The year 1934 saw three historic strikes that transformed U.S. labor. It was the year when the American working class clenched its fists and rose from the depths and humiliation of the Great Depression. Within just two years would come the great Flint Sitdown and the massive strike wave that organized industrial unionism — producing the historic gains that are under attack in today’s capitalist offensive.

The left played a critical leading role in all three strikes. The West Coast Waterfront Strike lasted eighty-three days, triggered by sailors and a four-day general strike in San Francisco, with leadership provided by militants of the Communist Party, and led to the unionization of all of the West Coast ports of the United States. The San Francisco General Strike, along with the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party headed by A.J. Muste, and the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 led by the Communist League of America, were important catalysts for the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

A new book by Canadian Marxist historian Bryan Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters, explores the Minneapolis Teamsters strike with the most detailed account to date of the strategic thinking of Trotskyist militants who organized and led it. A review by Barry Eidlin appears in the July-August 2014 issue of Against the Current. Two other reviews have also appeared, by Dan La Botz on the New Politics website and by Alan Wald in Labour / Le Travail Issue 73, Spring 2014.

An 80^th anniversary celebration of the historic 1934 Teamsters Strike will be held in Minneapolis on Saturday and Sunday, July 19-20, 2014. July 20 marks the date of a police massacre when 60 strikers were shot in the back, killing two. For information on the commemoration activities, contact the Remember 1934 committee [1].

We present these materials here not only for their considerable historical interest, but also because U.S. labor today so desperately needs its own new “1934.”

From Against the Current Editors

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 Trotskyist Teamsters of the 1930s—an Attempt to Draw the Lessons

Review of: Bryan D. Palmer. Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934. Historical Materialism Book Series. Chicago: Haymarket, 2013. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Photos. 308 pp.

In 1934, a small group of dissident Communists, followers of Leon Trotsky, led Teamsters Local Union 574 through a series of strikes and emerged victorious, ending the employers’ open-shop regime and making Minneapolis a union town. It was one of three important strikes that year—the other two were in San Francisco and Toledo—that signaled the beginning of the great labor upheaval of the 1930s with its sit-down strikes, mass picketlines, and violent confrontation, leading to the organization under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of industrial unions in auto, steel, rubber, and the electrical industry as well as in many other branches of the economy. Overall six million workers were organized by the CIO and the AFL in the 1930s, winning workers union protections, raising wages, improving working conditions, gaining respect from foremen and supervisors, and bringing workers a new sense of self-confidence and pride. Only the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-1960s rivals the 1930s strikes in significance in modern American history. How could a small group of radicals on the fringes of American society in one second-tier city in the Midwest have played such a crucial role in helping to detonate that momentous development in the American labor movement and society? That is the central question Bryan D. Palmer attempts to answer in his Revolutionary Teamsters.

We already have several books on the 1934 Teamster strikes, but Palmer’s is distinguished by its focus on the role of the Trotskyist leadership, that is, on the role of revolutionary socialists in the labor movement.[1] Palmer, a Canadian labor historian and Marxist intellectual, describes and analyzes the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America (later the Socialist Workers Party) in the Minneapolis Teamsters, offering an assessment of the group’s strengths and weaknesses in both leading one of the most important labor struggles of the era and in dealing with the political parties in Minnesota at the time: Republican, Democrat, and Farmer Labor. His goal, he writes, is to help today’s leftists and militant labor unionists draw lessons that can contribute to forging a revolutionary leadership for such labor struggles in the present. Such a book then is obviously of great interest to the American and Canadian left today.

As Palmer himself points out, today the words “revolutionary Teamsters” sound like an oxymoron. The Teamsters union, one of the largest in the United States (as well as in Canada and Puerto Rico), has a well-deserved reputation as a business union—that is, a union both run like a business and operating as a partner of business—with a long history of involvement by organized crime and continuing practices of authoritarianism and the suppression of rank-and-file democracy. In the 1970s Teamster union leaders supported President Nixon, in exchange for banning former President Jimmy Hoffa, Sr. from being involved in union politics and in the 1980s the Teamsters union backed Ronald Reagan—making it an anomaly in the labor movement. Under President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., in 2008 the Teamsters joined the rest of the unions in backing Barack Obama as it did again in 2012. But it has never supported independent or left wing alternatives. These were hardly the politics of “revolutionary Teamsters. Yet, as Palmer reminds us, it was the Trotskyists, revolutionary socialists, who in 1933 and 1934 led coal drivers and then freight drivers to win union recognition in Minneapolis and then went on between 1934 and 1940 to organized tens of thousands of other truck drivers, warehouse workers, and other laborers throughout the old Northwest Territory—winning higher wages along the way—and laying the basis for the transformation of the Teamsters into an industrial union.

