Daniel Tobin’s famous ‘rubbish’ comment and the need for a reconsideration of AFL national union leaders in the new deal era

ABSTRACT

Daniel Tobin led the Teamsters Union from 1907 to 1952. He guided its transformation from a dwindling set of locals representing horse-drawn wagon drivers to the nation’s largest union. However, Tobin is best remembered today for a comment he made during an American Federation of Labor (AFL) Convention in 1934, when he denigrated new members flooding into the labor movement as ‘rubbish.’ The quote has been used to illustrate depictions of the AFL leadership as racist, nativist, sexist and elitist. This article argues that the quote has been taken out of context and used to misrepresent Tobin’s meaning. He did intend to denigrate some of the new members coming into the labor movement, but his criticism had nothing to do with ethnicity, race, level of skill, or opposition to organizing the mass production industries.

KEYWORDS:

• Daniel Tobin
• teamsters union
• American federation of labor (AFL)
• brewery workers union
• rubbish

Acknowledegments

The author would like to express his appreciation for the very useful feedback he received from Leisl Orenic and Eric Arnesen on a version of this article given as a conference paper at the 2019 meeting of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, as well as the suggestions he received from the anonymous readers at Labor History.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For another example of a labor history text aimed at a general audience that follows the same formula invoking this quote, see Freeman et al. (1992), p. 272. The authors follow the same path laid out by Leuchtenberg, but with the additional misquoted line. “Teamsters’ president Daniel Tobin betrayed this prejudice when he derided ‘the rubbish that have lately come into other organizations. We do not want the men today if they are going to strike tomorrow.’ William Collins, the AFL’s New York Representative, joked, ‘My wife can always tell from the smell of my clothes what breed of foreigners I have been hanging out with.’

2. It should be noted that the Carpenters Union sponsored a biography of Hutcheson, Maxwell Raddock, Portrait of an American Labor Leader: William L. Hutcheson. (Raddock, 1955) But as Christie noted during his testimony before a Senate investigating committee, Raddock’s book blatantly plagiarized from Christie’s doctoral dissertation on Hutcheson.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Witwer

David Witwer is professor of History and Director of the Honors Programs at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (2003) and Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (2009). With Catherine Rios, he is co-author of the recently published, Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States.