OPEN SHOP VS. CLOSED SHOP

A Leader Emerges

A loser after a single term, Reuben purchased a one-way ticket out of Springfield and gazed out the train window at the cold gray November sky and pondered his future in Illinois politics. He may have thumbed through the few black and white photos of his children, Carl (6) and Jeanne (3), but his attention would be dashed by three confident businessmen striding through the car dressed in elegant tweed overcoats and hats, the snow falling off their shoulders as they walked: JM Glenn and two lieutenants. As they brushed past Reuben on the way to first class, he wondered: Why are they traveling to Streator instead of Chicago? He would soon learn that after JM Glenn and the manufacturers’ massive victory in Springfield, killing Reuben’s Anti-Injunction bill, they were now boldly expanding the lines of battle into Streator itself! The plan was to create a local version of the IMA called the Streator Manufacturers Association, a direct and audacious challenge to Reuben’s Trades and Labor Council. The battle was following Reuben from the statehouse straight back to the factories of Streator.

Glenn aimed to fan the flames of Streator’s rapidly escalating debate over “open shop” vs. “closed shop.” Streator factories that were “closed shops” were labor-friendly and hired only union workers. Open shops did not have such a requirement, and therefore had many employees who were merely at-will, independent contractors. Indeed, manufacturers favored open shops because the labor force quickly became atomized and ineffectual.

Up in the first class cabin on the train that day, Glenn consulted a long list of businessmen who owned factories in the labor stronghold of Streator; it was his goal to meet each one and lobby them to become anti-labor open shops. As Reuben later recounted, “Well, the employers, they finally made up their minds following the First World War…they formed what they called the American Plan…And one of the spots that was thoroughly unionized where they were going to destroy the unions, if they could, was Streator.”[1] Olga too remembers, “After World War I, an attempt was made in Streator to break all the Unions, and this was a terrific attempt to bring back the open, or non-union, shops. Injunctions were used among the workers, they were deprived of their rights—no freedom of speech, or peaceful assembly, or a free press was not to be allowed labor.”[2] Glenn brought a battle for the very heart of Streator directly to Reub’s doorstep.

The opening salvo occurred two days after Christmas. Reuben was waxing the runners of his son Carl’s sled when a neighbor approached, his finger stabbing the morning paper with anger. While standing in the snow on his narrow driveway, Reuben read the article to see that JM Glenn had made quick headway gathering businessmen to his cause, and had lost no time declaring it to the laborers of Streator in a prominently placed declaration:

We are now in an era of keenest competition for business ever known. Streator industries must be in a position to meet this competition. Only those plants which can meet the competitive conditions and pay fair and equitable wages, are those not handicapped in operating by the restrictions of a Closed Shop agreement during the past year has lost business, and decreased its payroll on account of this handicap…Several signers of this announcement have at the present time contracts with various labor unions and all of those contracts will be carefully and faithfully carried out. After these contracts have expired all of these factories will be operated on the Open Shop basis.[3]

The manufacturers dubbed their campaign the “American Plan,” playing off public fears of international communism invading from foreign shores, deliberately conflating unionism with communism. The stakes couldn’t be higher—the manufacturers had pledged themselves to nothing less than the total destruction of all the unions in Streator, and in the ongoing economic crisis they believed they could scare and bully the workers into submission. Glenn may have thought that Representative Reuben G. Soderstrom, fresh from defeat, would prefer not to get involved. He was wrong.

