Trotskyist Teamsters took a leading role in a historic labor upsurge and clashed with a corrupt leadership under Dan Tobin. Twenty-four-year Teamster Edgar Esquivel tells the story. 

Eighty-eight years ago this week, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike that paralyzed Minneapolis and Saint Paul caught the nation by surprise. It was led by radical Trotskyists from General Drivers Union Local 574—an affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and American Federation of Labor (AFL). The radical Teamster militants of the Minneapolis local had been active members of the Communist League of America (CLA) founded in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for their refusal to denounce Leon Trotsky after Joseph Stalin’s betrayal of the original principles and ideas of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It was these radical elements in the union and their loyalty to the internationalist struggle of Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” that argued that only the working-class can pursue its own interests independently and without compromise that induced one of the greatest working-class clashes in American history.     

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) took office in 1933 the country was caught in a deep economic depression. The hardships experienced by Americans generated a rebellious mood from every sector of society. The aims of FDR’s New Deal were set to first, stabilize the economy and secondly, to give enough scraps to the struggling working-class to suppress their appetite for a genuine social rebellion introduced by the misery created by the failures of international capitalism. However, FDR’s aims were supported by all the trade union bureaucracies which by the 1920’s came to be dominated by the conservative craft unionism of the AFL. The Trotskyists at Local 574 stood firmly against the president’s aims and those of then Teamsters’ General President (GP) Dan Tobin who was an ardent “red-baiter” that from the get-go stood in opposition to the massive strike that was to unleash in Minnesota.   

Unfortunately, a broad layer of Teamsters today—from the top echelons of the IBT’s bureaucracy down to the rank-and-file do not know this important part of their history. Much of it has to due in part to the American workers quiet and elementary state of class-consciousness suppressed by the nation’s devotion to the two corporate parties of capital and empire that have remained intact since the postwar era. Hence, such apparatus has been successful in pitting American workers against each other along the lines of the “conservative” and “liberal” consensus.         

Not surprising, when newly sworn Teamster GP Sean O’Brien announced his candidacy for General President in May 2018, he had the arrogance and audacity to declare: “I told Fred [Zuckerman] we got to do it in Boston where great leaders like Dan Tobin and Bill McCarthy came from.” To make such foolish declaration is to dismiss and suppress history. Using historical materialism this article will attempt to set the record straight on the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike by tracing the developments that unfolded at the IBT from the time Tobin became Teamsters GP, to the strike initiated by Local 574—and the aftermath that led the IBT to purge the radical elements responsible for turning the Twin Cities upside-down.        

The Dan Tobin Years: A Conservative and Business Unionist Era 

In 1907 Dan Tobin, who had immigrated from Ireland at the age of fifteen became the Teamsters second GP. As leader of the IBT he quickly became a union bureaucrat and willful tool of the ruling class. Tobin also became a class-collaborator devoid of any ability to rely on the power of the workers. In fact, he was frightened by the power of an educated, but more so militant membership. Tobin’s notion of trade unionism was to seek a partnership with employers. In other words, he became the perfect business unionist the establishment had been in search of as a response to the radical militancy the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies had espoused during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Tobin was a very conservative and prejudiced man uninterested in organizing minorities or industrial workers, who he referred to as “riff-raff.”¹ Organizationally, his IBT focused attention on only recruiting skilled workers. Nevertheless, under Tobin, the union steadily grew in membership during the first quarter of the century. However, Tobin actively discouraged strikes while encouraging a “go-along to get-along” agenda with employers. Anyone who dared to challenge his official policies could expect to be disciplined from the top. In 1915 he wrote, “Our international union is a business institution and it must be run on business lines or it cannot continue to exist.”²

Following FDR’s presidential election win in 1932, Tobin was invited by the president-elect and the business community to collaborate in a pact that would help their interests in getting the economy moving again. Just three years prior (1929), the Great Depression hit the globe by surprise when a sudden and sharp collapse on the New York Stock Exchange marked the start of the greatest economic crisis in the history of capitalism to date. Official unemployment numbers in America reached 25% and Washington along with its industrial allies pushed to implement austerity measures that further hurt the working-class. By the time FDR took office in March 1933, the Teamster leader was under the full control of the president eager to serve the interests of the ruling class. By putting himself at the disposal of the elite, Tobin went even further and dealt viciously with dissidents or anyone challenging the status quo of his pro-business agenda. 

