The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

It’s been far far too long since I last posted anything here.  I could offer the usual excuses (children, work, etc.), but instead I’ll try to tell a little story that relates directly to both my current life as a parent and to the history of STO.

A month or two after Nico was born, we decided we would bite the bullet and buy a double stroller, reversing our righteous disdain for all the yuppie parents we see on a daily basis crowding the sidewalks with their double-wide joggers.  Anne found a good deal on Craig’s List, and when she contacted the sellers, they gave her an address that was oddly familiar to me.  I wracked my brain to figure out where the street was and what intersections it was near.  Aha!  Suddenly it came back to me:  turns out the sellers lived on land that was once the Stewart-Warner Factory.

From at least the mid-twentieth century until its final demise in the early 1990’s, Stewart-Warner was one of the largest factories on the north side of Chicago.  In the early 1970’s, STO decided to make Stewart-Warner one of their major sites of industrial concentration, and several members obtained jobs there.  They were not alone:  other radical groups, including the October League and the Revolutionary Union, also sent cadre into the factory, creating an organizing environment that was possibly unique in Chicago.  The draw was at least two-fold:  first, the factory was centrally located, unlike many other factories in the Chicago area that were on the outskirts of the city itself.  Second, and more important in the minds of STO’s organizers, the demographics of the workforce were quite mixed, with an equal number of men and women, and whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans all working side by side. 

This must have seemed like the perfect laboratory in which to test out the group’s theories of workplace organizing and opposition to white supremacy.  Indeed, over the years, the group organized many campaigns inside the factory, some more successful than others.  At the same time, the various splits within STO during the course of the 1970’s created a situation where many former members of the group also worked at Stewart Warner.  As a result, at least one former member today remembers Stewart-Warner as having been the archetype of STO’s factory work. 

Given STO’s inability to grasp and confront the macroeconomic forces behind deindustrialization, it is perhaps fitting that when Stewart-Warner was finally shut down in the early nineties – production was moved to a maquiladora in Ciudad Juarez, naturally – the land was purchased by a developer.  The factory was torn down, and by 1996 the space that had once been a major hotbed of industrial working class radicalism had been transformed into a glaring symbol of class stratification:  a gated community. 

And eleven years later this gated community was home to a wealthy couple who had received three (count ‘em, three) double strollers from friends and family when their second child was born.  Two of the strollers went up for sale on Craig’s list, and in late June I drove over to pick one of them up for the very affordable price of $40.  The sellers were kind enough to give me the code to get through the gate, and I was treated to the sight of a “community” that could not possibly have looked less like the real Chicago just outside the fence.  The place looked like a New England village, with fake cobble stone streets and vinyl siding that was supposed to look like wood.  It was a fascinating glimpse of a very different life. 

I asked the sellers if they had any idea what was there before their community was built, and surprisingly they knew that it had been a factory.  I didn’t bother to mention my research, or my one previous visit to the area:  when I was a young anarchist new to Chicago in 1994, I participated in a “free skool” class on “Urban Exploration,” which mostly amounted to breaking into abandoned buildings.  One day we decided to visit the half-demolished hulk that had been the Stewart Warner Factory.  We spent several hours wandering around inside, but at that point I had never heard of STO and I knew nothing about the workplace organizing that had taken place there.  My second visit was on some level more productive, however:  we use the double stroller – or “oh-lair,” as Sofia pronounces it – several times a week.  And every time, I am reminded of a small piece of STO’s history.