Palmer’s book on the Teamsters grew out of research he carried out to write his biography of an American Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon and the origins of the American revolutionary left, 1890-1928, in the course of which he unearthed previously unexamined papers about the role of Cannon and the CLA/SWP in the 1934 Teamsters strikes. Revolutionary Teamsters begins with a brief account of the two other major strikes of 1934, the San Francisco longshoremens’ strike led by Harry Bridges and the Communist Party and the Toledo Autolite led by the Socialist Party. Palmer then writes a detailed and dense narrative of the Minneapolis strikes by coal yard workers and freight drivers that describes and analyzes all of the forces involved in them, from the Teamsters Union to the employers’ Citizens Alliance, from their opponents in the Communist Party and in Governor Floyd Olson and his Farmer-Labor Party. The book’s final sections deal briefly with the union’s regional expansion in the years from 1934 to 1940 and its suppression by the administration of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, eradicating the Trotskyist presence in the Teamsters in that era. Finally the book concludes by drawing some very general lessons for today’s activists and there is an appendix which provides a short account of the American Trotskyists at that time.

Most of the Trotskyists in Minneapolis who organized and led Teamsters Local 574 had long histories in the labor movement and in the left. Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne and Carl Skoglund, for example, had been involved in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and in the Communist Party (known in the early 1920s as the Workers Party), and had subsequently joined the Trotskyist Communist League of America. Others like Farrell Dobbs were recruited to the CLA in the course of its Teamster organizing. The Trotskyists first organized a strike in the coal yards and then, having won union recognition and a contract there, found an ally in William S. (Bill) Brown, the president of the local union. Working with him, and despite opposition from Daniel Tobin, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, they launched a drive to organize the truck drivers and make Minneapolis a union town. Without going into all of the details here, suffice it to say that the Trotskyists in leading the freight strikes created a highly disciplined and effective organization that at times in its violent confrontation with the Citizens Alliance’s deputized thugs and the local police took on a quasi-military character, capable of mobilizing hundreds of workers in pitched street battles and in calling thousands to mass rallies. It was not, however, brute force and violence that won the battle, but rather strategic savvy in choosing the right issue, the right moment, and the right tactic.

In passing, Palmer sketches rather one-dimensional portraits of the Trotskyist Teamster leaders, mentions briefly the Teamsters Women’s Auxiliary, but without really getting into the experience of women, and neglects the one opportunity to deal with racial issues which is provided by the several native American truck drivers (there being few African Americans or Latinos in Minneapolis at the time). The holy trinity of contemporary history and social sciences—race, gender, and class—does not have much sway in this book. Nor is there much more than a sketch of economic or social history. Palmer’s is an old school, leftist, labor history, an account of a strike movement, focusing on the union, the left, and party politics. Palmer wants to understand the degree to which a group of Trotskyists operating in the Teamsters union succeeded or failed in carrying out a revolutionary strategy.

Palmer, however, describes the Trotskyist leadership’s functioning in Local 574 to only a limited degree; we know that the Trotskyist core cadres are making the decisions, but we don’t really learn how they operated. Did they make decisions first in their cell, fraction, or branch and then work to convince their allies like Brown and others? Or did they make those decisions together with the worker leaders and activists closest to them? Such things are difficult to reconstruct, even with the documents that Palmer has at his disposal, but they are crucial questions that tell us something about the Trotskyists’ conception of the party, of leadership, of collaboration and of democracy. The author also describes the role of the CLA leadership — Cannon, Max Shachtman, and others —who traveled to Minneapolis to provide their skills as journalists, organizers, and especially as political advisors. Cannon in particular brought to bear his long experience as a labor organizer who could offer strategic and tactical advice. Still, one would like to know how party leaders interacted with local Trotskyists-Teamster leaders, relationships which don’t come off clearly in this account and may not be something that we can reconstruct. Perhaps only a personal diary, journal, or memoir could provide us with an account that would satisfy our curiosity.