Reuben Responds

Threatened with an attack on its very right to exist, the Trades and Labor Council took immediate action. The first step was to craft a rational yet passionate response to the accusations of Glenn and his manufacturers. The Council turned to Reuben, who as Reading Clerk was charged with writing public statements and speeches for the Council. He had also recently become a member of Streator’s Chamber of Commerce, which welcomed four members from labor. On January 9, and on behalf of the Trades and Labor Council, Reuben crafted and published the official response to Glenn’s salvo two weeks earlier:

The labor movement of Streator does not intend to enter into a newspaper controversy. This is merely a reply to the misleading statements made by the “Open Shop” advocates which appeared in our two papers the day after Christmas…Now then organized labor has been charged with retarding the growth of the city. If it wasn’t for the fact that people are so unthinking the charge would be humorous…

Prohibition, it is reliably claimed, reduced the payroll in the American Bottle Factory, our largest institution, from about $150,000 a month to $15,000 or less. Dry legislation did away with beer and the need for beer bottles naturally declined…

Streator also had almost two thousand coal miners 20 years ago. Labor, yes organized labor did its share towards eliminating the mining industry by willingly going down into the bowels of earth and bringing to the surface the coal that could be profitably dug. Shame on Union Labor. When the coal was exhausted the miners moved to other fields and reduced the population. Charge this to Labor…

Our labor movement represents the thought and struggles of a free people and it bears the marks and scars of battle. The labor movement of Streator represents the crystallized thought, hope and aspirations of humanity for a better life and these employers in their associations, their combinations, yes in their unions, if you please, are using a nationwide business depression, and a humbug population argument to drive back, to kill the spirit of freedom that lives in the hearts of those of us who belong to this movement of labor. May God grant that they fail.[4]

And with that, the war was on; a struggle for the soul of Streator, with Reub at the helm. It would soon get bloody.

Violence Erupts

On December 31 of 1921, three of the companies that had signed the IMA’s proclamation saw their collective agreements expire. True to their word, they refused to renegotiate and picket lines were immediately drawn by labor. To survive the strike, companies relied on strikebreakers who were often imported workers already marginalized by race or ethnicity and desperate enough to risk the anger of fellow workmen. To get the vitriolic flavor of the times, it is worth quoting historian Dale Bennett at length from his work, The Labor Movement of Streator, Illinois, 1868-1933:

At the Metal Stamping Works, Federal Labor Union 17317 ordered that a picket line be established on January 3. On January 14, EB List, purchasing agent, and FC Mason, superintendent of the plant, arrived at the plant around 7:30 am. Mason received a phone call from Will Jensen, a strikebreaker. Jensen told Mason he was afraid to cross the picket line. Mason told the boy not to worry because he and List would escort him across the picket line.

As List, Mason and Jensen approached the plant gate, they were confronted by 20 or 30 pickets. A couple of people in the small crowd of pickets grabbed Jensen and told List and Mason that “they wouldn’t let the (boy) go in the plant.” Mason and List finally freed Jensen from the crowd. As the three men passed through the plant gate, the crowd yelled “We’ll kill the damn scabs.”

The company continued to hire strikebreakers, but after the Jensen incident it took the precaution of bringing workers across the picket line in trucks. On January 15, as the strikebreakers were getting to leave the plant, the pickets ran up to the trucks and started fist fights with the men. The pickets also threw rocks and bricks at the strikebreakers. As the truck left the plant, Anna Malick, one of the pickets yelled “go get them, take them out of there.” Then she and three other girls began to throw rocks at the men in the trucks.

The next afternoon a crowd of 300 people gathered at the plant around quitting time. Earlier in the day the 45 strikebreakers had their cars pelted with stones and bricks as they drove into the plant. A few stones and bricks would be minor to what was awaiting the men outside the plant. Superintendent Mason opened the plant gate around 4:15 pm and the workers bean to drive out of the plant. After all the cars had passed through the gate Mason began to close the gate. The crowd yelled, “Kill him, hang him.” Then the crowd began to throw rocks at him. Mason was hit by a large rock and a club.

