A Tale of Two Factories Is a Metaphor For Our Time

 

A tractor like the one my old friend Dave might have manufactured if he had chosen to work at the old Lake Street Minneapolis Moline tractor factory after getting back from the Korean War. Photo Wikimedia Commons

Minneapolis was once the mecca of farm equipment manufacturing, and one can look at old photos of factories that manufactured every type of farm equipment from the late 19th century to the mid to late 20th. Like the hollowing out of the populations of rural America, Minneapolis has lost all the factories that once built the machines that energized rural America. As a geek who loves searching for lost geographies, I use Google Maps and Street View to pinpoint some of these old locations. Several, including the two I describe below, I had driven by countless times before I knew the history that lies just beneath the pavement. To me, the tale of these two factories are microcosms of more significant shifts in America that have taken place in my lifetime.

The ransacked Lake Street Target on the former Minneapolis Moline factory site after 2020 protests. Wikimedia Commons.

I still remember the old Korean War veteran I worked with on the second shift in the packaging department of Rockler Woodworking and Hardware in the suburb of Medina telling me that when he came home from the war, he got offered a job at the Minneapolis Moline tractor plant. He decided to do something else after touring around and choking on smoke and paint fumes. Factory jobs in those days had fewer protections than today, but at least there were factories and choice in the labor market.

At the corner of Hiawatha and Lake Street is the site of the Target store infamously ransacked in the anger that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. In 1972, the old tractor factory closed and was redeveloped as a shopping complex. The symbolism of the factory to shopping complex sweeping the nation in the "mall era" symbolizes the more significant shift in our economy from the 1970s to the present, as reflected in the graph from my previous post that illustrated the steep drop in manufacturing from then onward. Was the hollowing out of good jobs like the tractor factory indirectly a factor in the anger of multitudes in ransacking the store that symbolizes the dissolution of so many good American manufacturing jobs? If there were still good paying factories in Minneapolis instead of stores filled with consumer goods many can't afford (because jobs in a Target store or most retail outlets don't offer a living wage), would we live in as unequal a society as we currently do? I think of Henry Ford's famous idea that he needed to pay his workers enough so they could afford the cars they were building.

The other site I identified is a nondescript art-deco gem along the Mississippi in South St. Paul that is shown in the embedded map above. I have matched photos from the time to the building from Google Street View, and it is the place that served as the facility that manufactured Co-op #3 tractors in the few years after World War Two before Farmers Union stopped manufacturing tractors in the early 50s. Cooperative manufacturing was a sort of "open source" type of democratic production that sought, like all co-ops do to put the members back in control against corporate entities across the spectrum. There are lessons from these past movements that date back to the time when Oliver Kelley advocated for farmer owned co-ops to make and buy machines in the mid to late 1800s. 

 Famously, my grandfather and his two brothers drove them back from St. Paul to Reynolds, North Dakota. I wish I had more detail on that story. The tractor's top speed of around 40 meant they probably did it in one long day. I'm sure this building has served many uses in its many decades, but it is Minikahda Mini Storage today. You can store all the stuff you bought at Target inside for a fee. That is if you have a job that pays you enough to do that. If you can afford to shop at Target or any store and fill a storage unit with all your largesse, America is the land of milk and honey. But, if you can't afford to shop at Target or fill a storage unit with stuff, it is a horrifying place where many doors to advancement, like a road to a good middle-class job, can be hard to attain. When the tractor factory opened, the road to buying your American dream was a factory job. Today, working retail or storing other people's stuff gives a living wage to those who own or manage those businesses and nobody else