Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934 by Bryan D. Palmer-A Review and Commentary by E. Tanner
Workers Vanguard No. 1052 |
19 September 2014 |
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Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934 by Bryan D. Palmer-A Review and Commentary by E. Tanner
(Part One)
“The most important of all prerequisites for the development of a militant labor movement is the leaven of principled communists.” So wrote James P. Cannon, a leader of the Communist League of America (CLA), toward the end of the second of three truckers strikes that convulsed the city of Minneapolis in 1934. Bryan Palmer’s Revolutionary Teamsters, an in-depth study of those strikes—which were led by CLA members—brings this lesson home.
That spring and summer, the Minneapolis Teamster strikes overlapped with a similarly hard-fought 83-day strike by West Coast longshoremen and maritime unions, a battle that culminated in a four-day general strike in San Francisco. Both strikes were part of a wave of labor struggle that swept the country as the working class, shaking off the paralysis that had accompanied the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, began to fight. What distinguished these two strikes, along with one by auto parts workers in Toledo, from other 1934 labor battles is that they won big, establishing union representation for masses of previously unorganized workers and opening the road to the upsurge later in the decade that forged the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Key to the victory of all three strikes was the leadership provided by “reds”—labor militants who considered themselves socialist or communist.
As we explained in Part One of our two-part article “Then and Now” (WV Nos. 1050 and 1051, 8 August and 5 September):
“Unlike other strikes at the time, the militancy of the workers was not restrained by leaders who promoted the lie of a ‘partnership’ between labor and capital. Instead, the mass strength and solidarity of the workers was organized and politically directed by leaders who rejected any notion that the bosses are ‘reasonable’ or their state ‘neutral.’ Understanding the forces of the class enemy that would be arrayed against any union struggle, the leaders of these strikes were prepared for class war.”
When academics take up a subject of keen interest to revolutionary Marxists, the results are often disappointing. That was certainly the case with Philip A. Korth’s The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 (Michigan State University Press, 1995). Although basing his narrative on some interesting oral history interviews, Korth painted the titanic battles waged by the insurgent truckers as an unfortunate class polarization that illustrated the need for the capitalist rulers to establish a “community” agency like the National Labor Relations Board to regulate industrial relations.
There is no danger of such a fundamental misunderstanding from Bryan Palmer, a professor at Canada’s Trent University with an impressive body of work on North American left and labor history. Writing with sympathy for the proletarian revolutionary cause, Palmer places the CLA leadership—Trotskyists whom the Spartacist League counts among its forebears—at the center of his narrative, detailing the ways in which they “proved undeniably more resolute and far-seeing” and “more decisively in control of the events” than the other left-wing 1934 strike leaderships. In Minneapolis, the CLA militants sought not only to build and strengthen the basic economic organizations of the working class, but also to educate the union ranks in the principles of class struggle. Palmer quotes Cannon:
“Every strike settlement is a compromise in the sense that it leaves the bosses in control of industry and free to exploit the workers. The best settlement only limits and checks this exploitation to a certain extent. Realistic leaders do not expect justice from the capitalists, they only strive to extract as much as possible for the union in the given situation and strengthen their forces for another fight.”
—“Minneapolis Strike—An Answer to Its Defamers,” Militant, 16 June 1934
Revolutionary Teamsters grew out of research for the second volume of Palmer’s projected three-volume biography of Cannon. (For a review of his first volume, see “A Biography of James P. Cannon,” Spartacist No. 60, Autumn 2007). The Prometheus Research Library (PRL), library and archive of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S., was one of many institutions that assisted Palmer in preparing that previous book. PRL staff members also were among those who read and critiqued early manuscripts of Revolutionary Teamsters, as Palmer writes in his “Acknowledgements.”
Available for the last year only as an outrageously expensive hardback intended for the academic market, Revolutionary Teamsters has now been published in paperback by Haymarket Books. Happily, this edition preserves 28 pages of graphics (although without the color plates and photo-grade paper used in the hardback). The photographs will greatly assist readers, many of whom have witnessed little labor struggle in their lifetimes, to visualize the class war that rocked Minneapolis, including the pitched battles in which strikers routed police and their deputized auxiliaries. During the decisive five-week strike in July-August, cops armed with special riot guns shot 67 union picketers (two of whom died), martial law was declared and National Guard troops occupied the city. Readers might also want to view “Labor’s Turning Point,” a 1981 TV documentary now available on YouTube that features stunning 1934 newsreels as well as interviews with participants.
The Trotskyists inspired and mobilized the truckers in ways hardly imaginable today. Palmer’s text frequently makes the Minneapolis events come alive, marshaling an impressive array of published and archival sources. He vividly describes the extensive preparations for the second and third strikes, in particular the transformation of old warehouse spaces into strike headquarters, which included a hospital, kitchens and truck refueling and repair facilities. His chapter on Minneapolis Teamster Local 574’s Women’s Auxiliary—whose members were integral to the strike apparatus, among other things running the commissary that fed thousands of strikers and their supporters daily—is particularly notable. So is his account of the Minneapolis Central Council of Workers (MCCW), a united front initiated and led by CLA cadre that organized the unemployed working on public relief projects, bringing them to union pickets and evening meetings at strike headquarters.
