Farrell Dobbs and Marvel Scholl

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Strikers battle police during 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers' strike. Farrell Dobbs became one of the leaders of the Teamsters local in that city. 10 Socialist Action May 1984 Farrell Dobbs, who died Oct. 31, 1983, at the age of 76, was a leader of the historic Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934. Secretary-treasurer of Local 574, Dobbs played an instrumental role in the mass organizing drive that established Minneapolis as a union town. He went on to lead the first overthe-road organizing campaign in the Midwest that recruited tens of thousands of members to the union, laying the basis for-the emergence of the Teamsters union as a major force in the labor movement. In 1934 Dobbs joined the Communist League of America. The CLA, which was a predecessor of the Socialist Workers Party, was affiliated with the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Dobbs was one of 18 leaders of the SWP jailed under the notorious Smith Act during World War II. He was the SWP presidential candidate four times from 1948 to 1960 and was SWP national secretary from 1953 to 1972. Dobbs is the author of a four-volume series on the history of the Teamsters union and two books on the history of the revolutionary movement in the United States.

Marvel Scholl died Feb. 13, 1984, at the age of 76. She also joined the CLA in 1934 and was a member of the SWP at the time of her death. Scholl was a leader of the Ladies Auxiliary of Local 574 during the Teamster strikes and a staff member of Federal Workers Section, the unemployed organization affiliated with the union. She wrote a column for the Northwest Organizer, the daily newspaper put out by the striking drivers, and was a frequent writer for the SWP's newspaper The Militant.

Socialist Action offers this tribute to Farrell Dobbs and Marvel Scholl by Shaun Maloney, a leader of the Minneapolis strikes and a long-time friend of Dobbs and Scholl.

A tribute to Farrell Dobbs and Marvel Scholl is a phenomenal task. How does one illustrate in one article the tremendous accomplishments of these two people covering 50 years of activity on behalf of the working class?

I had been a member of the drivers union in Minneapolis for about four years when I first became acquainted with Carl Skoglund in the winter of 1930-31. It was Carl Skoglund who no doubt was a mentor to Farrell. I consider Carl the person responsible, in the first instance, for the success of the union. In 1932, Carl first outlined to me the fundamental concept of organizing the Teamsters on an industrial areawide basis. It was Farrell, however, who put it all together.

First met Farrell In the late summer of 1933 I met Farrell Dobbs for the first time at our union meeting. Farrell posed some critical questions to the business agent, Cliff Hall. Hall did not respond very well, and Farrell was a little disgusted. Later he and Grant Dunne came back to the meetings. Farrell worked at his job in the coal yard of the Pittsburgh Coal Company all day and late into the evenings. Like many of us whatever time he had left he volunteered to building the I did not see Farrell on a day-to-day basis because the company I worked for did some long-distance hauling and I was frequently away from the city. In this period, however, Farrell had become a very active supporter of the After the coal strike in February 1934 was settled, the organization of the general drivers began. It was just a couple of weeks after the strike was over that Farrell began volunteering his services full-time to the union. At the rate men were joining the union, it was difficult to tell from one day to the next how many members the union had.

After the May strike was over the employers refused to live up to the agreement. So it was necessary to develop plans to strike to enforce the agreement. The union now had grown by tremendous numbers. Ray Dunne, Carl Skoglund, Miles Dunne, Farrell Dobbs, and Grant Dunne were paid a small salary to carry on the strategic work of the union. And then, of course, came the third strike, the July strike. That was a very intense, violent period.

During the period of the coal strike, the top committee of the three strikes consisted of Carl Skoglund, Ray Dunne, Bill Brown, Miles Dunne, and Grant Dunne. Here the democracy and involvement of the ranks in all decisions proved to Farrell the soundness of the program of this group. With the exception of Bill Brown, all were members of the Communist League. This experience, Farrell told me, is what convinced him to devote the rest of his life to the Shortly after the end of the third strike, Farrell was elected secretary-treasurer of Local 574. This period was, in my opinion, the time of Farrell's greatest contribution to the union (and to the movement as well). He proved his extraordinary talents. It was Farrell who pulled the union together in 1934 in the face of almost insurmountable odds. In my opinion, absolutely without doubt, no one could have pulled or kept the union together, resolved the financial problems, and maintained the secretary's office as Farrell did. And that meant being there night and day as needed to aid the union.

