By Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action. Remarks at the St. Paul, Minnesota Dave Riehle memorial meeting, Eastside Freedom Library, Feb. 17, 2024.
[Editor’s note: Some 125 family, friends, comrades, trade union and socialist collaborators joined in celebrating Dave Riehle’s life on February 17, 2024. We reprint below a slightly expanded version of Jeff Mackler’s remarks, read by former Socialist Action member, Lisa Luinenberg. Mackler was unable to attend due to a last-minute health emergency. Some 10 speakers shared their memories of Dave Riehle, including his brother Jeremy, his former companion of some four decades, Gladys, Peter Rachleff, Co-Executive Director of the East Side Freedom Library and retired professor of history at Macalester College, and former Socialist Action member and longtime friend of Dave, Lisa Luinenberg. A video of the memorial was prepared and will be made available in a future post at socialistaction.org. We also include below an article by Dave written 15 years ago, on the historic 1934 Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamster Strike, the 90th commemoration of which Dave and others were in the process of planning.]
Above all, Dave Riehle, 76, was a lifelong revolutionary socialist in the tradition of Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and James P. Cannon.
In a nutshell, Dave believed that all the evils that everyone here today decry – racism, sexism, LBGTQI discrimination, endless wars, non-stop attacks on civil and democratic rights, poverty, worker oppression and exploitation – are inherent in the capitalist system.
That system, Dave insisted for a lifetime, had to be abolished via a massive revolutionary majority movement of the working class and its allies… a movement led by a mass revolutionary socialist party deeply rooted in all vital social struggles.
Dave spent his entire political life building that party. He was a member of Socialist Action’s leading bodies, its National Committee and Political Committee, until the day he was struck down and hospitalized during the Christmas holidays by his second stroke.
Dave first joined the Socialist Workers Party as a youthful railroad engineer and switchman, where he worked for 31 years.
He was elected Local Chairman of the United Transportation Union Local 650 for 20 years – re-elected five consecutive times – and later as its Chair Emeritus. He also served as an Executive Board member of the St. Paul, Minnesota Trades and Labor Association, AFL-CIO.
Dave was educated in the James P. Cannon school of the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist party that Dave joined in the early 1970s. The SWP led the historic 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike, 90 years ago, that made Minneapolis a union town and set an historic standard for labor militancy, union democracy, solidarity and class struggle trade unionism.
Cannon’s party in Minneapolis, at that that called the Communist League of America, was central to the successful fight against the bosses, their political parties, the Franklin Roosevelt government, the police and National Guard, the notorious boss-led Citizen’s Alliance and its thugs, and at times the Teamster bureaucracy itself. Minneapolis Teamsters won historic collective bargaining rights and contracts that pioneered the road to industrial unionism and the CIO in the United States.
Dave’s Twin Cities mentors were the leaders of that strike, including Carl Skoglund and V R. (Ray) Dunne, and the Dunne Brothers, Miles and Grant; Farrell Dobbs, Harry DeBoer and Jack Maloney. Young Jake Cooper, who later went to Coyoacan, Mexico to help physically defend Trotsky, was also an active participant in the 1934 Teamster strikes. All were later arrested and imprisoned in the infamous 1941 Smith Act witchhunt trials that imprisoned 17 of the SWP’s central leaders at Minnesota’s Sandstone Prison for 18 months.
Cannon’s “Socialism on Trial” account of that episode laid out the basic principles of defense of civil liberties and democratic rights that Dave lived by for a lifetime.
When the SWP, some fifty years later in the early 1980s, retreated from its historic revolutionary socialist politics, Dave joined the SWP’s internal opposition in fighting to reclaim the SWP’s Trotskyist politics, first as a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT), led by the SWP’s trade union director, Frank Lovell and the 1930’s -1940’s SWP militant and Malcolm X biographer, George Breitman.
In 1990 Dave and several of his FIT comrades, rejoined Socialist Action and contributed immensely to its political engagement and activity.
As I reviewed my correspondence with Dave over the past 25 years, via some 100 email exchanges, they revealed a comrade passionate about every social and political struggle of the times.
Dave was an avid defender of Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, who was unjustly pilloried as an anti-Semite three years ago for her defense of Palestinian rights. He was an active supporter of the present defense campaigns of Julian Assange and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Dave staunchly opposed the US-backed fascist-led 2014 coup in Ukraine that placed in power a fascist dominated coup government that proceeded to slaughter the Russian language speaking population in Ukraine’s East and South.
