Caleb Boggs

Caleb Boggs was the incumbent senator in the 1972 Delaware race against Joe Biden, a contest the book connects to a Teamsters-backed informational picket line that stopped campaign inserts from reaching newspaper readers. Boggs appears as a popular and experienced politician with a strong reputation, but also as a candidate whose final-week advertising was caught in a labor maneuver whose electoral effect remains uncertain.

Political Standing

By the time of the 1972 campaign, Boggs had served as governor and congressman before becoming a senator. The account describes him as personable and well regarded, and says he seemed never to have lost an election. His standing did not, however, persuade the leadership of the local Teamsters membership to give him a speaking opportunity.

Earlier in the year, Boggs visited the union and asked to address its members. He argued that because the Teamsters were supporting President Nixon’s reelection, he, as a Republican, should also have a chance to speak to them. The local union leader considered Boggs too hostile to labor and viewed him as aligned with corporations in Delaware. The request went to the executive board, which decided not to invite him.

The Senate Campaign

Biden, Boggs’s opponent, later asked to speak to the membership. The executive board raised no objection, and the union leader agreed. Biden, then a young County Council member, delivered a speech in favor of labor, answered questions from the floor, and promised that the Teamsters could reach him. The account says the performance strengthened the local leader’s support for Biden before the election-day intervention was proposed.

Shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer visited the local’s old office at 109 East Front Street in Wilmington, Delaware, accompanied by a worker from the company that published the Morning News and Evening Journal. The lawyer explained that Boggs had prepared advertisements for a daily newspaper insert during the final week of the campaign. The ads were to challenge Biden’s account of Boggs’s voting record by placing Biden’s claims alongside Boggs’s actual record. The lawyer wanted the papers kept from being delivered.

The Picket Line and Undelivered Ads

The newspaper worker said he wanted to establish an informational picket line but lacked people he could trust to walk it. The local union leader offered to hire picketers and said Teamsters drivers would honor the line. The stated labor rationale was that an informational line could support an organizing effort or protest a company’s conduct; it could not simply be marked as a strike when the union involved was not yet recognized.

The line went up. The newspapers were printed, but the inserts remained in the warehouse and the papers were not delivered. When the newspaper company asked for the picketers to return to work, the union leader maintained that the Teamsters were honoring the line. A company representative also asked whether he had anything to do with a railroad car being blown up while carrying supplies intended for newspaper printing. The account reports that nobody was hurt in the bombing, but does not establish who caused it; the union leader answered that the picket line would remain in place and suggested the company hire guards for its railcars.

Election and Uncertain Effect

The informational picket line came down the day after the election, and newspaper delivery returned to normal. Delaware had a new senator. Later accounts, the narrator says, frequently credited the maneuver with helping Biden win. Republicans argued that if Boggs’s inserts had reached readers during the last week, they might have made Biden look bad, leaving him little time to answer. The book does not establish that the blocked inserts would have changed the outcome, or that Biden knew the picket line was organized on his behalf.

The episode therefore preserves a distinction between the campaign’s documented sequence and its disputed political consequence. Boggs’s appeal to the Teamsters for a speaking opportunity was denied; his late advertising did not reach readers through the Wilmington papers; and Biden won. Whether the delivery stoppage decided the race remains an attribution made by later commentators, not a result the account can demonstrate.