A Family Tie that Makes Sense

For all those who refere to me as a "little Liberal" - I think my Great Uncle Allen and his wife Violet are responsible for that.  Please cross your fingers that the MN Historical Society can help me with getting copies of her biography of her husband (and our family history) and their papers.

Here is a description of Aunt Vi from her obituary June 3 2002.

Whether it meant being the first woman to run for the Minneapolis City Council, in the early 1930s, starting a women's debate team at Hamline University in the 1920s or opposing the regressive nature of sales taxes, Violet Johnson Sollie said: "I always managed to find a good fight."

The longtime lawyer and advocate for the poor died Wednesday. She was 95.
She was born on her family's farm near Ada, Minn., the oldest of 10 children. She graduated from high school at 16 and earned a scholarship to Hamline in St. Paul.

After she was barred from the men-only debate team, she started Hamline's women's debate team in 1926 -- "helping them live up to their coeducational promise," she once said. She went on to win state and national contests for extemporaneous speaking.

After graduating in 1928, Sollie received a master's degree in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1929 and assisted in a tax survey of poor people in West Virginia.

"I saw people living in shacks with pigs and chickens while their landlords lived in luxury," she said in a 1997 interview. "The sales tax hurts poor people without taking a fair share from the rich."
In 1932, populist Gov. Floyd B. Olson invited Sollie to join his reelection campaign committee. In 1933, she fought sales tax provisions from her clerkship on the Minnesota House Tax Committee.

The Minneapolis Star said she was the first woman who saw fit "to enter the merry scramble for [Minneapolis] City Council seats" in 1933. She finished third in the Second Ward race but continued speaking out on labor, welfare and tax issues.

Government jobs eluded her in the late 1930s despite high scores on civil-service exams. In 1940 she was hired by the U.S. Census Bureau and, three years later, she joined the Women's Division of the Industrial Labor Commission.
After her husband, Allen, urged her to return to school, Sollie graduated in 1957 from the Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law, a predecessor of the William Mitchell College of Law.

When a large downtown law firm told her "they wanted a young man -- not a middle-aged woman," Sollie started her own practice and worked with the Attorneys Referral Committee, helping people who could neither afford an attorney nor qualify for legal aid. She retired in 1993.
The Sollies had no children. She is survived by two sisters and a brother.