Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman (March 23, 1887 – July 10, 1946) was an American labor leader. He was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party.

Early life

Sidney Hillman was born in Žagarė, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on March 23, 1887, the son of Lithuanian Jewish parents. Sidney's maternal grandfather was a small-scale merchant; his paternal grandfather was a rabbi known for his piety and lack of concern for material possessions. Hillman's father was himself an impoverished merchant, more concerned with reading and prayer than with his faltering business. By the age of 13, Hillman had memorized several volumes of the Talmud. The next year he was chosen by the Hillman rabbinical clan to go away to attend yeshiva in Vilijampolė, a small town across the river from the city of Kaunas. The study circle's members read radical literature and books on political economy, and Hillman was here exposed to the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer in Russian translation.

Career

Russia

Early in 1903, Hillman passed from the training grounds of the Marxist study circle to fully fledged membership in the Bund, a revolutionary socialist union of Jewish workers within the Pale in conflict with the Tsarist authorities. Hillman became a leading activist in the Bund, leading the first May Day march ever conducted by the organization through the streets of Kovno in 1904. Hillman was arrested shortly thereafter for his revolutionary activities and sat in prison for several months, where he learned more about revolutionary social theory from fellow prisoners. Hillman played only a minor local role during the Russian Revolution of 1905, engaging in the distribution of leaflets, raising funds for the revolutionary organization, and informally speaking on the streets to groups of workers.

Great Britain

In 1906, Tsarist repression in the form of police raids and organized pogroms forced the Russian socialist movement back underground. Hillman joined the exodus of revolutionaries from the country in October 1906, traveling under a false passport through Germany to Manchester, England, where he joined his uncle, a prosperous furniture dealer, and two brothers already living there. Hillman's prospects were poor in New York and he soon set out for Chicago, where a friend and a more favorable job market awaited him.

Hillman's support for the Soviet experiment won him the enthusiastic support of the Communist Party USA in the early 1920s; it also further alienated him from those in the Socialist Party and associated with the Daily Forward under the leadership of Abraham Cahan, with whom Hillman and the Amalgamated already had strained relations. While Hillman's relationship with the Communist Party ultimately broke up in the conflict over whether to support Robert La Follette, Sr.'s candidacy for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, Hillman never faced the sort of volcanic upsurge that nearly tore apart the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union during this period and never undertook the wholesale purges that David Dubinsky and other leaders of the ILGWU used to stay in power. By the end of the decade, after fighting and losing battles in Montreal, Toronto and Rochester, the CP was no longer a significant force in the union.

Fighting organized crime

While battling the CP, Hillman turned a blind eye to the infiltration of gangsters within the union. The garment industry had been riddled for decades with small-time gangsters, who ran protection and loansharking rackets while offering muscle in labor disputes. First hired to strongarm strikers, some went to work for unions, who used them first for self-defense, then to intimidate strikebreakers and recalcitrant employers. ILG locals used "Dopey" Benny Fein and his sluggers, who were more often hired by unions than employers although they were thugs for hire.

Internecine warfare between labor sluggers eliminated many of the earliest racketeers. "Little Augie" Jacob Orgen took over the racket, providing muscle for the ILGWU in the 1926 strike. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter had Orgen assassinated in 1927 in order to take over his operations. Buchalter took an interest in the industry, acquiring ownership of a number of trucking firms and control of local unions of truckdrivers in the garment district, while acquiring an ownership interest in some garment firms and local unions.

Buchalter, who had provided services for some locals of the Amalgamated during the 1920s. also acquired influence within the ACWA. One of his allies within the ACWA was Abraham Beckerman, a prominent member of the Socialist Party with close ties to The Forward, whom Hillman used to inflict strongarm tactics on his communist opponents within the union. Beckerman and Philip Orlofsky, another local officer in Cutters Local 4, made sweetheart deals with manufacturers that allowed them to subcontract to cut rate subcontractors out of town, using Buchalter's trucking companies to bring the goods back and forth.

In 1931, Hillman resolved to act against Buchalter, Beckerman, and Orlofsky. He began by orchestrating public demands on Jimmy Walker, the corrupt Tammany Hall Mayor of New York, to crack down on racketeering in the garment district, Hillman then seized control of Local 4, expelling Beckerman and Orlofsky from the union, then taking action against corrupt union officials in Newark, New Jersey. The union then struck a number of manufacturers to bar the subcontracting of work to non-union or cut rate contractors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the course of that strike the union picketed a number of trucks run by Buchalter's companies to prevent them from bringing finished goods back to New York.

While the campaign cleaned up the ACWA, it did not drive Buchalter out of the industry. The union may, in fact, have made a deal of some sort with Buchalter, although no evidence has ever surfaced, despite intensive efforts to find it by political opponents of the union, such as Thomas Dewey and Westbrook Pegler. Buchalter claimed, before his execution in 1944, that he had never had any deal with either Hillman or Dubinsky, head of the ILGWU. He did claim to have murdered a factory owner and labour opponents of Hillman at Hillman's behest, a claim which was never corroborated.

Great Depression and CIO

thumb|right|upright=1.2|[[John L. Lewis, Hillman, and Charles P. Howard exit the White House after discussing labor legislation with president Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937]]

The Great Depression reduced the Amalgamated's membership to one third or less of its former strength. Like many other unions, the ACWA revived with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose promise of legal protection for workers' right to organize brought thousands of garment workers back to the ACWA. The AFL finally allowed the ACWA to affiliate in 1933.

