Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), Lithuanian-born American labor leader, was a founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and an important figure in reshaping national labor and welfare legislation during the New Deal.

Sidney Hillman was born on March 23, 1887, in Z ˇ agare, into a middle-class Jewish family. In 1901 he was sent to a Jewish seminary to study for the rabbinate. However, a year of religious study convinced Hillman that his interests were primarily secular, and he became involved in the Jewish Bund, a radical workers' organization dedicated to trade unionism and socialism. The small part he played in the Russian Revolution of 1905 resulted in a 4-month prison term. Fearful of the postrevolutionary wave of repression, he left Russia for England, where he stayed briefly.

Early Union Career

Arriving in the United States in 1907, Hillman went to Chicago and became an apprentice fabric cutter for a men's clothing manufacturer. In 1910 he went out on strike with his fellow employees, and despite obstacles thrown up by the leaders of the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA), the workers won a notable victory.

Hillman's active participation in union affairs as business agent for the UGWA coat-makers' local in Chicago taught him that "Power is always seized, never bestowed." His success in building the Chicago local brought him to the attention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which called Hillman to New York in 1914 to serve as chief clerk of its arbitration machinery.

However, a revolt was brewing within the UGWA; the workers had grown dissatisfied with the conservative policies of the union's leaders. The revolt erupted in 1914, when the immigrant tailors seceded from the UGWA to form their own national organization. The rebels invited Hillman to become president; he readily accepted. The new union, known as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), was opposed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) because it drew membership away from the UGWA, an AFL affiliate.

The ACWA

Despite its existence outside the mainstream of the labor movement, the ACWA flourished under Hillman's astute leadership. During the 1920s, when most American trade unions were foundering, the ACWA not only survived but also pioneered in a whole range of activities, from labor banks and unemployment insurance to cooperative housing projects and a Russian-American Industrial Corporation. The union also maintained an extensive education program for its members. These activities won Hillman a reputation as the "labor statesman." But even the labor statesman was unable to save his union from the ravages of the Great Depression, when membership and funds declined precipitously.

New Deal

Hillman was prepared to grasp the opportunities opened to unions by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal labor legislation. Hillman rebuilt the membership and finances of the ACWA and then united with other labor leaders in an aggressive campaign to bring industrial unionism to the mass-production industries.

After finally winning membership in the AFL, the ACWA, led by Hillman, bolted in 1936, when the AFL refused to support the Committee on Industrial Organization's program for industrial unionism. When the committee became permanent as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938, Hillman was elected vice president. From 1937 to 1939 he was also chairman of the CIO's Textile Workers Organizing Committee. The massive industrial unions, under the guidance of such men as Hillman, David Dubinsky, and John L. Lewis, drastically altered the nature of labor-management relations and made organized labor a significant force in national politics.

Political Activities

In the 1930s Hillman shed the last remnants of his socialist background and became an ardent New Deal Democrat. But because he retained a broader social vision than most labor leaders and felt comfortable among intellectuals, he became a confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt. He served on Roosevelt's first labor advisory board (1933-1936). To guide socialist voters in New York into the Roosevelt camp in the 1936 presidential election, Hillman helped establish the American Labor party, a sort of halfway house between the Socialist and Democratic parties.

In gratitude, Roosevelt in 1940 made Hillman labor's representative on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense and, during World War II, associate director of the Office of Production Management. Hillman was Roosevelt's major adviser on labor affairs.

Hillman was an accommodator and an opportunist who sought to offer workers a better living and society a reasonable degree of social stability. On July 10, 1946, at the height of his national reputation and influence, he died of a heart attack.

Further Reading

Two laudatory biographies provide the best introduction to Hillman: George H. Soule, Sidney Hillman: Labor Statesman (1939), is excellent up to the time Hillman became important in Washington politics, and Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor (1952), discusses his whole career. Two books which offer the fullest introduction to the development of unionism in the garment industry are Joel Seidman, The Needle Trades (1942), a brief but thorough survey, and Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor's Progress: The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (1944), which treats Hillman unfairly. Irving Bernstein's The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (1960) and Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970) provide important information on the milieu in which Hillman worked.

Additional Sources

Records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1989.

Fraser, Steve, Labor will rule: Sidney Hillman and the rise of American labor, New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. □

HILLMAN, SIDNEY 1887-1946

Labor leader and government bureaucrat

Politician

Unlike most labor leaders, Sidney Hillman assumed a place in the Roosevelt administration, both through a series of official appointments and as a confidant of the president, that allowed him to operate at the highest levels of government. Hillman became a power in the Democratic Party and was a participant in the shaping of domestic economic and social policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

Immigrant

In 1887 Hillman was born to a Russian-Jewish family living in Zagare. His family had a strong rabbinical tradition and intended for him to follow a religious calling. Against his father's wishes he began to read books on Western social thought, and he soon became politically active. In 1905 he was arrested for participating in a public protest in support of the Russian revolution of 1905. In 1907 he immigrated to the United States, where he became involved in the New York Jewish socialist community.

Pragmatic Labor Leader

Hillman's reputation came not as an ideologue but as a pragmatic labor organizer and a reasonable and fair negotiator. He helped to found and became the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914. During World War I he made contacts with progressives in the government and became convinced of the benefits of state intervention on labor's behalf. During the 1920s he urged the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to reform and accept industrial unionism and public ownership of utilities. With the Depression he became an important New Dealer and an early advocate of sweeping reforms and the adoption of Keynesian economic policies.

