LABOR: The New Force

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"Lochinvar." The fame of Sidney Hillman spread. A few years later, at a United Hebrew Trades dinner in Manhattan, he was introduced as a "Lochinvar from the West." In Manhattan the needletrades' Lochinvar made friends with Louis D. Brandeis, soon to be named to the Supreme Court, and the late Morris Hillquit, then the Grey Eminence of Socialism. When a new needletrades union was formed, Hillman became its president.

Under Hillman, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers remained an independent union until 1933, when it joined the A.F. of L., only to switch three years later to the C.I.O. It has grown from 40,000 members to 300,000. It started its own banks, housing developments, unemployment insurance system. In most of its dealings, it followed the Hillman line: be reasonable. To impatient members, disgusted with compromises, Sidney Hillman explained: if you destroy the employer you destroy your job.

Now Hillman spends only half an hour a week in Amalgamated's offices overlooking Manhattan's labor-famed Union Square. The union is in the hands of his old friend of Chicago strike days, spade-bearded Russian-born Jacob Potofsky, who casually, and habitually, refers to his boss as a genius.

The Statesman. Hillman's salary as Amalgamated's president is $15,000 a year —he gets nothing from P.A.C. He lives in a five-room, $120-a-month apartment on Manhattan's 20th Street. Chief room in the apartment is his book-lined den (like half a million other middle-class Americans, he subscribes to the Book-of-the-Month Club). His wife, Bessie, a plump, warm-hearted person, cooks all the meals, although she is also the fulltime, unpaid educational director of the Laundry Workers Union, an Amalgamated affiliate. She sees to it that there is always a bowl of borsch and sour cream in the icebox.

This Term IV summer, Sidney Hillman works in a big corner office overlooking the East River, P.A.C.'s national headquarters in Manhattan. There, aided by P.A.C.'s assistant chairman, Calvin Benham ("Beanie") Baldwin, onetime Farm Security Administrator, he directs the work of P.A.C.'s headquarters staff of 59, and its 14 regional offices.

"Love Thy Neighbor." P.A.C.'s work starts at the bottom, as realistic politics always does. Its first drive was to register voters, on the theory that a big vote means a Democratic vote. In many a city it moved registration booths right into factories, and registered the workers 100%. It has plastered the country, including the war-plant bulletin boards, with 120,000 posters, graphically painted in the "social protest" style. It has distributed 138,000 buttons, used up 9,900 pounds of newsprint and 22,000 pounds of paper for pamphlets and broadsides. The pamphlets are far & away the slickest political propaganda produced in the U.S. in a generation. They are written in blunt, two-syllable words, and edited by an ex-Harvard economist, the C.I.O.'s grey, handsome J. Raymond Walsh. Example, telling precinct workers what to do: "Become part of the caucus to select a candidate. . . . Nominate a friend as delegate to the convention and have him nominate you. Nominate your wives as alternates. If this shocks you, remember the choice is between your policy and your man and the opposition's policy and man."