on a “need to know basis.”
Chocolate and circuses are the legacy of the retired director of the Minnesota Historical Society, Nina Archabal. It is at best, a mixed legacy, one that present and future generations may regret. Past generations, the ones who founded the Minnesota Historical Society would regret it too, because it is so different from the purposes they expressed in founding the institution.
Earlier this year in the summer I did my best to try to convince people that the Minnesota Historical Society was capable of dealing with serious historical topics, that it was changing because its director of many years was retiring, and that the agency could handle a tragic subject like the indelible mark left on the state by the events of 1862. A few days later I received in the mail the announcement of the new “blockbuster” exhibit, on the subject of chocolate. I am a big fan of chocolate, but what bothers me about the exhibit is how little it has to do with the important mission of the Historical Society to preserve and interpret the history of this place, of Minnesota. There may be “chocolate stories” to tell about Minnesota, but this eight-year-old exhibit from the Field Museum in Chicago does not tell them.
The Minnesota Historical Society is not a history organization that happens to be located in Minnesota, it is an organization founded and dedicated to tell the history of Minnesota. The Minnesota Historical Society is not the equivalent of the Minnesota Orchestra, an orchestra that just happens to be located in Minnesota but does not focus on Minnesota music. For years Nina Archabal led the Minnesota Historical Society to embrace the mission that history was not as boring as it seemed–at least to people who were bored by history, or to people who did not consider the history of Minnesota to be important enough to bother about. For Nina Archabal history was entertainment, and the subject of the entertainment did not matter much as long as it was vaguely related to history and drew some crowds. What was missing was a sense of the importance of the history of this place and the social role that preserving and interpreting Minnesota’s history could serve in Minnesota. This became a particular problem at times when there were budget deficits.
There is nothing wrong with using the tools of entertainment to draw people into rich Minnesota stories. But when entertainment is used for its own sake or to tell Minnesotans about the Mayans and their chocolate, it does nothing more than convince people that rich stories can be found anywhere but in Minnesota. If the Minnesota Historical Society was merely an institution geared to provide entertainment why would it matter if its budget were cut in times economic woes, when entertainment could be dispensed with for awhile? The answer is that the historical society can have a much larger and much more important role to play in Minnesota, as the keeper of historical records, the site of Minnesota’s state-mandated historical library, the interpreter of and educator about Minnesota’s rich history as a state. What does chocolate do to further that role? The essential social role of the Minnesota Historical Society is one that the founders of the institution had in mind when they created it in 1849, before Minnesota was a state. It is a role that that the many talented and dedicated members of the staff of the historical society continue to carry out to the best of their ability, but it is that role that Nina Archabal shortchanged and frequently disrespected. I hope that the new director of the society, to be selected soon, will have a different point of view.
Here’s a more detailed description of the chocolate exhibit at the Minnesota Historical Society, from the institution’s own website. Oddly enough the page where this appears is numbered “1862” but it is very distant from any attempt to grapple with Minnesota’s own complex history:
Chocolate is a $16 billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States with Americans eating about 12 pounds per person annually, according to the National Confectioners Association. But chocolate is much more than a sweet treat associated with luxury and romance. Its story begins in the rainforest of Central and South America where the ancient Maya harvested the precious cacao seed to use as money and made a drink out of the grounds. Explore the relationship between human culture and this rainforest treasure in “Chocolate,” at the Minnesota History Center from Oct. 2, 2010, to Jan. 2, 2011.
The exhibit introduces visitors to the plant, products, history and culture of chocolate. Learn about the cacao tree and its rainforest environment; chocolate in the Maya and Aztec cultures; how chocolate came to Europe, its history there, and how technology changed it from a luxury to a mass-produced snack food; and how chocolate is grown, processed, advertised, consumed, and traded on the world market today.
Artifacts include pre-Columbian ceramics and ritual objects; European silver and porcelain chocolate services; nineteenth- and twentieth-century cocoa tins, advertising and packaging; antique and contemporary candy molds; and botanical specimens and agricultural tools.
Originated by The Field Museum in Chicago, this blockbuster exhibit has been seen by more than 1.6 million people in museums across the United States.
“Chocolate” is a bilingual exhibit; all text is in Spanish and English.
The Minnesota Historical Society is looking for someone to take on the problem of 1862 and its 150th anniversary. The job will remain open until filled, that is until someone is found who is willing to plunge into this thorny topic. For anyone who is not familiar with 1862, it may be hard to imagine how difficult it will be to find someone who is willing to do this, and even more, someone capable of taking on the job and making it successful.
