The Life and Times of Jimmy Hoffa By Chris Wright
Jimmy Hoffa used to say he’d be forgotten ten years after his death. This was an
uncharacteristically unintelligent judgment. Forty-four years after his murder on July 30, 1975,
Hoffa is still famous enough that one of the most celebrated movies of the year is about the man
who claims to have killed him, Frank Sheeran. Called The Irishman, the film, directed by Martin
Scorsese, stars Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa, and Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino,
the Mob boss who approved the killing. For a labor leader, such a level of fame is not only
extraordinary; it is unique.
Of course, the reasons for Hoffa’s fame are not entirely to his credit. He is seen as the dictatorial
and corrupt union leader who was close friends with gangsters and allied his union, theInternational Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), with the Mafia. Bobby Kennedy went after him for
years, starting with the famous McClellan Committee hearings of 1957–59 (for which Kennedy
was the chief counsel), and finally got him convicted in 1964 on charges of jury tampering and
fraud, for improper use of the Teamsters’ pension fund. His appeals having failed, Hoffa went to
prison in 1967, but was released in 1971 when Richard Nixon commuted his sentence. As
described in Charles Brandt’s bestseller I Heard You Paint Houses, on which Scorsese’s movie is
based, Hoffa’s subsequent campaign to regain the presidency of the Teamsters was sufficiently
threatening to the Mafia that they had him killed.
The Irishman focuses on this seedier side of Hoffa’s life, thus perpetuating the image of a wholly
amoral and self-serving criminal with which the McClellan hearings made Hoffa’s name
synonymous. Most articles published in popular media, such as Steve Early’s recent piece “The
Ghost of Jimmy Hoffa Won’t Go Away,” express a similarly one-sided view. The truth is that
Hoffa’s Mob connections were hardly the defining feature of his life. Rather, he deserves to be
known, in large part, as the preternaturally effective and hard-working—20-hour days six days a
week—leader of what was then the largest union in American history, responsible for raising
millions of truck drivers, warehousemen, laundry workers, retail clerks, and others into the middle
class.
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This article relies primarily on the following books: Thaddeus Russell, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa
and the Remaking of the American Working Class (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Arthur A. Sloane,
Hoffa (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991); Ralph C. James and Estelle Dinerstein James, Hoffa and the
Teamsters: A Study of Union Power (Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1965); James
R. Hoffa, The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa: An Autobiography (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1970);
Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy
Hoffa (Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2004); Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within (New
York: Popular Library, 1960); and Dan La Botz, “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970s,” in Rebel Rank
and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below in the Long 1970s, eds. Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner,
and Cal Winslow (New York: Verso, 2010), 199–226.
With the possible exception of John L. Lewis, no twentieth-century union leader was as beloved
by the members as Hoffa. He made it a point to be approachable and endlessly responsive: in
speeches, for example, he regularly gave out his office phone number and insisted that members
call him at any hour of the day or night if they had problems. The contracts he secured were
remarkably generous—and yet, ironically, even employers profoundly admired him, considering
him a master negotiator, a “genius,” more knowledgeable about the trucking industry than anyone,
all in all “a great statesman” who was scrupulously honest and realistic in bargaining.
Indeed, the fundamental reason for the perennial fascination with Jimmy Hoffa may be not so
much his ties to the Mafia as his sheer power and success. No other industry was more critical to
the nation’s economy than trucking, and Hoffa did more than anyone to rationalize and stabilize
conditions in this chaotic, competitive industry (a service for which employers were grateful).
Bobby Kennedy may have exaggerated when he said Hoffa was the second most powerful man in
the country, but he certainly did have a degree of power unimaginable for a union official in the
twenty-first century. And that’s what’s so interesting about him: Hoffa symbolizes a political
economy long gone, an era when a union leader could strike fear and loathing in the hearts of
senators and presidents, when the old industrial working class, millions strong and capable of
bringing the economy to its knees if it so desired, was still the foundation of the social order.
Certain sectors of the working class were even defiantly independent of the corporate-liberal
“consensus” of the Cold War establishment, having carved out their own self-policed political
economy with the help of organized crime, informal deals, and a willingness to meet violence with
violence. The Teamsters epitomized this independent working class, and Hoffa epitomized the
Teamsters.
