Sidney Hillman
I
IN the minds of many who fear and hate the Committee for Industrial Organization and all its works, Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, is Machiavelli in modern dress, tutor in unprincipled politics to John L. Lewis. The American Federation of Labor called Hillman that in an official resolution, with John L. Lewis as Cesare Borgia’s modern instance, Mussolini. Both men relished the nominations. ‘Well, Sidney,’ Lewis chuckled, ‘it seems I’m your muscle man.’ Hillman professed to be jealous and put in a claim to be considered both Machiavelli and Borgia.
However one takes the charge against Hillman, the accent in it, that he is merely adviser to a chieftain, is wrong. Though he is only fifty-one, he has been a top labor executive longer than either William Green, of the A. F. of L., or John L. Lewis, who are both older than he. He has been president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America since its inception in 1914, and perhaps never was he more securely president than to-day. Foes of the Amalgamated admit that it is one of the most potent and importantly pioneering unions in the country. When the Harmon Foundation voted an award to Sidney Hillman for outstanding public service, it also said of the Amalgamated that ‘it not only reorganized conditions in a major industry, but has been a laboratory where labor’s new share in the life of the community is being worked out.’
In early March, Hillman was convalescing from a long siege of pneumonia, brought on largely by overwork, and it was in palmand sycamore-shaded gardens that I saw him, brown, rested, and already incongruous in the atmosphere of a sanatorium. Unlike spectacular John Lewis, Hillman is the despair of the caricaturist who has to exaggerate some feature. Do that to Hillman and you destroy recognition. Except when he is on the platform, his person and personality affect you like a quietly uttered understatement, just before you recognize it as such. Then you notice the alert look in the brown eyes that make his glasses seem only an aid to an already keen vision.
His nose is straight and firm, his mouth broad and mobile; his jaws and chin, in which there is an ever-youthful cleft, are square without being angular; and it takes a second glance to see how solidly modeled are his head and body. There is a balance, a belonging to it all, that suggests not only a smoothly geared physical mechanism, but also a correspondence of physique with character. Also, whether he is listening — and he is a good listener — or quietly chatting, or in the full swing of action, he is as absorbed as an engineer in something bigger than himself, and essentially Hillman is an engineer in labor dynamics.
His English, though correct, obviously is acquired, but it can be vigorous enough. ‘All right, they’re crazy. But they’re tailors, are n’t they? Then we’ve got to deal with them!’ He laughs easily, apparently never with malice. His voice is mellow, of middle register, rich with modulation; but in casual talk it gives no hint of the power and passion that make him another man when he is crusading. Then his body becomes compact, with everything in him mobilized and in action. His pleasantly modeled chin and jaws take on a bulldog thrust and aggression. His voice rasps and rings, his consonants are hard and sharp. He uses few gestures, with the result that what he says acquires an impact almost muscular.
He was born in Zagare, Russia. As a boy he studied for the rabbinate simply because all the men in his family, with the exception of his father, a small merchant, were rabbis. He gave himself over to it with such intensity that to this day, when he is in the fervor of exposition, his body takes on the slight rhythmic rocking of the Talmudic student.
Rhapsodists have called him ‘the Moses of Labor.’ I asked him if in boyhood’s large dreams Moses had figured as a model. ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘You see, the rabbis in our family were not outstanding, but the rank-and-file kind that are called upon more to help than to lead. Concern in the everyday problems of working people was their job, so I took it for granted it had to be mine, just as I might have taken for granted I had to be a bricklayer or carpenter had my people been in the building trades.’
But the absolute values, the mysticism and the symbolism in religious orthodoxy, were not for him. He is a pragmatist to the core; there is not a breath of mysticism in the man, and symbols trouble him as mist would on his glasses. He gave up preparing to be a rabbi, broke with his family over orthodoxy, and at fifteen went to a larger Russian city, Kovno, to fend for himself.
Here he worked in a chemical laboratory for a living, and at night studied the economists. Karl Marx impressed him, though the Marxian concept seemed too mechanistic for the flesh-and-blood humanity Hillman knew. Ferdinand Lassalle, the man of action, appealed to him more than Marx, the theoretician. This is the more understandable as Russia was on the brink of the revolution of 1905. Hillman had already joined the Bund, an organization of Jews with a socialist ideology, but all Hillman’s reading of Marx, all the roar of revolution about him, translated themselves to him at this juncture into a demand for shorter hours for workers. In a parade of students one day, Hillman joined the chant for a ten-hour working day.