One of the most interesting things about the Trotskyist Teamster leadership is the degree to which they evaded and ignored both local and national Teamster organizational structures, roles, and rules and simply built a radical, fighting leadership at the core of the local trucking industry. While part of the International Brother of Teamsters, their rank-and-file organization maintained a remarkable degree of autonomy from the national and local union, until they had the power to take over and dominate the local union. When later they fell afoul of Teamster President Dan Tobin and their union lost its Teamster charter, they eventually joined the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but then, when the opportunity presented itself, they later rejoined the Teamsters, merging with another local that had been created during their brief absence. It is clear that they had no organizational fetishes, but rather created or seized upon whatever organization proved useful to their strategic goal of organizing the Minneapolis and later the Northwest regional trucking industry. One is reminded of how—as described by Wyndam Mortimer in Organize: My Life as a Union Man (1971)—the Communists in the auto workers union worked in the company unions, the AFL Federal locals, and then in the UAW-CIO, seizing up any opportunity to build their rank-and-file group.

Palmer praises the Trotskyist-Teamsters for their political principles and strategic wisdom, as well as for their obvious strength of character and courage in the face of slander and violence. Yet, he is not uncritical of this “steeled cohort” (p. 272) that he admires so much. He faults the Trotskyists for two things, one at the level of labor unionism and the other at the level of politics. At the level of union strategy Palmer argues that while the Trotskyists were initially far in advance of the conservative union officials in Minneapolis in 1933-34, by the mid- to late-1930s as they began organizing on the regional level, they found themselves dealing with a different sort of union leader. “…Trotskyists found themselves more and more aligned with progressive, but decidedly mainstream, labor-officials.” (p. 234) Palmer writes:

Rather than utilizing ongoing struggles to build militant class-struggle caucuses in the distant locales where interested organizing campaigns were being launched, the Minneapolis trade union leaders tended, instead, to forge relationships with established IBT union-leaderships. This was the easiest path to follow, and it produced tangible short-term gains s. The result, however, was that a rank-and-file, infused with radical currents, steeled in struggle, and trusting of a revolutionary leadership, did not cohere as it had in Minneapolis in 1934. (p. 234)

"The upshot was that, “Each step in this seemingly benign direction solidified the labor-movement credentials of Trotskyist union-leaders like Dobbs, but moved them further away from their capacity to promote the revolutionary politics of Left Oppositionists [i.e., Trotskyists].” (p. 235) He goes on:

“It was not so much that what the Trotskyist advance-guard in the Minneapolis labor-movement did was wrong; rather it was what it did not do clearly enough that proved troubling. Channeling their energies into consolidating ‘united fronts’ from above with various trade-union leaders, and concentrating their activity on trade-union questions alone, Minneapolis Trotskyists lost an important part of the revolutionary momentum that could have cultivated radicalizing rank-and-file caucuses through which revolutionary politics would have been extended among insurgent workers. This alone could have saved and preserved the victory of 1934. But it was not to be.” (p. 235)

He concludes that:

“The more the Left Opposition within the IBT succeeded, then, the more it seemed to be boxed into making accommodations with forces that had, in any case, adapted to a more liberal, if often bureaucratized stand. Unable to shift political gears sufficiently deftly and utilize the all-too-often meagre resources to develop left-caucuses and mass support within the union locals that they were promoting and working with, the Minneapolis Trotskyists thus found it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves from ‘progressive,’ but defiantly non-revolutionary, figures within established trade-union officialdoms. The localized base of the Minneapolis revolutionary teamster-leadership, as important as it had become, was unable to actually reach into the kind of broad regional and national development that would have been necessary for the Trotskyists among the teamsters to have been protected from the kind of attack that was entirely possible in the changed climate of Roosevelt’s third, wartime, term as President.” (pp. 238-39)

Palmer, it seems to me, more or less refutes his own criticism when he mentions the Trotskyist group’s “meager resources,” to which he might have added their small numbers and lack of broader influence in the union movement and society. The organization of caucuses in far-flung local unions throughout the upper Midwest and Great Plains states and then throughout the country would have required a much bigger organization in the union and a far larger political party, and with or without such union and party organizations it would have taken time—time during which the organized union base in Minneapolis might well have been destroyed. The Trotskyists would have faced not only the employers, but also ambitious adversaries such as West Coast Teamster leader Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit. The Trotskyists, moreover, were hated by the bosses, loathed by the Communist Party, despised by the Teamster leadership, and persona non grata with the U.S. government. To say the least, they had few friends. These circumstances led the Trotskyist to ally with progressives or business unionists in order to accomplish the goal of creating regional pattern contracts and building an industrial union in the trucking industry. It is hard to believe, knowing the difficulties they would have faced, that they could have pursued another course, including the course that Palmer suggests, that might have made them more successful than they were.

