Note: The epic story of the events in
Minneapolis in 1934 is too much for one entry.
We will cover it in three parts.
Before 1934 Minneapolis, Minnesota was a conservative,
anti-labor bastion. A railroad and river transportation hub for the upper-Midwest bread basket and a significant manufacturing city, the local elites organized in the Citizens
Alliance in conjunction—or collusion—with local authorities had long kept the city relatively free of unions except for some traditionally well behaved craft unions, members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
All of that began to change
dramatically when a successful
strike by Teamsters Local 574 closed
down sixty-five of the city’s sixty-seven coal
yards during the midst of one of the notoriously
brutal Minnesota winters earlier
that year causing the employers to capitulate and recognize the union in only three days.
Impressed, drivers, warehousemen, and dock
workers in other industries flocked to
the victorious union setting up a city-wide
cartage strike which began on May 16.
Superbly organized, the strike effectively
shut down the city with a system of peaceful
and unarmed flying squad pickets.
The character of the strike changed
dramatically on May 21 when a mixed flying squad of men and women pickets
was lured into to a trap and severely beaten. That transformed the walkout into a general
strike with the support of even the Building
Trades and Central Labor Council and
workers in all industries, many of
them unorganized, downed tools and joined the
strike. Strikers also armed themselves
with saps, clubs, and lengths of pipe determined to battle it out with police and special
deputies in a “citizens militia”
organized by the Citizen Alliance. Intensely violent confrontations
erupted and virtual open class warfare gripped
the city for months before a stunning union
victory.
A Teamster Local 574 dues button issued during the strike. |
At the heart of the strike were the
Teamsters, nationally one of the largest
unions in the AFL but gripped by the
conservative leadership of President
Daniel Tobin who opposed most use of
the strike. The union’s members had
a reputation for solidarity in
respecting the picket lines of other
unions’ strikes. But strict allegiance to craft unionism
meant that divers, warehouse men, and dockworkers were divided into small locals by occupation
and also by industry—ice deliverymen, milk drivers, movers, general
cartage divers, etc. each in separate locals. It was a perfect
recipe for a weak movement.
In Minneapolis however, Local 574
had a somewhat unusual and loose charter from the international
union covering general cartage, which new leadership quickly defined as all traffic that moved by truck
or wagon. In 1933 the local had only about 100 dues paying members and its represented
workers at only a handful of employers.
But new leadership changed that.
Vincent
R. (Ray) Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, and Swedish born Carl Skoglund were all veteran unionists and former members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
They were conditioned to think of
labor struggle as class war and had a commitment
to industrial rather than craft
unionism. Elected to leadership in Local
574 they chose immediately to ignore the
strictures against strikes by the national leadership and to make the local
a union of all workers engaged in
transportation, delivery, and support across industries. When unorganized workers in other industries
joined the fight they were readily welcomed in the spirit of the One Big Union in which they had all cut their teeth.
Local Teamster leaders were militant former IWW members, dedicated industrial unionists, and Trotskyist Left Communists |
But all of them were also Communists. In fact they were leading members of the Party’s Left Opposition which had recently split after the purge of Leon Trotsky and founded the Communist League of America (CLP) which would later become the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SLP). The prominence of the Trotskyists in the leadership of the strike, which soon included young Farrell Dobbs who had joined as a rank and file coal driver in 1933 and quickly rose to prominence during the strike, has always colored views of the history of the epic struggle in Minnesota.
It would cause many labor historians sympathetic to the
role of Communist Party militants in
the development of industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) to downplay the Minneapolis General strike in comparison with other
important militant strikes in 1934—the West
Coast Longshoremen’s Strike let by CP member Harry Bridges and the Toledo
Auto Lite Strike led by the independent
socialist American Workers
Party. Many AWP members later that
year joined with CLP but others switched to the CP giving it some bragging rights in the Toledo
struggle.
The Teamsters look on the
Minneapolis strike as the pivot point in
their history, transforming them to a modern,
militant union and eventually leading to their domination not just of local
delivery services, but cross-country
trucking. The Trotskyist leadership
developed in Minneapolis was key to the spread and success of the union with
new locals growing up side by side with SWP chapters. But by the early ‘40’s Teamster national
leadership purged the Trotskyists and most other radicals including Dobbs, who had became young Jimmy Hoffa’s mentor and right-hand
man. After that they rewrote their history of the
Minneapolis strike to minimize or erase
the Trotskyist leadership.
After emerging from prison for violating the Smith Act, which made it illegal to “conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States Government,” Dobbs became a major figure and eventually leader of the SWP. His histories of the Minneapolis strike and the spread of the union, Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power tried to build a mythology around the Trotskyist leadership and resulted in a backlash by other labor historians.
Of course, conservative historians have always discounted the significance of the virtual rebellion in Minneapolis
or characterized it as evidence of a
Communist conspiracy to incite violence and subvert order. It is in their interest to minimize, if not erase, such a major event
from the public memory.
Whatever you think of the
Trotskyists, the story of the Teamsters and the Minneapolis general strike is important to working people and replete with valuable lessons.
Tomorrow—we begin to
examine all of the events in detail.
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