The police swooped down on the parade and threw scores of the students into jail, Hillman with them. At first, imprisonment was an agony of enforced idleness; he never could find in books an adequate outlet; then he steeled himself to a resilient patience. After eight months behind bars, amnesty freed him and he plunged back into revolution. But the government reassembled its forces, and those revolutionists who were not shot or imprisoned fled abroad or went into hiding.
Hillman escaped to England, where in Manchester a prosperous uncle received him cordially. He could have stayed on there comfortably; but life in England was not dynamic enough for him, and after seven months he left for America. He avoided New York, where he knew he would become involved in the life of immigrants like himself, and went to Chicago, where he hoped, as quickly as possible, to translate his life and values into terms of the new world.
For two years he was a clerk, then he went to Hart, Schaffner and Marx to learn the trade of cutter of men’s garments. At first he worked without pay, then he got six dollars a week. Three years later he was still at Hart, Schaffner and Marx making eleven dollars a week. It was the average wage for all workers there for a week of fifty-four hours. Elsewhere in the men’s garment industry in Chicago the pay was less, the hours longer, working conditions worse. Twelve-year-old children were employed. Toilets and drinking water in many shops were shut off to keep employees from taking time out. If a boss said he did not like the way a garment was done, the one who had worked on it had to pay for it at a rate that included a profit. There were night work, speed-up, and sweatshops in tenement homes. Yet what Hillman found more prevalent than rebellion among his fellow workers was fear of discharge. He said of this period, ‘I remember especially how, in the panic of 1907, uppermost in all our minds was, “Who will be thrown out next?”’
II
ON September 22, 1910, five girls walked out on strike against Hart, Schaffner and Marx. At first there was laughter at this assault on the strongest open-shop citadel in Chicago, the biggest manufacturers of men’s garments in the world. Then the six thousand employees of Hart, Schaffner and Marx joined the walkout, and inside of three weeks 45,000 other men’s garment workers in Chicago were out on strike.
Familiar concomitants followed — picketing, injunctions, hundreds of arrests, brutality by the police of Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson in his palmiest days, beating up of pickets, with two of them killed, a public funeral, countless meetings, an aroused public opinion, and a long deadlock of forces.
For the first ten weeks of all this, Sidney Hillman walked the pavements as a picket. Then he was chosen one of a committee of eleven to combat the influence of William D. Haywood, who was trying to lead strikers into the camp of the Industrial Workers of the World. Haywood’s stronghold was Hod Carriers’ Hall, where big meetings were held daily. After two days Hillman found himself the only one of the committee on the job. He gained the platform, and the metal and temper of his Russian experiences, now forged in an American industrial conflict, so impressed the strikers that they turned to him in increasing numbers until he found himself leading the strike.
Meanwhile the strike was also developing Joseph Schaffner, of Hart, Schaffner and Marx. Like many another business head, he had left labor relations to his overseers. At first he led the fight on the strikers. Subsequently, testifying before an industrial relations commission, he said, ‘I was so badly informed of the conditions in my shops that only a few days before the great strike I called the attention of a friend to what seemed to me the highly satisfactory state of my employees. When I found out later the conditions that had prevailed I concluded that the strike should have occurred much sooner.’
On January 14, 1911, Hart, Schaffner and Marx signed a simple agreement that brought their employees back to work. Its essence was the setting up of an arbitration committee consisting of employers and employees equally represented and an impartial chairman. ‘Said arbitration committee shall take up, consider whatever grievances the employees of Hart, Schaffner and Marx shall have, and shall fix a method for settlement of grievances, if any, in the future.’
The other Chicago strikers fared worse. Thomas A. Rickert, president of their union, the United Garment Workers, lukewarm in the strike, had tried several times to settle with employers, but the rank and file had voted his terms down. Finally on February 3, 1911, without a referendum vote, Rickert called the general strike off. Worn out with eighteen weeks of struggle and privation, the garment workers gave in, and those who were not blacklisted went back without anything to show for their long fight.