It was the aesthetic, so to speak, of the Teamsters and their form of unionism to which Bobby
Kennedy and other “corporate liberals” objected (together with “socially responsible” unionists
like Walter Reuther of the United Autoworkers). As historian Thaddeus Russell argues, “the
confrontation [between Kennedy and Hoffa] represented a cultural conflict between the rising,
respectable professional class of the prosperous postwar years and the uncultured, unassimilated,
and unruly industrial working class of the Depression.” To have such an untamed and independent
social force right at the heart of society—in the age of triumphant liberalism—was an
embarrassment.
That working class is dead now. But in its heyday, it was one hell of a force to be reckoned with.
The Rise of Jimmy Hoffa
Years later, Hoffa formulated the moral philosophy he had imbibed from his early days in Indiana
and Detroit:
Every day of the average individual is a matter of survival. If by chance he should
go from home to work and have an accident, lose an arm or an eye, he’s just like
an animal wounded in the jungle. He’s out. Life isn’t easy. Life is a jungle… Ethics
is a matter of individualism. What may be ethical to you may be unethical to
someone else… But my ethics are very simple. Live and let live, and those who try
to destroy you, make it your business to see that they don’t and that they have
problems.
It was in Detroit in the Depression years that Hoffa learned the law of the jungle. As a dockloader
at Kroger’s warehouse, Hoffa led a strike against the sadistic foreman, which resulted in a
temporary agreement with the company that improved conditions and pay. When he was fired a
couple of years later, in 1935, for dropping a crate of vegetables on the loading dock, he was
immediately hired by a Teamsters official to be an organizer (or “business agent”) with Local 299.
He was only 21, but with his boundless energy and intelligence he proved effective.
Across much of the country, the IBT was beginning a sustained offensive in these years. In 1934
its members played a decisive role in two successful general strikes: one in San Francisco, where
they joined the longshoremen’s union to shut down the city, and one in Minneapolis, where the
Trotskyists in charge of Local 574 led a strike that elicited shocking violence from the police and
thugs hired by employers.
The Teamsters’ almost total victory in this strike, leading to the
unionization of thousands of “unskilled” workers, began its transformation from a small
conservative craft organization to a national industrial union encompassing over two million
members.
The more politically conservative Detroit Teamsters were, in their own way, just as militant as the
Trotskyists in Minneapolis. To organize the increasingly numerous—and abysmally paid—
intercity freight drivers, Local 299’s organizers favored a strategy much simpler than signing up
workers and petitioning for elections that would be overseen by the newly established National
Labor Relations Board. Instead, they approached an employer: “either enroll your workers with
the union or we’ll bomb your trucks.” If he refused, they bombed his trucks. And sometimes his
home. In a violent, lawless city, this strategy worked well. (They had likely learned it, in fact, from
having their own cars bombed by “hired thugs.”) Combined with frequent strikes and strike threats,
such intimidation resulted in an influx of new members into the local and steadily rising wages.
Hoffa and his several union colleagues didn’t limit themselves to organizing drivers; anyone who
worked on a loading platform was fair game too. “We’d go out,” Hoffa later recalled, “hit the
docks, talk to drivers, put up picket lines, conduct strikes, hold meetings day and night, convince
people to join the union.” It was treacherous work: “My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to
require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was
beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year.” During one strike he was
jailed eighteen times within a 24-hour period, since he kept returning to the picket line after being
released. In these years he also had a list of arrests “that’s maybe as long as your arm” for fighting
with strikebreakers, hired thugs, and members of rival unions who were trying to organize the
same workers the Teamsters were
In 1938 two developments occurred that would later facilitate Hoffa’s centralized control over the
entire union. First, Dave Beck, an organizer from Seattle (who went on to become president of the
IBT in 1952), formed the Western Conference of Teamsters, an administrative body covering the
eleven western states and British Columbia. Such a higher-level body was necessary for
coordinating organizing and bargaining in a fragmented industry that had thousands of small
employers and hundreds of local Teamster unions. That very year, two thousand employers in the
eleven states signed an agreement to bring higher wages to intercity (“over-the-road”) drivers.
