He is notable for his leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis general strike,[1] his conviction and imprisonment under the anti-communist Smith Act, and his membership in the Socialist Workers Party and opposition to Stalinism.

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.

Eventually, a state road-building project was commissioned to provide jobs for some of the unemployed, but Dunne himself would travel south to California, where in Los Angeles he was sentenced to a road construction chain gang that helped to build Sunset Boulevard.

This situation would last for almost 10 years before, in 1928, Dunne became a victim of the "Factional War", when members of the party who opposed Joseph Stalin and supported the theses of Leon Trotsky were purged.

Unfazed, Dunne and his comrades formed the Communist League of America (later renamed the Socialist Workers Party) in alignment with Trotsky's Left Opposition to Stalinism.

[2] Dunne and the other SWP leadership were found guilty, and in 1943 he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the Sandstone federal prison along with other leading American Trotskyists such as James P.

[6] After his release from prison, Dunne would unsuccessfully run for mayor of Minneapolis in 1943 and 1947, and would go on three national speaking tours, as well as serving as a long-time chairman of the Socialist Workers Party in Minnesota.