At Hart, Schaffner and Marx the agreement did not begin working with immediate ease. Overseers and employees had to be educated, first to accept the instrument whole-heartedly, then how to use it best. Sidney Hillman, enthusiastic for it from the beginning, had a stubborn time getting the workers to try a technique of labor adjustment other than the only way they knew, the strike. Such a vast number and variety of problems came up, most of them requiring judgment born of practical experience in the trade, that the arbitration board as originally set up had to be supplemented by a trade board of five employees, five representatives of the firm, and a neutral chairman. The trade board, on which Sidney Hillman was chief workers’ deputy, winnowed out the complaints, set up standards, and established procedures and precedents. The arbitration committee functioned as a court of last resort.
The historic agreement was kept on its course largely by a fundamental agreement on objectives on the part of employers and workers. ‘The large concern and its employees constitute a small society, ’ Joseph Schaffner, as employer, said. ‘Under conditions where the employer does not consult the rights of the employees, that society is a despotism; under conditions where the workers are given a voice, it is a republic. When the change in Hart, Schaffner and Marx was made from the monarchical form to a republic, the original agreement became the constitution, and the trade board and the board of arbitration were given legislative and judicial powers. What had to be done was to have laws made and interpreted in such a manner as to give every member of that society full understanding of his rights, his obligations, and his responsibility.’
Sidney Hillman’s attitude was: ‘A constructive labor attitude must be in terms of the achievable. . . . We cannot ask from industry more than it can soundly afford to give. ... A strike victory or a defeat, as such, settles nothing fundamentally. An employer may win a strike and discover, when it is too late, it was so costly that he has lost his business. A union may win a strike and find that it has lost both the industry and the union. We cannot defeat an industry; when we do that we defeat ourselves. . . . Labor must be industryconscious.’
Hillman’s skill as chief workers’ deputy brought him a call in 1914 to do for the women’s garment industry what the Hart, Schaffner and Marx agreement was effecting. He became chief clerk of the Cloakmakers’ Union in New York; and he was making a notable record in administrating when the men’s garment workers called him to lead in a new and unpredictable conflict, this time against their own union.
Discontent had been rising in the ranks of the United Garment Workers. One of their complaints was that the officialdom of their union ‘refused to take notice of the growing demand on the part of the clothing workers for industrial rather than craft unionism.’ Other charges were ‘autocratic and unrepresentative administration of the union’s business’ and ‘corrupt practices existing among the officers of the United Garment Workers.’
At the convention of the union in Nashville on October 12, 1914, President Rickert struck back, refusing to seat 105 delegates representing 40,000 dissenters, about two thirds of the total membership. The barred delegates thereupon held a convention of their own, and asked the American Federation of Labor, to which they belonged, to recognize them as the United Garment Workers.
Meanwhile they had nominated Sidney Hillman as their president. He called a small group of friends together and anxiously asked if he should accept. They warned him that the American Federation of Labor would never recognize the rebels. Anyone who led them would find his career in organized labor at an end. They pointed out that Hillman was doing important work, that the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, where he was then engaged, was powerful in the A. F. of L. and offered a bright future for him if he stayed on. Suddenly Hillman made up his mind. One of his advisers that night remembered the exact expression of that decision. ‘When I came to America,’ Hillman said, ‘I looked for a nine-dollar job and I was worth all of six. Well, the tailors made me? They can have me!’
He resigned his position, led the revolt of the men’s garment workers, and, as everyone had predicted, he and His followers were thrown out of the A. F. of L. On December 26, 1914, the outcasts held a convention in New York at Webster Hall, and organized themselves as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Sidney Hillman was elected president. Thereafter New York became his headquarters.
III
From then on the careers of the Amalgamated and of Hillman have been practically inseparable. Not the least of the reasons for this is that they march in step. Hillman not only respects the tempo of the working masses, but feels it incumbent upon himself to measure his step largely by theirs. That explains why in America he is reformist rather than revolutionary. ’In Russia I discovered how universal is the fear of chaos,’ he said to me. ‘ Only a few can nourish their lives on the promises alone of things to come. Most of us need to make a living now, mate now, enjoy now a reasonable degree of social stability.’
