1915: NEW LIFE AND LOSS

The 1914 campaign had been brutal for Reuben. He lost his party’s primary contest, was nominated by default when the victor dropped out, and then failed to secure any of the three open seats. It was not a fully formed attempt to gain a legislative seat, but it was enough to earn Reub the fierce enmity of JM Glenn and Illinois Manufacturers’ Association (IMA), who stood like an impenetrable wall between the young, card-carrying union man and the hallowed halls of the Illinois statehouse. In January of 1915, Ole Benson returned to Springfield as one of Streator’s statehouse representatives, while Reub remained in Streator and turned his attention back to his printing job and his family.

Family Matters

“Baby Bobbie” was a joy for Reub and Jeanne as they watched him grow through his first year, celebrating his first steps and his first words. In the hot, humid days of July, Anna, Lafe and Olga joined Reuben and Jeanne in celebrating Bobbie’s first birthday with an apple pie and a few wooden toys. Bobbie was a family effort, and Anna and Olga often washed his cloth diapers in an outdoor tub or gave Jeanne a break by holding the little bundle of joy in a hand-washed, sun-dried cotton blanket on their small front porch.

Reuben and Jeanne moved out of the family house and found a home of their own on Sherman Street on the West side of Streator. It was 600 square feet with three small rooms and cost $900. The young couple would walk three blocks on sidewalks made from Streator bricks to City Park or to the green grocer to buy zucchini and tomatoes. New neighbors offered mushrooms from walks in the woods, small baskets of wild raspberries and the occasional hunting prize: a game bird such as a quail or pheasant, which would be cooked in a cast iron pan with field onions and rosemary.

After sleepless nights with the newborn, Reub walked to Andy Anderson’s print shop, where he now worked full-time as an operator, linotype repairman and also, importantly, as a writer for several publications. As he stated later in life in an interview with Professor Derber:

I wrote articles for labor papers; Peoria Labor News was one of them. I did that for a long time—without compensation—just because I liked to write….As a member of the central body I wrote two columns; one general news for the city of Streator because the Peoria Labor News had the circulation in my community there, you see, and another column that I called “Doings in Printerdom,” which was devoted largely to the activities in the typographical industry.[1]

Anna, widowed without any of her sons in the house, began taking short-term tenants to help pay the bills. A senior in high school at the time, Olga remembers the attempts at squeezing a meager income from their home. “Mother made our home into two apartments—one upstairs and one downstairs. The parlor downstairs we always kept; but folks who rented could have their choice of three rooms downstairs or the three rooms upstairs. So often we were moving from one to the other.”[2] Anna also returned to “practical nursing,” occasionally taking cases in-house and acting as a home care assistant for sick friends or patients. It was the only source of income for a widowed woman with no pension or savings, and she cared for enough patients to get by.

Missing from the Streator landscape at this time was Reub’s brother and best friend Lafe, who had stayed in the Second City as a proud member of the Chicago ITU. Still, Lafe frequently journeyed to Streator on the train with small gifts for Bobbie and Marshall Field chocolates for the others, which the poor family would gather around to admire and discuss before devouring with relish.

Paul, meanwhile, had taken a drastically different course. In addition to losing his first child, Paul had lost his wife, Clara, after the birth of their second child, Lorraine. At this point, Paul had already left his baby daughter with his mother Anna and had headed for parts unknown. What we know now is that the former race car driver and mechanic became a motorcyclist in the US Army, carrying sensitive messages between dangerous outposts along the Mexican Border for General John Joseph Pershing. On March 15, 1915, Paul Soderstrom and the rest of Pershing’s troops entered Mexico on an expedition to capture the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who had just attacked Columbus, New Mexico. For over a year, Paul and the 10,000 other members of the expeditionary force penetrated 350 miles into Mexico, seeking without success to capture the famous outlaw. For the thrill-seeker from Streator, the scrubby desert was an exhilarating place with its warring men, maps and motorbikes. Although he didn’t know it, Paul’s battles in the hot Mexican hinterlands were just a taste of more foreign lands to come.

Sadness Strikes

For the rest of the Soderstroms, 1915 was a fast-paced and happy year, culminating on December 15 with the birth of Carl William Soderstrom, second son to Reuben and Jeanne, making for an extra special Christmas that year. Reub brought home a small Christmas tree and placed it in the parlor and everyone adorned it with popcorn and cranberry string and candles. Only a few gifts were placed under the tree, while others were placed on the doorstep in the Swedish custom. On Christmas Day Reuben took his family to his father’s old place of worship, St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. With a baby boy in each arm and his wife by his side, it was a holiday for Reuben to remember.

