With a coalition formed by local leaders associated with the Trotskyist Communist League of America, a group that later founded the Socialist Workers Party (United States), the strike paved the way for the organization of over-the-road drivers and the growth of the Teamsters labor union.

These members – Ray Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, Carl Skoglund and later Farrell Dobbs – began by organizing coal drivers through a strike in the coldest part of 1933 that ignored both the cumbersome approval procedures established under the International's Constitution and the ineffective mediation procedures offered under the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Finally, it entered into discussions with the sympathetic leaders of organizations of farmers and the unemployed to obtain their support for the upcoming strike.

Fighting intensified the following Monday, May 21, when the police, augmented by several hundred newly deputized members of the Citizens Alliance, an employer organization, attempted to open up the market for trucking.

At this point city government appealed for Governor Floyd B. Olson to mobilize the National Guard, the 34th Infantry Division (United States) under Adjutant General Ellard A.

The union's leadership had chosen to use different tactics in this strike; it ordered its members to picket without carrying any clubs or weapons of any sort.

On Friday, July 20, a single yellow truck drove to the central market escorted by fifty armed policemen.

An eyewitness reported that as the pickets moved to aid their fallen comrades, "They flowed directly into buckshot fire ... And the cops let them have it as they picked up their wounded.

No weapons were in possession of the pickets.On July 26, after the violence which led to the deaths of two protesters, Farmer-Labor governor Olson declared martial law and mobilized four thousand National Guardsmen of the 34th Infantry.

Between July 26 and August 1, the National Guard began issuing operating permits to truck drivers, and engaging in roving patrols, curfews, and security details.

On August 1, National Guard troops seized strike headquarters and placed arrested union leaders in a stockade at the state fairgrounds in Saint Paul.

Although the strike was gravely weakened by martial law and economic pressure, union leaders made it clear that it would continue.

On August 21, a federal mediator got acceptance of a settlement proposal from A. W. Strong, head of the Citizens Alliance, incorporating the union's major demands.

They were the first victims of the anti-radical Smith Act, a law the United States Supreme Court eventually found to be unconstitutional.

The members sentenced to prison included James P. Cannon, Grace Carlson, Jake Cooper, Oscar Coover, Harry DeBoer, Farrell Dobbs, V.R.

Dunne, Max Geldman, Albert Goldman, Clarence Hamel, Emil Hansen, Carlos Hudson, Karl Kuehn, Felix Morrow, Edward Palmquist, Alfred Russel, Oscar Schoenfeld, Carl Skoglund.

More importantly, the strike launched the career of Farrell Dobbs, who played a significant role in the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout the Midwest.