The forgotten battle of East Lansing

> “But many Michigan State College students, overhearing the arguments between the unionists and the businessmen, quickly perceived the situation as a challenge to their sovereignty and to their eating places,” they wrote.

I'm skeptical of the idea that this was all the result of a big misunderstanding. Students were often recruited to act as strikebreakers in the early 20th century.

There's a book that deals with this subject, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Football players were especially valued.

Fun to see something about East Lansing here. While I am Dutch, I have been there in the neighborhood (e.g. Lansing itself) on and off for 6 months in total when I had a long distance marriage (we live in the Netherlands nowadays). I’m a fan of Blue Owl coffee there.

REO town was cheap to rent and quite walkable to the city center (or “downtown” as they call it). I liked it more than I thought I would. Many places there aren’t walkable but from REO town to the city center it was possible. One thing I noticed was that walkability wasn’t priced in the rents at all since after a 1 mile walk from the city center, studio apartments were about 800$ (2024) whereas in the city center itself it was more like 1100$ IIRC. In my view going 300$ while just having a 1 mile walk seems like a steal.

MSU is massive nowadays. It’s crazy how big it is. It feels like an actual town. I wonder how big it was then.

As for the article itself. I find it interesting to read how certain groups were just taking action and there was no discernible leadership that could talk to each other. I wonder if this would have happened if that was the case.

The car manufacturing culture in Michigan in general is a low-key tourist worthy thing to check out (e.g. in the Detroit Institute of Art). But I have my father in law for that, haha. Asking Claude what a CNC programmer does because he’s not that great at explaining it to a total noob like me :’) once I understood that he had a macro language inside what he called G-code it was fun to ask what he programmed haha.

> At 2 a.m. Monday, June 7, 1937, Lansing police pounded on the Washburns’ door to arrest him and his wife, Nevah, but the union leader was on a train back from Detroit. His wife was home with their three young children, all under 10. Nevah was arrested and left her children with a neighbor. Several labor union leaders and their wives were rounded up that night by the Lansing Police Department.When Washburn returned to Lansing about an hour later and found out his wife was in jail, he hurried to a pay phone — he said police had cut the telephone wire outside their home before serving the warrant for their arrest — and started waking people up. He gathered with other leaders who had escaped arrest and, within the next few hours, the UAW had declared a Lansing Labor Holiday. Approximately 15,000 union members would not report to work that day to protest the arrests. The union members and their supporters took to the streets in a parade led by a gravel truck, Washburn recalled in the 1986 interview.

sigh