Secondly, Palmer criticizes the Trotskyist Teamsters for being insufficiently critical and wary of Floyd Olson and the Farmer-Labor Party. Palmer explains that:

"Trotskyists like Dunne, Skoglund, and Dobbs knew [that Olson could not be trusted], but they chose [initially], unlike the Communist Party, to focus their early approach to Governor Olson not on his shortcomings, but on placing strategic stress on the Farmer-Labor Party leader’s ostensible pro-union sympathies, which could be exploited to build labor-organization among the truckers.” (pp. 64-65).

This is a position that Palmer agrees with. He disagrees, however, with the Trotskyists later for failing to adequately understand and criticize Olson, who would ultimately call in the National Guard to occupy Minneapolis, stop the Teamsters strike, and impose a settlement that included arbitration. Palmer writes, “Stronger stands could have been taken against Olson, his harnessed use of the National Guard, and his duplicitous role in the obvious ambiguities inherent in the settlement, including the nature of arbitration. There is definitely evidence that Dobbs and others seemed to rely, at times, rather naïvely on Olson’s assurances.” (p. 121). Palmer goes so far as to say that the Trotskyists cultivated illusions in Olson and the Farmer-Labor Party. (p. 236, fn. 11) He argues that the Trotskyists should have criticized the Farmer-Labor Party as a cross-class alliance, and an organization that was, moreover, politically related to the Roosevelt Democratic Party. They should, says Palmer, have advocated more clearly and consistently the organization of a “workers’ party.” (p. 226) Their failure to do so, he believes, meant that workers had no political alternative, which left the Trotskyists open to their ultimate political repression.

There were throughout the 1930s local labor party efforts and the idea was raised more broadly within the CIO at various points.[2] Yet one has to wonder how successful such an attempt to found a labor or workers’ party would have been in Minneapolis, where a nominal labor party—the Farmer-Labor Party—already existed. Attempting to create such a workers party would have been extremely difficult, especially after 1936 when both the Socialists and Communists had gone over to Roosevelt and the Democrats. This is not to say that the effort might not have been worthwhile for propagandistic reasons, but that such a party could have been built in Minnesota or perhaps anywhere in the United States at that time seems dubious to me. Then too there’s the question of whether the Trotskyists had the resources both to build caucuses in the unions and to build a workers’ party.

I think Palmer’s view of the Trotskyists is open to criticism on another more general level. He argues that it was the presence of the Trotskyist revolutionaries which made possible the Teamster victory, where presumably others would have failed. (He actually writes that the Stalinist Communists would certainly have failed – p.262). Yet we know that Communists won a victory in San Francisco as the Socialists did in Toledo. Communists would just a few years later play a major part in organizing the United Auto Workers victory at General Motors, while both Communists and Socialists played central roles in organizing in the steel industry. One might draw the conclusion that workers’ attempts to build industrial unions were more likely to succeed if they had a far left leadership of almost any sort. Yet we also know that opportunistic business unionists in the Teamsters led the same sorts of fights in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston and they also succeeded in organizing big cities and entire regions of the trucking industry. West Coast Teamster leader Dave Beck, for example, who had organized the Seattle area truck drivers in 1933 and 1934, succeeded between 1935 and 1937 in organizing Los Angeles, until then an open-shop stronghold dominated by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association.[3] Perhaps the key ingredient was a cohesive team of savvy strategists—whatever their politics—who were capable of mobilizing workers and were prepared to engage in the kind of violent confrontations required at that time.

The Trotskyists did bring important elements to their organization of a strike that some others did not: their regular mass meetings and especially their daily strike newspaper. Most important was their political independence from both the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. Still, the question was, perhaps, not so much whether or not workers could fight and win without revolutionary socialist leadership; they clearly did fight and win without it in many situations under various sorts of leaders. The real question is: What sort of union does one get in the end? Does one get a democratic, militant, and socially-conscious union capable of continuing the fight for a socialist society, or does one get a bureaucratic union subordinate to capitalism? Only in a few places—one thinks of the independent Union of All Workers created at Hormel’s meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, in 1933—were genuinely independent, democratic, and militant unions created. That union lasted until the 1980s.[4] Such unions were few and far between.