Mason turned around and looked at Mabel Shedd, one of the pickets, and said, “You son of a bitch, you have said enough.” Frank Shedd, Mabel’s brother, ran up to Mason and hit him so hard that Mason was knocked to the ground. Mason was pelted again with rocks and bricks. Mason—who by this time was badly bruised—finally got back into the plant and away from his attackers. He called the Chief of Police in Streator and asked Chief Hopkins to the plant to take him home.[5]

When the police arrived, they arrested several protesters, including Mabel. The attack on Mason caused an instant media firestorm. “Police Save Streator Man From Mob” read the front page of the Belvidere Daily Republican the following morning, complete with a sensationalized story that described a “frenzied strike mob” that “had a rope around Mason’s neck.”[6] The media attention only strengthened the strike; the next day a giant crowd— newspaper estimates ranged anywhere from 300 to 800— formed outside the plant, led by Mabel’s mother Mary.[7]

While the police clashed with the strikers, the Metal Stampings Corporation clashed with the unions in court. Their lawyers, led by prominent Streator attorney Arthur Shay, filed a petition on January 19 for an injunction to “prohibit the strikers from assembling at the plant, or on any street leading to the plant, or any street that a worker in the plant traveled upon to get to work.”[8] The injunction bound strikers not only in where they could travel but in what they could say; calling the strike breakers “scabs” or the open shop contracts “yellow dog” deals could land a worker in jail, no matter where or in what context the words were uttered. Most devastatingly, the injunction applied not only to the striking union itself, but to all the officers of the Streator Trades and Labor Council.

Reuben Under Injunction

As Reading Clerk of the Trades and Labor Council, Reuben was now party to an anti-labor injunction, precisely the same infamous and inequitable legal tool he legislated against the previous term in Springfield. Saliently, he was named in the injunction regarding the event at the Metal Stamping Corporation in which he did not even participate (Attorney Shaw would later argue that Reuben was named in the injunction for inciting the town’s violence with his January 9 newspaper statement). Seeing Reuben’s name on the injunction must have brought forth a hearty laugh from JM Glenn in his august Chicago offices; this meant that Reuben, who was just run out of Springfield after a single term, now found himself barred from traveling in and around the streets of his own hometown.

In response, Reuben rallied the Streator Trades and Labor Council and the Executive Committee of the ISFL to hold an emergency session at the Plumb Theater in Streator. Thousands of laborers—angry, anxious and unemployed—filled the theater and hundreds more had to be turned away into the cold January night. It was at this point that one of the enduring figures of Reuben’s life literally walked onto center stage: Victor Olander, ISFL Secretary Treasurer and the man who would become one of Reub’s closest confidants for many decades. The child of immigrants, Vic was orphaned at thirteen and forced to do, in his words, “Everything a kid ever did to earn a living, I guess, and several things no kid ever had to do before.”[9] A former sailor, he began his career in labor as a delegate for the Seaman’s Union in 1901 and was elected secretary-treasurer of the ISFL in 1914. He cut a striking appearance; after meeting him in person writer Mary Gray Peck described him as “A blue-eyed, fair-haired Viking, who stood six feet in his stockings and tipped the scales at two hundred odd. He laid aside the omnipresent pipe as I entered, and welcomed me in a deep bass voice. A leader of the heroic type, it was evident at the first glance, one with the men around him, hearty, frank, and ready with a smile and perhaps an equally ready frown.”[10]

Reub, also the child of immigrants and likewise driven by necessity into child labor, saw in Victor a man with whom he could relate. They shared both life story and professional passion; each was a gifted leader with the ability to clearly assess the fight at hand and connect it to the greater struggle for human dignity. “Victor A. Olander was a great man,” Reub later said. “He possessed a mind which was constantly reasoning. He could analyze any situation accurately and evaluate the opposition to labor’s progress in language that needed no translation. His memory was matchless and his judgment of proportions penetrating and entrancingly correct…He was a natural teacher and a dedicated leader of labor of the Samuel Gompers variety.[11]

That night at the Plumb Theater, Olander turned the tables on the manufacturers—who never tired of confusing labor with communism—by making a clear connection between Glenn’s IMA and Bolshevism:

