Farrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist, trade unionist, politician, and historian.
13 Facts About Farrell Dobbs
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At this point, young Farrell Dobbs was a Republican, and supported Herbert Hoover for president in 1928.
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In 1933, while working for the Pittsburgh Coal Company in Minneapolis, Farrell Dobbs joined the Teamsters.
4.
Farrell Dobbs was one of the initiators of a general strike in Minneapolis, and for a while worked full-time as a union organizer.
5.
Farrell Dobbs was influential in the Teamsters' shift from emphasis on local delivery work to over-the-road traffic, which keyed their great expansion towards becoming the largest union in the United States.
6.
Farrell Dobbs quit in 1939 to work for the new Socialist Workers Party.
7.
Farrell Dobbs met the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky when he visited Mexico shortly before Trotsky's death in 1940.
8.
Farrell Dobbs served as mentor and advisor to a young Jimmy Hoffa, while Hoffa was making his rise within the Teamsters, eventually becoming its president in 1957.
9.
Farrell Dobbs primarily inspired Hoffa with his view that the capitalist system was a Darwinian struggle, where power, rather than morality, was the primary factor determining the eventual outcome.
10.
Farrell Dobbs served over a year in Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, from 1944 to 1945.
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Farrell Dobbs succeeded James P Cannon as national secretary of the party in 1953, serving until 1972.
12.
Farrell Dobbs retired in 1972, but remained in the party until his death in 1983.
13.
Farrell Dobbs devoted the later part of his life to historical documentation of the American leftist movement and the Minnesota Teamsters.