Over 100 police officers and the fire department were needed to quell a 1962 demonstration in Philadelphia by dissident members of the Teamsters, one of the largest trade unions in the world. Yet the Teamsters membership during the 1950s and 1960s, when the union was under the leadership of president Jimmy Hoffa, is portrayed in most popular accounts as either apathetic or committed to union leaders who, although corrupt, secured good pay and contracts for union members. Hoffa biographer Arthur Sloane, for example, argues that by the 1960s, there was neither any significant opposition to Hoffa nor rank-and-file dissent. This picture of a peaceful, contented membership clashes with new histories of union reform groups, such as the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, that formed during the 1970s and 1980s. However, while these new histories have broadened our understanding of the Teamsters during these decades, they mistakenly convey the idea that the reformers of the 1970s arose in a union with no strong tradition of dissent: in fact, dissidents in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the early 1960s, drawing on earlier traditions of dissent, mounted powerful challenges to the Teamsters leadership, by, for example, pushing for secession from the national union.