Albert Lea, Nineteen Fifty-Nine: When the Governor Called Martial Law

Albert Lea is a quiet city of lakes and farmland tucked against the Iowa border in southern Minnesota. But in the autumn and winter of nineteen fifty-nine, it became a national flashpoint for labor conflict, and the site of the only declaration of martial law in Minnesota's history.

The Wilson and Company meatpacking plant was Albert Lea's dominant employer. More than eleven hundred workers staffed its lines, in a city of only about seventeen thousand people. The company was known as the most aggressively anti-union of the major American meatpackers. When the contract expired on September first, nineteen fifty-nine, workers in Local Six of the United Packinghouse Workers of America walked off the job over mandatory overtime and a string of other grievances. Within weeks the dispute had turned volatile. There were confrontations on the picket line, allegations of violence on both sides, and a company refusing to budge.

Governor Orville Freeman, who would go on to serve as United States Secretary of Agriculture under Kennedy and Johnson, stepped in on December eleventh and made a dramatic decision. He declared martial law in Albert Lea and ordered the Wilson plant to close entirely, a move he believed would force both sides to the table. National Guard troops arrived. Residents were under curfew after ten o'clock at night.

The courts did not agree with Freeman's approach. A federal district court ruled within days that he had exceeded his authority in ordering the plant shut, and the closure order was reversed. The strike dragged on until February of nineteen sixty, when both sides finally agreed to arbitration.

The Wilson strike is a largely forgotten episode of American labor history, but it captured everything raw about the industrial Midwest of that era: company towns, stubborn management, workers with few options, and a governor willing to make a drastic call that the law said he couldn't make.