Minnesota: A Unique Political Landscape
Revolutionary Teamsters adds significant detail to previously published accounts. Best known is Teamster Rebellion (1972), written by Farrell Dobbs, a young trucker who was catapulted into the strike leadership team and joined the CLA. As the memoir of a leading participant, that book remains central to any attempt to revisit the 1934 events, although Dobbs eventually abandoned the revolutionary politics that animated him at the time. (As National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, the CLA’s eventual successor, he presided over the organization’s descent into reformism in the 1960s). Not as well known is American City: A Rank and File History (1937), a comprehensive study written by the liberal journalist Charles Rumford Walker in the aftermath of the strikes. Currently available in a 2005 reprint, Walker’s excellent account situates the Teamster battle in the specific social, economic and political context of both Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Though not without criticisms, Palmer acknowledges his debt to both works. He follows Walker in his description of the marked decline by 1934 of the railroads and extractive industries (mining and lumber) that had previously driven the region’s economic growth. Agriculture was left as the central engine of the economy, but American farming had been in free fall since the early 1920s. Minneapolis was a center for milling wheat, with many city dwellers retaining family links to rural areas. One of the first points that Walker made was that “the farmer is one-half of economics and two-third of politics in Minnesota.” Unfortunately, Palmer gives short shrift to this crucial observation.
Minnesota was one of only a few states where agrarian Populism—which had dominated rural areas for decades from the time of the 1870s Grange movement—remained an important political force. It had propelled the state’s Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) into the position of the Republican Party’s main bourgeois electoral rival, surpassing the Democrats, with whom the FLP was in a sometimes-uneasy alliance. (The two parties finally merged in 1944.) But Palmer never explores the ways in which the FLP made the Minnesota political landscape unique, creating both potential openings and pitfalls for an astute communist organization spearheading a union organizing drive, as Part Two of this article will detail.
Instead, Palmer insists on seeing Minneapolis as a locale of “uneven and combined development,” making belabored and erroneous use of the concept, which Trotsky expounded in reference to tsarist Russia and the imperialist-dominated countries where capitalism arrived late. In such societies, modern industry is superimposed on backward, traditional economies. Palmer argues that the weakness of the AFL unions and the strength of the Citizens Alliance—a group of some 800 employers who maintained an iron grip on the city, keeping wages low and unions out through a network of anti-union provocateurs and informers—made class relations in Minneapolis particularly brittle. The opening thereby created for a small group of Trotskyists to assume leadership of a major class struggle was, in Palmer’s words, “the privilege of historical backwardness.”
But he fails to make a convincing case that the relation of class forces in Minneapolis was different in any substantial way from other anti-union bastions of the time, e.g., Detroit or Los Angeles. The inappropriate use of Trotsky’s concept fails to take adequate account of the strike wave that was sweeping the country as a whole. In the end, it conceals far more than it elucidates.
The Importance of the Party Fraction
Revolutionary Teamsters includes a useful appendix that details the origins and early history of the CLA, giving particular emphasis to the poisonous personal polarization within its leadership between Cannon and his supporters (including the Minneapolis local leadership) on one side and Max Shachtman and his supporters on the other. This destructive internal struggle, which almost split the organization, was documented by the PRL in its book Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 (2000).
The upsurge of workers struggle that began in 1933 enabled the CLA to finally turn outward toward the mass movement, contributing to the end of this internal battle, which had no principled programmatic basis. In early 1934, League members found themselves in the leadership of a strike by New York hotel workers. The strike’s leader, B.J. Field, was expelled by the CLA in the middle of the battle for violating discipline. Field had elevated himself above the CLA fraction, the body on which he nominally sat that was charged with overseeing the party’s intervention into the strike. He let himself be taken in by mediators from the Federal Labor Board, ignoring the counsel of the CLA leadership who knew that the “help” proffered by these slick operators would be a “noose for the strike” (as Cannon put it). The hotel strike went down to defeat.
The success in Minneapolis came hot on the heels of the disaster in New York. The contrast was later noted by Cannon:
“In our movement we never played with the absurd idea that only those directly connected with a union are capable of giving assistance. Modern strikes need political direction more than anything else. If our party, our League as we called it then, deserved to exist it would have come to the aid of the local comrades. As is always the case with trade union leaders, especially in strike times, they were under the weight and stress of a thousand pressing details. A political party, on the other hand, rises above the details and generalizes from the main issues. A trade union leader who rejects the idea of political advice in the struggle against the bosses and their government, with its cunning devices, traps and methods of exerting pressure, is deaf, dumb and blind. Our Minneapolis comrades were not of this type. They turned to us for help.”
—History of American Trotskyism (1944)
Minneapolis was the only place in the country where a sizable proportion of the CP’s core leadership had come over to the Trotskyist movement—cadre with deep social roots in the city and years of experience working together in the labor movement. The branch had a social weight unique to the tiny CLA, enabling the cadre there to transform the insubstantial Local 574 (which Cannon later aptly described as “holding on to the ragged edge of nothing”) into an industrial union of some 7,000 truckers as well as loaders and warehouse workers by May 1934.
