Authors: George Lakey
A majority of Norwegian labor leaders had grown disenchanted with high-handed instructions from Soviets who were out of touch with Norwegian realities. One of the Soviet instructions was to prepare for armed struggle. Tranmael and Falk were certainly not alone in their strong anti-militarist inclination, and the Russians’ bloody and destructive civil war following 1917 must have set a miserable example.
Not everyone in the Labor Party wanted to leave the Comintern, however. When the party had its annual convention later that year, a minority of workers and labor leaders demanded that the party remain in the Comintern. That meant a split in the party—a very emotional moment for a movement that so highly valued solidarity. It was hard enough that two years before, in 1921, a split had led to the creation of the moderate Social Democratic Labor Party. Now, in 1923, a new minority formed the Communist Party of Norway to remain a member of the Soviet-dominated Communist International.
The main body, having now lost members on both its left and right wings, opened its membership to anyone whether or not in a unionized workplace. Many rural farmworkers and small farmers joined. The members of the Social Democratic Labor Party then came back. More middle-class students, influenced by
Mot Dag
, joined as well.
One of these was twenty-four-year-old Karl Evang, a medical student who later became a celebrated doctor who co-founded and chaired the World Health Organization. As a student, Evang threw himself into
Mot Dag
’s new evening school for workers. He also helped build a parallel association for middle-class young people,
Clarté
.
Like
Mot Dag, Clarté
(French for “clarity”) was socialist and pacifist, but unlike
Mot Dag
members,
Clarté
young adults didn’t accept a group discipline that centered one’s life on the revolution. It had started as a French-based organization and had Swedish, Danish, and Finnish branches.
Mot Dag
members edited
Clarté
’s periodical and offered other leadership.
Young Karl Evang experienced the growing intensity of
Mot Dag
’s community life. The group welcomed psychoanalysis—in the 1920s a revolutionary idea—and sought to replace middle-class individualism with a collective spirit. Evang’s medical studies led to fresh considerations of sexuality. His flair for writing made his articles popular in
Mot Dag
’s outreach, including among the proliferating workers’ study groups. He also helped
Mot Dag
lead the Norwegian Students Society; he was elected chair of that association in 1931 even while the government held him in prison for conscientious objection.
As
Mot Dag
’s influence grew, however, detractors called it a sect and a “black magic order of monks.” Others saw it as “the most together political organization that ever existed in the Nordic countries.”
Mot Dag
became a breeding ground for national leadership; many members became valued civil servants and advisors to Labor members of Parliament. Evang himself became the government’s health minister and led campaigns that eradicated poliomyelitis
and reduced tuberculosis. A popular radio speaker, lecturer, and author, he later spoke against Norwegian participation in the Korean War and in NATO. In 1972, he helped lead the movement that kept Norway out of the European Union.
By the middle of the 1920s, some members of the Norwegian owning class began to doubt the effectiveness of the army for repression of the labor movement. My future father-in-law Johannes Mathiesen was far from alone in his passionate rejection of the military. The Labor Party tried calling for a military strike; the government retaliated and threw party functionaries in jail. Nobody knew how reliable the army would remain in defending the status quo.
The Patriotic League was their answer. Launched in 1926, the League’s mission was to wade into labor strikes and violently defend replacement workers from the efforts that union members made to keep “scabs” from taking their jobs. By the 1930s, the League had recruited tens of thousands of members.
This resort to street violence to try to keep the Norwegian labor movement from winning had of course been preceded by the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist “blackshirts” in Italy. Sir Oswald Mosley was a frustrated politician in the United Kingdom whose meeting with Mussolini in 1932 inspired the English version, called the British Union of Fascists. Its paramilitary wing also called itself the “blackshirts.” Mosley was supported by an array of wealthy funders and members of the British nobility.
The Great Depression hit Norway hard, resulting in a higher rate of unemployment than in any other Nordic country. In a shrewd move, the union movement decided to continue the membership of unemployed workers, even those who couldn’t afford their union dues. It was another way to generate solidarity, and to reduce the chance of former union members turning, in their desperation to feed their families, into scabs.
The year 1931 was one of widespread hunger and suffering. The unions organized boycotts and eighty-two strikes. The Norwegian Employers Confederation tried to force the unions to accept a reduction of wages for workers who still had jobs, and used the technique of the lockout—locking the doors of their factories and shipyards to prevent workers from working. Workers fought back nonviolently, with massive demonstrations. The four-month struggle had no clear victor.
In 1932, the total number of union campaigns increased again, to ninety-one unions fighting for a living wage, union recognition, and the right to strike. A middle-aged Norwegian politician named Vidkun Quisling believed that the time had come for a coup d’état to establish military rule and crush the left.
Quisling had begun his career in the military, where he joined the General Staff on the eve of World War I. He was said to detest the strong Norwegian pacifist movement that achieved its goal of keeping Norway out of that war. After the war, Quisling did diplomatic work, using his administrative skills to help Fridjof Nansen with international humanitarian projects. He then drifted rightward in his politics. He explored the value of militias, published an openly racist book, and advocated war against Bolshevism.
In 1931, he became defense minister in a government led by the Agrarian Party, although Quisling was not himself a member
of the party. One of his first tasks as defense minister was to deal with a conflict at Norsk Hydro’s plant near Berit’s hometown of Skien. Coincidentally, Quisling had also lived in Skien as a boy.
Norsk Hydro had joined the national employers’ strategy of locking out their workers, but then the local management hired some replacement workers for limited production. One hundred police guarded the replacement workers while 2,000 striking workers marched to the port and warehouse at Menstad. The police were overwhelmed by the demonstrators, some of whom supplemented the power of their numbers by throwing stones and pieces of iron pipe.
