Dobbs, Farrell

DOBBS, FARRELL (1907–1983). Best known as a talented trade union organizer—particularly in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)—and as a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which sought to apply the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky to US conditions, Farrell Dobbs was born in Queen City, Missouri. The son of lower-level manager in the coal industry, he began his political career as a registered Republican and supporter of Herbert Hoover. His thinking changed during the Great Depression, however, and his first contact with left-wing ideas occurred in 1933, when he became involved in Teamsters Local 574 while working as a coal heaver at the Pittsburgh Coal Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Key activists in the local were the well-known Dunne brothers (Vincent R., Miles, and Grant) and Carl Skoglund, all of whom were seasoned veterans of the Industrial Workers of the World, socialist and communist movements, and were Trotskyists. Admiring the leadership these activists displayed in a successful coal strike in early 1934, Dobbs decided to join the Minneapolis branch of the Communist League of America, which was the forerunner of the SWP.

The Dunne brothers and Skoglund went on to initiate the Minneapolis Teamsters strike of 1934; the struggle turned into a militant general strike that ultimately made Minneapolis a union town. Dobbs was centrally involved in this struggle as chief picket dispatcher, helping to pioneer techniques such as the “flying wedge” that were instrumental in the workers’ victory. In 1935 Dobbs and his comrades fought off attempts by IBT president Dan Tobin to drive the Trotskyists out of Local 574. Reconstituted as Local 544, the Teamsters local elected Dobbs as its recording secretary.

Dobbs played an important role in Teamster organizing drives of 1936 and 1937, which drew into the IBT 125,000 new members covered by a pioneering master contract over an eleven-state area. The impact and success of the Trotskyist organizers moved Tobin to hire Dobbs as an IBT staffer in 1939, though he resigned the following year to devote his energies to working as the SWP’s trade union director. During this period he journeyed to Mexico to discuss issues facing the labor and socialist movements with Leon Trotsky. Convicted under the first Smith Act trial, in 1941, he served thirteen months in Sandstone Prison in 1944–1945 for defending revolutionary socialist ideas.

Dobbs was an increasingly prominent leader of the SWP. An editor of the weekly Militant from 1943 to 1948, he became the party’s first candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1948 (and again in 1952, 1956, and 1960). He and Tom Kerry—a veteran from the SWP’s maritime faction—became the organization’s central figures during the 1950s, after party leader James P. Cannon went into semi-retirement. Dobbs served as the SWP’s national chairman from 1949 to 1953 and as its national secretary until 1972. Between 1972 and 1977 the organization published his valuable four-volume history of the Teamster struggles, although after the mid-1970s he became relatively inactive in party work. Dobbs spent his last ten years in California.

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald. Trotskyism in the United States. Chicago: Haymarket Books, Reprint Edition, 2016 [1996].

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad, 1972.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Power. New York: Monad, 1973.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Politics. New York: Monad, 1975.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Bureaucracy. New York: Monad, 1977.