Palmer is at his best in the chapter describing the political histories, personalities and interconnections of the CLA members who conceived of and carried through this campaign. Pulling together information from previously disparate sources, he paints compelling portraits of Carl Skoglund (“Skogie”) and Vincent (Ray) Dunne along with his brothers, Miles and Grant. All found themselves working in the coal-hauling yards in the early 1930s. Understanding that truckers were strategic to the economy of an agricultural hub like Minneapolis, they made various attempts to prod Local 574 into an organizing campaign. But it only took off after the gregarious Miles succeeded in selling the idea to the local’s president, Bill Brown, who was disaffected with the craft-union prejudices and bureaucratic inertia of the national Teamster leadership.
Bill Brown was an FLP activist, not a Trotskyist, but he had a “sound class instinct” (Cannon’s words). His support to the volunteer organizing committee set up by the Dunne brothers and Skoglund was crucial. It gave the committee the cover to organize truckers and their helpers on an industrial basis into an established AFL union, enabling them to do an end run around the craft-union bureaucrats who dominated Local 574’s executive board.
The strength of Palmer’s book is that he understands how much the CLA as a whole contributed to the battle in Minneapolis. Palmer describes the supporting role of local CLA members and chronicles the growth of the local branch in parallel with the union. The first strike in the coal yards, carefully timed for a cold-snap in February, was won in three days as the innovative “flying picket” squads initiated by the strikers shut the coal yards tight. There was consultation with the New York CLA leadership but little need to involve national resources.
In the aftermath of the February victory, things moved with lightning speed as truckers from all the city’s industries began flocking into Local 574. Due to what Palmer views as misplaced concerns about the strains on New York, the Minneapolis Trotskyists didn’t keep the national leadership abreast of developments, which Ray Dunne later wrote was a “grievous mistake.” Cannon and other CLA leaders in New York were caught off guard when the national newspapers carried accounts of the pitched battles in the Minneapolis market area on May 21-22 that kept the companies from resuming operations with scab drivers. In what became known as the “Battle of Deputies Run,” the truckers and their supporters routed the cops and their specially deputized anti-union volunteers, killing two.
The money to fly Cannon into Minneapolis was quickly scraped together. He arrived just after FLP governor Floyd B. Olson had stepped in to negotiate a truce. The May settlement that followed was not a total union victory but a compromise. It gave the union the essentials of recognition; however, it was ambiguous with regard to the inclusion of the inside warehouse workers. The strike leadership, with Cannon’s full support, recommended the agreement to the membership because it allowed the union to regroup its forces while advancing the fight on the ground to represent all its members. The implacability of the bosses soon made it clear that a third strike would be necessary, for which the CLA mobilized nationally.
The CLA brought in some key pieces to reinforce Local 574’s impressive strike apparatus, including Cannon and Shachtman. Along with the experienced journalist Herbert Solow, Shachtman would be essential to producing the Organizer, the daily strike newspaper that Local 574 produced during the third strike to mobilize, motivate and inform their members. This innovation of the Trotskyists proved crucial in combating the red scare that both Teamsters president Daniel Tobin and the bourgeois media bellowed forth as the strike began.
Hugo Oehler—an experienced mass organizer who had been a leader of the bitterly fought 1929 Gastonia, North Carolina, textile strike—was brought in to mobilize the unemployed behind the Teamsters. From the Chicago CLA came the lawyer Albert Goldman. Providing essential legal counsel, Goldman also proved himself an able revolutionary propagandist, and his speeches to union gatherings were often reprinted in the Organizer. Palmer details the activities of all these men, as well as local CLA members like Oscar Coover and Chester Johnson, unionists who marched a contingent of electricians to Local 574’s headquarters to support the May strike, and railway engineer C.R. Hedlund, who also mobilized support in the broader labor movement. Clara Dunne and Marvell Scholl, the wife of Farrell Dobbs who was recruited to the CLA along with her husband, ran the Women’s Auxiliary. Palmer also notes that strikers like Harry DeBoer and Jack Maloney joined the League in the course of the struggle.
Notably absent from Palmer’s book, however, is any substantial discussion of the party body responsible for the work in Local 574—the Teamster fraction of the Minneapolis CLA branch. This hole in Revolutionary Teamsters is not surprising given that Palmer is an academic, but it is glaring. Trotsky had stressed the absolute necessity of trade-union fractions in a document written to address the internal dispute in the CLA in 1933 (“Trade-Union Problems in America,” 23 September 1933). As the PRL explained:
“Essential to consistent work in any milieu is the organization of party cadre in working bodies that regularly meet, discuss how to implement party perspectives, and continually evaluate ongoing work, as laid out in the resolution on organization adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International. This is the only way the party can act as a ‘fist’ in social struggle. In the absence of fractions responsible to geographically organized local committees, cadres, especially in the trade unions, are inordinately susceptible to political pressures that can pull them off course.”
—Introduction, Dog Days
The CLA’s attempts to work within the Progressive Miners of America in Southern Illinois were stymied precisely due to the lack of party branches and fractions, ensuring that its isolated supporters in the area remained weak reeds. Ignoring fraction discipline was the charge against B.J. Field, expelled from the CLA in the middle of the NYC hotel strike.