But six weeks later, the yuletide happiness was shattered. The local newspaper reported:

The Death Angel entered the home of Mr. and Mrs. R. G. Soderstrom, 216 Sherman Street, late Saturday afternoon, claiming their firstborn, little Robert George, aged twenty-one months. The little fellow had been ailing for two or three weeks, but his condition was not considered serious, as he had always been so strong and sturdy. When pneumonia developed and the Grim Messenger entered the home on Saturday the parents and relatives were totally unprepared, and could scarcely realize the little life had been cut short so soon, for “Bobbie” had been the pride of the household.[3]

Any parent who knows firsthand the power and wonder of witnessing an infant grow through the first year of life cannot fathom the devastation of seeing that precious little life cut short. Even worse, having financed the funerals of his father, brother Joe, and sister-in-law Clara, Reub had no money left for Baby Bobbie’s miniature casket and burial. He instead took out a loan from the Finlen Funeral Chapel and made painful monthly payments of $1.50 for the next two years. For Jeanne, Baby Bobbie’s graveyard headstone was viewable from her kitchen window—across the Vermilion River and in the Riverview Cemetery—and no doubt the little family was shackled with grief at every turn. They would soon move to a different house.

1916: POLITICAL STRUGGLES

Reeling from his loss, Reuben threw himself into labor as a council member. Over the next year, labor leaders increasingly voiced concerns over fair pay and working conditions, but faced intimidation, violence and even worse: court ordered injunctions preventing the peaceful assembly of workers to discuss their plight. The working man was being muzzled and abused and something had to change.

Battling the Injustice of Injunctions

It was as this point that Soderstrom encountered an enormous mountain of injustice—the excessive use of injunctions to impede the peaceful gathering of laborers to discuss their plight. In response, he commenced a life-defining, 10 year-long journey to provide workers with the right to organize, freely assemble, engage in discourse and altogether gain self-determination as a political group unfettered by unconstitutional maneuvers from pro-business judges.

It is no surprise that when a mass meeting was called in Chicago that year to formulate a strategy to pass anti-injunction legislation, Reub eagerly attended as the representative for the Streator Trades and Labor Council. Samuel Gompers himself attended the conference, helping to craft a statement and legislation to end this rule by judicial fiat.[4] Addressing the conference, Gompers stressed the importance of electing “friends” to office as the best solution. Describing his experience on the national level, he told the delegates:

We began a campaign to elect some congressmen who held union cards, regardless of their party. And we succeeded in electing six; and then at the next election we went to the same political parties in their national conventions and presented identical demands….And what occurred you know - a political revolution occurred; and those who primarily stood for “the interests” were routed…Now as a result, we secured the election of eighteen members of Congress, union card men, and regardless of which party they were members. We had Republicans, we had Democrats, and we had a Single-Taxer and a Socialist. But insofar as the fundamental principles and demands of labor were concerned, the union card group voted as a unit.[5]

At the conclusion of the conference, 28 year-old Reub proudly affixed his signature to a letter signed by all 20 attendees, which included Illinois UMWA President Frank Farrington, CFL President John Fitzpatrick, and AFL Vice President John R. Alpine. Stressing the importance of legislation that allowed workers to freely assemble, the illustrious group wrote, “The organized movement of the workers of all pledges itself to make this measure the paramount issue in the pending political campaign.”[6] Although not yet a legislator himself, Reub was helping labor become more politically active, endorsing steps like making the Joint Labor Legislative Board—an effort by multiple labor groups endorse politicians for office—become a permanent body to give potential candidates like himself sustained support.[7]

A paramount issue, indeed. Injunctions posed the single greatest legal threat to labor. Despite some union successes in Congressional and Presidential elections, the courts remained firmly under the control of industry. In Illinois, judges like Denis Sullivan of the Superior Court of Chicago were actively suppressing labor’s right to organize, treating organized labor as if it were a business cartel. Through the use of injunctions, pro-factory judges like Sullivan could restrict the movement of labor leaders, preventing them from speaking to striking workers or even disbursing pamphlets. Factory owners also pushed for charges of “conspiracy to extort” against labor leaders, claiming that strikes were “an unlawful interference designed to coerce and compel a party to do something which he has a legal right to refuse to do…picketing is done for the same purpose and also may be and generally is, and is frequently held to be in and of itself intimidating, menacing and annoying.”[8]

Lobbied heavily by JM Glenn and the IMA, many Illinois State Attorneys aggressively prosecuted labor leaders, securing three-year prison terms for six union agents in 1916, while fining another eight a total of $13,250 (over $290,300 in 2012 dollars).[9] While the IMA had labor leaders on the run, Reuben undoubtedly sat on the train back to Streator studying his notes from the Gompers’ conference and strategizing on how to outlaw the anti-labor injunctions. It was no surprise or irony that injunctions were soon filed against him too.

