Sticking To The Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila.
By Sandy Polishuk.
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003. 288 pp.Hardcover $75; paperback, $22.95.
Reviewed by Gene Vrana,
ILWU Director of Educational Services & Librarian
This is a gem of a book about a larger than life, small-town, working-class hero by the name of Julia Ruuttila. Telling her own story through a compelling oral history interview with historian and writer Sandy Polishuk, Ruuttila’s life in the Pacific Northwest reveals a great deal about the lives of activist radical women who have so often been compelled to sacrifice or compromise their personal lives in order to act out their political beliefs and participate in the turbulent struggles of militant left-wing organizations and unions.
Most of her tale is set in Oregon and along the Columbia River—and much of her adult life there was in support of and in service to the ILWU. But the issues and events that marked her tireless dedication to the cause of workers and their unions as an organizer and a journalist (including decades as a correspondent for The Dispatcher) have a universal appeal that will move and inform unionists and their allies just about anywhere.
This larger appeal is made possible through effective editing and fact-checking by Polishuk, and her superior ability to repeatedly set the historical context for the twists and turns of Ruuttila’s life in recurring narratives that are clearly and concisely written in a style that is simple, descriptive and dramatic.
In a statement that echoes descriptions of many left-wing women, Ruuttila’s story, writes Polishuk, “was one in which political beliefs—working class solidarity and antiracism—were primary, and her personal life secondary.” Yet it is a great credit to Polishuk’s skills as an interviewer—and to Ruuttila’s general willingness to be open and honest about her life—that the reader can feel, humming beneath this extraordinarily political life, the tension of domestic violence, failed marriages, botched abortions and recurring depression.
This same tension between the personal and the political has been described elsewhere in the life stories of radical activists Elaine Black Yoneda (“The Red Angel”), Dorothy Healy (“Dorothy Healy Remembers”), and Peggy Dennis (“The Autobiogra-phy of an American Communist”). But unlike these women, Ruuttila never belonged to the Communist Party. Her family roots were in the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World). She learned early on an independent brand of socialist politics. As Polishuk writes, “She wasn’t in the Party...her father had raised her to think for herself and she couldn’t submit to its discipline.”
Fortunately for many workers and members of the ILWU, Ruuttila also learned from her father that, “you had to build a base of support” before fighting for unpopular views. Her skills at developing allies and coalitions inside and outside the House of Labor won her respect, support and admiration from many who did not share her radical politics, yet joined with her to oppose racial and economic injustice—both on and off the waterfront.
Unfortunately, however, Ruuttila also received from her father a set of personal demons that led more than once to suicide attempts—one claimed him, another, her son and she narrowly escaped her own. In hindsight she seemed to have reduced these terrors and depressions to manageable size with the same matter-of-fact simplicity that characterized her political decisions. “I learned a great deal out of that episode,” she said.
“I learned that when you get absolutely exhausted, you’ve absolutely got to stop. You’ve got to stop everything you’re doing and get a good night’s sleep and play some soothing music.”
And later, reflecting on her son’s death, she observed, “You know, the lives of working people are full of desperation.”
Whatever emotional scars she carried throughout her long life, they were easily matched by the physical ones inflicted during a succession of picket-line encounters with cops and goons who left her unable to do much more than desk work. By 1934, during the longshore strike in Portland, Ruuttila was increasingly known for both her fearlessness and her skill with writing leaflets and contract proposals on her trademark typewriter. During one harrowing escape from goons trying to keep her and others away from the striking longshoremen, an older Italian woman told her pointedly, “You with your machine of writing could do much.”
Soon after, Ruuttila found employment putting those writing skills to work for unions and to support her family. It was also a way she could directly join in and support what she saw as the heroic struggles of workers trying to fight their way out of the economic Depression:
“The strikes on the waterfront, in the camps and mills and other mass production industries in the thirties all had this factor in common: We won them, and we were no longer timber beasts, sawmill stiffs, and waterfront bums. We were the people who loaded the ships and sailed them, who made the head rigs turn and the green chains run. We were the workers of the world. Without us there would be no world.”
After World War II, Ruuttila’s life centered around the Portland waterfront, which she covered as a journalist for left and labor publications, and also as secretary to ILWU Internation-al Representative Matt Meehan (who had previously been the union’s International Secretary-Treasurer).
The period when she apparently came closest to unifying her political and personal goals began in 1951 when she married then-ILWU Astoria warehouse Local 18 (as opposed to now Sacramento longshore Local 18) activist and Communist Party stalwart Oscar Ruuttila and moved to live with him in Astoria, Oregon. There she began her decades of devotion to building the ILWU Auxiliaries—and helping Lois Stranahan and Clara Fambro to transform them from “ladies clubs” into a racially integrated, progressive political force, first in Astoria and then in Portland where she relocated in 1965 after Oscar’s death.
As with other portions of her journey, Ruuttila’s experience in the Auxiliaries includes anecdotes and observations that help the reader understand the nuts and bolts of those activities, not just the big events.
Her writings also helped readers of The Dispatcher better understand politics and the ILWU in the Columbia River and Puget Sound areas. All in all she wrote for The Dispatcher for more than 40 years—first as Kathleen Cronin then as Kathleen Ruuttila.
She died in 1991 in Alaska, where she had moved after a series of disabling illnesses to live with her grandson. Somewhere along the line, perhaps during this latter period of her life, she wrote her own fitting epitaph: “Died as she lived, shouting the system down.”
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