The necessity of a fraction was fully understood by the Minneapolis branch. According to Farrell Dobbs, “Within the union the party fraction functioned as a cohesive unit, harmoniously united in carrying out party policy. Intimate contact was maintained between the fraction and the local party branch.” Ray Dunne was the fraction head, even though he had been fired from the industry for his political activities in 1933 and had no standing to be a member of the union. Dobbs describes how the fraction implemented crucial decisions made by the CLA at each step of the struggle. In this regard, his narrative is far stronger than that of Revolutionary Teamsters.
Cannon and Federal Mediators
As is to be expected in a work that grew out of research for a biography of Cannon, Palmer focuses heavily on the role of Cannon himself. He reasonably posits Cannon as the author of the “dere emily” letters that were a regular feature of the Organizer. Chronicling with cornball humor and purposeful misspelling the awakening class consciousness of Mike, a fictional striker straight off the farm writing to his sweetheart back home, these “Lake Wobegon” missives may have been effective and humorous at the time, but.... Let’s just say Cannon would be grateful no one has yet sought to include them in a book of his writings, unlike, e.g., “Spilling the Dirt—A Bughouse Fable,” a satire of the anti-communist hysteria dominating strike coverage in the bourgeois press, written for the Organizer and later reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958).
Cannon was immediately incorporated into the CLA strike leadership team upon his arrival in Minneapolis. Palmer draws special attention to his contributions as regards the federal mediators and the handling of Governor Olson. Especially after the experience of the NYC hotel strike, there can be no doubt that Cannon had plenty to do with tactics to counter the “wily artifices and tricks” of government mediators in July-August. As he later wrote, “Unlike stupid sectarians, we didn’t ignore them. Sometimes we would initiate discussions. But we didn’t let them use us, and we didn’t trust them for one moment. Our general strategy in the strike was to fight it out.”
Palmer implies that if Cannon had been on site earlier to provide “input,” the union could have struck a harder bargain in the May settlement and avoided the ambiguous formulation Olson proposed on the inside warehouse workers. His corollary is that the Minneapolis CLAers were much more susceptible to government deception, and Palmer insists: “There is definitely evidence that Dobbs and others seemed to rely, at times, rather naïvely on Olson’s assurances.” But Palmer only cites post-strike testimony by Dobbs before the Regional Labor Board, where he would naturally have sought to use Olson’s authority to bolster the union’s position. Such evidence is not convincing. Dobbs wasn’t acting on his own—he was the new boy in a party fraction that included plenty of Marxist capacity.
By late May, the strike had reached a pivotal point. The union had beaten back the local police, prodding the bosses to bray for the governor to call out the National Guard. Olson had called up the state troops but not deployed them, preferring first to try to force a deal. Even before the settlement was announced, the Militant warned:
“The swift developments of the strike are putting the Governor on the spot. Whether or not to call out the Militia—he can’t decide. No reliance can be put upon the Governor or the Labor Board to settle anything favorably for the workers. This is tirelessly explained by the militant leadership of the strike.”
—“Minneapolis Shows the Way,” Militant, 26 May 1934
There was careful calculation involved in the decision to accept the compromise rather than face all-out confrontation with the National Guard. In the pages of the Militant, Cannon scoffed at the CP and its spokesman Bill Dunne (the senior brother and the only one who had remained within the Stalinist ranks) for attacking the limited victory as a “sellout” because it stopped short of attempting to bring down Olson. This charge was an expression of the ultraleft adventurism typical of the CP during its 1928-34 “Third Period.”
But Cannon also frankly acknowledged the limits of the deal, describing the union’s agreement to set wage rates and settle seniority disputes through a joint union-employer arbitration board as “a serious concession which the union officials felt it necessary to make under the circumstances in order to secure the recognition of the union and consolidate it in the coming period.” Nonetheless, Palmer writes:
“Dunne and the Communist Party did highlight some shortcomings of the Trotskyist leadership.... 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 on the nature of arbitration.”
This concession to Stalinist Third Period sour grapes hardly seems merited.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1053
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3 October 2014
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Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
By Bryan D. Palmer
A Review and Commentary by E. Tanner
(Part Two)
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 1052 (19 September).
At the time of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) and its brand of agrarian populism largely dominated Minnesota politics. A proper appreciation of the capitalist loyalties of FLP governor Floyd B. Olson was essential to charting a course for workers struggle. In his 1937 book American City: A Rank-and-File History, Charles Rumford Walker noted that 56 percent of the state’s population was foreign-born, and he discussed at length the FLP’s Scandinavian-derived plebeian base. These working people were strongly influenced by the Social Democratic parties that had awakened the proletariat in their native countries.
The Scandinavian foreign-language federations had played a major role in the Minnesota Socialist Party (SP). Nationally, the reformist, social-democratic SP had been suffused from its founding with a strong dose of petty-bourgeois radicalism that derived from the Progressive and Populist movements. Among its members, the class line separating petty-bourgeois populism from unambiguously working-class political and social organizations was not widely understood.