The 1934 Labor Clashes and the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike

In 1934 a series of labor outbursts suggested that America was ripe for revolution as approximately 1.5 million workers in different industries went on strike.³ In the spring and summer, longshoremen along the West Coast in a rank-and-file insurrection struck against their own union leadership and employers in an attempt to put an end to the slave-market practice of nepotism and favoritism where work gangs were chosen by the day over seniority members. In such manner, two-thousand miles of America’s Pacific coastline were tied up from Seattle down to San Diego. In solidarity, the Teamsters and maritime workers joined the longshoremen’s work stoppage. In San Francisco alone a violent general strike consisting of 130,000 workers left the city immobile. The liberal Los Angeles Times wrote: “the situation in San Francisco is not correctly described by the phrase “general strike.” What is actually in progress there is an insurrection, a Communist-inspired and led revolt against organized government. There is but one thing to be done—put down the revolt with any force necessary.”⁴    

The fierce class confrontation that was to erupt in Minneapolis was one of three major strike victories in 1934 led by radical socialists, that paved the way for labor’s historic upsurge over the following decade. Alongside the longshoremen and the Minneapolis Teamsters, auto-parts workers in Toledo also struck and won. These three victories carried into the fall when 421,000 textile workers throughout the country walked-out and showed America that using mass strikes as a tool could fight and win.  

Hence, Minneapolis in 1934 was largely a non-unionized town under the supervision of the Citizen’s Alliance—a pseudo-fascist and anti-union employers committee which pledged on keeping the city an “open shop.” The organization took pride and maintained a notorious national reputation for keeping the city anti-union. The city had been an agricultural and transportation hub where the majority of its workers were from the transportation and warehouse sectors. The truck drivers and warehouse workers had also been unorganized, underpaid, and overworked. Against these exploitive measures, the Trotskyists at Local 574 first took it upon themselves during the winter of 1933 to launch a union organizing drive at the city’s coal yards. Local 574 was one of the few locals not set up along strictly controlled craft lines and represented a small number of coal yard workers and cab drivers. Their main objective was to launch an organizing drive of every coal yard worker into Local 574. 

However, Local 574 had to struggle past every bureaucratic obstacle set by the IBT: from official strike authorizations that included mandatory “cooling-off” periods, forced arbitrations and the power held in the hands of Tobin’s conservative brand of business unionism. Despite the hurdles imposed by the IBT the organizing campaign carried on and more and more coal workers signed up to join Local 574. Hence, the coal yard employers backed by the Citizen’s Alliance refused to recognize the union. Their refusal to recognize the union led to a strike in February 1934 that shut down sixty-five out of the sixty-seven coal yards. Opposing the strike Tobin refused to sanction the work-stoppage and halted strike payments for the workers.⁵ Despite the IBT’s refusal to support the strike, the coal bosses capitulated to Local 574’s demands and agreed to recognize the coal yard workers as union members.   

After the victory, Local 574 mobilized to begin another ambitious campaign to organize all truck drivers and warehouse workers in the city. But during the second organizing drive the bosses rescinded their recognition of the union they had agreed to after the February strike. By May, Local 574 succeeded in gaining the support of other trade unions in the city and 35,000 building trades workers joined the strike. They were also joined by the wives of Local 574 members and unemployed women which organized under the Women’s Auxiliary. The women worked the telephone lines dispatching pickets, assisted at the hospital that was set up at strike headquarters and distributed copies of the strike committee newsletter The Organizer. Their participation was highlighted by a march of 700 women to the mayor’s office demanding the withdrawal of the police from the strike premises.  

