Farrell Dobbs (July 25, 1907 – October 31, 1983) was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.
Dobbs was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal company garage. The family 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 1930s. 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 Trotskyist 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). Dobbs met the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky when he visited Mexico shortly before Trotsky'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 from 1944 to 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.
In 1960, Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen, Trotsky’s former secretary in Mexico, went to Cuba to experience the revolutionary movement there. The two American Trotskyists came to the conclusion to fully support the Cuban Revolution and the leadership of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Farrell Dobbs retired in 1972 but remained in the party to his death in 1983.
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