Dave helped expose the US role in the obliteration of the Nordstream Pipeline, a multi-billion dollar US imperialist move to substitute US-fracked liquid natural gas for Russia’s cheaper and nearby supplies, yet another US oil war.
Dave opposed the US/NATO/Gulf State monarchy war against Syria that slaughtered 500,000 Syrians.
In addition his trade union and revolutionary socialist engagements, Dave was a labor historian and journalist, regularly contributing and researching for the Minnesota Historical Society, the Ramsey County History magazine and other labor and research groups.
Dave sent me in 2013, an article he wrote in for Workday Minnesota, the online publication of the Minnesota AFL-CIO. He stated that his article, “Analyzes in depth the continuing factors of unrestrained greed and negligence that created the unthinkable catastrophe when a runaway train carrying heavy, fracked crude oil derailed in the small town of Lac Megantic, Ontario, killing upwards of 50 people.” He added, “I am presently writing an updated piece on the two current disastrous derailments in the state of Ohio, and explaining how the same mad scramble for profits by the railroad robber barons is again responsible for an enormous environmental and human catastrophe.”
That was yet another expression of Dave’s passion in everything he wrote, from defense of the Cuban Revolution, to pillorying the trade union bureaucracy for its capitulation to Biden’s recent smashing of the national railroad strike, to helping to organize a Socialist Action webinar against yet another US war in Haiti, to marching in antiwar demonstrations of the Minnesota Peace Action coalition, to hailing the mass French mobilizations of 2 million workers against the government’s “pension reform,” to denouncing a Hyundai subsidiary using child labor at an Alabama factory. Dave rarely missed an opportunity to expose capitalist’s endless horrors, including the present US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza.
No point was too small to escape Dave’s quick mind and incisive comments. In response to an article I wrote entitled, “Hoisted on His Own Petard: Biden’s Hidden Classified Documents Set to Expose U.S. Instigation of 2014 Ukraine Coup,” Dave wrote:
“Not to be picky, but it’s “the engineer hoist by his own petar.” Dave explained that in the rail industry, “We have these explosive charges which are laid down on the rail to warn an oncoming train of an obstruction ahead. We call them torpedoes, but in Mexico they are called petardoes. Just thought you’d like to know.”
In response to a NLRB ruling ordering striking mineworkers to pay $13.3 million to mining corporations, Dave commented, UMWA President John L. Lewis would have told the NLRB to go fuck themselves. Of course he wouldn’t have signed such a craven, bullshit agreement with the bosses in the first place.”
Dave often visited us in Oakland, California when he attended our Socialist Action National Committee plenums and our 2020 Presidential election rally with Alice Walker, speaking along with a broad range of activists who supported my 2020 run for the US presidency. While here, Dave researched labor history at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.
Dave was a dear friend, comrade and close political collaborator, replete with a kindness of heart and a wisdom and wit that came with years of struggle and, to the end, a dedication to socialist liberation and revolution.
THE 1934 MINNEAPOLIS TRUCKERS STRIKE
Introduction: On “Bloody Friday”, July 20,1934,at 3rd and 6th, 67 striking truck drivers and their supporters were shot by Minneapolis police, acting on orders from the Citizens Alliance, an anti-labor employers’ group, which controlled city government. Seventy-five years later, WE REMEMBER THEIR SACRIFICE!
This weekend Minneapolis returned to an old tradition and celebrated the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, that brought unionism to Minneapolis. The first day was a music festival in the streets where the fighting took place. Today was a picnic attended by relatives of strikers, and representatives of the UE who took part in the Republic Windows occupation in Chicago. No known 1934 strikers are living.
Teamsters got their name from starting out organizing drivers of teams of horses. There was less time between the 1934 strike and the Civil War, than the strike and today.
By Dave Riehle,
Originally published, July 27, 2009 at Renegade Eye
Three successive strikes by Minneapolis truck drivers in 1934 resulted in the defeat of the Citizen’s Alliance, the dominant employer organization that had broken nearly every major strike in that city since 1916. The strikes also established the industrial form of union organization through the medium of an American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft union and set the stage for the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout an 11-state area, transforming the Teamsters into a million-plus member union. The strikes were notable for their almost unequaled advance preparation, military tactics, and the degree to which they drew the active participation of union, non-union, and unemployed workers in Minneapolis alike into their struggle. Veteran union militants expelled from the American Communist Party in 1928 as Trotskyists led the strikes.
