LABOR: The New Force

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The young hotheads advocated forming a third party and to hell with both the G.O.P. and Franklin Roosevelt. C.I.O. President Phil Murray offered some cool advice. Third parties, he said, are not practical. And Sidney Hillman warned: "Don't come along with any highfalutin organization that may work out 25 years from now, or may not." Murray and Hillman well knew how third parties have failed in the U.S.: the Populists, the Socialists, the Communists, "Big Bill" Haywood's Wobblies (the I.W.W.), whose theory of progress was to dynamite the social order; or even old Bob LaFollette's 1924 Progressives, the most successful of all but never strong enough nationally to dent the two-party system. They had seen the 1936-40 failure of John Lewis' Labor's Non-Partisan League, of which they themselves were a part. And they remembered the late Sam Gompers, the cigarmaker from London's East Side who ruled the A.F. of L. for 37 years and who held that labor should do no more and no less than "reward its friends and punish its enemies."

With history in mind, Phil Murray proposed an organization which would promote labor's interests within the two-party system, but which would have a platform and party workers of its own. The choice of Sidney Hillman as head of the P.A.C. was obvious—he had long been labor's shrewdest, most pragmatic politicker, with connections in the White House.

The Cutter. Some of Sidney Hillman's journalistic biographers, notably the apostate leftist, Benjamin Stolberg, who profiled him in the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, insist that Hillman's sole talent is to coast along on the influence of his friends.* This is not wholly true, though Hillman indubitably has made his friendships work for him.

The first instance came in the famed Chicago garmentworkers' strike of 1910. Until then Sidney Hillman had been just an $8-a-week pants cutter. Born in Lithuania, son of a mill owner, grandson of a rabbi, he had studied Russian, absorbed some revolutionary doctrines, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, aged 20.

The strike started when 16 female button sewers at a Hart Schaffner & Marx factory, earning $3 to $8 a week, walked out over a 4¢ reduction in piecework pay. (One of the 16 strikers was round-faced, Russian-born Bessie Abramovitz, whom Hillman later married.) For three weeks, more & more workers left their sweatshops until the 16 strikers had become 41,000. Each night there were meetings, usually at Hull House, addressed by Welfare Worker Jane Addams, Lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the strike leaders.

But Hillman, a brash young man in high lace shoes, who spoke hopelessly fractured English, persuaded the strikers to ask for modest terms. This was a great accomplishment. He gained the friendship of Joseph Schaffner, who took a sudden vow to better conditions in all his factories. Finally, Sidney Hillman slipped a clause into the strike settlement calling for a permanent arbitration board, an almost revolutionary innovation in labor relations.