Further yet, Local 574 succeeded in building broad support from Minneapolis’s working-class. Unable to break the strike with injunctions, the bosses tried to break it through violence. Goons and police converged on to the city market where the docks and warehouses were located. A one-day battle between workers, the police and the boss’s goons broke-out. Against all odds the workers won the battle coined as “The Battle of Deputies Run” that in a blow to the Citizens Alliance resulted in thirty policemen injured. The strike that had broken out on May 17th ended on May 25th with the union again winning recognition and wage increases. But the employers for a second time broke their agreement and refused to recognize the newly organized warehouse workers that were not directly connected to the truckers. The third and final strike broke-out in July when an enraged Tobin taking the side of the employers and government agreed to engineer a mini “red scare” campaign against Local 574. With their blessing the mainstream press called on citizens to “save Minneapolis from communism.” 

On Bloody Friday July 20th police armed with riot guns opened fire on the strikers where two were shot dead by local police and over fifty others were wounded as the strike spread. The city was put under martial law and occupied by approximately 4,000 National Guard troops.⁶ Approximately 40,000 people attended the funerals of the men shot dead and clearly showed Tobin, the bosses, goons and the government that they would not be intimidated. When the strike committee leaders were arrested it was followed by a march of 40,000 more workers demanding their release. Finally, without the support of the IBT, on August 22nd the bosses capitulated to all the union’s main demands.⁷ With the employers and Citizens Alliance defeated workers in other industries throughout Minneapolis gained the confidence to organize and transform the city from a “company town” to a “union town.” Under the socialist leadership of Local 574, most of the trucking industry was succesfully organized.

Daniel Tobin Launches his First Offensive Against Local 574

Without the blessing of the IBT, Local 574 led by the radical Trotskyists took the initiative to stand in solidarity with the coal yard workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers and paralyzed Minneapolis for over three months. Enraged by this rude violation of his class-collaborationist agenda, Tobin ordered Local 574 to seek arbitration for their demands. Fortunately for the workers, Tobin’s orders were ignored by the local and the strike raged on until it was won. Tobin was strongly anti-communist and was disturbed by left-wing influences in the Minneapolis local led by Trotskyists like Farrell Dobbs, Carl Skoglund, and the Dunne brothers: Grant, Miles and Ray. When the strike concluded it was Dobbs, Skoglund and the Dunnes that were the men responsible for the Minneapolis Teamsters victory and not Tobin or any of his loyal cronies who strongly opposed the massive strike.     

After the victory of Local 574, Tobin retaliated by launching a “red-bait” campaign against Trotskyist members while demanding their expulsion from the union. The victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike resulted in the revokement of Local 574’s charter from the IBT. But with tremendous pressure brewing from the rank-and-file and major strikes erupting nationwide under the leadership of the challenging Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Tobin was forced to negotiate a settlement. A compromise was eventually reached in 1936 and the charter was reinstated into IBT Local 544.

The spontaneous labor uprisings of 1934 forced Congress to pass the Wagner Act in 1935 which created the National Labor Relations Board and for the first time in American history recognized labor unions as legal entities. Following the enactment union radicalism further spread throughout America. Tobin noticed the constructive organizational methods the Trotskyists introduced and sent new personnel to train in Minneapolis—amongst them was James Riddle Hoffa. These Trotskyists proceeded to spearhead a successful organizing campaign of over-the-road drivers throughout the upper Midwest. They went beyond planned expectations and also succeeded in unionizing freight, dock and warehouse workers. The methods introduced by the Trotskyists helped organize 125,000 new members from across eleven midwestern states.⁸ As new workers joined the ranks, Tobin happily welcomed the funds that were filling his coffers and with those exact funds Tobin was able develop the regional conference structure he claimed would provide stability, organizing strength and leadership, but which in fact only created a new layer of unnecessary bureaucracy that unfortunately is still entrenched in the Teamsters today.⁹  