First of all 1862 refers to the events known by various names relating to conflicts between Dakota people and white people starting in Minnesota in August 1862, and all that flowed from those events. In the job announcement the Historical Society has chosen to call these events the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, though they did not start or end in 1862. The year 2012 happens to be the 150th anniversary of 1862.
A monument in Mankato, MN, one of many remnants and reminders of the events of 1862 and that attitudes that survived in the years after. Minnesota Historical Society photo, probably taken with a camera belonging to the photographer Monroe Killy, who is pictured in the photo, around 1930.
Remembering 1862 and what happened then, before or after, would be difficult enough, but it is made more difficult by the role that the Minnesota Historical Society–in an overall, institutional way–has chosen to play in the Minnesota of the last twenty years. The Historical Society has tried to be a bringer of good news, an institution that puts on entertainment, rather than one that deals with serious historical issues. Unfortunately there is little in the way of good news about 1862. There was no good news in 1862 and there has been no good news about 1862 in the years since then. There is a great deal about 1862 that was tragic for all concerned. To deal with 1862 requires a sense of the tragedy involved. Can the Minnesota Historical Society handle tragedy?
It is clear that the Historical Society would like to hire a Dakota person to do this job. And while the Historical Society is on the verge of the possibility of change, now that its director Nina Archabal has retired, it is not clear that the Historical Society is willing to deal with 1862 in a serious way. Is there a Dakota person who is ready to be a mediator between an institution designed to entertain a large public and a Dakota community in which there are many points of view about 1862, but in which there are few that view 1862 as a source of entertainment? It would be a difficult, thankless job.
Perhaps it is a job that can be done. But it requires a lot of soul-searching in the halls of the Historical Society before one can imagine it being successful. There is of course a lot more to say, and there are two more years in which to say it. And maybe there is someone who can make a difference. If so, that person, would be making a great contribution not only to the Minnesota Historical Society, but to the state and the people of Minnesota. And that person would probably deserve a lot more than the money offered in this job announcement.
Minnesota Historical Society
Job Announcement
The Minnesota Historical Society’s External Relations division seeks applicants for a Program Specialist, 1862 position to assist the Deputy Director in planning, funding, coordination, and promotion throughout Minnesota related to the observance of the Sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. This is a full-time, project position (2088 annual hours) located at the History Center in St. Paul, MN working through June 30, 2011. Renewal dependent upon available funding and program need.
Summary of Work: Responsibilities include: 1) oversee the work of the managers of U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 projects and partnerships; 2) monitor U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 budgets; 3) monitor and facilitate the work of other managers with external partners; 4) coordinate the work of project managers, the Marketing & Communications Department, and the Director of Public Policy & Community Relations; 5) work with the Deputy Directors and U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 project managers ; and 6) provide work direction to assigned staff.
Minimum Qualifications:
B.A. plus five years program experience or equivalent OR an advanced degree plus three years program experience or equivalent.
Experience supervising a major project with demonstrated ability to plan, organize and monitor a project with many disparate elements.
Strong interpersonal skills.
Ability to lead a diverse group of people and facilitate cooperation.
Knowledge of, and sensitivity to, institutional and program concerns, procedures, and techniques.
Ability to write clearly and concisely.
Ability to develop and track budgets.
Detail oriented with strong planning, monitoring and follow up skills.
Desirable Qualifications:
Experience working with Dakota people.
Knowledge of Minnesota and/or Dakota history.
Ability to speak effectively in public and relate easily and positively to many different audiences.
Salary: $3,484.00 monthly minimum.
Application Deadline: This position will remain open until filled.
To Apply: Send an MHS application, cover letter, and resume to: Minnesota Historical Society, Human Resources Department, Program Specialist, 1862 position, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102. To be considered an applicant, you must submit all requested materials. If not complete, your application materials will not be accepted and your materials will be returned. For an application, see our website at www.mnhs.org/about/jobs or call MHS Job Line 651-296-0542. EEO
Todd Mahon, Executive director of the Anoka County Historical Society, writes that he is looking for a historian to do a study of suburbanization in Anoka and Hennepin Counties in Minnesota. The work is to be funded by a a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, through the Minnesota Historical Society. Here’s how the grant application explained the topic of study and below that is the job announcement:
The phenomenon of suburbanization has had a huge impact on the lives of Minnesotans. The populations shifts away from the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul and from rural areas to suburban communities of the Twin Cities metro area has changed the state’s political makeup, its natural environment, its infrastructure, its education system, and much more. Anoka and Hennepin Counties share a unique history that lends itself to telling the local and national story of nineteenth and twentieth century suburbanization in the United States. Columbia Heights was among Minneapolis’s first streetcar suburbs when Thomas Lowery brought his streetcar line up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights, where he owned and developed real estate. The two counties share one of the largest school districts in the state, and the transportation corridor of the Mississippi River—a transportation corridor that has been reemphasized with the opening of the Northstar Commuter Railroad in 2009.