Democrat

In 1940 Hillman cemented his relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped firmly commit the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to the Democratic Party. Not only was he becoming an important person in the Democratic Party, he was also a personal friend of Roosevelt. As the only labor representative on the National Defense Advisory Commission, Hillman was a supporter of the administration's preparedness policies. He had a difficult time persuading the leadership of the CIO that preparedness was necessary, since many labor leaders feared that war preparation would be used as a pretext for eliminating the gains made by organized labor over the previous five years. During World War II he served on various government agencies. Roosevelt expected Hillman, as a labor leader, to prevent strikes and other labor disputes during the war—a thankless and virtually impossible task. Roosevelt also made him associate director of the Office of Production Management, which was under the direction of William S. Knudsen of General Motors. Unfortunately for Hillman, 1941 proved to be a bad year for labor relations. During his first year on his new job he faced strikes in shipyards, repair shops, aircraft plants, lumberyards, and many other businesses. The year saw more strikes than in any other year of American history except for 1937 and 1919. Furthermore, his position as a government official undermined his credibility with other labor leaders. For example, he sided with Roosevelt and Knudsen in the use of army troops to break a wildcat United Automobile Workers strike against the North American Aviation Company in June 1941. Even though it was a strike the CIO had itself condemned, the CIO in turn condemned Hillman for supporting the use of troops to end it.

Honest Broker

As the person unofficially in charge of mobilizing manpower for the war, Hillman tackled two major problems. The first was that of labor peace and plentiful workers. To promote these ends he pushed for an understanding between the AFL and the CIO that would end the feuding between the two major labor organizations. He also recognized that the Depression had undermined the skills of the American workforce and that such skills were needed for war industries. He worked closely with Owen Young of General Electric to create a vast vocational education program that drew on every government agency in any way related to mobilization and also stressed a "training within industry" program of worker training. On 12 April 1942 Roosevelt created the War Manpower Commission to oversee labor during the war and appointed Paul McNutt, the former governor of Indiana, as director. Hillman had been performing the responsibilities of the commission by himself and had expected to be appointed director. He finally succumbed to the pressure under which he had been working and suffered a heart attack. It was six months before he returned to work.

Politician

Although HillMan's influence as a labor leader was in decline during the last few years of his life, his political influence continued to be considerable. He played an important part in the Democratic Party national convention in 1944 and in choosing Harry S Truman as its vice-presidential nominee when most insiders realized that Roosevelt would not live out a fourth term. Hillman died in 1946 at age fiftynine.

Source:

Steven Fraser, "Sidney Hillman: Labor's Machiavelli," in Labor Leaders in America, edited by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 207-233.

Hillman, Sidney (1887–1946), labor leader.Born in Zagare, Lithuania, and reared in an orthodox Jewish family, Sidney Hillman rebelled as a teenager by joining Jewish social‐democratic trade unionists and revolutionaries fighting tsarist rule. Arrested twice in 1905, he joined the emigration of Lithuanian Jews to the United States. In 1909 in Chicago he began his American career as a labor leader among fellow immigrants. In 1914, at age twenty‐eight, he became the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a position he held until his death.

Hillman's idealism, influenced by the practices of American trade unionists and Progressive Era reformers, led him to promote industrial unionism as a social democratic reform of American capitalism. His union's collective bargaining agreements with employers in the men's clothing industry brought a forty‐four‐hour work week, workshop efficiency, discipline, social welfare benefits, and arbitration arrangements for stabilizing a conflict‐ridden industry. Without severing his links to Jewish labor movements at home and abroad, he steered the multiethnic union—it had 177,000 members by 1920—through the turmoil of the post–World War I decade: Red scares; trade union decline; and, in the needle trades, competing passions of socialism and nationalism. During the Great Depression and the New Deal Era, Hillman became a leader in the campaign to organize industrial workers throughout the economy. As vice president of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (1935) and in 1936 in coalition with the Labor Nonpartisan League and American Labor Party, he allied with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1940 Roosevelt appointed him codirector of the Office of Production Management. Hillman fought for Roosevelt's reelection in 1944 and played a key role in the political solidification of organized workers as a liberal force in the Democratic party. After Roosevelt's death, Hillman worked for a World Federation of Labor, which he envisioned as part of a new world order under U.S.–Soviet leadership.
See also Congress of Industrial Organizations; Immigration; Labor Movements.

Bibliography

Steven Fraser , Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, 1991.
Gerd Korman , New Jewish Politics for an American Labor Leader, 1942–1946, American Jewish History 82 (1994): 195–213.

Gerd Korman

Sidney Hillman 1887–1946, American labor leader, b. Lithuania. He emigrated to the United States in 1907. Beginning as a garment worker, he became a union leader after his key participation in a successful clothing workers' strike (1910) in Chicago. In 1914 he began his long tenure as president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. He promoted union-management cooperation and started many novel union practices, such as cooperative housing and banking. One of the founders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), he was its vice president from 1935 to 1940. A moderate, opposed to labor schism, he directed the labor sections of the Office of Production Management from 1940 to 1942. Through the CIO Political Action Committee, which he headed from its start (1943) until his death, he sought labor support for political programs favored by unions. His strong support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies made him influential in the Democratic party. He was also a founder of the American Labor party and its chairman (1944–45). As CIO delegate at world labor parleys, he helped create (1945) the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Bibliography: See biography by M. Josephson (1952).

Hillman, Sidney (1887–1946) US labour leader. He was first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (1915) and helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. He rallied support for President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, established the American Labor Party, and helped form the World Federation of Trade Unions (1945).