In 1940, the White House appointed Tobin to FDR’s staff of administrative assistants and Democratic Convention delegate-at-large.  Obviously, the federal government and business community since the beginning of the FDR administration had been working in collusion with union bureaucrats to promote labor peace. Interestingly, in the prelude to the U.S. indirectly mobilizing for war (World War II), at the 1940 IBT Convention Tobin proposed at the floor the authority to ban strikes during wartime. When his proposal was put up to vote, Teamster delegates defeated his proposition. But when Tobin and his “Tobinites” proposed the authorization of raising the GP’s salary to $30,000 a year, the overwhelming majority of delegates approved the motion by a vote of 950 to 186.¹⁰  

After WWII broke out in Europe following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 there was a strong anti-war sentiment that had grown within the Minnesota labor movement and the newly formed Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that replaced the CLA. The SWP of which the Local 544 Trotskyists belonged to denounced the war as imperialist. This of course spelled trouble for the dedicated officers of Local 544 that had become targets of Tobin following the successful 1934 strike. When Hitler succeeded in sweeping through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France in May and June 1940—the US had not yet committed troops to the war against fascism. However, the United Kingdom was left alone in Europe facing the axis and their military arsenal was no match to that of the Germans. Furthermore, during Britain’s disastrous evacuation from Dunkirk, their army left behind nearly all of its equipment.¹¹ The Third Reich’s victory in Western Europe forced FDR to move with an American rearmament plan of their British ally. By the end of 1940 the U.S. had provided London with 25% of its steel and other necessities such as machine tools to rebuild their military arsenal and help challenge Nazi military superiority.¹² For the sake of collaboration with the government’s war economy work stoppages in America needed to be put to a halt. As an administrative assistant of the FDR administration and Democratic Convention delegate, Tobin was determined to smash the anti-war movement brewing within his union. 

Tobin Launches his Second and Final Offensive Against the Trotskyists 

In retrospect: in June 1941, Tobin ordered the IBT’s general executive board to join him in barring all the radical officers and rank-and-filers from Local 544 and place the local into receivership (trusteeship). In response to the IBT’s putsch, Local 544’s executive board rejected the receivership and immediately lobbied the CIO for a charter. After back-and-forth negotiations with the CIO and an overwhelming vote of 4,000 members, the local voted to leave the Teamsters on June 9th, and join the CIO¹³, who designated the radical local as Motor Transport and Allied Workers Industrial Union, Local 544-CIO.¹⁴ Tobin’s treachery to the members was best illustrated in the May 1942 IBT Magazine— The International Teamster where he published: “a new era in labor relations when all strikes may be virtually outlawed.”¹⁵ In the same issue he also ordered Teamsters’ truck drivers to act as strike-breakers against radical trade unions opposing the war.

After the split of Local 544 from the Teamsters-AFL that resulted in the creation of Local 544-CIO, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover selected Local 544 as their first “red-bait” target and used the Smith Act of 1940 to attack them. The Act alleged Local 544 posed a threat to US national security. The Smith Act coined after Virginia Congressman Howard Smith, gave Washington the peacetime sedition law Hoover and his allies had been seeking since 1919¹⁶—the year the Wobblies were finally crushed under the First Red Scare and their leaders disappeared, executed, jailed or exiled to Bolshevik Russia under the Espionage Act.

The enactment of the Smith Act was a political favor delivered by Washington to Tobin who for long had been seeking to purge the radical subordinates in Minneapolis. In June 1941, Tobin’s wishes were fulfilled when the State Court of Minnesota authorized the IBT to seize Local 544’s records and resources. The police invaded the local’s headquarters and turned it over to Tobin’s lackeys. Following the raid, twenty-nine Trotskyist Teamsters were indicted on two counts of trying to interfere with the military and advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government for their opposition to the war. In 1943 a total of eighteen members were put on trial for sedition and sentenced to prison terms.¹⁷ Amongst them were Dobbs, Skoglund, and the Dunne brothers. 

