Abstract

The article presents an interview with James Riddle Hoffa, president of International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of North America. He came up the hard way. His father was an Indiana coal miner who died in 1920 when Hoffa was seven years old. He led his first strike at the age of eighteen, timing it with the arrival of a load of highly perishable strawberries. He won the strike and organized a local union. He got a charter from the American Federation of Labor, then affiliated with the Teamsters, soon assuming the leadership of Detroit Local 299. He was a fighting man, as happy on the streets as at the bargaining table, suspicious of the world, determined on victory and careless of means, evidently without doubts or illusions. He married to a philosophy of the jungle, a mastery of his trade, a personal asceticism, a great capacity for work, and a love of power. They brought him to the top. He became the most investigated union official in the history of the U.S.