This remained the case even after significant elements of the Scandinavian federations transferred their allegiance to the Communist movement. (The Finnish Federation, by far the largest, comprised roughly half of the national Communist membership in 1922). The confusion over the class nature of farmer-based populism was compounded by the fact that the Minnesota FLP allowed for bloc affiliation of trade unions, which gave it the appearance of a working-class organization. However, the FLP’s program clearly reflected its populist origins and its constitution carefully limited trade-union voting power to prevent labor from controlling the party.
The young American Communist movement, of which the CLA’s founding cadres were part, was almost shipwrecked on the shoals of farmer-laborism. In the 1924 presidential elections, the Communist Party (CP) came close to giving support to the Farmer-Labor candidacy of the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, Robert La Follette. Only the intervention of Leon Trotsky in Moscow pulled the party back from this opportunist course. But the Communist International, which was then at the beginning of its bureaucratic degeneration, muddied the waters by insisting that the American Communists continue to call for a two-class party and work within the Farmer-Labor movement. The story of this near-debacle is laid out in the introduction to the Prometheus Research Library’s book James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism, Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 [1992].
The CLA’s founding cadres were quite cognizant of the debt they owed Trotsky for this intervention. Their founding document declared unequivocally: “The organization of two classes in one Party—a Farmer-Labor Party—must be rejected in principle in favor of the separate organization of the workers, and the formation of a political alliance with the poor farmers under the leadership of the former (“Platform of the Communist Opposition,” Militant, 15 February 1929). Less than a year later, Vincent Dunne, who as a CP leader had also served as an FLP ward secretary, explained:
“Any political party composed of two classes, as is the case in this instance, with farmers and workers in the same organization, maintains unity only at the expense of the program put forward by the most exploited and propertyless section. The leadership of such a party can lead only as long as it is able to hold back the thrusts of the workers and satisfy the demands of those elements whose political outlook is bounded by the illusion that it is possible to achieve security under the capitalist order, by acquiring property or enhancing the value of that which they already hold, through reforms, half measures, etc....
“With this political outlook, the leadership, from the vantage point of the farmers’ wagon, from time to time sees bogholes in the road ahead and is forced to use the workers as pushers of the cart in such bad spots as political campaigns, financial difficulties, etc.
“That the workers have nothing to gain from this horseplay must be evident to those who give it a little thought.”
—“Minnesota F.L.P.—Six Years of Confusion and Disappointment in a Two-Class Party,” Militant, 18 January 1930
There is some evidence of lingering softness in the Minneapolis CLA toward farmer-laborism. Later that year, the Militant (1 November 1930) repudiated the branch’s initial agreement to bloc with others recently expelled from the CP, including Jay Lovestone’s organization and remnants of the former Finnish-language federation, to found a new regional farmer-labor newspaper. Such unprincipled political alliances between supporters of Leon Trotsky and Right Communists like Lovestone (supporters of Nikolai Bukharin) destroyed the nascent International Left Opposition in some other countries, and Cannon worked hard to make sure the CLA learned from these mistakes. Whatever the wobbles in the local, significantly the CLA’s Militant never gave electoral support to the Minnesota FLP. Considering themselves an expelled faction of the Communist Party until mid 1933, the Trotskyists generally supported CP candidates for public office.
None of this history figures in Palmer’s book, a real weakness since he criticizes the CLA strike leadership for “its early inability to mount a revolutionary critique of Farmer-Laborism, which may have fed into a tendency to rely unduly on this political tendency’s head spokesman, Governor Floyd B. Olson.”
Governor Olson and the FLP
Olson, who had been an IWW member in his youth, was a maverick even by Minnesota FLP standards. He was Minnesota’s chief executive officer responsible for capitalist law and order, but he hesitated to become an open strikebreaker, not least because he was on record as supporting the truckers’ right to unionize. The organizers of Local 574 had seen to that, having pressured him to speak at a truckers’ mass meeting on April 15. (Olson didn’t show, but sent a representative to read a support statement.)
Palmer writes that at the time, the Trotskyists “undoubtedly neglected to hammer home relentlessly how this seeming advocate of the producers was bound to turn against the very plebeian constituency that had propelled him into office.” He may be right, but there is little evidence of what CLA fraction members argued at the time to their co-workers. Palmer himself notes that the New York leadership was not fully informed of the situation. The Militant had exactly one article on the Minneapolis truckers between the end of February and its May 26 issue, and that article didn’t even mention Olson or the April 15 mass meeting.
The CLA organizers had to confront a big problem—most of Local 574’s ranks were FLP voters with massive illusions in the governor, who cultivated his image as a populist spokesman for the working people. When the Organizer began publication on the eve of the third strike, it sought to patiently and pedagogically explain that any intervention by Olson would inevitably be on the side of the bosses. Even before National Guard troops appeared on the street, the union journal demanded their removal:
“Governor Olson, in his statement, said he will not take sides in the strike. But his action in mobilizing a battalion of the National Guard on the first day of the strike—is that not taking sides? Many workers will be keenly disappointed both with the statement and the action of Governor Olson. They voted for him in the firm conviction that he would side with them against the bosses. Union men and women have a right to doubt that anyone can be really neutral in the great struggle between capital and labor. But in any case they expected something more than neutrality from the Farmer-Labor Governor. They expected support of their struggle, not the threat of military force against them.