Yet Hillman has a tempo of his own, and it indicates why he left Russia when he did. What little labor movement had arisen was crushed, and he felt it would remain so for many years to come. He was too young and too impatient to curb his step so long; and that same impatience found life in England too slow. In the Amalgamated he met his marching partner.
Born of rebellion against autocratic rule, the Amalgamated has written democracy into the whole framework of its constitution. Officers of the union can be elected only by a general referendum. The membership can initiate legislation, or change the constitution. Any member can prefer charges against any officer, and, if dissatisfied with decisions of the union’s lower courts, he can carry his case to a general convention of the Amalgamated. Unlike bludgeonruled unions, whose chiefs let years pass without giving their members a chance to express themselves through a convention, the Amalgamated holds one every two years.
Long after Hillman has secured a majority of the membership of his union or of his general board for something he recommends, he labors passionately to convince the rest. He argues with subordinates whom he has the right to order. The feeling between him and the rank and file is exceptionally personal. ‘ When you see young girls face fire hoses on the picket lines,’ he said to me, ‘and New York tailors lay themselves down in front of non-union trucks . . .’ And he smiled at the inadequacy of comment. An audience of his union members lights him up as no other gathering does. But even before his own people his words are so small a part of what he expresses that a transcript of his speech is surprisingly inadequate to anyone who has heard him.
The result of all this is that the rank and file of the Amalgamated are convinced he understands their problems and feels their stresses in his very bones. They follow his leadership so completely that they have been known to cheer his recommendation that they accept a 15 per cent wage cut. They are gleeful at his shrewdness and his successes as a general; but, win or lose, they have never nominated anyone but Hillman for president, in all the years of the union. In a very real sense the Amalgamated is as much a product of his leadership as he himself has been conditioned by his followers and their officers.
The Amalgamated was born in the midst of pressures and strikes in every important centre of the men’s garment industry, attacked by the A. F. of L. as ruthlessly as by the manufacturers. In New York the preponderance of small shops presented such a problem in unionization that the Amalgamated tried to postpone decisive battle until it was stronger. For that reason the manufacturers launched their offensive by slashing wages on July 12, 1915. The Amalgamated had to gamble on a bit of showmanship. It did not call out all its troops simultaneously, but a division at a time. If the union got enough response, the effect would be cumulative; if not, the device would be a boomerang.
At the first call 10,000 pants makers came out on strike. The next day 11,000 vest makers and knee-pants makers followed. On the third day 25,000 coat makers struck, and the manufacturers asked the Amalgamated for a conference. Wage cuts were restored, the union shop was recognized. It was by no means the last of the war in New York. But to-day the men’s garment industry in that city is completely unionized.
In Chicago in 1915, Hart, Schaffner and Marx, the ally whose well-being was so important to the Amalgamated, had to compete with open shops that paid workers as little as $2.50 and $4.00 for a week of sixty to seventy hours. Hillman went to Chicago and presented Amalgamated’s demands. The open shops rejected them. Hillman gave the word, and Bohemians, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Jews, Italians, and Americanborn workers came out on strike: cutters, coatmakers, tailors, trimmers, pants makers, pressers, spongers, and sewingmachine adjusters. This time they had to contend not only against bosses, injunctions, police, thugs, and ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, but also against scabbing by the United Garment Workers. But after twelve weeks of fight the manufacturers yielded recognition of shop committees and chairmen and a forty-eight-hour week. In 1919 an abridged copy of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx agreement was signed between the Amalgamated and the Wholesale Clothiers Association of Chicago. To-day Chicago, like New York, is completely unionized in the men’s garment industry.
By the end of 1936 the Amalgamated had Rochester, Cincinnati, Montreal, and Toronto also in the 100 per cent division, with Philadelphia, Cleveland, and other cities close to complete unionization. Then, early in 1937, the union signed up the manufacturers of the men’s garment industry in this country on a nation-wide scope, in an agreement that showed the influence of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx experience, covered 95 per cent of the industry, and won a $30,000,000 wage increase for its workers.
Before he begins negotiations with a manufacturer or orders a strike, Hillman has an exhaustive survey made of his antagonist’s business situation, while he himself studies his man for the human equation. Sometimes Hillman has found a knowledge of the latter more important than the business rating.
