Sidney Hillman

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.

From a young age Sidney had shown great academic promise, mastering the rote memorization upon which the cheder education of the day was based. 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. It was hoped that Sidney would follow in the Hillman family tradition by becoming a rabbi.

Things did not proceed as planned, however. While in Slobodka, Hillman began to regularly attend the secret meetings of an illegal study circle headed by a local druggist. 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.

By 1905 Hillman — along with many others in the Bund — had come to identify himself with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), identifying in particular with the internationalism of Julius Martov. 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.

Chicago

In the summer of 1907, Hillman emigrated once again, this time setting out for America aboard the White Star liner Cedric, arriving in New York City on August 8. 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.

In Chicago, Hillman worked briefly picking orders in a warehouse for $6 a week. He then found a slightly better-paying job as a clerk in the infants' wear department of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Hillman remained in that position for nearly two years before being fired in the spring of 1909 during a downturn of business.

The unemployed Hillman found work in the garment industry as an apprentice garment cutter for Hart Schaffner & Marx, a prominent manufacturer of men's clothing. It would prove to be Hillman's last job as a worker at the bench.

Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union

When a spontaneous strike by a handful of women workers there led to a citywide strike of 45,000 garment workers in 1910, Hillman was a rank-and-file leader in the strike. That strike was a bitter one and pitted the strikers against not only their employers and the local authorities, but also their own union, the United Garment Workers, a conservative AFL affiliate. When the UGW accepted an inadequate settlement, the membership rejected the offer and continued the strike, winning some gains at Hart, Schaffner. Hillman became a business agent for the new local.

The leadership of the international union mistrusted the more militant local leadership in Chicago and in other large urban locals, which had strong Socialist loyalties. When it tried to disenfranchise those locals' members at the UGW's 1914 convention, those locals, representing two thirds of the union's membership, bolted to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

Hillman had taken the position of Chief Clerk within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York in early 1914. He found that job, in which he tried to maintain the stability imposed on a ferociously competitive industry by the Protocols of Peace, and in which the internal rivalries within the union threatened to flare up into all-out conflict, frustrating. When the insurgents who had walked out of the UGW convention to form the Amalgamated sent him a telegram imploring him to accept the Presidency, followed by another telegram from Bessie Abramowitz (b.1889). She was one of the original leaders of the 1910 strike, an important figure in union politics and his fiancée. Hillman accepted and left the ILG after less than a year.

Hillman knew the risks he was taking. The AFL refused to recognize the new union and the UGW regularly raided it, furnishing strikebreakers and signing contracts with struck employers, in the years to come. He helped the Amalgamated solidify its gains and extend its power in Chicago through a series of strikes in the last half of the 1910s and to extend the union's membership into important garment centers in Baltimore and Rochester, New York, where the union had to overcome divisions within garment workers on ethnic lines and the opposition of the Industrial Workers of the World. Manning ramparts for Hillman in Rochester was Paul Blanshard.

The ACWA also benefited from the relatively pro-union stance of the federal government during World War I, during which the federal Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing enforced a policy of labor peace in return for union recognition. Hillman was particularly receptive to the opportunities that government intervention in labor relations presented the union; he not only did not have the ingrained distrust of governmental regulation that now marked Samuel Gompers and other leaders of the AFL, but had a firm belief in the sort of industrial democracy in which government helped mediate between labor and management. The government's interest in maintaining production and avoiding disruptive strikes helped the Amalgamated organize non-union outposts such as Rochester and control the cutthroat competition that had prevailed in the industry for decades.

Great Depression and CIO

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

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.

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

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.