The nation is in as much danger now as during the world war. However, with the problem as it stands now it is not the outside forces that are to be feared but those working from the inside…The situation as it is in this country today can in a way be compared to that in Moscow, Russia. The big men in that country say that we will permit you to speak to us but you must do the things we tell you to do and take the things we give you and work as we tell you and in no event shall you take part in any organization…

The open shop men are doing the same thing right here in Streator, at least it is the same thing in principle, only the Moscow men know what they are doing and the businessmen of Streator do not. The thing for working men and women to do is keep on preaching and practicing right things and in time this will bring out the man and womanhood in our organization... A great many men who signed the open shop declaration are not (to be) held responsible as they were led to the thing by their ignorance rather than by their intention and now these same men have made this great mistake, it is up to the working men and women to teach them a lesson and we can prove ourselves capable of the task through knowledge of our own rights.[12]

While the meeting inspired the masses, the joint councils were unable to legally defeat the injunction. Sitting around the small dining table back at his house that night, Reub, Olander, and the Council instead focused their efforts on immediate matters on the street: now the Streator Clay Manufacturing Company and Streator Drain Tile Company were also canceling their contracts with labor, and the ensuing strikes soon descended into violence as well. On February 11, a truck importing seven out-of-town strikebreakers to Streator Clay was met by over 125 picketers, and on February 20, John Morris, the general manager of Streator Drain Tile, was accosted by a crowd of over 300 dispossessed workers. Again, injunctions were filed not only against the striking workers but the Trades and Labor Council as well, who were charged with nothing less than conspiracy. The injunctions against Reuben were piling up; by March, he and his fellow councilmen were effectively prisoners within their own city, barred from any route on any road that might lead to any of the factories that had signed Glenn’s declaration of war.

In the middle of these turbulent times, one thing became clear in Reuben’s mind: he had to return to Springfield and fight against the insidious use of anti-labor injunctions. The labor movement would never get off the ground as long as he and the council were prevented by law from simply holding a meeting after being roundly fired and replaced!

And with that he decided to charge right at Glenn and launch another campaign for the statehouse.

THE 1922 ELECTION

In early 1922, a soggy spring witnessed the city of Streator exhausted by daily skirmishes, emergency court hearings, and roaming vigilante (anti-labor) “peace officers” who enforced the confusing network of streets made unusable by a hailstorm of anti-labor injunctions. With the town bound by the IMA’s makeshift attempt at martial law, JM Glenn began focusing on the next part of his co-called American Plan: taking Springfield. Operating through a hand-picked committee tasked with “securing the election of a legislature more friendly to business interests,” Glenn was determined to place his candidates in the statehouse to run down any runaway revivals of the injunction limitation bill in Springfield’s next session. [13]In LaSalle, that meant putting Reub’s old rival Ole Benson back on top in the Republican primary.

Reuben entered the primary race too. There was simply too much at stake. He had endured and was even energized by the constant opposition from the IMA and its anti-labor judges, whose efforts to belittle labor escalated as the primary election date of April 11 approached. Still, the restrictions stung; Olga writes that the injunctions piling up with Reuben’s name not only complicated his campaigning but even prevented him from seeing his family! “Reub had a number of injunctions served on him and he was limited to just certain areas in Streator where he could walk or visit. One area ended at the Santa Fe tracks, he could not cross them so he couldn’t even visit his mother.”[14]

And as if this was not enough challenge for Reuben, one of his biggest threats came not from the manufacturers or Ole Benson but from his own boss, Andy Anderson.

Job Loss?

