Two years later, the NPL won control of both houses of the state legislature and created the North Dakota Mill, still the only state-owned flour mill, and the The Bank of North Dakota, which remains the nation’s only government-owned general-service bank. In 1916, the Non-Partisan League did, in fact, elect farmer Lynn Frazier as governor of North Dakota with 79% of the vote. ‘Northern Lights’ is based on an early-20th-century farmer-led political uprising in the Midwest. He eventually persuades skeptical farmers that electing NPL candidates could get the government to create cooperative grain elevators, state-chartered banks with farmers as stockholders, and limits on the prices that railroads can charge farmers to haul their wheat. In his beat-up Model T, he travels the back roads, talking to farmers in their fields or around the potbellied stoves of country stores. The film follows Ray Sorenson, a young farmer influenced by socialist ideas who leaves his North Dakota farm to become a Non-Partisan League organizer. Economic insecurity was a part of life, and foreclosures were routine. This is a fictionalized account of a fascinating but little-known political movement: the Non-Partisan League, which organized farmers in the upper Midwest in the early 1900s.ĭuring this period, Midwestern farmers worked long hours to harvest grain that they were then forced to sell for low prices to elevators, while paying high prices to the big railroad companies and banks. Here are five unsung labor movies, all based on real-life events, that, in my view, deserve more attention. I’ve found that students more easily grasp the human dimensions of workers’ lives and struggles when they are depicted on the screen. When I teach labor history, I’ve used films to supplement books and articles. Red Scare-era releases, such as 1952’s ” Big Jim McLain“ and the 1954 film ” On the Waterfront,“ often depicted unions as corrupt or infiltrated by communist subversives. There’s also an anti-labor strain of Hollywood history, particularly during the post-World War II Red Scare, when studios purged left-wing writers, directors and actors through an industrywide blacklist. In an iconic scene from ‘Modern Times,’ Charlie Chaplin gets caught in the gears of factory machinery. “ Bread and Roses,” a 2000 film about low-wage janitors in Los Angeles, is based on the Service Employees International Union’s “ Justice for Janitors movement. The textile worker and single mom inspires her fellow workers to overcome their racial animus and work together to vote in a union. “ The Grapes of Wrath,” a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, tells the story of sharecropper Tom Joad’s radicalization after his family and other migrant workers experience destitute conditions in California’s growing fields and overcrowded migrant camps.ġ979’s “ Norma Rae,” is based on the life of Crystal Lee Sutton, who worked in a J.P. It features the famous image of Chaplin caught in the gears of factory machinery. Some of the most well-known labor movies champion the struggle of the everyday worker: “ Modern Times,” released in 1936, stars Charlie Chaplin going crazy due to his job on an assembly line.

Hollywood studios and independent producers have long depicted the collective efforts of working people to improve their lives and gain a voice in their workplaces and the larger society. Is a Hollywood drama about angry Starbucks baristas or frustrated Amazon warehouse workers far behind? is in the midst of a new upsurge of union organizing. Unions are more popular now than at any time since 1965, and the U.S.

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