“That is the only way the mobilization of the National Guard can be understood—as a threat against the strikers.”
—“Troops in Minneapolis—What For?”, Organizer, 18 July 1934
Olson did not declare martial law and bring out the National Guard until after the “Bloody Friday” massacre of strikers by Minneapolis police. On the heels of that violence, the bosses rejected a compromise deal worked out by federal mediators and accepted by the union. Olson’s pretense that he had mobilized the National Guard to “defend” the strikers was quickly blown apart as the Guard indiscriminately issued permits allowing scab trucks to operate. When the union ordered all its members to report for renewed picket duty on August 1, Olson ordered the Guard to raid strike headquarters and arrest those union leaders it could find. The Organizer declared: “Is there one fool who still thinks that Olson’s National Guard is here to help the strikers?” and carried a banner headline “Answer Military Tyranny by a General Protest Strike!”
Olson gambled that he could find non-communist militants in the second tier of strike leaders whom he could coax into settling on terms more favorable to the bosses. That his gambit spectacularly backfired is testimony to just how successful the Organizer and the CLA fraction had been in convincing the ranks that Olson was not their ally. Revolutionary Teamsters includes an amusing account of the governor’s failed discussions with some of the strike picket captains, who refused to negotiate while union leaders remained in jail. Under pressure from the AFL officialdom—which did not want to call a general strike—Olson quickly backtracked, released the arrested leaders of Local 574 and handed back the union its headquarters.
There was a necessary division of labor between the Organizer and the Militant. In the face of Olson’s open strikebreaking, the Organizer (1 August) published a speech by Albert Goldman that declared, “Judging by the Governor’s actions, one is justified in labeling Governor Olson as an enemy of the working class. He has given the bosses hard words and no blows; he has given the workers soft words and hard blows.” The Militant drew the programmatic conclusions:
“The ‘friend of the worker,’ the Farmer-Labor Governor of Minnesota had revealed himself to be the bitterest foe of organized labor, the shrewdest supporter of the bosses....
“Under the pretense of helping the strike, Olson has done his level best to crush it.... Taking a leaf from Hitler’s book this ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ committed the most despotic action American labor has seen in years when he crashed into strike headquarters and jailed strike leaders. His cunning words of support were only slightly more successful than the raw propaganda of the Citizens Alliance and Dan Tobin. This agent of capitalism, like all the rest, needed the mailed fist to get results for the employers....
“Victory or defeat, the curse of the entire labor movement is on Olson. He is forever discredited in the eyes of every worker and honest progressive. The career of Olson as a liberal is over. The curtains that are rung over Olson are rung over the whole gamut of liberalism and Farmer-Laborism.
“Away with it! Clear the road for a revolutionary party of the working class and the overthrow of the rotten system that Olson represents!”
—“A ‘Farmer-Labor’ Strikebreaker,” Militant, 4 August 1934
Olson worked assiduously to re-establish his credentials as a “neutral” arbiter. The Organizer foolishly helped him by demanding that the governor raid Citizens Alliance offices. The populist demagogue duly issued the orders, an act inconceivable to any bourgeois politician in the U.S. today. The enraged Citizens Alliance sued against the continued imposition of martial law, allowing the FLP leader to posture once again as an opponent of the bosses. In turn, both the Organizer and the Militant softened their portrayal of Olson. Hugo Oehler wrote in the Militant:
“The Farmer Labor Governor of Minnesota is pressed between two warring camps—between the workers and the capitalists, represented by Local 574, and by the Citizen’s Alliance. Whoever exerts the greatest pressure will force this radical petty-bourgeois to alter his course.”
—“Once Again on the Role of Governor Olson,” Militant, 18 August 1934
However, Oehler also pointed to the FLP alliance with Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and claimed that, in making demands on Olson, the leaders of Local 574 had simply made use of “division within the camp of the enemy.”
The Organizer bent even further, portraying Olson as responsible not to the capitalists whose state apparatus he helped administer but to the voters who elected him:
“There is absolutely nothing strange in the fact that the Governor has made some concessions to this working class pressure. As Governor of the state he wields a great power, but it is by no means a completely independent personal power. As a Farmer-Labor Governor he is obliged to depend on the support of the farmers and the organized workers. They put him in office and they should not be the least bit bashful in presenting demands to him. He can ignore them only by committing political suicide.”
At the same time, the union reiterated its determination to use the power of the picket line and not rely on the governor:
“Feeble efforts are being made in certain quarters—even in the upper circles of the organized labor movement—to ‘whitewash’ Governor Olson. It is being explained that his military raid on our headquarters and the arrest of our leaders and members were meant to ‘help’ the strikers....
“Nobody is going to fool us with such treacherous reasoning. Nothing will induce us to relax our vigilance and rely on the friendship of Governor Olson or anybody else to win our battle for us. We are going to rely now in this critical period, as in the past, on our own strength and on the sympathy and solidarity of our fellow workers and brother unionists. That, and that alone, is the power that will bring us victory.”
