Peter Rachleff taught history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a focus on labor issues. The Progressive recently sat down with Rachleff to discuss the state of the nation, his work as a co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library, and what people can collectively do to build community power. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You have seen federal administrations come and go. What are your thoughts about where we are as a nation now?
Peter Rachleff: I think it’s important to analyze this situation historically and place it in our historical context. I would suggest that we are living through the end stages of neoliberalism, the phase of American, and perhaps global, capitalism which came to dominance in the 1980s, replacing Keynesianism, which had come to dominance in the 1930s.
Keynesianism, aka “demand-side economics,” had responded to the crisis of the Great Depression by centering the involvement of the state in the economy via regulation, welfare policies and practices, and tolerance of unions, in ways that would promote economic growth, with even some narrowing of economic inequality.
In the 1970s, some capitalists and conservative politicians began to promote “market-driven economics,” or supply-side economics, as a way to boost economic growth and expand opportunities for the accumulation of greater wealth. They sought to reduce taxes, cut the costs of labor, and expand globally in order to access cheaper raw materials and labor. New industries, such as “FIRE”—finance, insurance, and real estate—emerged as drivers of the economy’s engine. Neoliberalism would create new vehicles, such as the World Trade Organization.
From 2008 to 2010, the American economy entered a period of crisis and political uncertainty. It appears that the second Trump Administration represents a response to this crisis and its consequent instability, building on currents of racism and authoritarianism to fashion a new political and economic culture.
Q: What are your thoughts about this from a labor perspective?
Rachleff: These developments constitute a crisis for all working people in the United States, and perhaps the world, and certainly for the labor movement. Trump policies have undercut union rights in the public sector, victimized immigrant workers in all industries, raised the cost of living, and generated a mood as well as an experience of precarity across the country.
Q: You are co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library (ESFL), an amazing progressive space for learning and organizing. How did you come into having an old Carnegie library at your disposal?
Rachleff: It is hardly at our disposal. The ESFL, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, leases the building from the city of St. Paul. The organization is responsible for the maintenance of the building, which has included installing a new roof and replacing the HVAC system. ESFL has occupied this building, formerly the Arlington Hills Library in St. Paul’s public library system, since 2014. My partner, Beth Cleary, and I coalesced a board, raised initial funds, and developed a team committed to the ESFL’s mission.
In 2023, we stepped down from the formal leadership of the library, but we have continued to be involved. ESFL moved into an empty space in 2014. It now holds more than 38,000 books, with all property catalogued and shelved, and there are about 8,000 people on the library’s email list. They use ESFL’s resources and participate in ESFL’s programs to learn the histories of Native Americans, immigrants, and workers, to learn each other’s stories, and to explore how to build solidarity across our community.
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ESFL co-founders Peter Rachleff and Beth Cleary at a celebration of the library's tenth anniversary in June 2023.
Q: Walk us through some of the main collections and resources available at ESFL.
Rachleff: The books are organized in collections that were donated to the library. The two largest are Beth Cleary’s, which focuses on theater and creative writing, and mine, which focuses on labor, immigration, and African American history. Each collection reflects the intellectual passions of the donor, such as Fred Ho, who was a Chinese American jazz musician, or Hy Berman, who taught labor history at the University of Minnesota. ESFL is also the home to the Hmong Archives, which includes not only books but also 2,000 paj ntaub [story cloths].
Q: How do you see labor issues and Black, Hmong, and Latine cultures of the neighborhood intersecting?
Rachleff: The East Side, the ancestral homeland for centuries of Dakota people, became the home for northern and western European immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. Swedes, Irish, Germans, Italians, Serbians, and Croatians moved here, seeking employment in the manufacturing industries which were growing on the East Side. In the late twentieth century, economic neoliberalism and deindustrialization removed more than 15,000 unionized blue collar jobs, and many of the descendants of the European immigrants moved away. But economic neoliberalism was disrupting the lives of people in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Central America, and thousands of them moved to the East Side. They are working in the health care, retail, education, and public service industries, their lives echoing the lives of their European predecessors.
Q: The Progressive has provided excellent coverage of the recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion here in the Twin Cities and in broader Minnesota. How did ESFL react to this grave threat to the community?
Rachleff: By the time of Operation Metro Surge, ESFL had been working for twelve years to bring our European-descended and new immigrant neighbors together, to learn and share each other’s stories, appreciate each other’s cultures, and explore the similarities in their values. This work included cultural performances, author presentations, book discussions, close mentorship of middle and high school students, union job fairs, and frank and intense conversations. I like to think that our work at ESFL planted seeds that blossomed in the community during the challenge of Operation Metro Surge.
Q: What advice would you give others who are looking to create something similar in their own communities?
Rachleff: Last summer, months before Operation Metro Surge, activists from Minnesota 8 [MN8], an organization that fights the detention and deportation of members of Southeast Asian communities, spoke to an overflowing, largely white audience at the ESFL. In response to an audience member’s question—“How can we help your struggle?”—an activist from MN8 replied, “The most important thing you can do is learn your own history.” Now, when our sisters, brothers, and kin in the labor movement ask us, “What can we learn from the Minnesota labor movement?” I respond, “The most important thing you can do is learn your own history.”
I want to build on Minnesota AFL-CIO state President Bernie Burnham’s remark at the national convention in mid-June, that “we are a rich community of traditions.” I would add that the Minnesota labor movement, and especially the committed activists within the movement, have for generations studied our traditions and found ways to pass those traditions along to ensuing generations.
Hormel workers striking in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985 and 1986 had been educated and inspired by their predecessors, who had participated in the country’s first sit-down strike in that same plant in November 1933. When those Hormel strikers in the mid-1980s needed rent money, mortgage and car payments, tuition payments for their children, and food for their families, a solidarity committee in the Twin Cities—led by Jake Cooper, a veteran of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, and a man who had started a grocery store in Chaska, Minnesota, after he was blacklisted by employers in the 1940s—took the lead in raising material support for the strikers.
Six years later, United Auto Workers (UAW) members of the solidarity committee, which had met at the UAW Local 879 union hall on Ford Parkway, took the lessons of solidarity they had learned in support of the Hormel strikers and applied them to the challenges posed by the North American Free Trade Agreement. They reached across our country’s northern and southern borders to initiate a transnational solidarity movement that they called “MEXUSCAN.”
The stories of solidarity, from the 1933 Hormel strike in Austin and the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes to the labor struggles of the 1980s and 1990s, were being passed along, generation to generation, within families, within neighborhoods, and within and between cities. These stories were told over breakfast and dinner tables, but they were also told at union meetings, in local labor newspapers like the Minneapolis Labor Review and the St. Paul Union Advocate, and in songs, plays, memoirs and novels, and labor history classes at the University of Minnesota’s Labor Education Service, and more.
Going back to the advice from our comrades in the MN8, I want to encourage our sisters, brothers, and kin in the labor movement to learn your own history, celebrate it, pass it along, and encourage the next generations to learn from it and add to it. To quote President Burnham, we all have rich traditions. To add to that, it is our responsibility to discover these traditions, learn from them, and teach them to the next generations. This is how we can—together—realize the dream of what life can be in this country.