Laborfest: Films: 1934 Minneapolis General Strike;Anna Louise Strong & 1919 Seattle Strike

Labor’s Turning Point (59 min) (1981) US
By John DeGraaf
The 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was a pivotal struggle for working people of the mid-west. As a result of new tactics developed in the successful strike, it led to the organization of over the road truckers and the growth of the Teamsters nationally into one of the most important and powerful unions in the United States. The film shows how the strike was organized and how the union broke the back of the anti-union Citizen’s Alliance and made Minneapolis a union town. It also includes the ground breaking role of the strikers’ wives in organizing for the strike and the establishment of a daily strike bulletin. These tactics are still relevant today in the struggle of labor to organize and survive.

Witness To Revolution, The Story of Anna Louise Strong By Lucy Ostrander (27 minutes) 1984 US
This film contains the history of the 1919 General Strike in the context of the life of Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970), a partisan and a journalist, who reported on the strike and also on the 1916 Everett, Washington Massacre, which also took place in the same year. The film provides a close up look at why the strike took place and how it affected the working people of Seattle and the world.

The daughter of a Nebraska minister, Anna Louise Strong earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago. But it was in the Pacific Northwest, where she witnessed the 1916 Everett massacre and chronicled the 1919 Seattle General Strike, that her political vision took shape. In Moscow she helped found the first English language newspaper, in Spain her many visits resulted in her book, Spain in Arms; and in China she interviewed Mao in a Yenan cave in 1946. She is buried in Beijing in a special cemetery for martyrs of the revolution.

Film is winner of Student Academy Award, the Nissan Focus Award, a CINE Golden Eagle and was broadcast nationally on PBS as well as the Canadian Learning Channel and CCTV in the Peoples' Republic of China
See also:
http://www.stourwater.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Louise_Strong
http://www.laborfest.net/2009schedule.htm