—“The Road to Victory,” Organizer, 4 August 1934
The ranks held out in the subsequent war of attrition, winning a stunning victory against the formerly invulnerable Citizens Alliance.
On the whole, the CLA proved tactically adept and principled in its handling of Olson during the strike. But the propagandistic softening toward the end reflected an attenuated understanding of the class nature of the Farmer-Labor Party. The Militant variously labeled the mercurial governor a “liberal” or a “petty-bourgeois radical.” The Organizer tended to treat him as the representative of a reformist workers party. But never did the CLA characterize him as what he was—a demagogic capitalist politician who headed a bourgeois-populist third party, a problem correctly noted by Palmer.
This failure was a political reversion from the early CLA’s recognition that there is a qualitative difference between a party that bases itself on the working class and claims to stand independently of the capitalist parties, even if it has a pro-capitalist leadership like the British Labour Party at the time, and a two-class populist party like the Minnesota FLP. More research is needed as to when and how the CLA took this political step backward.
Palmer reasonably proposes that the lack of a slogan calling for a genuine labor party handcuffed the CLA in winning workers to a principled alternative to the trans-class Farmer-Labor Party. The Spartacist League raises the call for a workers party as a propagandistic and algebraic way to pose the need for the working class to break with the capitalist parties and fight for a workers government. At its Second Congress in September 1931 the CLA, with Trotsky’s support, had dropped from its program the demand for a labor party. There was at the time little vibrancy in the AFL unions, which were firmly under the control of the pro-capitalist bureaucrats. The direction of any future working-class upsurge remained unclear. Since the Trotskyists considered themselves an expelled faction of the Communist Party, the labor party slogan would have been understood by the Stalinist ranks as a call for a renewed reformist party like the SP.
By 1934, the situation was beginning to change. However, the lack of a workers party slogan did not prevent the CLA from clearly counterposing a revolutionary party of the working class to Olson and his FLP, as the Militant editorial quoted above clearly illustrates. In 1933, Trotsky’s supporters internationally had begun to call for new workers parties and a new, Fourth International to replace the bankrupt Stalinist Communist International.
In the U.S., moves to fuse with A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party (which led the victorious 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike) had been proposed even before the July-August Minneapolis strike; the Workers Party of the United States was founded at the end of the year. Governor Olson was up for re-election that fall, and the CLA did not support the FLP or any SP or CP candidate, instead calling for support to the new Workers Party then in the process of formation. Neither did the Organizer endorse any candidates; in an October 10 editorial, it warned against unnamed demagogues who “make promises to labor which they do not intend to keep,” which could only have been understood as a reference to Olson.
Opportunist Support to FLP from 1935
If the CLA did not support Olson and his FLP in the 1934 Minnesota elections, neither did the Militant polemicize against the Minnesota third party. In contrast, the Militant derisively dismissed Upton Sinclair’s “progressive” campaign for California governor on the Democratic Party ticket. The program of the new Workers Party declared: “At present the Farmer-Labor party movement in this country is weak and inconsequential,” saying nothing about the very consequential Minnesota FLP (Militant, 27 October 1934).
A few months later, in May 1935, the Workers Party went on to cross the class line in a blatant opportunist adaptation, supporting the FLP slate in the Minneapolis municipal elections, in which the FLP mayoral candidate Thomas Latimer narrowly defeated the hated Republican incumbent A.J. Bainbridge. From this point until the FLP merged with the Democratic Party, the American Trotskyists treated the FLP like a reformist workers party.
Latimer would prove himself to be just as bloody a strikebreaker as Bainbridge. But the Trotskyists worked within the FLP for most of the rest of the decade, engaging in an unprincipled struggle against CP supporters for control of this Democratic Party stand-in. These events are outside the scope of Palmer’s book, and he mentions them only tangentially, noting they merit further research. We concur, though Farrell Dobbs’s Teamster Politics (the third of three books he wrote on the Trotskyist work in the Teamsters union) sketches the outlines of this capitulation pretty clearly, if dishonestly, since Dobbs claims that the policy of critical support to FLP candidates went back to the early CLA.
While the SWP continued to assert that the Minnesota FLP was a “genuine labor party” even after it merged with the Democratic Party in 1944, the Trotskyists under Cannon’s leadership drew back from flirtations with bourgeois third parties in 1948, when the National Committee debated and decisively rejected support to the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Correctly declaring Wallace’s Stalinist-backed Progressive Party to be a “capitalist splinter party unworthy of critical support by the revolutionary workers,” the SWP decided to run its own candidates for U.S. president and vice president. (The Spartacist League now views running for executive office in the bourgeois state to be a violation of Marxist principle, but the Trotskyist movement at the time did not hold this position; see “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist No. 61, Spring 2009.)
It’s obvious, as Palmer observes, that the Trotskyists’ support to the Minnesota FLP paved the way for their increasing nationwide tendency to politically adapt to the pro-Roosevelt AFL union officialdom, with whom they often blocked against the Stalinists. Trotsky noted this tendency in his 1940 discussions with SWP leaders, including Cannon and Dobbs:
“You are afraid to become compromised in the eyes of the Rooseveltian trade unionists. They on the other hand are not worried in the slightest about being compromised by voting for Roosevelt against you.... If you are afraid, you lose your independence and become half-Rooseveltian. In peacetimes this is not catastrophic. In wartimes it will compromise us. They can smash us. Our policy is too much for the pro-Rooseveltian trade unionists.”