Violence Strikes Illinois

Attacks on labor movement struck ever closer to Streator. In 1916, a bitter nine-week strike at the cement plants in neighboring Oglesby and La Salle impacted the entire county. The strikes had been particularly contentious, with attorneys for the cement companies charging that strikers made “indecent display of their persons and called the guards all sorts of vile and indecent names, and did everything they could to provoke a riot.” Worse, they made unsubstantiated claims that protesters had attacked strikebreaking workers and “filled them with shot; some of them were killed on the streets of Oglesby by strikers.”[10]

Factory owners were in turn accused of hiring “gunmen and sluggers for the purpose of intimidating the workers.”[11] Citing threat of a riot, local businessmen convinced the Governor to send in the state militia. As the strikers persevered, owners used increasingly dirty tactics to keep their factories open, like using employment agencies to hire men for work in Dubuque, Iowa, who were then sent to La Salle to work as strike breakers without their knowledge or consent.[12] Threats soon descended into mob-style “hits.” In Peru, IL, General Organizer Chubbeck was assaulted by an attacker who jumped out of a car, clubbed Chubbeck, and then quickly drove off, sending a clear message to labor leaders that they were in constant personal danger.[13]

Violence and brutality also defined the other major Illinois strike of 1916: the miner’s strike at Rosiclare. In what was called the “Ludlow of Illinois,” roughly 450 miners striking for better wages and shorter hours faced an army of gunmen hired by the mine’s owners. The owners’ men, many of them out-of-state convicts, were “deputized” by the Sheriff and quickly went beyond their mandate to protect the mine and company assets. They moved into the town itself and declared martial law, driving over five hundred townspeople from their homes. Again, union leadership was specifically targeted, with the local labor president and trustees run out of town.

The Election of 1916

Reub had spent the last year considering another run for the Illinois General Assembly. He took advantage of his work at Andy’s to learn all he could in anticipation of a second round. As Olga remembered:

Reub made use of his printing job in many ways. He didn’t just set the type, he absorbed what he was printing. Andy Anderson’s was a job office printing many things. Besides, Reub’s wife carried books from the Streator Library and Reub burned the midnight oil studying. He always called the Streator Library his university. He studied hard and long these many years.[14]

Ever the idealist, Reub certainly had thought of running again as a Progressive. The nascent party, however, was quickly coming undone. The year 1916 was again a Presidential election, but Teddy Roosevelt refused the Bull Moose nomination and eventually endorsed the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes. Reuben likewise decided to refrain from running. Soderstrom watched from the sidelines as IMA-friendly candidates like the 39th’s Ole Benson were elected for another term in the Illinois statehouse while he returned to meetings of the active Streator Trades and Labor Council, to work at Andy Anderson’s print shop, and to a quiet life spent at home with a grieving Jeanne and their precious and only son, Carl.

A Happy Farewell

Olga graduated high school in the summer of 1916, just six days after Reub returned from the Chicago anti-injunction conference. After initially working as a secretary in a washing machine factory, Olga decided to go into nursing. Reub wanted his sister to become a teacher, but ultimately approved of her decision and even helped finance her schooling. His support was not lost on Olga: “Seems phenomenal, that I could make these decisions because of our dependency on my wonderful brother.”[15] Her sendoff even made the local paper (thanks, in all likelihood, to a few strings pulled by her linotypist brother). The Streator Daily Independent Times notes:

Miss Olga Soderstrom, 708. E. Lundy Street, was given the surprise of her life last evening when a merry group of her girl friends called at her home…They had the lawn brilliantly decorated with Japanese lanterns and didn’t mind it a bit when “big brother” came onto them suddenly in the midst of an interesting game of leap frog. Of course there was music, with Miss Grace Carroll at the piano, and singing and dancing and a good time generally…After the games the “kids” had refreshments of ice cream, cake and stick candy, and then had their pictures taken by Photographer Fedor.[16]

Olga moved near her brother Lafe in Chicago and entered the West Side Hospital in September of 1916. Despite Reub’s support, Olga still faced difficulties making ends meet. She described her circumstance in that first year:

We, nurses in training, received three dollars per month the first year of training, which, of course, did not cover expenses. Mother used to buy shoes on sale sometimes for twenty-five cents a pair and send me. Many times they were a poor fit, but I wore them. I could buy blouses and sometimes I bought material and would hand-make a dress. We could usually buy things on credit at nearby stores and I’d pay say fifty cents a month on the bill.[17] Her journey to become an educated woman certainly filled Reuben with joy. It was because of Reuben that Olga had the opportunity to pursue her professional desires, and they both knew it. And as Reuben bid Godspeed to Olga, Jeanne gave him the first piece of good news he’d had in recent memory. She was pregnant again.

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