"Interior view of the living room in one of the new homes in the Thompson Park housing development near Northdale Boulevard and Foley Road in Coon Rapids"5/23/1955; Minnesota Historical Society Photo, Photographer: Norton & Peel Photograph Collection, Location no. Norton & Peel 230772 Negative no. NP230772
The 21st century finds both counties at a crossroads in their suburban development. Each has only one township remaining (Linwood and Hassan), and Anoka County has seen two other townships incorporate in just the last four years. Hassan has recently started its own historical society over the threat of annexation by Rogers. Hennepin County is seeing its first ring suburbs, like Richfield, Bloomington, and St. Louis Park, face redevelopment issues, while up in Anoka County, Ramsey and Nowthen (Anoka County’s newest incorporated city), are facing land use decisions and other pains of suburban growth like the extension of city municipal services and law enforcement. Policy makers across the two counties are in need of resources to inform their decisions that will impact the planned growth of these communities.
In addition to their shared histories, the impact of suburbanization has been felt, and continues to be felt, but it has only recently been the focus of a serious academic study. The suburbanization has occurred and it is now time to examine it through an historians lens. Both counties have nationally recognized historical societies, but neither have tackled this subject in depth. A report on their shared history will be a benefit for policy makers, academics, and more. The final product will also include tangible programming ideas with realistic road maps to produce these programs and bring the history of suburbanization to the greater public and encourage them to think about and discuss their community, what it is, how it became that, and what they want it to be in the future.
Contract Historian Position
The Anoka County Historical Society (ACHS) and Hennepin History Museum (HHM) seek applicants for a part-time, independent contract position to complete a history of the suburban development of Anoka and Hennepin Counties. This position exists through a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. The Contract Historian will compile an extensive, written history using primary and secondary sources, administer an oral history program, and create a resource guide for others interested in researching the suburban development of the two counties. Other duties will include working with ACHS and HHM staff to hire two interns that will assist with the project, and work with high school students from the Breck School on a phase to be determined by the contract historian and the students’ advisors (possibilities include researching community incorporation dates and changing municipal boundaries, etc.). The final draft must be completed by May 15, 2011. Funding for the grant provides for 973 hours for the contract historian at an hourly rate of $20.00. The successful candidate must have a Bachelors Degree in History or a related field and demonstrate skills commensurate with this type of project.
The project is contingent upon a request from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Applicant Instructions
Candidates for this position are required to deliver:
1) Letter of Application
2) Resume
3) Two Letters of Reference
4) Two writing samples (excerpts from larger works will be accepted.)
Please provide copies as materials will not be returned.
To:
Suburban Development Contract Historian Position
Anoka County Historical Society
2135 Third Avenue North
Anoka, MN 55303
Call Todd Mahon, ACHS Executive Director, for more information.
Phone # (763) 421-0600 x104, or via e-mail at [email protected].
The application deadline is July 23, 2010.
The selection of applicants for interviews will be based on the above materials.
Anoka Shopping Center, Anoka. Photograph Collection ca. 1955; Minnesota Historical Society photo, Location no. MA6.9 AN3.1 r5 Negative no. 6046-A
Former director of the Minnesota Historical Society Russell W. Fridley died on June 17, 2010. He was director of the Historical Society for thirty years, during a dynamic and formative period of the institution’s history. He had a true commitment to history in all its forms. He believed that popular and scholarly history were compatible and that neither would diminish the other. For Russell Fridley history was a big tent and all kinds of history could exist there. No history of any kind diminished any other kind of history. But he was a supporter of detailed, well-researched, and well-documented history. He supported new ideas when they came along. When someone came to him with a new idea, he was always encouraging. “Why don’t you work on that?” he would ask. That did not always mean that he could find money to support your particular project, uncertainties being what they were. But he was unfailingly curious about what you were doing, what you were researching. When you told him, probably in too much detail, he would respond with a pleasant, humorous, or encouraging comment. He was good with the legislature, in getting money for the historical society, and good with his staff, in getting productive work out of them. He did not believe that Vikings carved the Kensington Runestone, but even supporters of the Runestone liked Russell Fridley. They would invite him to come debate with them. The worst that anyone would say about him was that he was too affable, a fact which would make suspicious people more suspicious. Russell Fridley’s commitment to the work of history in all its forms is greatly missed.
Russell Fridley in 1982, photo by Stan Waldhauser, courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society
