In the spring of 1934, Minneapolis was one of the most thoroughly anti-union cities in the United States, governed in practical terms by an employers' association that had broken organizing efforts for three decades.

By August it was a union town, and the change had come through a strike that shut down the movement of goods in and out of the city almost entirely.

The organizing began among coal yard workers over the winter and spread to the trucking drivers who moved nearly everything in a city whose economy ran on distribution. The union's demands were not extravagant: recognition, a wage floor, an end to the shape-up hiring system in which men gathered each morning and hoped to be chosen.

The employers' association declined to recognize the union and prepared to break the strike as it had broken others.

What differed in 1934 was organization. The strikers established a headquarters with a commissary, a hospital staffed by volunteer physicians, a fleet of cruising picket cars coordinated by dispatchers, and a daily newspaper. Women organized an auxiliary that ran the kitchen and much of the communications.

In May, a confrontation in the market district left two members of the employers' citizens' army dead and the strikers in effective control of the city's streets. A truce followed and collapsed.

On July 20, police fired on a truck of unarmed pickets on Third Street. Two strikers were killed and sixty-seven people were wounded, most shot in the back. A commission later found that the police had fired without warning on a crowd that posed no threat.

The funeral procession for one of the dead drew a crowd estimated at forty thousand.

The governor declared martial law. Federal mediators arrived. In August, the employers agreed to terms substantially favorable to the union, and the shape-up ended.

The strike is remembered nationally as one of three 1934 labor conflicts — with San Francisco and Toledo — that shifted the political ground beneath the National Labor Relations Act, passed the following year.

Locally, its legacy is more specific. The city's political character in the decades that followed, including the coalition that produced a young mayor named Hubert Humphrey, is difficult to explain without it.

The buildings where it happened mostly still stand, converted to offices and apartments. A modest plaque marks the street where the shooting occurred. Most people walking past it are unaware.