In Cincinnati, for instance, the Rock of Gibraltar for open-shop manufacturers against invasion by the Amalgamated was ‘Golden Rule’ Arthur Nash, owner of the biggest men’s garmentmaking plant in the city. Nash ran his business on what he called ‘God’s Plan,’ which included a bonus system, profit sharing, and other welfare features for his employees; but he forbade them to join the Amalgamated or any other union. Hillman’s study of the man was almost a psychoanalysis. He decided that Nash was completely sincere. Instead of trying to recruit among Nash’s workers, Hillman enlisted the aid of churchmen to point out to Nash that his employees were subjected to greater speed-up than in most sweatshops, that wages paid by him were 25 per cent lower than in union shops, and that his workers were at the mercy of their foremen in the matter of arbitrary discharge. Hillman worked at his man three years apparently without result. Then one day Cincinnati open-shop manufacturers were shocked to learn that Nash had ordered his employees to join the Amalgamated. ‘I unionized,’ Nash said in a public statement, ‘because I could not sleep nights over a job I had to do and could not. So I passed the buck to Sidney Hillman.’ His surrender broke the back of open-shop resistance in Cincinnati.
A unique reaction for a manufacturer to get from a militant labor union was experienced by the head of the Kahn Tailoring Company of Indianapolis. After a hard struggle the Amalgamated signed up the shop. A year later Hillman received an urgent telegram from the head of the firm asking for a conference. Hillman found the sixty-four-year-old man pale and under emotional stress. ‘Mr. Hillman, I wanted you to be the first to know,’ he said, ‘that after fifty years of uninterrupted business the Kahn Tailoring Company is liquidating. But it is not in the least the fault of the union and I will make a public statement to that effect.’
‘What has happened?’ Hillman asked, though he had known for some time.
‘We’re overextended on inventory; I owe the banks $300,000 and they refuse to extend the loan.’
‘Perhaps they will,’ Hillman offered, ‘if you tell them that the Amalgamated will advance $100,000 to tide you over.’
The manufacturer stared. When he told the bankers they stared too, but they extended the loan. The Kahn Tailoring Company used only $30,000 of the Amalgamated’s loan and repaid it within a year.
Hillman delights in exposing the practical considerations that underlie everything he does. ‘The Kahn Tailoring Company was the only big employer of men’s garment workers in the city,’ he told me. ‘If it closed there would be some nine hundred of our union members without jobs. Also the plant was so near Chicago that some manufacturer would find it profitable to snap it up at the sacrifice price it would bring, and by running it with non-union labor he would make it hard for Chicago manufacturers to compete with him. We had to protect our Chicago market. We had investigated the Kahn Tailoring Company’s business and found it sound, and our analysis seems to have been more thorough than the judgment of the banks that almost forced the company to the wall. So, all in all, we did not lose by our loan.’ In a similar situation the Amalgamated advanced $125,000 to another employer of its members.
IV
America’s entry into the World War found Hillman supporting it on behalf of that democracy for which the union has fought on the economic front. ‘The war was started by individuals with tremendous power over the lives of the people,’ Hillman declared in 1917. ‘The settlement of the war and the maintenance of peace must lie with the peoples of the world, not with individual rulers.’ The same attitude to-day has brought the Amalgamated and its president out militantly against Fascism.
In 1922 the union established the Amalgamated Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago and the Amalgamated Bank in New York. Hillman is on the Chicago board of directors and chairman of the New York board. Deposits in the two banks rose from $2,356,411 in eight years to $13,348,986; resources mounted to $16,348,986. A year after the New York bank was established it was offered a million and a half dollars profit if it would sell. The offer was refused. Other banks availed themselves of boom conditions to make money. The Amalgamated banks let the lure go by. Eugene Meyer lectured Hillman. ‘You’re no banker,’ he told him. ’Of course not,’ Hillman replied. ‘The Amalgamated banks have been set up to perform services, not to chase riches.’ In 1926 there were thirty-six labor banks in the country. By 1933, after the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers banking collapsed, only the two Amalgamated banks survived.
