Bryan D. Palmer

The leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters came out of the Communist Party. Many of them had been active in radical politics and revolutionary politics for years. Some of them were members of the Socialist Party, particularly its ethnic Scandinavian section. And some were members of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies.

The four, I would say, key figures were three brothers, the Dunne Brothers — Vincent Ray Dunne, Miles Dunne, and Grant Dunne — and a Scandinavian socialist named Carl Skoglund. They had all been, by the late 1920s, very active in the Communist Party. But they left the Communist Party in 1929 when they were expelled for refusing to abide by a party dictate, the Communist Party dictate, against James P. Cannon, who led a very small group of people away from the party because of Trotsky’s critique of the degeneration of the Communist International and how that affected the American party.

Cannon was expelled along with those who were aligned with him. And the Minneapolis Teamsters who were members of the Communist Party, they really didn’t understand or know what the issues were. But they knew enough to know that this was a big deal, signifying a potential break in the party. They thought that if there was going to be a fight around Trotskyism, they should at least be allowed to read the documents and come to their own conclusions.

In this, they basically ran up against a party bureaucracy, led by Jay Lovestone, that was trying to silence people. It stopped them from reading documents, stopped them from looking at what was going on in the wider Communist International. When the Communists in Minneapolis, the Dunne brothers, Skoglund, and others said, “Well, we’d like to read the material, and we’d like to find out what this is about,” they too were expelled.

And so they aligned with Cannon and others in an organization, the first Trotskyist organization, called the Communist League of America. And it was as members of the Communist League of America that they devised this protracted strategy of organizing and building a new kind of unionism.

They were revolutionaries who understood that it wasn’t necessarily a revolutionary situation, and that the struggle wasn’t to build a kind of revolutionary entity within the Minneapolis Teamsters; but instead, that the struggle was to build a mobilization that would achieve union recognition and develop mass-production unionism within the AFL, which was dedicated to craft unionism.

In some senses, it’s kind of a contradiction — the notion that Teamsters and workers in the trucking sector were a highly skilled workforce. They weren’t, but they had this notion of the privileged elite workers being the ones who should be organized. This was a centerpiece of the IBT ideology, if you will. The Trotskyists saw the need to organize all workers who worked in the sector, including those who just unloaded produce in the markets, who heaved coal and who loaded up the trucks, as well as the drivers. And this was anathema to the employers in the sector who wanted nothing to do with a union that organized all workers as opposed to just a few who moved the actual trucks.