The American left, labor unions, and workers in the 1930s only partially succeeded in laying the basis for a more democratic, militant, and socialist union movement. They succeeded in creating the CIO, but lost in their attempt to create a labor party and to bring socialism to the United States. By the 1940s, the New Men of Power, as C. Wright Mills called them, were already heading up what had become simply larger bureaucratic business unions.[5] In part this is because of the authoritarianism found on the left, for example the terrible role played by the Socialists in driving out the militants and building a bureaucratic machine in the steel industry.[6] Or consider the one-party state that socialist Walter Reuther established in the United Auto Workers, a ruling party so successful that it continues to run the union to this day. Where Communists became the leaders of local unions, they also built powerful political machines with little toleration for opponents. The Smith Act sedition trials of 1941 eliminated the Trotskyists from the labor movement—we will never know what a Trotskyist-led labor movement might have looked like—and other leftists, even where they built strong unions failed to maintain the labor movement’s political independence from the state. The leftist union leaders’ political decisions, especially the almost universal decision not only by the businesses unionists but also by the Communist and Socialist parties to support World War II, meant that unions, employers, and the government came together in kind of partnership that—together with the Cold War and McCarthyism—laid the basis for the dominance of business unionism in the post-war period.[7]

Palmer’s book gives us one more take on the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, but because of its all-too-dense narrative, its portraits of Teamster leaders that border on caricature, and its often reading like a political tract from another era, its audience will, I think, be limited to the small field of labor historians and to the (unfortunately) equally small number leftists. If a labor union activist or some young radical were to ask me what to read about the 1934 strike, I would still recommend Farrell Dobbs personal account in Teamster Rebellion, a memoir that reads like a radical’s strike manual and seems as relevant today as ever.

Dan La Botz, June 13, 2014

[1] The books dealing with the 1934 Teamster strike are: Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Pathfinder, 1972). Dobbs also has three other volumes dealing with his Teamster experience. Charles Rumford Walker’s American City: A Rank-and-File History (New York: Arno Reprint, 1971), originally published in 1937, remains an interesting economic and social history of Minneapolis at the time of the Teamster strikes. Philip A. Korth’s The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995) is a rather undigested combination of historical narrative and interesting oral histories. Elizabeth Faue’s Community of Suffering & Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which also deals with the Teamster strikes, emphasizes women workers and communities, but she is less interested in labor union strategy and politics. Finally, Chapter 3 of Paul Jacobs, Is Curly Jewish: A Political Self-Portrait Illuminating Three Turbulent Decades of Social Revolt: 1935-1965 (New York: Atheneum, 1965) provides an interesting and amusing account of his several weeks as a Trotskyist youth organizer in Minneapolis during the period of the Teamster strikes.

[2] See Eric Leif Davin, “The Very Last Hurrah? The Defeat of the Labor Paty Idea, 1934-36,” in Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 117-71.

[3] Donald Garnel, The Rise of Teamster Power in the West (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), pp. 146-64.

[4] Peter Rachleff, “Organizing ‘Wall to Wall,’ The Independent Union of all Workers, 1933-37,” in Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”, pp. 51-71.

[5] C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948).

[6] Clinton S. Golden and Harold J. Ruttenberg, The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publisher, 1942). The authors describe how they got rid of the troublemakers who had built the United Steel Workers of America as they constructed the union bureaucracy. Golden was a member and sometimes a leader of the Socialist Party.

[7] The Communist Party officially supported the war, while the Socialist Party did not officially oppose it.

Dan La Botz was a truck driver and Teamster activist in the 1970s and a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He is the author Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990), of the “The Fight at UPS: The Teamsters Victory and the Future of the ‘New Labor Movement’,” (Detroit: Solidarity, 1997), and of the chapter “Tumultuous Teamsters” in Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Calvin Winslow, eds. Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010). He is a member of Solidarity and a co-editor of New Politics.

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 Minneapolis 1934 Strike Revisited

Revolutionary Teamsters:
The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934
by Bryan D. Palmer
Brill hardcover 2013, 308 pages,
Haymarket Books paper, 2014, $28.

FEW EVENTS LOOM larger in the history of the U.S. Trotskyist-influenced Left than the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strikes of 1934. While often cited within mainstream labor historiography in conjunction with the San Francisco general strike and Toledo Auto-Lite strike as the opening salvos of the working-class upsurge of the 1930s, the Minneapolis strikes take on an outsized role in the Trotskyist imagination.

Here was a case where a movement often forced to struggle at the margins was able to take center stage. While leftists of various stripes have led many working-class struggles, the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes are among the only cases in U.S. labor history where Trotskyists led a major battle.

Thus, the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes serve as a touchstone for what appears possible when Trotskyists are in charge: With the right leadership, the right strategy, the right combination of revolutionaries and organic working-class militants, the case of the Minneapolis truckers shows that real working-class power is more than a pipe dream. In scientific terms, it provides a proof of concept. In psychological terms, it provides a reason to keep fighting.

