Vincent R. Dunne
| Vincent R. Dunne | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Vincent Raymond Dunne 17 April 1889 Kansas City, Kansas, United States of America |
| Died | 17 February 1970 (aged 80) |
| Occupation | Union organizer, teamster |
| Organization |
International Brotherhood of Teamsters Industrial Workers of the World |
| Political party |
Socialist Workers Party Communist League of America Communist Party of America |
| Movement | Trotskyism |
| Criminal charge | Sedition (under the Smith Act) |
| Spouse(s) | Jennie Holme |
| Children | Raymond Vincent Dunne, Jr. Jeanette Adele Dunne |
Vincent Raymond Dunne (17 April 1889 – 17 February 1970), also known as Vincent R. Dunne or Ray Dunne, was an American Trotskyist, teamster, lumberjack, and union organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is notable for his leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis general strike, his conviction and imprisonment under the anti-communist Smith Act, and his membership in the Socialist Workers Party and opposition to Stalinism.
Dunne was born in Kansas City in 1889, the second of nine children. His mother was the daughter of a Wisconsin shoemaker and his father, a migrant worker from County Clare, Ireland, worked as a repairman for the local street railway. Tragedy struck early in his life when his father broke his kneecap on the job and his mother was forced to move him and his older brother to a farm by where her parents had settled near Little Falls, Minnesota, where they were eventually joined by his father after he had recovered. Adding to their hardships, their cabin burned down one winter when Dunne was six or seven, but they were able to rebuild with the help of neighbors. His father began to work again, this time as a lumberjack and building railway lines. By then, Dunne himself was working for pay on neighboring farms driving teams of horses and working the threshing rigs.
By fourteen, Dunne would leave home to work at lumber camps throughout Minnesota, in conditions he found deplorable. Moving further west the next year, he harvested grain in North Dakota. In 1905, he would go even further west to Montana, where he encountered the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in lumber camps. Dunne was immediately struck by the difference in conditions between the union lumber camps and the non-union camps back in Minnesota, finding the bunkhouses spacious, comfortable, and hygienic. The union also proved a source for cheap literature, which Dunne, who had been forced to leave school to work after only five years, enthusiastically embraced, reading titles like Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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