Hillman was a supporter of the New Deal and Roosevelt from the outset. FDR named him to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. Hillman provided key assistance to Senator Robert F. Wagner in the drafting of the National Labor Relations Act and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in winning enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Within the AFL, Hillman was one of the strongest advocates for organizing the mass production industries, such as automobile manufacture and steel, where unions had almost no presence, as well as the textile industry, which was only partially organized. He was one of the original founders in 1935 of the Committee for Industrial Organizing (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations; CIO), an effort led by John L. Lewis, and became Vice-President of the CIO when it established itself as a separate union confederation in 1937.

Hillman played a role in nearly every major initiative of the CIO in those years. He oversaw, and provided major financial support for, the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which sought to establish a new union for textile workers after the disastrous defeat of the United Textile Workers' strike in 1934. The Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, came out of that effort in 1939. Hillman also played a decisive role in mediating the internal disputes that nearly destroyed the United Auto Workers in its infancy in 1938 and helped create the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America through the CIO's Department Store Workers Organizing Committee.

Hillman and Lewis eventually had a falling out, with Lewis advocating a more independent tack in dealing with the federal government than Hillman. Lewis, however, gradually distanced himself from the CIO, finally resigning as its head and then withdrawing the United Mine Workers from it in 1942. Hillman remained in it, still the second most visible leader after Philip Murray, Lewis' successor.

Political activities

thumb|right|upright=1.2|Hillman, [[John L. Lewis, David Dubinsky, and Baruch Charney Vladeck at an American Labor Party rally]]

Hillman and Dubinsky founded the American Labor Party in 1936, an ostensibly independent party that served as a halfway house for Socialists and other leftists who wanted to support FDR's reelection but were not prepared to join the Democratic Party, with its alliance with the most reactionary white elites in the South. Dubinsky later split from the Labor Party over personal and political differences with Hillman to found the Liberal Party of New York.

thumb|left|Hillman addressing a 1944 political rally

Hillman was a strong opponent of Nazi Germany and a supporter of U.S. aid to England and France. Roosevelt appointed Hillman to the National Defense Advisory Committee in 1940 and named him associate director of the Office of Production Management in 1941. When FDR created the War Production Board in 1942, he appointed Hillman to serve as the head of its labor division.

As in the case in World War I, Hillman used the influence of the federal government to advance both labor's social goals and its immediate organizing needs. Hillman was unable to persuade the Board to debar labor law violators but did help introduce arbitration as an alternative to strikes in defense industries. Hillman's prioritization of emergency production for national defense over labor radicalism brought him criticism from others within the CIO, as when he stood with the Roosevelt administration's decision to send in troops to break a wildcat strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California in 1941. (The strikers' wage demands were soon conceded in arbitration, which the Communist-supported strike had forestalled.)

Hillman also believed in the need for unions to mobilize their members politically. He and Lewis founded Labor's Non-Partisan League, which campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 and again in 1940, even though Lewis himself had endorsed Wendell Willkie that year. Hillman was the first chair of the CIO Political Action Committee, founded in 1942, as well as of the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) (which co-founded the 1948 Progressive Party).

In July 1943, Philip Murray of the CIO led formation of the CIO-PAC, of which Hillman was the first head. In Roosevelt's last election in 1944, Hillman raised nearly $1 million on behalf of the Democrat national ticket. Hillman was also credited with grass roots activities, registering labor voters and bringing them in heavy numbers to the polls. In 1945, he attended the World Trade Union Conference in London alongside many renowned trade unionists.

Personal life

thumb|right|upright=1.2|The mausoleum of Sidney Hillman in [[Westchester Hills Cemetery.]]

Hillman and Bessie Abramowitz were married in 1916 and had two daughters.

Death

Hillman, who had been sick for some time, died of a heart attack at age 59 on July 10, 1946, at his summer home in Point Lookout, New York. His body was interred in a mausoleum located at Westchester Hills Cemetery, 20 miles north of New York City.

Legacy

According to labor historian David Brody, Hillman built upon the conservative job-oriented unionism that dominated the American scene, discarding his youthful radicalism and opposition to capitalism. Hillman was realistic, nonideological, and eager for tangible results. Under Hillman's leadership, the Amalgamated became an active partner in the men's clothing business, building two banks, fostering low-cost unemployment insurance, and setting up internal educational and social support programs for union members. This was the "New Unionism"of the 1920s, which combined a large powerful union, with many small capitalist enterprises, all of them controlled by Jews who could talk together easily. Hillman's broader perspective gave him a leading role in forming the CIO and establishing entirely new mass-production unions that confronted not small local Jewish capitalists but world-class corporations. Hillman also was a pioneer in integrating union power with major political powers on a national level. The New Deal had proven a bonanza for union membership growth, and beginning with the 1936 presidential election, Hillman pushed hard for labor to give systematic nationwide support to Roosevelt and the New Deal cause. His main rival was John L. Lewis, who broke with Roosevelt, and with the CIO, leaving Hillman the central labor politician in the national Democratic Party.

Hillman's successor as head of the ACWA, Jacob Potofsky, took a far less visible role within the CIO, a federation which re-united with the AFL in 1955. The American Labor Party that Hillman had helped create passed out of existence in that same year.

The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx was the first limited equity housing cooperative in the United States. It was funded and inspired by Hillman and Abraham Kazan. A street in the neighborhood, Hillman Avenue, is named for him. Hillman is also the namesake of the Hillman Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and part of Cooperative Village in Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation, established in his honor, gives annual awards to journalists and writers for work that supports social justice and progressive public policy. The first Sidney Hillman Awards were announced in 1950. In addition, from 1949 to 1995 the foundation made annual awards honoring public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good.

References

External links

Sidney Hillman Foundation
Guide to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America records, #5619. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library.