HILLMAN, SIDNEY

Sidney "Hilkie" Hillman (March 23, 1887–July 10, 1946) was president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW), founding member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), co-director of the federal Office of Production Management (OPM) during World War II, and director of the CIO Political Action Committee. Born in Zagare, Lithuania, to a family of merchants and rabbis, Hillman's intellectual achievements at a young age enabled him to pursue rabbinical studies. At Yeshiva, Hillman chafed under severe restrictions against secular training, and in 1903, he joined the socialist Bund. As a young revolutionary and labor organizer, Hillman fled Russia in late 1906 to avoid the czar's persecution. He immigrated to the United States the following year.

Settling in Chicago, Hillman went to work in the needle trades where he experienced oppressive labor conditions. He emerged as a local leader of independent immigrant garment workers during the violent Chicago garment strike of 1910, garnering notice from such Progressive leaders as Jane Addams. In 1914 Hillman assumed the presidency of the new Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, an organization devoted to industrial unionism, led largely by socialists, anarchists, and Bundists, and made up predominantly of women and Jewish immigrants—three factors that encouraged the enmity of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and conservative craft unions. Hillman's organizing talents were prodigious: by the end of World War I the ACW represented nearly 50 percent of the nation's garment workers.

In the reactionary 1920s, employers, AFL officials, and government representatives increasingly targeted Hillman for his allegiance to left-labor political organizations, especially his close relationship to supporters of the Russian revolution. Some of the nation's leading attorneys, including Harvard's Felix Frankfurter, rushed to defend Hillman. The 1924 convention of the ACW endorsed the presidential candidacy of Progressive Robert M. La Follette, signaling a moderation in Hillman's socialist activism. For founding ACW cooperative banks and housing programs, and for instituting a union unemployment insurance plan, Hillman was recognized by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as "the flaming genius of union labor in the U.S." by the late 1920s.

As the Depression worsened in the early 1930s, Hillman's commitment to a workers' vision of "industrial democracy," in which workers' organizations were made more powerful without revolutionary class struggle, led him to endorse a cautious course of action for the ACW, including agreeing to wage cuts, endorsing prohibitions against child labor, and boycotting sweatshop-manufactured goods. He campaigned vigorously for a national unemployment insurance plan. Hillman was well regarded within the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he counted among his confidantes such leading New Dealers as Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Harold Ickes, and Senator Robert Wagner. Although Hillman held reservations about the labor provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, he did accept appointment to the National Industrial Recovery Board (NIRB) and quickly emerged as labor's most audible voice in the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and in Washington.

Hillman found his service on the NIRB acutely frustrating, though by 1935 the ACW had recovered from its early Depression-era slump and its members had achieved significant wage increases. With the Schechter decision, which declared the NRA unconstitutional, Hillman's optimism that government intervention in the economy would lead to economic recovery faded. In response, Hillman turned to the solution of mass industrial unionism. At the 1935 AFL convention, Hillman advocated the right of autoworkers to industrial union representation in a series of floor debates that culminated in a fight between the United Mineworkers' John L. Lewis and the craft-based carpenter's president William Hutcheson. Within days, the Committee for Industrial Organization, later called the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was founded as a federation of industrial unions closely tied to the Democratic Party. Among the unions newly affiliated with the CIO were those in mining, the needle trades, typography, auto, steel, rubber, radio, oil, millinery, and mill and smelting. Initially, the CIO attempted to work within the institutional framework of the AFL, but by mid-1936 the AFL executive council suspended the ten founding unions of the new federation; expulsion of the renegade unions followed in 1937. Hillman served as vice-president of the fledgling organization.

Although considered a labor moderate, Hillman himself had little patience for peacemaking within the AFL; instead, his experience as president of the ACW led him to endorse a "new unionism," incorporating a mass movement for industrial unionism with bureaucratic interventionism of the sort expressed most clearly by Roosevelt's Second New Deal and the expansion of the welfare state. A significant component of the new unionism vision was rationalization within the workplace with the intent of eliminating outmoded work practices and bringing efficiency in production to employers. Roosevelt's secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, called regularly on Hillman for advice. That advice was respected even by Roosevelt, who reportedly said upon encountering congressional opposition to the 1937 Fair Labor Standards Act, "I will never let Hillman down."

Hillman was so wedded to the Roosevelt administration and the new unionism ideal that by the late 1930s his political opponents within and outside of organized labor questioned his commitment to the CIO rank and file. As a supporter of Roosevelt's reelection to an unprecedented third term, Hillman found himself in opposition to Lewis, the president of the CIO, and to members of the Communist Party. Hillman's support proved key to Roosevelt's reelection in 1940, while the Hillman-Roosevelt coalition secured the election of Philip Murray to the presidency of the CIO in the same year. For his unwavering support, the administration rewarded Hillman with positions on the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, and in 1942 the War Production Board. Hillman also directed the CIO's Political Action Committee, an organization seen by opponents as too closely tied to the Roosevelt administration.

Troubled by President Harry Truman's unpredictable attitudes toward progressive labor, alarmed by what seemed an impending red scare, and frustrated by failures of the CIO's southern organizing campaign Operation Dixie, Hillman died of heart disease in July 1946.

HILLMAN, SIDNEY

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