Anderson had supported Reub’s earlier run and term in office in hopes of furthering his own political career. In 1921, Anderson ran for mayor of Streator with the backing of the Chamber of Commerce, both local newspapers, the ITU and other unions. Yet despite this support, Anderson lost to CG Reno, a war veteran who had the support of the powerful American Legion Post.[15] Embittered by the loss, Anderson decided that if his political career had ended, Reuben’s should as well. On February 22, while recuperating from the loss at the modern Hotel Poinsettia in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida, Andy penned a terse ultimatum to Reub:

Dear Reuben,

Just see by the paper you are talking about being a candidate for the legislature once more. Don’t you think you are losing too much time under our present agreement? It is hardly fair to the balance of us and I do not think I will be as lenient this time as I was four years ago. The time has come where you must choose between the printing business and politics, as they can go together no longer. You must either quit one or the other. It is up to you to decide.

Your friend, Mr. Anderson

Of course I prefer you stay with the printing business.[16]

Reub had run Andy’s print house for years and suspected that Anderson needed him more than he needed the shop. Reub knew Anderson’s real motivation may have been his own disappointment; but still, Reub was legally barred from campaigning himself in much of the city and faced a mounting number of injunctions, fines, and even potential jail time. With Jean and two young children at home, Reub could ill afford to lose his job too.

But a withdrawal at this critical moment would have assured a Statehouse seat for Reub’s old foe, Ole Benson. Reub was the only candidate with a chance of beating him. After a long conversation with Jeanne, two days later Reub sat down and wrote the only response he felt he honorably could:

Friend Anderson,

The campaign will be on in earnest by March 20, and I think it will be better for all concerned if you will secure an operator to take my place from then on. I don’t think that I have a chance to win a place on the Republican ticket, but political obligations and ramifications make it impossible for me to honorably withdraw from the contest.

If it is agreeable to you after April 11 (election day) whether I win or lose I’ll be glad to work for you again. If you don’t want me back and you desire to keep your new operator it will be all the same. I’ve talked the matter over with my wife and home people and we think we have money enough to equip a nice little printing office of our own. I would rather stay at the AH Anderson offices, of course, but will not knowingly be the party that is doing the unfair thing to his partners.

Hope you will be home in time to vote for me.

With kindest regards and best wishes to you and Mrs. Anderson, I am yours, as ever,

R. G. Soderstrom[17]

Unblinking, Reub called Andy’s bluff. Anderson let the matter pass without further comment and Reub continued to work at the print shop as the 1922 election came into full swing.

A New Alliance

The Open Shop fight in Streator continued to worsen. With Reub and his Labor Council on its heels, the Manufacturers of Streator mounted an even stronger offensive. Leveraging their power within law enforcement, they tasked the LaSalle County Sheriff to deputize out-of-town ‘detectives’ hired by the IMA. Ostensibly hired to protect the plant, these private security forces soon spilled into the streets as armed “patrols,” accosting not only striking workers but also average citizens. The “imported thugs” began stopping and questioning anyone at will. George Hodgson, a former worker at Western Glass, wrote an appeal to the City Council to have the Sheriff remove the dehumanizing patrols:

They show no credentials and this I think is not right, as we would like to know whether or not these men are officials of the law. If they are, we want to respect them, if they are not we want to have them released from their duties, as they are violating the law and should be charged with inciting riots. The sheriff is deputizing men working in the plants, after which they are allowed to carry weapons and patrol the streets. Four of the deputies were ordered out of the city only to be replaced by six more…It is coming to the point where something has to be done as the men have been idle now for several months and it makes it quite difficult for them to be hampered by these men acting as deputies patrolling the streets with weapons.[18]

The City Council, however, was cowed by the IMA. They demurred, ruling they had no authority over the sheriff and were therefore powerless to stop the violence and intimidation on their own streets. Soderstrom was barred by injunction from meeting with striking workers, harassed by armed intimidation at every street corner, and unable to turn to city government for any kind of relief.