—“Discussions with Trotsky” (12-15 June 1940), printed in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40)
Trotsky’s words were indeed prophetic, as is clear from Revolutionary Teamsters’ chapter on the 1940 witchhunt in which the U.S. government—aided and abetted by Teamsters president Daniel Tobin—wrested the Minneapolis Teamsters local from its Trotskyist leadership. Palmer makes use of new research on how the Roosevelt administration railroaded Ray Dunne, Skoglund and 16 others, including Cannon and Albert Goldman, into prison for opposing World War II. Determined to enter the interimperialist slaughter and fight for their own world primacy, there is no way the U.S. ruling class was going to tolerate communists committed to working-class internationalism in the leadership of a major trade union. The outcome was predetermined by the absence of broader revolutionary working-class struggle.
Nonetheless, by supporting the FLP, the Trotskyist Teamsters leaders seriously undercut their ability to build a base in the union for the kind of independent working-class political action against the capitalists and their parties that they formally stood for. Rather than pointing to this programmatic capitulation, Palmer finds fault with the failure to build caucuses based on the Transitional Program in the far-flung locals created during the Teamsters’ Northwest over-the-road organizing campaign, which the Trotskyists masterminded (with the cooperation, briefly, of Tobin).
In this, Palmer echoes the line of a series of articles based on partial and now-dated research by Chris Knox that were published in early issues of Workers Vanguard. These articles were subsequently reprinted by the embittered clot of ex-Spartacists and their hangers-on calling themselves the Bolshevik Tendency (BT). The BT has long screamed that the Spartacist League has abandoned the trade unions in favor of “community organizing.” These fakers were to be found nowhere near the successful series of labor-centered anti-fascist demonstrations that the SL initiated in the early 1980s, which kept the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, for a time, from rallying in Northern cities. Drawing a hard separation between the black plebeian masses and the working class, the BT views the Labor Black Leagues that we initiated in the early 1980s as a diversion from “trade-union work.”
Palmer follows the BT in fetishizing the organizational form of the trade-union caucus. But the caucus is not the fundamental vehicle for communist work in the trade unions. That role is reserved for the fraction of party members. The fraction is strategic, the caucus episodic. Whether or not to form a caucus is a tactical question, usually depending on whether or not there exist broader forces with whom the fraction can bloc on key issues in order to fight for leadership in the union. In the absence of Trotskyist branches with functioning fractions, caucuses within the Northwest Teamster locals would quickly have gone astray.
The Necessity of Work in the Unions
The 1934 Teamsters strikes broke the back of the Citizens Alliance and made Minneapolis a union town. The impact was such that, some 40 years later, a high-level police official responded to a complaint about double-parked trucks with the observation: “Since 1934, we don’t question anything the Teamsters do” (quoted in Philip A. Korth, The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, 1995). No more.
Yet another 40 years have passed, during which a one-sided class war has eroded the organization, wages and benefits that working people wrested from the bourgeois rulers in the momentous class battles of the 1930s and the immediate post-WWII period. There are no union towns left. Non-union shops and “temporary” contract workers are legion, even in industries that were once union, like trucking and warehouse. Wages are poverty-level for huge portions of the American working class, and worse for the marginalized populations of the ghettos and barrios kept under the jackboot of cop terror.
A central obstacle to the necessary mobilization of working men and women to fight in their own interests now, as in 1934, is the pro-capitalist labor fakers who sit atop what remains of the unions, bowing to every anti-labor law and Supreme Court decision, channeling the discontent that roils beneath the surface of U.S. society into the dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. Palmer addresses the current abject state of American class struggle in his last chapter, attempting to draw lessons from 1934. But his effort is marred by jargon reflecting the fads and fancies of what passes for Marxist discourse in academia and dated by his preoccupation with 2011’s Occupy movement, which went the way of most petty-bourgeois protest movements in America, dissolving into electoral pressure politics. In Occupy’s case, this meant support for Barack Obama around the 2012 presidential elections. Trotskyists would do better to contemplate the words of James P. Cannon:
“The purposeful activism of the educated socialists must be directed primarily into the trade unions precisely because they are the immediate connecting link with a broader circle of workers and therefore the most fruitful field of activity. When the socialist idea is carried into the workers’ mass organizations by the militant activists, and takes root there, a profound influence is exerted upon these organizations. They become more aware of their class interest and their historic mission, and grow in militancy and solidarity and effectiveness in their struggle against the exploiters.
“At the same time, the party gains strength from the live mass contact, finds a constant corrective for tactical errors under the impact of the class struggle and steadily draws new proletarian recruits into its ranks. In the trade-union struggle the party tests and corrects itself in action. It hardens and grows up to the level of its historic task as the workers’ vanguard in the coming revolution.”
—“Deeper Into the Unions,” Labor Action, 5 December 1936 (reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator)