Understanding why the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes succeeded therefore remains more than an academic exercise. It offers valuable lessons for building a powerful working-class movement. This is particularly the case for those who identify with the Trotskyist tradition, but it also holds more generally for those who seek to build a stronger and broader labor Left.

In studying the strikes, we see the key role not only of an organized Left leadership, but one embedded within the rank-and-file membership. We see the transformative effect of struggle on ordinary people’s sense of what is possible. We see the necessity of dense organizational networks to transmit information between the leadership and membership, develop assessments of quickly changing events, and formulate effective tactical responses.

Importantly, we also see how key it is to retain democratic practices even in the midst of relentless attacks and changing events, precisely at those moments where many argue that discipline and expediency must take precedence over democracy.

The classic account of the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes has been Teamster Rebellion by strike leader Farrell Dobbs, through which generations of budding young socialists and labor activists, myself included, were first introduced to these historic events.

A coal yard worker in Minneapolis who voted for Hoover in 1928, the truckers’ strikes radicalized Dobbs. He was recruited to Trotskyism and, after a few years leading an organizing campaign that unionized over-the-road trucking across the Midwest, he devoted himself full-time to building the Socialist Workers Party.

Dobbs wrote Teamster Rebellion and three accompanying volumes in the 1970s, to document in detail the Minneapolis truck drivers’ efforts to transform the conservative Teamsters Union Local 574, and build a powerful working-class movement throughout the Twin Cities in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Despite Dobbs’ personal implication in the events and his clear political commitments, his account holds up well to scrutiny as a work of historical scholarship. It is well researched and, while Dobbs certainly advances a pro-worker, pro-Trotskyist, anti-employer interpretation, he largely steers clear of gratuitous sniping against his opponents.

Aside from Dobbs’ book, the Minneapolis truckers’ strikes have also received several other journalistic and academic treatments.(1) The question arises: What can be gained from yet another account of these events, no matter how seminal they might be?

The answer, according to radical historian Bryan D. Palmer, lies in the lessons of the Minneapolis strikes for struggles today: “Minneapolis in 1934 matters because, in 2013, it has things to tell us, ways of showing that the tides of history, even in times that seem to flow against change, can be put on a different course.” (7)

Forging An Alliance

In Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truck Drivers’ Strikes of 1934, Palmer seeks to draw out those lessons. Chief among them is the importance of an alliance of working-class militants and revolutionary intellectuals for mounting an effective challenge to capital.

To that end, Palmer integrates a detailed account of the strikes that shook Minneapolis with a more comprehensive analysis than has been previously available of the role of the Trotskyist-affiliated Communist League of America (CLA), and in particular its leader, James P. Cannon.

As Palmer explains, this was not a book he set out to write. Rather, it grew out of his larger project, a multi-volume biography of Cannon. [The first volume of this biography was reviewed by Alan Wald in ATC 129, online at http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/584 — ed.] What was supposed to be a chapter in the second, forthcoming volume soon morphed into a several hundred-page manuscript of its own.

The result is the most vivid, in-depth, meticulously documented account we have of this critical moment in the development of the U.S. left and labor movement. As a historian of the highest caliber, Palmer leaves no stone unturned in tracking down nearly all possible primary and secondary sources to craft his narrative.

Piecing together evidence from union and CLA internal documents, government and police reports, contemporary mainstream and left newspaper accounts, reporters’ notes, oral histories with key participants, and more, Palmer puts the reader in the thick of events.

The book begins with an introduction that motivates the project, followed by two chapters that set the stage for the Minneapolis strikes. Chapter 2 places the events in Minneapolis within the historical context of the Great Depression and the working-class upheavals in San Francisco and Toledo with which it is often paired.

These, along with many other lesser-known surges of class struggle in that year, “revealed the capacity of American labour…to mobilise in combative ways, but…also reflected the importance of Left leaderships embedded in the unions.” (24)

Chapter 3 then focuses on the political and economic context of Minneapolis and the upper Midwest of the early 20^th century. The city’s early role as a commodity entrepôt for wood, minerals, and wheat was waning. While a strong, community-based labor movement had developed in the city’s early decades, it was virtually wiped out in the aftermath of World War I.

Even more than notorious open-shop bastions of the period like Detroit and Los Angeles, Minneapolis developed a reputation in the 1920s as a notoriously anti-union city. Employers organized as the Citizens Alliance maintained a union blacklist, monitored suspected radicals, and were quick to quash any incipient worker organizing.