The record of events from 1933 until 1940 has been excellently documented in the four books that Farrell wrote on the Teamsters. Anyone who has not read them should do so. They will inspire those in the movement today and will continue to inspire people for years to come. If there is anything paramount in these books it is the low-key, almost humble way Farrell accounts for his participation. It is a further example of his greatness and how he believed in team play and involving others in the struggles. This trait served him in good stead during the campaign to organize the line drivers.

Directs area campaign

I want to discuss briefly another great accomplishment-the area campaign. After our return to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in late 1936, Farrell directed the organization of the 11-state committee, in his capacity as a general organizer appointed by Daniel Tobin, president of the IBT. All the efforts that Tobin had used against us from 1934 to 1936 were forgotten by Tobin because of Farrell's ability as an organizer and the tremendous increase in membership of the IBT. The contracts that later changed the Teamster unions from provincial little posts into the largest union in the world (via the concept of the area council form of organization and contract negotiation) are testimony to the great talent of Farrell Dobbs.

I worked with him in that period for three years up until the day that he resigned from the international staff of the Teamsters union. I recall that I was in Omaha, Nebraska, having breakfast with Farrell in the Rome Hotel when he told me, "Jack, I'm going in to Indianapolis tomorrow, and I'm going to offer my resignation to Tobin"' I had anticipated this because we had had many serious discussions about the obvious war preparations underway during Roosevelt's second administration. The pell-mell, almost frantic efforts to involve America in the war should have been clear to everyone. Tobin was on the Democratic National Committee and in step to Roosevelt's war drums. Farrell knew that sooner or later his opinions against war would surface and a sharp confrontation would ensue. Farrell could not, would not, be a party to this mad scramble to involve the United States in a war to save capitalism. Teamsters union. There is no question in my mind that he would have been a later-date president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

My recollections here must not be considered adulation or hero worship but, more properly, an outline of my association of many, many years with a man who I consider has no parallel. A man who was able to learn from everyone. A man who could impart his knowledge to all. A man whose efforts made the lives of so many people so much better. A great, humble man who understood cooperation and teamwork, and utilized it every day of his life.

Marvel organizes women

At the beginning of the organizational drive in 1934 Farrell and his wife Marvel had three small children. Because of the very nature of what we were trying to do, Marvel and Farrell had very little money. Marvel not only had the duties of a homemaker and a mother, but she also played a very important role in the 1934 strike, organizing the women into what became the Ladies Auxiliary of Local 574.

The women played a very important role in the period of strife that summer in Minneapolis. The women organized and maintained the strike headquarters and helped to administer aid to the countless numbers of families who were impoverished as a result of the strike. The women put their efforts into forcing the city council to grant strikers city relief, to assist strikers in their medical problems, to assist them in the day-to-day personal relationships that had become very hectic as a result of the tension and the uncertainty of the strike.

Marvel became one of the leaders, if not the leader, of the Ladies Auxiliary during this period. Marvel Scholl and Clara Dunne, in particular, devoted their efforts to organizing the unemployed in support of the strike, countering the great danger that the jobless might become involved as strikebreakers. To this end the union, as soon as the strike was over, formally set up a section of the union that was known as the Federal Workers Section of Local 574. Marvel played a very important and essential role in this development.

Now there was another problem which Marvel never spoke about that I know was of tremendous importance and consequence to her. Pat Corcoran, secretary of the Milk Wagon Drivers Union and secretary of the Teamsters Joint Council, developed a very close working and personal relationship with Farrell. And Farrell was able to convince Pat to become a real ally of our efforts to establish an industrial organization of the Teamsters. In November 1937, Pat Corcoran was assassinated His murderers were never apprehended. And then in May 1938, Bill Brown, (continued on page 9, in “[Does U.S. "national security" really require this? The…]”)

Farrell Dobbs and James P. Cannon, founder of the Socialist Workers Party.

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Trudeau is touring the world with his Peace Initiative. It's a position which, of course, very wrongly lays the blame in equal proportion on the imperialist camp and on the leadership of the bureaucratized workers' states for the nuclear buildup and the war drive. So