With the walls of Streator closing in on him, our protagonist went to extraordinary measures to keep himself and his movement alive; he contacted the Governor of Illinois, Len Small, who accepted the proposal that he meet Reuben in his offices in Springfield. Speaking for the Streator Labor Council, Reuben appealed for the Governor’s support, fearing that without his help many union leaders, himself included, might be imprisoned for conspiracy and wholly eliminated from public life. After a long, private discussion, Governor Small pledged his support to Reub, telling him: “In spite of what happens, Soderstrom, just remember that Governor Len Small holds the keys in his hands to the penitentiaries in the state of Illinois.”[19] The Governor’s support wasn’t simply altruistic. In his analysis of the deal, historian Dale Bennet concludes:

Governor Small took such a position (of support) for two reasons: First, Soderstrom was a Republican, as was Small, running for a term in the General Assembly in the fall elections of 1922. Secondly, Small always had a great deal of sympathy for the underdog in any dispute. The first reason is significant because Len Small became Governor running on a platform promising the building of highways throughout Illinois. Reuben’s platform for 1922 was also the building of more highways. The second reason is pertinent because of the persecution that Small experienced after he vetoed the appropriations of the fifty-second General Assembly. Small’s enemies had made many charges and tried to impeach him on more than one occasion; therefore, Small’s promise to Soderstrom that he would not go to jail appeared to be an exchange for Soderstrom’s aid for Small’s program in the next General Assembly.[20]

With Smalls’ endorsement, Reuben was able to return to Streator and shore up the remaining votes he needed. On April 11, Reub defeated both the incumbent John Wylie and the resurgent Ole Benson to claim the second seat in the Republican primary alongside longtime representative William Scanlan. Much to the chagrin of the IMA, Soderstrom was alive!

Reuben Exonerated

The IMA’s immediate response to Reuben’s primary victory was to extend the injunctions against him and therefore impede his campaigning abilities leading up to the general election in November. So in the last week of May, Reuben and the Streator Trades and Labor Council were called back into Judge Baker’s Pontiac, Illinois courtroom to determine if the earlier temporary injunction would become permanent. Arthur Shay, the IMA’s attorney, aggressively claimed that all the violence in Streator was the result of a conspiracy conducted by the Labor Council generally and Reuben G. Soderstrom specifically, particularly his newspaper response to the Open Shop declaration of December 27, 1921. The 34-year-old Reuben was called to the stand, where he and Shay engaged in combative and colorful jousting about the purpose of the IMA’s published statement and Reuben’s response. One can only imagine the humiliating requirement that Reuben defend his exercise of free speech (which ironically was in response to the IMA’s exercise of the same), or the proceeding’s condescending quality in which all members of the Labor Council were called to the stand like schoolchildren in the principal’s office.

With Reuben on the stand, Shay referenced various newspaper articles stating that members of the trade union movement in Streator were anarchists (the terrorists of the day) and asked if Reuben agreed. “I do not,” Reuben replied, “But I would like to explain the sentiment that it developed. Well, the fellows who had read the articles and those who had talked to me, they resented it. They said that we were not lawless anarchists, that we had nothing to do with that proposition.”[21] One after another the members of the Council were brought to the stand and interrogated about Reuben’s article, attacked for every word. At the end of the trial, Judge Baker ruled in favor of the Manufacturers and made permanent all the injunctions against Local 17317. It was a devastating blow. The IMA asked Judge Baker to consider extending all other outstanding injunctions against Reuben as well. But then came a miraculous turn of events, and the historian can only wonder if illicit, outside influences—like the office of the Governor—were at play. Eleven days after the ruling, Judge Baker ruled in favor of Reuben and the Council in regard to both outstanding injunctions as well as the formerly adjudicated injunctions, effectively overruling himself and removing any and all injunctions against the members of the Streator Trades and Labor Council. Reuben was euphoric. Labor’s attorney, smelling blood, pressed for more, stating “in my part of the country, the plaintiff always pays damages when he fails to prove his case.”[22] Judge Baker agreed and ordered $2,666 in damages be awarded to the Council.

