Farrell Dobbs
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Farrell Dobbs (July 25, 1907 – October 31, 1983) was an American Trotskyist politician and trade unionist.
Born in Queen City, Missouri, where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall. At this point, young Farrell Dobbs was a conservative Republican and supported Herbert Hoover for President. However, his political viewpoint was changed during the Great Depression in the 1930's. Seeing the plight of workers in that situation (including himself), he became politically radicalized to the left.
In 1933, while working for the Pittsburgh Coal Company in Minneapolis, Dobbs joined the Teamsters and after getting to know the three Trotskyites Dunne brothers, (Miles, Vincent & Grant Dunne) and Swedish socialist Carl Skoglund, he joined the Communist League of America. Dobbs was one of the initiators of a general strike in Minneapolis, and for a while worked full-time as a union organiser, but quit in 1939 to work for the new Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Just like the SWP leader, James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs became a personal friend of the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who he visited in Mexico shortly before the latter's death in 1940.
For opposing World War II, he and other leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters were convicted of violating the Smith Act, which made it illegal to "conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of the US Government." He served over a year in Sandstone Prison during the end of World War II (1944-1945).
After his release, he became the editor of the SWP's newspaper, The Militant. From 1948 to 1960 he was the SWP's candidate for President of the United States, and succeeded James P. Cannon as national secretary of the party in 1953. He retired in 1972 and remained in the party even after it expelled large numbers of Trotskyists under Jack Barnes' leadership.
Dobbs was the author of a four-volume history/memoir of the Minneapolis struggles, Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics & Teamster Bureaucracy, and had completed two volumes of a planned history of the Marxist movement in the United States at the time of his death, called Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years, 1848-1917 & Birth of the Communist Movement, 1918-1922.
External links
- The Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (http://www.themilitant.com)
- Pathfinder Books, the bookstore of the Socialist Workers Party (http://www.pathfinderpress.com)