To save workers from loan sharks the Amalgamated banks inaugurated the small loan at 6 per cent. To-day the biggest banks in the country have adopted the feature. Other financial services set up by the Amalgamated have been credit unions for its members, a coöperative investment corporation, and a foreign exchange branch.
In 1922, Soviet Russia, starving and striving to get on her feet economically, called for help. The youth who had fled from Kovno in 1906 was now able to respond through the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. They donated a quarter of a million dollars for Russian relief, created a million-dollar corporation to introduce American methods and machinery in the men’s garment industry in Russia, and were instrumental in having many who had families and friends in that country send remittances amounting to nearly thirty million dollars, with the assurance that the money would arrive safely.
To furnish adequate housing for some of its New York members the Amalgamated built garden apartments and helped workers buy them with loans from their own bank; to-day over four thousand live in these modern homes that cost them five dollars a room less per month than the normal rental for similar apartments in New York.
In 1920 a convention of the union voted for unemployment insurance in the industry. By 1932 Chicago alone had paid out six million dollars to Amalgamated members out of work, the money coming half from their wages when employed, half from their employers. Other cities followed suit. But Sidney Hillman, in an article in the Atlantic for November 1931, insisted that unemployment insurance was only a palliative for an ill that must be treated more basically. He advocated ‘ a planned and oriented economy, intervention of government in social processes, and a National Economic Council working under authority in which management and labor are represented.’ It so clearly forecast the NRA that when President Roosevelt brought it into operation he appointed Sidney Hillman on the Labor Advisory Board, then on the National Industrial Recovery Board.
When the different industry codes were being drawn up Hillman’s antagonists among the leadership of the American Federation of Labor sought his advice and help. They found him coöperative, just as the Amalgamated itself, even when it was out of grace with the A. F. of L., contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to A. F. of L. strikes. It surprised no one, therefore, when in 1933 the American Federation of Labor took the Amalgamated back into its fold, leaving the United Garment Workers jurisdiction only over the making of work clothes and shirts.
Then, in 1935, history repeated itself when the Amalgamated again made industrial unionism a paramount issue and the A. F. of L. again cast Hillman and his union out, suspending it along with the other nine unions that had formed the CIO. What followed is too recent history to detail, except, perhaps, Hillman’s campaign to organize the textile industry, which made few newspaper scareheads.
At the very time when CIO efforts to bring Little Steel to its knees were filling the press with stories of violence, deaths, and defeat for the Steel Workers Organization Committee on that battle front, Sidney Hillman was put in charge of CIO efforts to organize the textile field. Of 1,200,000 workers in that industry 39 per cent were women, 9 per cent children. The lowest labor and living conditions in the country’s manufacturing system prevailed in the textile field. ‘In the industry itself,’ ran a graphic account of Hillman’s problem, ‘wool wars on cotton; both fight silk for a bigger share of the consumer’s dollar. Style changes are an ever-present hazard. . . . The industry’s distribution system is a maze of crisscrossing, profit-eating lines from mill to wholesaler to broker to converter to jobber to retailer to consumer.’
Unlike the steel industry, which was concentrated in a few hands, enabling labor also to concentrate its forces, 3400 textile companies owned 5870 production units. About the time Hillman surveyed the field the markets in wool and cotton broke. ‘It would take a Moses or a Mussolini to bring order out of chaos in the textile field,’ was the general comment.
The Amalgamated contributed half a million dollars to the effort, and Hillman went to work. Inside of ten months he organized nine hundred of the leading textile manufacturers into two powerful groups, the United Weavers Institute and the Textile Converters Association, signed up union contracts with them affecting a quarter of a million workers, and increased the membership of the United Textile Workers from 30,000 to 450,000 — all this without violence or bad blood.
Hillman was instrumental in organizing Labor’s Nonpartisan League, which played such a part in the reëlection of President Roosevelt; then in 1937 he headed the American Labor Party’s entry info New York City elections, and thereby helped break Tammany’s grip and put Mayor La Guardia back in the city hall. ‘I have always believed in independent political action for labor,’ Hillman told me. ‘Labor’s Nonpartisan League should be continued. A Labor Party for America? Yes, when we are strong enough to vote a man into power. The American people will not go in for a mere protest vote.’