While this context created in many ways a bleak terrain for union organizing, Palmer points out that it also contained within it the seeds of the future rebellion. Its proximity to extractive industries meant that Minneapolis served as a way station for generations of timber, rail, mining and agricultural workers, some of whom carried with them radical political traditions.

The weakness of the city’s conservative, AFL-dominated official labor movement allowed Communists to develop an influential presence within the unions. Among those Communists were the Dunne brothers, Vincent Raymond (“Ray”), Miles, and Grant, as well as Carl Skoglund.

When the Comintern expelled supporters of Leon Trotsky, these four and 23 other Minneapolis party members found themselves expelled. They played a key role in the founding of a new party organization, the Communist League of America (Opposition), making Minneapolis an important base for American Trotskyism.

They would also figure prominently in the uprising a few years later. While the Communist Party retained a presence in the city after the expulsions, it was nowhere near as dominant as in other cities.

Having set the political and historical stage, Palmer then tells in the ensuing chapters the remarkable story of how these Trotskyists came to lead one of the most important episodes of class struggle in U.S. history, in the process defeating one of the country’s best-organized capitalist classes and, to paraphrase the slogan of the time, making “Minneapolis a union town.”

The blow-by-blow account, moving from the early organizing in the coal yards leading to the initial February strike, through the May strike featuring the “Battle of Deputies Run,” to “Bloody Friday” in July, to the final showdown and settlement in August, takes the reader into the heart of the action. While carefully documenting his interpretation of historical events, Palmer writes with a novelist’s attention to narrative tension and plot development.

More than in Dobbs’ Teamster Rebellion, we see how U.S. Trotskyist leaders like Cannon and Max Shachtman initially took stock of the unfolding situation from their base in New York, and then, as the conflict escalated, traveled to Minneapolis to take more hands-on roles behind the scenes.

Both were key in helping Teamsters Local 574 put out its daily strike bulletin, The Organizer, which served as an essential source of information and agitation throughout the series of strikes. Cannon also caucused with strike leaders at key turning points in the strike settlement negotiations. With meager resources and a small membership nationwide, the CLA devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to supporting the Minneapolis truck drivers.

At the same time, it remains clear in Palmer’s narrative that the workers themselves were in charge of the strike, despite employer attempts to tar Cannon and Shachtman as “outside agitators.”

Women in the Struggle

Palmer also goes to great lengths to highlight and assess the central role that women played in the strikes. The workers themselves were uniformly male, but wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and other supporters formed a Local 574 Women’s Auxiliary. It was originally the idea of the Dunne brothers, Dobbs, Skoglund and their wives, and faced opposition within the local when initially proposed.

Palmer recognizes that women’s contributions were limited, in that Auxiliary members were confined to gendered support roles such as cooking, cleaning, record-keeping and the like. But he also contends that for many of the strikers, “such organizing was not merely an appendage to a masculine cause, but was an essential component of the widening solidarity emblematic of insurgent labour in 1934.” (80)

Altogether, Palmer provides a nuanced, detailed, and engaging narrative of the strike from the workers’ perspective. While some might criticize him for giving short shrift to the perspectives of employers and state actors, that is clearly not the brief that Palmer sets out for himself.

Fortunately, a fine-grained history of the Minneapolis Citizen’s Alliance already exists, which delves into employers’ actions around the strikes in some detail.(2) What remains considerably less well documented is state actors’ complex role in assessing the strikes and negotiating the settlement. This is particularly interesting because the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (MFLP) was in charge of state government at the time.

While certainly not revolutionary, the MFLP was nonetheless one of the most promising examples of an independent party to the left of the Democrats in the early 20^th century. Given the focus of the book, Palmer understandably focuses on the MFLP’s vacillating response to the strikes, and the Trotskyists’ suspicion of their motives. Nonetheless, an interesting path for future research would be to develop an account of the internal debates within the Minnesota government and MFLP surrounding the strikes, and how they shaped the state’s response.

The Aftermath

Having told the story of the Minneapolis Teamsters and their 1934 strikes in detail, Palmer moves to a chapter summarizing the history from their victory to their 1941 defeat at the hands of Teamster goon squads in collusion with state agents.

His concluding chapter reflects on the lessons that the truck drivers strikes hold for today. The message, unsurprising to readers of this magazine yet still worth repeating, is that more than anything, it is the self-activity of the working class, based in the workplace, that is necessary for bringing about a better world.