At the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945 the two victors were the Soviet Union and United States. They together went on to bring about a period of geopolitical tensions and the greatest military arms race the world had ever seen—far superior to that of the fascist states they had in alliance defeated. In this arms race best referred to as the Cold War (1947-1991), Washington quickly presented Bolshevik Russia as just not a rival but an immediate threat. In a series of moves abroad and at home, it established a climate of fear and hysteria about communism.¹⁸ In this atmosphere the era of McCarthyism and/or Second Red Scare (1947-1957) ushered the most widespread episode of political repression in the history of America. In the name of U.S. national security liberals and conservatives alike supported the anti-communist crusade that went on to ruin the lives of many Americans, but more importantly dealt a blow to the nation’s tradition of radical labor militancy. The labor militancy espoused by these radicals since their defeat in 1943 has yet to resurface in America today.  

With the putsch jointly ensembled by the federal government, the state of Minnesota and the IBT, Local 544 was left under the tutelage of a loyal Tobinite – Sidney L. Brennan who carried on to destroy the radical legacy of the Minneapolis local. Not surprisingly, in 1957 the AFL-CIO brought charges on new GP Dave Beck and two International Vice-Presidents that included the Local 544 appointed head by Tobin himself. Brennan was charged with negotiating a “sweet-heart” contract and accepting a bribe from a company employing his members.¹⁹ When the IBT’s leadership failed to take action against the three general executive board officers, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters from their affiliation.  

Tobin was never charged with any personal corruption himself and some mainstream labor scholars and apologists like Sean O’Brien will argue he was personally an honest man. However, it cannot be denied that he turned a blind eye as gangsters and labor racketeers exercised control of many locals in major metropolitan localities. By the 1930’s it was evident organized gangs had begun to take control of both local unions and in some cases the national headquarters of the IBT.²⁰ By 1952 the Tobin administration was buried with internal problems and the union’s corruption scandals were making daily headlines throughout the U.S. media. Working in conjunction, Seattle Teamster Dave Beck with the assistance of the notorious Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit quelled a revolt against Tobin and won control of the union in the same year. Today it can be correctly argued that Tobin opened the flood gates to the corruption scandals that have plagued the Teamsters for at least a century and at the same time laid the foundations of what has become the most bureaucratized and corrupt union in North America.  

That the images of a class collaborationist like Dan Tobin and a puppet of organized crime like William McCarthy still hang on the walls of the Marble Palace in Washington D.C. facing the White House is beyond comprehension.

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1. Edgar Esquivel, “Reformer Takes on the Teamsters Old Guard,” Socialist Worker, December 15, 2010.
2. The International Teamster, July 12, 1915, 6.
3. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (The New Press: New York, 2003), 287.
4. Samuel Yellin, American Labor Struggles, (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1974), 347.
5. Bryan D. Palmer, “Red Teamsters,” Jacobin, October 14, 2014.
6. Bruce Vail, “Dan Tobin and the Rise of the Teamsters Union,” In These Times, May 27, 2015.
7. David May, “The 75th Anniversary of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike,” In Defence of Marxism, July 17, 2009.
8. Bill Onasch, “75th Anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster Strike,” Socialist Action, August 4, 2009.
9. Ed Witwer, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union, (University of Illinois: Chicago, 2003), 96.
10. Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Bureaucracy, 2nd Ed., (Pathfinder Press: New York, 2018), 136.
11. Chris Bambery, The Second World War: A Marxist History, (Pluto Press: London, 2014), 90.
12. Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality, (Elephant Paperbacks: Chicago, 1991), 205.
13. Joe Allen, “In the Shadow of the War,” Socialist Worker, July 8, 2011.
14. Farrell Dobb, Teamster Bureaucracy, 169.
15. Ibid., 351.
16. Ellen Schrecker, Manny Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, (Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1998), 97.
17. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 307.
18. Ibid., 311.
19. “Labor: The Engine Inside the Hood,” Time Magazine, September 9, 1957.
20. Ed Witwer, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union, 62.