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Reviewed by:
  • Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 by Bryan D. Palmer
  • Claire Goldstene
Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934
Bryan D. Palmer
Boston: Brill, 2013
x + 308 pp., $167 (cloth)

Like most historical monographs, Bryan D. Palmer’s Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 focuses on a specific series of events in order to make a set of broader points. But unlike many historical monographs, he seems less preoccupied with historiographical debates than with connecting historical events explicitly to the present. Palmer elucidates the successful unionizing effort among truckers in Minneapolis during the midst of the Depression to identify lessons about the possibilities and practicality of building progressive social movements in political moments seemingly inimical to such developments. Here, Palmer engages with methodological considerations related to the pursuit and uses of historical memory and embraces, rather than retreats from, the inherent political nature of such endeavors. In telling the detailed story of the 1934 General Truck Drivers’ strikes, a narrative built on rigorous scholarship, Palmer suggests an organizational model for current labor activists at a time of severe economic inequality, historically low union density, and when defeats for workers seem much more frequent than victories.

Burdened by the weight of the Depression, frustrated by the limited reach of early New Deal programs, and energized by mass strikes across the country, truckers in Minneapolis successfully built an industrial, militant union, led by self-identified Trotskyists. They did so in defiance of the craft-based conservatism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Teamsters hierarchy and in a city considered a bastion of the open shop. Palmer convincingly credits the sophisticated leadership at the helm of the campaign as essential to this achievement. Beyond his central focus on identifying lessons from the past for present-day application, Palmer counters a perception of Trotskyists as “ineffectual in the real world of politics and labour-struggle” because they viewed workers only as “abstract agents of revolutionary transformation.” In contrast, Palmer portrays the leaders of Local 574 as innovative organizers and clever strategists who recognized the need to “harness the militancy of the masses” and took advantage of cleavages among the ruling class to attain immediate gains as necessary for the advancement of future “revolutionary possibilities” (221, 4, 117). Yet they simultaneously recognized the limits of what could be achieved in the given historical moment. Palmer especially admires the ability of these Trotskyists to successfully head a union composed of a rank-and-file less radical than themselves. This relationship between the principal organizers and members—what he terms the “dialectic of leaders and led”—constituted an integral component of the truckers’ achievement in Minneapolis (221). The implication throughout the book, and explicitly commented upon in the final chapter, is the importance of leaders who have both a long- and a short-term vision for a social movement. [End Page 123]

Palmer highlights two of Local 574’s tactics as critical to gaining union recognition and for augmenting its strength during the intense and violent strikes that occurred in May and July 1934. Through determined organizing efforts, the union forged alliances among the swelling ranks of the unemployed and also enjoyed the support of a strong women’s auxiliary, which Palmer describes as not merely an appendage to the work of the men but an essential component of the class struggle. Further, local union leaders, in defiance of the strict craft-based distinctions that characterized the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), sought to build an inclusive, industrially based union that welcomed “inside workers”: those whose labor connected them critically to that of the truckers, such as warehousemen, dock and truck loaders, dispatchers, and clerks (66). According to Palmer, the exclusivity of craft-based unionism, alongside the weak and ineffectual leadership of the Teamsters in Minneapolis—“labour’s very failures”—created an opening through which walked the Trotskyists, who then fully exploited the opportunity to advance a more radical, and more successful, organizing model (33). This analysis serves Palmer’s interest in identifying specific lessons from the past, especially those that can guide the development of a progressive, and possibly radical, social movement in a seemingly inhospitable context...

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