The 1972 Delaware Senate election between Joe Biden and Caleb Boggs is recalled as a close encounter between electoral politics, organized labor, and control over how campaign messages reached voters. Frank Sheeran describes choosing which candidate could address his union’s members and helping to stop the delivery of newspapers containing Boggs’s final-week advertising insert. The intervention’s scale and its consequences remain uncertain in his account: the papers were withheld, Biden won, and Sheeran says he could not know whether Biden knew the picket line had been arranged for his benefit.

The union as a political audience

The episode begins not at a campaign headquarters but in the old office of Teamsters Local 326, at 109 East Front Street in Wilmington, near the railroad station. Sheeran recalls that toward the end of 1972 a prominent lawyer he knew came there to discuss the coming Senate race. The lawyer was accompanied by a man who worked inside the Morning News and the Evening Journal, the two Wilmington daily papers, which were published by the same company and were, in Sheeran’s description, effectively the same newspaper.

The local’s membership mattered as a political audience and as a body able to act collectively. Earlier that year, Boggs had asked to address the members. He argued that, because the Teamsters were supporting Richard Nixon for reelection, he deserved an opportunity to speak to them. Sheeran took the request to the executive board, but he and the board judged Boggs too hostile to labor and declined to invite him. Sheeran acknowledged that Boggs was well liked, personable, and had a strong electoral reputation; he nevertheless regarded the senator as aligned with corporations rather than workers.

Biden, then serving on the County Council, also requested an opportunity to speak. Sheeran consulted the board again, found no opposition, and invited him. Biden addressed the rank and file, made a pro-labor case, took questions, and promised that the Teamsters could reach him. Sheeran remembers him as a young candidate who spoke and handled questions with a maturity that belied his age. In this telling, the contrast between the candidates was not simply party affiliation: it was a contrast in how each presented his relationship to organized labor.

The newspaper insert and the picket line

The lawyer’s later visit brought a different kind of campaign conflict. Boggs had prepared advertisements for an insert scheduled to appear in the papers each day during the final week before the election. The ads challenged Biden’s account of Boggs’s voting record by setting Biden’s claims beside the senator’s record. The newspaper employee accompanying the lawyer wanted an informational picket line but lacked people he trusted to walk it. Sheeran agreed to hire picketers, saying the people he supplied would not be intimidated.

Sheeran explains the labor tactic as a way to publicize an organizing dispute or alleged unfairness, not as a recognized union strike. A line could object to pressure on workers or seek support for a union, but its signs could not claim a strike where the union had not been recognized. He promised that Teamsters drivers would honor the line, extending the action beyond the newspaper workers themselves. The episode thus turned on a union’s practical capacity to make a boundary effective: the campaign insert could be printed, but its route to readers depended on labor and distribution.

The line went up. The papers were printed, but the editions carrying the insert remained in the warehouse and were not delivered. When the newspaper company called for Sheeran’s men to return to work, he said the Teamsters were honoring the picket. The caller also asked whether Sheeran had anything to do with a railroad car being blown up. It had contained materials intended for printing the newspaper, though Sheeran did not know whether those supplies were paper, ink, or something else. No one was injured in the bombing. Sheeran denied neither involvement nor responsibility in that exchange; instead, he answered that the line was being honored and suggested that the company consult the Yellow Pages if it wanted guards for its railcars. His account leaves the bombing’s cause unresolved rather than establishing who carried it out.

Election result and disputed influence

The day after the election, the informational picket came down, newspaper delivery returned to normal, and Delaware had a new senator: Biden. That sequence gave the intervention a striking political afterlife. Sheeran says that accounts of the incident have repeatedly named him and that Republicans, in particular, have argued that withholding Boggs’s inserts helped elect Biden. Their claim is counterfactual: they contend the ads might have damaged Biden in the campaign’s final week, when there would have been little time to answer them.

Sheeran does not present that claim as something he can verify. He says he had no way of knowing whether Biden knew the picket had been arranged for his benefit, and that Biden never let on to him that he did. The distinction matters: the account supplies a concrete mechanism for disrupting delivery and confirms the election outcome, but it does not establish Biden’s advance knowledge or demonstrate that the blocked advertisements changed enough votes to determine the result. Sheeran’s own sympathy for Biden was explicit—he believed Biden was better for labor—but his recollection does not convert that preference into proof of a coordinated campaign operation.

Labor power and political memory

The scene acquires its force from the broader institutional power described elsewhere in Sheeran’s account. Under Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters pursued nationwide bargaining through the Master Freight Agreement; the first agreement brought a 45-cent hourly raise, and union pensions increased. Hoffa had also established a pension fund that grew into a major source of loans, including loans that connected union resources to organized-crime figures. Those accounts portray a union whose influence reached beyond contract negotiations. In the Delaware episode, that influence appears in a more local form: the power to decide who addressed the membership and whether drivers crossed a picket line.

Sheeran’s own position helps explain the practical reach he describes. He recalls serving as president of Local 326, handling grievances and contract enforcement, and securing a separate charter for the local through Hoffa after it had been run by Philadelphia. The Senate-election story is therefore narrated from inside a labor organization, by a figure who presents union solidarity as an operative force in a newspaper distribution dispute. Yet the same perspective requires caution: the account records his decisions and the sequence of events, while leaving the decisive electoral effect, the bombing’s responsibility, and Biden’s knowledge unsettled. The election is remembered both as a victory for a candidate Sheeran considered pro-labor and as an episode in which the boundary between workplace pressure and political advantage could not be cleanly drawn.