It was an important victory for Reub and his allies; now the Council could continue advocating for workers’ rights and meet openly with the laborers of Streator. The win in court also insulated them against future conspiracy claims. For Reub personally, it meant that he could charge unencumbered toward the general election.

Allies Line Up

In the 1922 elections, the ISFL rejected the idea of a Labor Party and returned once again to Sam Gompers’s call for non-partisan support of labor candidates rather than creating their own Labor Party. Gompers and the AFL committed to enter “elections everywhere to make certain that candidates favorable to the rights and interests of the workers are nominated.”[23] In a national speech, Gompers singled out Reub’s home state. “There is a striking unity of determination. Illinois has been particularly active in making early preparations.”[24] And although he had their moral support, Reuben refused union money on principle. “A person elected to public office, if he bankrolls himself, pays his own expenses, and he’s obliged to no one, then he’s free to serve whomever he pleases after he’s elected to public office,” Reuben later recounted. “I bankrolled my own campaigns—every one of them.”[25]

Reuben had access to something even more powerful: manpower. Unable to purchase newspaper ads, Reub and his supporters relied on the distribution of flyers and multiple personal appearances. Soderstrom missed no opportunity to attend a gathering, whether it be union, lodge, or celebration. He found particularly supportive allies in the local churches, which had been strong supporters of labor throughout the open shop crisis.

Most importantly, Reub could count on his family for support. Jeanne and Anna spent the unseasonably cold days knocking on doors. Lafe took days off work so he could help hand out pro-Reuben leaflets at union meetings and at the gates of closed shop factories as workers changed shift. Paul did not appear at many of his brother’s campaign events, but acted behind the scenes, particularly helping with the veteran vote. Even Olga’s new husband, Arthur Hodgson, helped the campaign while he and Olga (who had just finished nursing school) lived in Anna’s house, temporarily transformed into the campaign headquarters for Reuben’s 1922 effort.

There was a bittersweet joy in having the family together again. Sunday evenings in mother Anna’s house were busy affairs. Lafe would take one of the six Wabash daily trains on the Streator-Forrest branch into town to be met at the station by Reub. They’d animatedly discuss the latest labor issues of the day while Anna and Olga worked in the kitchen preparing Isterband sausage or Kalops stew. Jeanne would strike up friendly conversation with the ever-polite Art in the parlor, who always smiled (even when he failed to understand her Scottish accent). Meanwhile little Lorraine re-connected with her father Paul, who quietly suffered from the trauma he had endured overseas. When dinner was ready they’d gather around the table, a family reunited for the first time in years.

A November Surprise

Reuben’s primary win in April brought attention and support from labor supporters around the state. Victor Olander visited Streator a second time in the sweltering August heat in a show of support for Soderstrom the labor candidate. Feeling momentum turning against the IMA, thousands of laborers turned out for a twelve-block long march through town in support of unions. Reuben presided over the festivities as Olander addressed the crowd of 4,000 in City Park, appealing for industrial freedom and the “right to happiness.”[26] According to the Streator Daily Independent Times, Olander explained how injunctions hurt all workers and then “paid a splendid tribute to RG Soderstrom, local labor leader, who as a member of the Illinois Assembly for two years, ‘made a splendid fight in favor of revision in the injunction system.’ On the strength of this, Olander urged that local man’s election in the Assembly in the fall.”[27]

In November, the 39th District elected Reuben Soderstrom back into the Illinois Assembly, capping one of the more tumultuous personal campaigns in the history of the Illinois statehouse. However, Reuben’s victory wasn’t the only election day surprise. Ole Benson, undaunted by his loss in the primary, broke with his party and ran as an independent candidate. Although losing to Reuben by several thousand votes in the primary, he managed to defeat Scanlan by several hundred, securing his old seat in the Assembly. When Reuben again boarded the train to return to office at the statehouse, Ole Benson stepped on board as well; the IMA was following Reuben back to Springfield.

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