He had been working simultaneously on Amalgamated’s activities, the textile drive, and the American Labor Party campaign in New York, when illness overtook him at a time when peace negotiations between the CIO and the A. P. of L. had broken down. David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and one of the original Big Three of the CIO, blamed John L. Lewis for the breakdown of the negotiations. Lewis sharply retorted. At the turn of this year the American Federation of Labor expelled Lewis and his United Mine Workers. Dubinsky and his union, and Hillman and the Amalgamated, were not expelled, obviously a manœuvre to split the CIO. Subsequently Dubinsky and his union did withdraw from the CIO.
From Hillman, sheltered from outside stresses, came no word. What he could or would have done in the circumstances is mere speculation. When I saw him he frankly declared he was out of touch with the latest in American labor’s civil war.
But I am reminded of what he has repeatedly held in negotiations with employers. ‘The happiest solution in a dispute may be readied before all resources are drawn into the fight. One is more likely to get concessions while one is on speaking and bargaining terms. Once a fight is on, there develops the desire to win even though victory may mean ultimate defeat for both sides.’
A month later Hillman, recovered and active again, was elected one of the two vice presidents of the CIO, and was put in charge of resumption of peace negotiations with the A. F. of L.
V
Hillman married Bessie Abramovitz, one of the five girls who led the walkout at Hart, Schaffner and Marx in the 1910 strike. She has been active in the Amalgamated throughout its whole history. They have two children, both products of American public schools, and neither children nor parents would have chosen any but public schools. The daughter is majoring in labor economics in a Midwest college, enthusiastic about, the subject, and convinced, as her father once was, that at the geographical centre of the country one gets more nearly at the heart of it. The son is still in high school, also interested in economics. The Hillmans live in Lynbrook, Long Island, in a modest suburban home which they lease when they are away. They have no car, because Sidney Hillman ‘would feel uncomfortable about owning one.’ He gets $7500 a year as president of the Amalgamated; the constitution of the union forbids him to hold any other remunerative office. He has no other source of income.
Hillman seems to mean it when he says that labor should be ‘industryconscious.’ The Amalgamated has introduced production techniques in the making of men’s garments that have increased output, saved overhead, and thereby raised profits for manufacturers. Inevitably this has brought sharp criticism from the Left. He has been accused of what is to socialists a serious betrayal — class collaboration. His answer is characteristically that of a pragmatist, and is partly affirmative, partly negative. He points out that the more industry is helped to function efficiently, the larger the share of the derived benefits labor can demand. In actual practice the Amalgamated has reduced the average work week for its members from sixty and seventy hours before the advent of the union to a thirty-six-hour week in 1933. In 1911 the average wage in the men’s garment industry was twenty cents an hour; in 1932 it came to sixty-five cents an hour in Chicago, fifty-eight cents in New York. In the same year non-union cities and districts paid as low as thirty-five cents an hour in St. Louis, twenty-one cents in eastern Pennsylvania.
Negatively, he has pointed out that class collaboration does not necessarily conflict with a socialist position. It is simply making the best of what is indisputably a fact, that at least in this country we are likely to live for some time to come in a capitalist system, and it is just as well to get as much return as possible for the workers meanwhile. His negative argument is clearly evasive and is characteristic of the way he shies away from involvement with abstractions. The pragmatist in him finds himself impatient. ‘Labor unions do not function in the realm of theory,’ he says.
In 1928, midway in Hillman’s career as labor leader, there appeared in American Labor Dynamics, by J. B. S. Hardman, an imaginary conversation between a labor leader, XYZ, and his younger self, in which the youth accuses the man of betraying his ideals, ‘You decry idealism because it upsets your hunt for the immediate and tangible. . . . You think not of the larger enterprise of which your organization is a part. . . . You take no chances in ventures in which you may be defeated, and you cannot afford defeat because you must hold on to your power.’
It should be illuminating to test Sidney Hillman by that speech ten years after it was written. Among other ventures he has helped launch the American Labor Party and the CIO, both of which have the support of the most militant youth of the Left. In their grudging admission that this is true of him, his most antagonistic critics charge that Hillman has not led in these movements so much as ho was pushed by a militant membership. I asked him what he would say to that. His reply was a radiant grin. ‘What could be better?’ he demanded.