Voices of Minnesota

Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota Oral History Project

70 INTERVIEWS

DATE: 1972-1989

INTERVIEWERS: Carl Ross (principal interviewer), Hyman Berman, Alan Bruce, Susanna Frenkel, Virginia Hyvarinen, Thomas O'Connell, Sal Salerno, Steven Trimble and others

The Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota Oral History Project consists of interviews generated between 1986 and 1989 for the Project to Document Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Minnesota and of a select number of interviews conducted earlier. Carl Ross, former Minnesota Communist leader, served as project director. This oral history project has been one part of a larger effort by the MNHS Research Department to uncover the role of left-wing radicalism in shaping the state's political culture. Radicals who were active in the decades up to 1960 were interviewed, including men and women, members of various left-wing political parties and unaffiliated activists, artists, organizers, and WPA workers.

The other major product of the MNHS radicalism research was an annotated bibliography of sources on the subject in the collections of MNHS and the University of Minnesota libraries, Radicalism in Minnesota, 1900-1960: a survey of selected sources, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in 1994.

COMMENTS: 37 interviews were generated by MNHS specifically for the Radicalism Project from 1986 to 1989. 33 other interviews were collected and/or transcribed by MNHS for inclusion among the Radicalism oral history collection.

LENGTH OF INTERVIEWS: 152 hours

TRANSCRIPTS: 2,464 pages