Quisling’s solution was to send in the army, evoking a storm of popular protest.
Quisling grew more contemptuous of what he regarded as weakness in the Agrarian-led government. In 1932, he secretly laid plans to overthrow the elected prime minister so he could seize power with the help of the military. He couldn’t secure the support of top military officers.
In 1933, since his personal popularity was soaring among right-wing Norwegians, Quisling decided to strike out on his own and organize a new political party: the Nasjonal Samling (National Unity). The party mixed romantic nationalism and Norse paganism with admiration for the Nazi movement. In parallel with the early days of similar movements in Britain, Italy, and Germany, Quisling’s uniformed paramilitary wing was called the
Hird
, an ancient Norwegian word for warriors. The
Hird
held marches to provoke violent clashes with working-class activists.
In national elections, Quisling’s new party never got more than 2.5 percent of the votes. Still, its drama reflected the polarization of the country. Because Norwegians knew about the Nazis’ attacks
on German unions and the left, and knew about the support Hitler received from the German owning class, Quisling’s activity heightened their sense of urgency about resolving Norway’s own question: which class will direct the future of Norwegian society?
Sweden, too, wrestled with that very question. As in the Norwegian labor battle in Skien, the boiling point in Sweden’s Ådalen Valley was the use of strikebreakers. By 1931, three lumber mills were involved. Four thousand striking workers picketed and rallied against the owners and the political authorities who backed them. National soldiers were mobilized, killing five and injuring five more.
Thousands attended funerals of the slain workers.
The parties representing the owning class had been losing ground in elections, while the labor-based Social Democrats made steady gains. The Liberal-led coalition government’s choice to defend capitalism by killing workers lost the coalition most of its remaining credibility with middle-of-the-road Swedes. The government fell, an election was called, and Swedes elected the Social Democrats in 1932 to give them a fresh start.
The policymakers faced an economy in deep trouble. One of the creative Swedish economists they turned to was Gunnar Myrdal, a name familiar to many Americans for the landmark study of black-white relations in the United States entitled
An American Dilemma
.
30
Myrdal had broken with the classical economists and offered breakthrough thinking that later won him the Nobel Prize in Economics.
He argued that the reason the classical economists were unable to imagine an economy that included well-being for workers was because they were not holistic enough. He believed that it was possible to design an egalitarian economy that would prevent poverty and be productive at the same time. His theory encouraged an investment in the individual person as a resource for economic growth—a pillar of what came to be called the Nordic model.
Myrdal urged the new policymakers in the Swedish government to let go of the old, negative understanding of incentives for work held by classical economists—that it was a struggle for existence—and design a positive framework of incentives for economic participation.
Swedish voters reelected the Social Democrats to lead their society almost without a break until 1976, by which time the Nordic model was firmly established.
In 1932 in Norway, however, the battle continued.
In 1933, the government continued to flounder in the face of depression. More Norwegians went hungry. Farm families could find something to eat, but they were unable to keep up payment on their debts. Banks tried to foreclose on farmers, and crowds gathered at farms nonviolently to prevent seizure. Workers launched ninety-three strikes in Norway in 1933.
The 1933 general election did not resolve the deepening conflict. Labor got more votes than ever and added twenty-two more members of parliament than it got in the 1930 election. Nevertheless,
the Labor Party missed by seven seats the number required for a majority in the Storting.
The Conservatives had made a blunder in Norway’s second-largest city, Bergen. For the local election it formed an alliance with Quisling’s new party, the National Union. Because Quisling was widely regarded as Norway’s Hitler, the generally democratic Norwegians were shocked to see their party of the economic elite make that alliance. In the general election, the Conservatives lost a quarter of their popular vote and thirteen parliamentary seats.
The parliamentary majority was held by what Norwegians call the four “bourgeois” parties, but that coalition had no real mandate. Politically, Norway was split fairly evenly. A former prime minister from a right-of-center party put together a caretaker government.
Significantly, the minority Labor Party did not try to move to the right and make a deal that would enable it to form a government. The Norwegian workers’ theory of change, after years of study groups and educational debates, accepted the need for polarization in order to bring about a new society.
The Agrarian Party, however, formerly in coalition with the Conservative Party, began to reposition itself. Labor had been wooing family farmers for decades, and it was obvious that the Conservatives had no idea how to get out of the depression. The Agrarian Party’s experience with Quisling in its government’s cabinet was bruising, and it needed to look elsewhere for answers.
The workers’ nonviolent direct action intensified. In 1935, the strike total hit 103. The bourgeois parties saw that they could not, in fact, govern. The Agrarian Party switched sides in the Storting and supported the Labor Party to form a government. But the power struggle between labor and capital was not yet resolved, and
the Labor government could initiate only limited Keynesian measures to expand the economy and start an old-age pension scheme for hungry workers.
The poorest members of the labor movement pushed their leadership to alleviate the pain immediately, rather than to continue to struggle for the complete overthrow of capitalism as stated in the party’s manifesto. Labor’s leadership began to consider compromise.
On the other side, the employers’ federation had waged decades of open struggle against the growing workers’ movement and had its back to the wall. It knew that the Labor Party’s manifesto envisioned a socialist society. Norway has a common border in the north with Russia. The owners were well aware that the Russian revolution left no room for capitalist survival. The owners had to wonder: if they were not willing to compromise, would the Norwegian workers and farmers and middle-class allies surge ahead and leave them with nothing?
In 1935, the owners met with the labor leaders. Together they hammered out what came to be called the “Basic Agreement.”
The owners’ federation agreed to accept the right of unionization throughout Norway, including collective bargaining, and accepted the workers’ right to strike (except during the life of a contract). Owners agreed to political strikes and sympathy strikes.