What does Aquatennial have to do with Minneapolis’ bloody 1934 Teamsters strike?

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Minneapolis has celebrated itself each year since 1940 by throwing a strange summer festival with an ostentatious name: Aquatennial.

Over the years, it has included a beauty contest, a torchlight parade, synchronized swimming and milk carton boat races. It culminates in fireworks that put the July 4th show to shame.

Aquatennial’s origin story, however, is murky. And why does it always happen on the third full week of July?

Reader Greg Nammacher, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 26, has long heard a story linking the Aquatennial with a Teamsters strike that happened 90 years ago.

On July 20, 1934, Minneapolis’ “Bloody Friday,” police killed two workers. In the summers that followed, unions held annual “victory picnics” to honor the workers who died. The picnics drew such massive crowds that the city’s leading businessmen cooked up a rival spectacle: Aquatennial.

At least that’s the story Nammacher has heard. He wanted to know whether it is true.

He sought answers from Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reporting project fueled by reader questions. “I’ve never read any kind of sourced material on this stuff,” Nammacher said. “I imagine the labor scene must have some people who would know.”

A memo does reportedly exist revealing business leaders’ intent to create a major event to counter the “bad publicity” the bloody strike had brought the city. According to the Minneapolis Labor Review newspaper, it came from a confidential source in 1939, but its whereabouts are currently unknown.

Local labor historians do generally agree, however, that the Aquatennial’s creation was linked to the 1934 strike. So does the current leader of the Downtown Council, the modern-day organization that continues to throw the festival.

The Aquatennial “represented an effort to help heal the community divisions” caused by the strike, said local historian Iric Nathanson.

“My sense is that very definitely, the Aquatennial was created to create a sense of interclass unity,” said retired Macalester professor Peter Rachleff.

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, a wave of workers began organizing in Minneapolis, fighting diminished wages and working conditions during the 1930s.

“A common laborer in this city was nothing better than a serf,” recalled former Hennepin County Sheriff Ed Ryan in Philip Korth’s book “The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934.”

At the same time, employers in Minneapolis and around the country fought collective bargaining. Organizing themselves as the “Citizens Alliance,” they boycotted businesses that voluntarily recognized unions and pressured law enforcement to bust up picket lines.

In 1934, Minneapolis truck drivers went on strike for better wages, conditions and union recognition — blocking streets downtown and battling police in the streets. After months of protests, police opened fire on pickets and killed two.

Gov. Floyd Olson sent in the National Guard and brokered a settlement that recognized the Teamsters and ended the strike. The following year, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, establishing many of the rights of unions.

In the years after the strike, unions held popular commemorative picnics in the parks. Newspapers described massive throngs gathering to hear speeches and play games like tug-of-war.

“Unity in the labor movement was keynote of the addresses,” the Minneapolis Star wrote in 1939, describing a sea of people gathered for a picnic in Powderhorn Park.

The Aquatennial was founded the following year by members of the Citizens Alliance.

The eight-day festival’s founders said they simply hoped to draw more visitors to Minneapolis.

Founders would later recall that the Aquatennial was born during a trade delegation to see King George VI in Winnipeg, the Minneapolis Tribune wrote in 1964. The group huddled together to avoid the rain during the royal parade.

“The conversation turned to Minneapolis, and the bad image of the labor strife and the gangland ‘30s,” the paper wrote. “The idea of a summer festival was born.”

In 1939, a confidential source reportedly gave longtime Minneapolis Labor Review editor Robley Cramer a document proposing a secret committee to help combat unions and promote capitalism, according to a 2007 article in the Labor Review.

“The special emergency Citizens Committee should have as its third major project some special plan to offset the bad publicity the city has received during the past three years,” the document read, according to the article.

This proposed activity “would serve to take the minds of Minneapolis citizens off past troubles and focus all minds throughout the state on some pleasant event occurring in Minneapolis.”

The article’s author, Kelly Ahern, was a student at the time. She no longer recalls where the memo is located, except that it belongs to the Minnesota Historical Society. Labor historian David Riehle, who died earlier this year, had told her where it could be found. The Minnesota Star Tribune spent hours looking for the memo in the Gale Family Library of the Historical Society with no luck.

The Aquatennial was an overnight success, according to newspapers of the era. It attracted tourists from all over Minnesota and was said to be among the best summer festivals in the country.

The business leaders who put it on publicized the fact that they included labor leaders in planning for the event.

Tom Hastings, president of the Minneapolis Aquatennial association, said in 1941 that the event hired local union workers, according to the Minneapolis Daily Times. “A large amount of additional work was provided [to] carpenters, painters, metal workers, laborers, electrical workers, stage hands, musicians and workers in many other lines,” he said.

John Boscoe of the Central Labor Union served on the Aquatennial organizing committee, making sure union shops got all the paid work and that union workers bought the $1 buttons providing entry to Aquatennial events.

The unions were also invested in boosting Minneapolis tourism after its reputation took a hit in the previous decade.

“People will find complete or very nearly complete industrial peace prevailing in Minneapolis,” the Labor Review wrote in 1940.

“Quite likely the visitors who come to the city for the first time will be much surprised to find that the city hall remains on its foundation and the post office is where it has been for some time,” it continued. “They will probably look in vain for the battle scarred buildings and the trenches that they might also have been led to believe existed from reading the lurid daily press.”

Today Aquatennial has shrunk to four days, having dispensed with the milk carton boat races and synchronized swimmers. It still has a parade and massive fireworks show sponsored by Target, and continues to be produced by the city’s business leaders through the Minneapolis Downtown Council.

Notably, Adam Duininck, a former official with the regional carpenters union, now heads the Downtown Council.

He sees a parallel between the Minneapolis of today and the city in the 1940s. Then, it was trying to repair its reputation after decades of labor strife. Today, it is trying to recover economically and mend relationships broken by COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd.

“Civic leaders, business leaders, people that cared a lot about the city at the time realized that there was significant reputational harm done by the incidents in 1934” and came together to do something about it, Duininck said.

The Aquatennial doesn’t gloss over history, in his opinion. After the bloody ‘30s, it brought people from different political value systems together for decades.

“I would say the same thing about what we’ve gone through over the last few years around public safety,” said Duininck. “We don’t want to just whitewash that and say, ‘Let’s forget about that.’... Let’s learn from these mistakes.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the current length of Aquatennial. It runs for four days.

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