Closing with an invocation of the Internationale, Palmer proclaims that “those who would arise in belief that ‘A better world’s in birth’, and that ‘Justice thunders condemnation’, can see in Minneapolis in 1934 the small seeds of a potentially large transformation, in which ‘the Earth shall stand on new foundations’, and we who have been naught shall finally be All!” (268)

As a coda Palmer offers an “appendix,” really an additional chapter, on “Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-33.” Drawing on material from his Cannon biography, he provides readers with a useful capsule summary of the birth pangs of American Trotskyism, and the internal struggles within the movement leading up to the 1934 strikes.

While somewhat orthogonal to the narrative of the strikes, the appendix sheds light on those fragile early years, when what was then known as the Left Opposition remained isolated from the often Communist-led class struggles that were bubbling up in that period. It was the Minneapolis strikes that, for a moment, pushed the Trotskyists to the fore.

While Palmer’s narrative of the strikes is thoughtful and carefully documented, albeit resolutely partisan, in the concluding chapters he allows his sectarian tendencies to show through.

For example, in the strike narrative he notes the wisdom of the Trotskyist Teamsters’ decision to accept a resolution to the May strike that was only a partial victory, against more militant calls to escalate the struggle by calling a general strike. (110) By contrast, in the penultimate chapter, as he recounts the story of how the Minneapolis Teamsters spread their influence across the Midwest by spearheading an organizing drive among over-the-road truck drivers,(3) Palmer faults them for “forging relationships with established IBT [Teamster] union leaderships,” instead of “build[ing] militant class-struggle caucuses in the distant locales where interstate organising campaigns were being launched.” (234)

More broadly, Palmer argues that by focusing on “consolidating ‘united fronts’ from above with various trade union leaders, and concentrating their activity on trade-union questions alone, Minneapolis Trotskyists lost an important part of the revolutionary momentum that could have cultivated radicalising rank-and-file caucuses through which revolutionary politics would have been extended among insurgent workers.” (235)

Where his assessment of the May 1934 strike settlement, and the strikes overall, shows a sensitivity to the strategic constraints and the balance of forces that the Trotskyist Teamsters faced, his criticisms of their later actions seems more informed by ideological imperatives and wishful thinking than by a concrete analysis of the historical dynamics at play.

Although the Minneapolis Teamsters’ accomplishments in their hometown were impressive, Palmer offers no evidence to suggest that they were in any position to lead not only a massive regional organizing drive on a scale never seen before, but also a simultaneous rank-and-file insurgency against the very Teamster bureaucracy that was funding the organizing campaign. Much as an expanding network of rank-and-file caucuses would have been desirable, it is difficult to see how this was a plausible historical alternative at the time.

These minor criticisms aside, Palmer’s book remains an important achievement, both for U.S. labor history and the history of the American Left. For those who remain committed to building working class power through workplace organizing, Palmer shows that the case of the Minneapolis Teamsters remains a case well worth revisiting.

Barry Eidlin

Notes

1. Most notably, reporter Charles Rumford Walker wrote a contemporaneous book-length account of the strikes, American City: A Rank and File History, in 1937, and historian Philip Korth published a monograph, The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, in 1995. There have also been several academic theses and articles published on the strikes.

2. Millikan, William. A union against unions: the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and its fight against organized labor, 1903-1947. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.

3. The best account of that campaign remains the second volume in Dobbs’ quadrilogy, Teamster Power.

July/August 2014, ATC 171

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 “A Seemingly Incongruous Alliance”: Trotskyists and Teamsters in 1934

by Alan Wald

Bryan Palmer’s exuberant 300-page book immediately takes its place among the essential works about 1930s radicalism in the United States. Revolutionary Teamsters is no nostalgic chronicle of sepia-tinted events, much less a sentimental tryst with the revolutionary past. Using artful, stirring, and formidable research, Palmer puts pen to paper (or is it finger to keyboard?) with a moral urgency that vividly raises the political stakes in the field of labour studies. Even in the context of the author’s own sizeable and distinguished Marxist œuvre spanning thirty-five years, it shapes up as a standout through its pertinence to contemporary activism: “Minneapolis in 1934 matters because, in 2013, it has things to tell us, ways of showing that the tides of history, even in times that seem to flow against change, can be put on a different course.” His sources are examined from every possible angle to produce a work radiant with the achievements of singular protagonists, men and women aflame with world-transforming convictions. We now have the richly detailed account that the militants of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Minneapolis deserve, as well as a brilliant rebuke to the forgetting of history...

Read the full article here:

http://solidarity-us.org/files/WalRevolutionaryTeamsters.pdf

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