Our local labor movement and historical community lost a vital comrade when Dave Riehle passed away on January 21. Since my arrival in Minnesota almost 42 years ago, Dave was my mentor, my colleague, and my comrade. I will miss him greatly, but his work lives on.

Over these many years I have condensed my “big” ideas into a set of aphorisms:
• Our best path to the future reveals itself when we put the past and present into conversation with each other.
• Working people have made history, are making history, and will make history.
• They have the greatest agency in making history when they are not only organized in unions, but those unions are part of a larger labor movement, indeed part of broader social movements for racial and gender justice, peace, and environmental protection.

In reflecting on Dave’s life since his passing, I have realized how much my experiences with him helped me develop these aphorisms.

Dave was an outstanding historian. He supplemented his work in the archives with in depth oral history interviews with labor activists of earlier generations. He contributed the primary materials he gathered and the tapes of those interviews to the Minnesota Historical Society archives, so that other researchers might use them.  In the essays and articles he wrote, he connected the past to the present, always with an eye to the future, and he wrote in language accessible to non-academic readers. His writings appeared in a wide range of publications and platforms, including the St. Paul UNION ADVOCATE, RAMSEY COUNTY HISTORY, the website of Historic Saint Paul, and a number of progressive and socialist journals. He also presented his findings to various gatherings, including his own union, the United Transportation Union, the St. Paul Labor Speakers Club, the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, the Meeting the Challenge conferences, a series of labor history walking tours, and the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s “Untold Stories” series, to name only a few.

Dave inspired many of us – from an academic historian like me to committed trade unionists – to follow his path.  In 1996-97, he had the brilliant idea of celebrating the100th anniversary of the St. Paul UNION ADVOCATE by recruiting authors to produce a new local labor history article for every issue of the paper that year. Dave pushed and pulled in his quiet, understated way, and a whole bunch of us produced new historical knowledge and shared it widely.  

Dave not only unearthed compelling but forgotten chapters in local labor history – such as the St. Paul African American community’s celebration of the “Cuban revolution” of 1898, the election of an African American boot and shoemaker, Charles James, to the presidency of the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly in 1902, the role of veteran radicals in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes – but he connected these past experiences to the ongoing struggles of workers and unions in the present.  I still remember Dave teaching me, Bud Schulte and others about the history of meatpacking unionism in Minnesota while we stood on the South St. Paul picket lines of UFCW Local 3 at Iowa Pork Processors in 1983.  These workers were making history.

A year after the Iowa Pork strike, Dave and I would become co-chairs of the Twin Cities Local P-9 Support Committee, organizing support for striking Hormel workers. We researched the history of the Independent union of All Workers, who had carried out the nation’s first sitdown strike in the Hormel plant in November 1933, then spread their vision of “wall-to-wall unionism” to other meatpacking plants, factories such as American as Machine in Albert Lea, and to women retail workers from Woolworth’s to Sears. We shared our findings wih Support Committee meetings, as we tried to chart a path for Hormel workers to defeat management’s demand for concessions. While the strike fell short of its goals, new layers of knowledge and understanding inspired workers from UAW 879 at the Ford plant, railroad workers on the Soo Line and the Chicago Northwestern, and mechanics at Northwest Airlines, to postal workers, Minnesota public employees, and members of AFSCME Local 3800 at the University of Minnesota.  We were using labor history to inform and inspire the contemporary labor movement.

Dave is gone, but his presence and influence lives on. He would want us to continue to study and teach labor history as a path to a better future.