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Review
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Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times
of Julia Ruuttila, by Sandy Polishuk. New York, N.Y.:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 304 pages, $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
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Sandy Polishuk's Sticking to the Union tells the life story
of Julia Ruuttila, a left-wing activist and journalist in Oregon
for nearly six decades. Ruuttila was a correspondent for the International
Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Dispatcher, the Federated
Press, and the People's World. She was a founder of the women's
auxiliary of the International Woodworkers of America in 1937 and
a leader of the ILWU women's auxiliary. Ruuttila worked for racial
integration in the union movement and in public accommodations and
campaigned to elect progressives. She often experienced economic
deprivation and faced difficulties due to her politics. The Oregon
welfare department fired her in 1948 because of her articles criticizing
government handling of aid to flood victims. The House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) questioned her about her role in the
American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born in 1956
and the FBI harassed her. Ruuttila remained active, however, and
by the 1960s was protesting the Vietnam War alongside young people.
In 1975 when Ruuttila was "too old to get beat up" (217),
she conducted a sit-in to protest high utility rates. In 1987, Ruuttila,
then 80, retired as a Dispatcher correspondent, moved to
Alaska to live with her grandson and his family, but remained an
activist until her death in 1991.
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Polishuk's work is a fine example
of a bottoms-up history that illuminates the dynamics of local struggles
by working people to create and maintain unions. It contributes
to the literature on the generation of left-wing activists who helped
build CIO unions in the 1930s and then faced repression during the
cold war. The book is especially valuable as an addition to a new
scholarly focus on union women's auxiliaries. It works as well as
a rounded human portrait of Ruuttila's upbringing by a father who
was a Wobbly and a mother who was a suffragist and Socialist, her
four marriages, the challenges she faced in rearing a child and
a grandchild, and the pain involved in the suicides of her father,
son, and her own attempted suicide.
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Most useful for readers of History
Teacher will be Polishuk's careful attention to presenting her
methods of discovering the full story of Ruuttila's life. Polishuk
supplemented her oral history interviews with Ruuttila by excerpts
from Ruuttila's articles, letters, fiction, and poetry, and with
interviews with family members and friends. She also cross-checked
Ruuttila's recollections against the documentary record of Ruuttila's
FBI file, the transcript of her testimony before the House Un-American
Activities Committee and other available sources. Polishuk lets
the reader know when there are discrepancies in the sources and
when she is unsure. Noting a tendency on Ruuttila's part to exaggerate
her own role, she usefully reviewed the oral history literature
on "the complications of memory and motive" (7). Throughout
the book, Polishuk provides alongside Ruuttila's account, the historical
context for the events discussed, evidence from the documentary
record, and relevant accounts by others involved.
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Polishuk first met Ruuttila at the
founding meeting of a new activist organization in 1966 and was
impressed with her leadership of a workshop in which they both participated.
Polishuk's empathy with her subject allowed her to gain the trust
that enabled the her to shape a richly rewarding "life and
times." Ruuttila initially wanted the story to be of her political
activities alone but she gradually opened herself to the idea of
this fuller treatment of her life, with discussions of painful episodes
such as domestic abuse by her third husband. In constructing the
narrative, Polishuk uses the first person so the reader can see
the author both as a detective handling contradictory evidence and
trying to unravel the full story and as a human being who cares
personally about her subject. The book's closing chapter includes
a moving description of Polishuk's last visit with Ruuttila in Alaska.
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Ruuttila said that the women's auxiliary
movement was her religion. She identified throughout her life with
working class people, "always liked the foreign-born people
that I lived around" (155), but was also gifted at making friends
of diverse religious and political views and backgrounds. Aware
of divisions within the working class, she claimed to have a black
ancestor to foster interracial understanding. She became particularly
fond of the community of Red Finns of which her fourth husband was
a part. Sticking to the Union is both a personal story and
a history of the twentieth century. It would serve as an excellent
supplementary text in upper division classes in labor history, women's
history, social history, and twentieth century or oral history.
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Henderson State University
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Martin Halpern
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