Farrell
Dobbs, the son of a coal miner, was born in Queen City, Missouri in
1907. After being educated at North High School in Minneapolis he
moved to North Dakota in search of work. At this time he held conservative
political views and supported the Republican
Party and
in 1928 voted for Herbert
Hoover.
Dobbs
worked for the Pittsburgh Coal Company in Minneapolis and as a member
of the Teamsters became involved in an industrial dispute in 1934.
Dobbs was radicalized by the strike and soon afterwards joined the
Communist
League of America,
a organization influenced by the ideas of
Leon Trotsky.
In 1936
Dobbs became recording secretary of Teamsters Local 574 and by the
following year it had 125,000 members. Eventually the president of
the Teamsters, Dan Tobin, recruited Dobbs as a national organizer
but in 1939 he decided to work full-time for the Socialist
Workers Party
(SWP).
Dobbs travelled
to Mexico to meet Leon
Trotsky
in 1940. Soon after arriving back in the United
States he was arrested
under the Alien
Registration Act.
He was detained in Sandstone Prison and was not released until after
the end of the Second World War.
After
his release Dobbs became editor of The Militant
and replaced James
Cannon as
national secretary of the Socialist
Workers Party in 1953.
Dobbs
was the SWP's presidential candidate in 1960 but received only 60,166
votes. He retired as the SWP's national secretary in 1972 and died
on 31st October, 1983.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
