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Reviews
Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila
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By Sandy Polishuk
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Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 292 pages. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Tim Hills
Portland, Oregon
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| Sandy Polishuk's Sticking to the Union grabs its subject — Julia Ruuttila — from the margins of documented history and propels her wholly into the public arena for consideration and scrutiny. It is a process with which Ruuttila had some experience during her eighty-four years. The press, the FBI, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) periodically dissected facets of her life. Sticking to the Union is the first fully realized examination of the public activism and private life of this important Northwest figure. It is a remarkable work that succeeds on several levels. |
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Julia Ruuttila was a force unto herself with a personality impossible to forget. Armed with a strong voice, rock-solid convictions, and a passion and proficiency for persuasive writing, she put herself in the fray of many of the Northwest's significant labor, civil rights, and antiwar struggles from the 1930s into the 1970s. In particular, championing the worker became her life's purpose. Characterizing Ruuttila's drive, one Portland activist said: "A liberal is someone who will fight for reforms up to the point of personal sacrifice. Takes a radical to go on from there. And that's what she was her whole life, was fighting for a better world for people" (p. 5). |
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Polishuk chronicles Ruuttila's activism with a rich, gripping firsthand narrative, mostly culled from the thirty-three hours of taped interviews the author conducted with Ruuttila during the 1980s. Included are defining events of the Northwest's twentieth-century experience: the 1934 Pacific Coast Dock Strike, the effort to free one of the union men incarcerated for the 1919 Centralia Massacre, the 1948 Vanport flood investigation, the HUAC witch hunts of the 1940s and 1950s, a 1966 Vietnam War protest in Portland, and the 1971 International Longshore and Warehouse Union strike. |
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Ruuttila's language thrusts readers to the very point of action, be it on the picket line or in a HUAC hearing room. A professional writer for much of her life, Ruuttila knew how to sway an audience. Graphically illustrating the violence of the Pacific Coast Dock Strike in 1934, Ruuttila recalled a shooting incident near Pier Park in North Portland: "There was still blood there. Some of it had sunk in and the railroad ties were red. Longshoremen had a large wreath of red roses there in their honor and they had it roped off. And we saw the trees in the park that were pockmarked, literally pockmarked, with bullet holes.... For years, you could go out there and dig lead out of the bark of those trees" (p. 50). |
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The author pushed Ruuttila to talk of her personal life, too — an area she was not nearly as comfortable discussing. In fact, she did so with great reluctance and sometimes created obstacles. Sticking to the Union is better for Polishuk's persistence. Ruuttila's perspectives about family, friends, and her own failings reveal her complexities, thereby unraveling some of the inaccuracies and mythmaking surrounding her life (something that Ruuttila herself played a part in creating). |
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The subject of her son, Mike, weighed most heavily on her mind. Ruuttila revealed that "... one thing that used to depress me was thinking about all the things I had done wrong in bringing up my son, because I'd put all the movements that I was involved in and all the books and poetry I was trying to write ahead of the things that I should be doing for him" (p. 140). |
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Ruuttila's reticence to speak of such personal matters, as well as her tendency to make herself more heroic in the retellings of her experiences, becomes, in Polishuk's hands, an opportunity to understand more about the subject and offer an effective model for writing oral history. When Ruuttila's version of events does not conform with available documented history, the author interjects explanatory notes and alternate perspectives from more than fifty of Ruuttila's friends, family members, and contemporaries. |
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Polishuk thoroughly covers the subject. In some passages, readers may question the detail into which the author goes. The space devoted to the Finnish Leftist community in Astoria, where Ruuttila and her husband lived after World War II, for instance, as well as the timing of Ruuttila's abortions seems in excess, especially when compared with the little attention that is given to Ruuttila's increasing health problems as she grew older. These are but small issues, however, in the larger scope of what Polishuk accomplishes with Sticking to the Union. |
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This well-conceived book is highly recommended to students and enthusiasts of labor history, women's history, and oral history. Sandy Polishuk presents a much-needed and powerful, discerning, and multifaceted portrayal of one of the region's influential, unsung figures. |
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