Around the same time, Farrell Dobbs was achieving a similar ambition in the Midwest. One of the
Trotskyists who had led the 1934 Minneapolis strike, Dobbs realized it was inefficient and
mutually damaging for locals to separately negotiate different wage scales for their own over-theroad drivers. So he and his comrades, with the cooperation of the IBT leadership, created the
Central States Drivers Council (CSDC) to bargain for all unionized over-the-road drivers in the
twelve Midwestern states. To force reluctant—and widely scattered—employers to come to the
bargaining table, Dobbs gave them the kind of ultimatum that Hoffa used to great effect in later
years: all firms with lines ending or beginning in Chicago (which meant most firms in the Midwest)
would have to negotiate an areawide contract or face a devastating strike. They quickly complied,
and over two weeks they and the CSDC hammered out the most ambitious and important contract
the IBT had ever negotiated. Establishing uniform minimum wages, maximum hours, seniority
rights, safety guarantees, a grievance committee, and a closed shop (all drivers had to belong to
the Teamsters), the contract covered 125,000 workers at 1,700 companies.
Hoffa worked with Dobbs in this historic campaign, specifically as a leader of Dobbs’ effort to
organize those long-distance Midwestern drivers who hadn’t yet been recruited into the union.
Whatever qualms he felt about Dobbs’ Trotskyism, Hoffa was profoundly impressed by the man’s
strategic and organizational genius. “I was studying at the knee of a master,” he reminisced later.
He also learned from Dobbs the usefulness of the secondary boycott. Some employers in Omaha
and Sioux City had refused to accept the CSDC contract and locked out their unionized employees.
Dobbs and other Teamster leaders studied the companies’ routes and decided that the best way to
force them to capitulate was to threaten a strike against employers in Kansas City, who made
shipments for the Omaha and Sioux City operators, unless they suspended their dealings with the
latter. This would cut off the holdouts in Nebraska and effectively force them to sign the contract.
The plan worked—and Hoffa was made vividly aware of the power of the secondary boycott, a tactic he would never be afraid to use. (After the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 made such boycotts
illegal, Hoffa found a legal loophole and defiantly continued to use them.)
This tactic also inspired a broader strategy that helped the Teamsters organize industries
contiguous to trucking, thus increasing the IBT’s membership considerably. Any company that
depended on Teamsters for deliveries and pickups could be compelled to unionize its employees
simply by being refused service and thereby shut down. “Warehouses, canneries, laundries, retail
stores, bakeries, and breweries fell to this tactic,” one historian writes, “which Hoffa used to make
the Detroit Teamsters and ultimately the entire IBT into a boundless, multi-industry union.
Hoffa’s triumphant future might have been quite different if not for a fateful decision Farrell Dobbs
made in 1939: he resigned from the Teamsters to devote all his time to the Socialist Workers Party.
Daniel Tobin, head of the IBT, pleaded with him to reconsider, to drop his Trotskyist politics and
continue working with the union, even promising him the first available vice-presidency. Which
could have been a stepping-stone to the presidency. But it was to no avail: Dobbs resigned his
union positions, including negotiating chairman of the powerful CSDC. This is what made possible
Hoffa’s rise to national prominence, as he wrote later in his autobiography:
I was chosen to replace Dobbs as negotiating chairman. I didn’t realize, when I
accepted the job, along with a vice-presidency [of the CSDC, not the IBT] the
following year, that it was the post that would project me into the national limelight
as far as the International Brotherhood was concerned, but that job really paved the
way to the General Presidency. As a rung in the ladder of my career, it provided a
giant step upward.
Hoffa’s star was rising on other fronts too. He had been de facto leader of Local 299 since 1936—
overseeing its financial stabilization (after near-bankruptcy) and recruitment of several thousand
new members—and was gradually becoming de facto leader of the Joint Council of all Detroit
locals. In 1942 he was elected to the board of directors of the Wayne County Federation of Labor,
but more importantly, he established the Michigan Conference of Teamsters to centralize in his
hands bargaining for all locals in the state. Weaker locals regularly negotiated subpar contracts for
their intracity members, which exerted downward pressure on wages across the state. With Hoffa
negotiating a uniform statewide contract, the wages of thousands of workers were raised, and
increasingly many members became familiar with him and intensely loyal to him.
