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

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 oeuvre 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.” (7) 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 (ibt) in Minneapolis deserve, as well as a brilliant rebuke to the forgetting of history.

A few pages into this meticulously crafted and captivating reconstruction of the events leading to the historic Minneapolis General Strike of the early Great Depression, the author observes that the Trotskyist/teamster bond crucial to the building of Local 574 is a “seemingly incongruous alliance.” (10) An activist himself, Palmer appreciates that models matter, particularly ones ill-treated by preceding scholars. The marvelously rendered tale that follows uses his capacious talents and exemplary evidentiary standards to explain how this hitherto undervalued partnership “advanced the agenda of the working class and helped to establish 1934 as one of the unforgettable years of labour-upsurge in America.” (10) Twenty lively and fluent chapters provide extraordinary glimpses into each stage of the proletarian uprising that transformed the city and the union; a final two review and assess the political afterlife of Minneapolis Trotskyism up to the early 1940s.

Through the scrim of memory, the role of the Far Left in building industrial unions may be difficult to appraise in light of the present-day disorganized condition of the working class in the United States. Among much of the general public, Communism is little more than a boo word. Labour historians, however, are obliged by empirical evidence to provide more judicious treatments and there are some classics such as Bert Cochran’s Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions.¹ Much less discernable is the Trotskyist presence in working-class history, usually restricted to the three Minneapolis strikes addressed by Palmer and subject to sustained attention only in a handful of book-length studies that remain (unfortunately) relatively marginal in the academic field: Charles R. Walker’s American City, Farrell Dobbs’ Teamster Rebellion, and Philip A. Korth’s The Minneapolis Teamster Strike of 1934.²

Regrettably, the Minneapolis events and their Trotskyist leadership receive no mention at all in the most prized books about American radicalism, Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left and Michael Kazin’s Radical Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, or even Eli Zaretsky’s recent Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument.³ One volume sympathetic to the Communist perspective, Fraser M. Ottanelli’s The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II, actually mentions the strikes without using the dangerous T-word.⁴ As Palmer suggests, the perception of Minneapolis as epitomizing an “incongruous alliance” is the effect of an eighty-year battle over inherited images of the radical legacy: “This book has a purposively mischievous title … about people whom we now have difficulty imagining.” (2)

Historians out of the long New Left romanticize the Communist movement, due to the undeniable heroism and antiracism of its rank and file. Contemporary liberals, and those farther to the Right, are...