LABOR: The New Force

The most important politician at the Democratic convention in Chicago this week is, very probably, a labor leader.

The labor leader is Sidney Hillman, 57, of Manhattan, for 30 years the president of the rich and powerful Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Hillman's importance derives from the biggest new fact in U.S. politics: the C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee, of which he is chairman.

The tone and approach of P.A.C. is apparent in the very first sentence of its Political Primer for All Americans (2,000,000 copies have already been distributed). Says the Primer: "Politics is the science of how who gets what, when and why." This is a full 2,000 years and many miles of Marx-marked thought away from Aristotle's "The good of man must be the end of the science of politics." But, though neither idealistic nor pious, the Primer's opening shocker is unquestionably as American and up-to-date as the word "realism."

The Primer continues: "To the average American, politicians are crooks. . . . The truth is that politicians are no more corrupt than the people who elect them. The people corrupt the politicians. . . . Let's quit blaming the politicians and face the responsibility of full citizenship. . . . Let's become politicians ourselves."

P.A.C.'s attempt to turn at least part of C.I.O.'s 5,000,000 members into politicians is something unique in American labor, and in American history. It is the first sophisticated, thoroughly professional entry of labor into politics. It is everything which all of labor's political movements in the past were not. P.A.C. is not even a third party, except germinally. It does not intend in the foreseeable future to nominate its own men for office, nor to try to get on the ballot. But P.A.C. is the most formidable pressure group yet devised by labor—a pressure group backed with money, brains and an army of willing workers.

In many a community P.A.C. has received help from the A.F. of L.—although Bill Green sneers at P.A.C.—and the Railroad Brotherhoods. Last week P.A.C. further broadened its scope by setting up a National Citizens Political Action Committee, studded with the names of radicals, movie stars, authors and liberals of all shades that ranged from George Norris to Paul Robeson.* Partly the reason for this was to get around the Smith-Connally Act by having the new committee collect and disburse contributions. Partly the reason was that shrewd Sidney Hillman, looking ahead, wants to get a broader base for his party than labor unions—just as the British Labor Party gradually came to include peers and peeresses, from Lady Noel-Buxton to the late Lord Wedgewood.

The Record. How effective can P.A.C. be? The old axiom was that no one can deliver the U.S. labor vote. Most recent example: John Lewis' failure in 1940 to swing the C.I.O. to Willkie.

P.A.C.'s record to date in its few tries at the polls has been up & down. Its strength was suddenly dramatized by the defeat or abdication of Congressmen Joe Starnes, John Costello and Martin Dies—all from the South, where P.A.C. is least powerful. But Congressmen John Rankin and Gene Cox, also from the South, handily won renomination despite P.A.C., and their colleagues in the House generally breathed a little easier.