But it was his achievements with the CSDC that ultimately made him wildly popular across the
country. During World War II Hoffa’s ambitions were confined within the straitjacket imposed by
the National War Labor Board, but starting in 1945 he was able to negotiate contracts that
contained wage increases as high as 20 percent or even 50 percent. He brought tens of thousands
more drivers into the Midwestern agreement and established a Central States health and welfare
program funded entirely by employer contributions. And he did what the CIO failed to do with its
postwar Operation Dixie: he organized the South. Using the secondary boycott, it wasn’t
particularly challenging (at least in principle). He ordered warehousemen and dockworkers to
boycott Southern trucking companies crossing into the Midwest unless they hired union members,
which after a few years forced the large majority of Southern employers to sign with the union.
And then, by the mid-1950s, he forced them to raise wages and improve working conditions to the
level of the CSDC
At the same time, the CSDC (renamed the Central States Conference) had undertaken two
gargantuan projects: to negotiate uniform contracts for local workers—as opposed to over-theroad drivers—in the 22 states the Conference now covered, and to complete the unionization of all
trucking companies in these states. By 1957, these goals were achieved.
Hoffa’s meteoric rise in the IBT was cemented at the 1952 convention, when he was unanimously
elected a vice-president of the union, the youngest ever (at 39). He quite possibly could have been
elected president, but he preferred to engineer Dave Beck’s election in return for Beck’s promise
not to interfere in his activities. Aside from the president, Hoffa was the most powerful union
officer at the time, controlling the Southern and Central Conferences, and by the middle of Beck’s
brief reign (ending in 1957) he was certainly the dominant force in the entire IBT.
How did Hoffa rise so high so fast? Part of the answer, which will be explored below, is that he
allied himself with a lot of useful people. But much of his success was due simply to his personality
and intelligence. According to people who knew him, he had an “almost hypnotic” charisma, was
a “master psychologist,” “the smartest guy I know,” “like an elephant with his memory—it’s
beyond belief,” and expert in the minutiae of labor law. In the 1960s he would often give talks at
universities or business executive lunches, discoursing perceptively on the history of labor
legislation or jousting with economists and lawyers, leaving initially hostile audiences so
impressed they would give him a standing ovation (as on one occasion at the Harvard Law School
Forum). He was supremely confident and supremely competent.
In addition to all this, of course, he was infinitely ambitious.
He wanted the union to be millions strong. It’s almost as if he shared the old IWW dream of One
Big Union for the entire working class—even as he rejected the concept of social-movement
unionism associated with both the political left and, in a diluted way, liberals like Walter Reuther.
Just before Hoffa was elected president in 1957, he wrote a “policy statement” that included
earmarking at least 25 percent of the IBT’s income to organizing. This was at a time when the
AFL-CIO, to which the Teamsters belonged, was (myopically) devoting about 5 percent of its
revenue to organizing. A year later, even as the McClellan hearings—broadcast on televisions
around the country—were making his name synonymous with corruption and criminality, Hoffa
announced a plan to bring every policeman in the U.S. into the IBT. “It is a piece of unmitigated
gall,” one political official responded, speaking for multitudes. Hoffa also planned to establish a
“Conference on Transportation Unity,” under his leadership, that would bring together the IBT,
the International Longshoremen’s Association, the National Maritime Union, railroad
brotherhoods, airline unions, in total more than fifty organizations in the transportation sector.
Both of these projects had to be scuttled because of public opposition. But they indicate the scope
of Hoffa’s dreams, which the union continued to pursue by organizing everyone from egg farmers
to airline flight attendants.
The other ingredient of Hoffa’s personality that was crucial to his success was the one that also
led to his downfall: his contempt for bourgeois respectability, bourgeois hypocrisy, and liberal
pieties.