Carl Skoglund and V R. (Ray) Dunne, the central leaders, had also been expelled from the AFL Trades and Labor Assembly in Minneapolis in 1925 for their political views, along with 20 other Communists. In 1931 Skoglund obtained membership in Teamsters Local 574, a small general drivers local. The president, William Brown, was supportive of their perspective for organizing drivers, helpers, and inside workers into an industrial union formation that could break the hold of the Citizens Alliance.
By late 1933, working in Minneapolis coal yards, they had consolidated a volunteer organizing committee, including Grant and Miles Dunne (V.R’s brothers), Harry DeBoer, and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs, DeBoer, and Shaun (Jack) Maloney became key leaders of the over-the-road drivers’ organizing campaign from 1935 to 1940.
On 7 February 1934, a strike was called in the coal yards, shutting down sixty-five of sixty-seven yards in three hours. Under the leadership of DeBoer, an innovative strike tactic was introduced for the first time, cruising picket squads patrolling the streets by automobile. Cold winter demand for coal brought a quick end to the strike two days later, resulting in a limited victory for the union. Local 574’s membership rose to three thousand by April, as the organization drive continued.
In preparation for a general drivers. strike, 574 got agreement for active support from Minneapolis unemployed organizations and the Farm Holiday Association, allied with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. On 15 May, Local 574, now 6,000 members strong, voted to strike all trucking employers, demanding union recognition, the right to represent inside workers, and wage increases.
The union deployed cruising picket squads from strike headquarters, a big garage where they also installed a hospital and commissary. A strike committee of one hundred was elected, with broad representation from struck firms. A women’s auxiliary was established at the suggestion of Carl Skoglund.
On Monday, 21 May, a major battle between strikers and police and special deputies took place in the central market area. At a crucial, point, 600 pickets, concealed the previous evening in nearby AFL headquarters, emerged and routed the police and deputies in hand-to-hand combat. Over thirty cops went to the hospital. No pickets were arrested.
On Tuesday, 22 May, the battle began again. About 20,000 strikers, sympathizers, and spectators assembled in the central market area, and a local radio station broadcast live from the site. Again, no trucks were moved.
Two special deputies were killed, including C. Arthur Lyman, a leader of the Citizen’s Alliance. No pickets were arrested. On 25 May a settlement was reached that met the union’s major objectives, including representation of inside workers.
In the following weeks, it became clear the employers were not carrying out the agreement. Over 700 cases of discrimination were recorded between May and July. Another strike was called on 16 July. The union’s newspaper, The Organizer, became the first daily ever published by a striking union. Trucking was again effectively closed down until Friday, 20 July, when police opened fire on unarmed pickets, wounding 67, two of whom, John Belor and Henry Ness, died.
The Minneapolis Labor Review reported attendance of 100,000 at Ness’s funeral on 24 July. A public commission, set up later by the governor, reported: “Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the pickets.” On 26 July, Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B. Olson declared martial law and mobilized four thousand National Guardsmen, who began issuing operating permits to truck drivers.
On 1 August, National Guard troops seized strike headquarters and placed arrested union leaders in a stockade at the state fairgrounds in Saint Paul. The next day, the headquarters were restored to the union and the leaders released from the stockade, as the National Guard carried out a token raid on the Citizen’s Alliance headquarters. The union appealed to the Central Labor Union for a general strike and the governor issued an ultimatum that he would stop all trucks by midnight, 5 August, if there was no settlement. Nevertheless, by 14 August there were thousands of trucks operating under military permits.
Although the strike was gravely weakened by martial law and economic pressure, union leaders made it clear that it would continue. On 21 August, a federal mediator got acceptance of a settlement proposal from A. W. Strong, head of the Citizen’s Alliance, incorporating the union’s major demands. The settlement was ratified and the back of employer resistance to unionization in Minneapolis was broken. In March 1935 International president Daniel Tobin expelled Local 574 from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). However, in August 1936 Tobin was forced to relent and re-charter the local as 544. The leaders of 544 went on to develop the area and conference bargaining that exists today in the IBT. Local 544 remained under socialist leadership until 1941, when eighteen leaders of the union and the Socialist Workers Party were sentenced to federal prison, the first victims of the anti-radical Smith Act, a law eventually found by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
