A rabbinical family in Žagarė
Sidney Hillman was born on March 23, 1887, in Žagarė, a small town in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. He was the second of seven children of a poor Jewish family. His paternal grandfather was a rabbi remembered for his piety and his indifference to possessions, and his father, Samuel, a struggling merchant, was more devoted to reading and prayer than to business, so that his mother, Judith, kept the family shop going.
The boy was quick and studious. He excelled at the rote memorisation on which the cheder education of the day was built, and by thirteen he had committed several volumes of the Talmud to memory. The family hoped he would continue its rabbinical tradition, and at about fourteen he was sent to a yeshiva in Slobodka, across the river from the city of Kovno (Kaunas).
From the yeshiva to the Bund
Slobodka did not make a rabbi of him. Hillman began attending the secret meetings of an illegal study circle run by a local druggist, where young men read radical literature and political economy, Darwin, Marx, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer in Russian translation. After a dispute with the yeshiva’s head over his secular reading, he left religious school at around fifteen, homeless and without work, and was taken in by a family active in the Bund, the revolutionary Jewish workers’ movement of the Pale of Settlement.
In 1903 he joined the Bund himself and soon became one of its local activists. On May 1, 1904, he led the movement’s first May Day march through the streets of Kovno, and was arrested and jailed for several months; he was arrested again in 1905. During the revolution of that year he distributed leaflets, raised money and spoke to knots of workers on the street, identifying with the Menshevik wing of Russian social democracy. When police raids and pogroms crushed the revolutionary movement in 1906, he left Russia on a false passport, travelling through Germany to Manchester, England, where an uncle and two brothers were already living.
Chicago and the great strike of 1910
In August 1907 Hillman crossed the Atlantic on the White Star liner Cedric, landing in New York at twenty. Work was scarce there, and he soon moved to Chicago, where he took English classes, picked orders in a warehouse for six dollars a week, and then spent nearly two years as a clerk in the infants’ wear department of Sears, Roebuck. Laid off in a downturn in 1909, he became an apprentice cutter at Hart Schaffner & Marx, a large maker of men’s clothing. It was the last job he ever held at a workbench.
In September 1910 a handful of women workers at Hart Schaffner & Marx walked out over a cut in piece rates. The protest grew into a citywide strike of tens of thousands of garment workers that lasted for months. The strikers faced not only their employers and the police but also their own conservative union, the United Garment Workers, which accepted a settlement the rank and file rejected. Hillman emerged as one of the strike’s leaders, negotiating with management and persuading workers to accept terms that won recognition and arbitration at Hart Schaffner & Marx. He became business agent of the new local, and among the young strike leaders he worked beside was Bessie Abramowitz, whom he would marry in 1916.
Building the Amalgamated
In early 1914 Hillman moved to New York as chief clerk of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, administering the industry’s “Protocols of Peace.” Later that year the leadership of the United Garment Workers tried to disenfranchise its big-city immigrant locals at the union’s convention. Those locals, representing about two-thirds of the membership, walked out and founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and they asked Hillman to be its president. He accepted, reportedly remarking, “The tailors made me. They can have me.” He would lead the union for the rest of his life.
It was a risky beginning. The American Federation of Labor refused to recognise the Amalgamated, and its rival raided it and supplied strikebreakers. Hillman spread the union through Chicago, Baltimore and Rochester, overcoming ethnic divisions among Jewish, Italian and other workers. The union survived a four-month lockout in New York in 1919 and emerged stronger: by 1920 it had contracts with about 85 percent of the city’s men’s clothing manufacturers and had won a 44-hour week.
Under Hillman the Amalgamated pioneered what came to be called social unionism. It offered members low-cost cooperative housing and unemployment insurance, ran education programmes, and founded the Amalgamated Bank to serve working people. Hillman preferred arbitration to strikes during the life of a contract and was willing to help struggling employers become more efficient, reasoning that a stable industry could pay higher wages. In the early 1920s he also led the union into a short-lived venture to bring modern methods to clothing factories in Soviet Russia. In 1931 he moved against racketeers linked to the gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter who had gained a foothold in the union’s cutters’ local, expelling corrupt officers and striking against non-union contractors, though critics, including Thomas Dewey, long claimed the union had compromised with organised crime, a charge never substantiated.
The New Deal and the CIO
The Depression cut the Amalgamated’s membership to a fraction of its former size, but the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, with its promise that workers could organise, brought garment workers flooding back. That year the AFL finally admitted the union. Hillman was an early and steadfast supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was appointed to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934, helped Senator Robert F. Wagner draft the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and helped Labor Secretary Frances Perkins win passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a federal minimum wage and maximum hours.
Inside the AFL, Hillman argued that the labour movement had to organise the vast mass-production industries, steel, automobiles, textiles, where craft unions had almost no presence. In 1935 he joined John L. Lewis in founding the Committee for Industrial Organization, which became the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations, with Hillman as a vice-president. He financed and oversaw the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which produced the Textile Workers Union of America, mediated the factional battles that nearly destroyed the young United Auto Workers in 1938, and helped organise department-store workers. Millions of industrial workers who had never had a union gained one in these years, and with it seniority, grievance procedures and a voice in their wages.
Labour in politics and war
Hillman believed unions had to act politically as well as at the bargaining table. In 1936 he helped found Labor’s Non-Partisan League and, with David Dubinsky, New York’s American Labor Party, giving socialists and other left-wing voters a way to back Roosevelt without joining the Democratic Party. An early opponent of Nazi Germany and supporter of aid to Britain and France, he was appointed labour member of the National Defense Advisory Commission in 1940 and associate director of the Office of Production Management in 1941, and later headed the labour division of the War Production Board.
Wartime service brought criticism from both sides. Some in the CIO thought he put production ahead of workers, as when he backed the administration’s use of troops to end a wildcat strike at North American Aviation in 1941. In 1942, amid complaints from union leaders and a procurement controversy, Roosevelt eased him out of the administration. In 1943 he became the first chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee, a pioneering effort to register union members and bring them to the polls. In 1944 he raised large sums for Roosevelt’s re-election and built a grass-roots machine that became a model for labour’s political work for decades.
“Clear it with Sidney”
Hillman’s influence made him a target. During the 1944 campaign a newspaper report claimed that Roosevelt, discussing the choice of a vice-presidential running mate, had told an aide to “clear it with Sidney.” Republicans turned the phrase into a campaign slogan, portraying the Democratic Party as controlled by a foreign-born radical labour boss. The attacks carried an unmistakable antisemitic and nativist edge: contemporaries noted that several congressmen stressed his Jewishness and his foreign birth, and the columnist Marquis Childs wrote about the campaign under the heading “The Hating of Hillman.” Roosevelt won a fourth term, and labour’s turnout was widely credited to the political machinery Hillman had built.
Hillman never returned to religious observance after leaving the yeshiva, but he remained Jewish culturally and politically all his life. The Amalgamated he built was rooted in the Jewish immigrant world of the needle trades, even as it reached out to Italian and other workers, and his rise from the shtetl to the White House was, for many American Jews, a measure of what the new country made possible.
The man
Those who worked with Hillman described a pragmatic mediator rather than an ideologue. He had shed the revolutionary politics of his youth for a belief in what he called industrial democracy, in which government helped balance the power of labour and capital and disputes were settled by impartial arbiters. Labour historians such as David Brody have described him as realistic, non-ideological and eager for tangible results. His rivalry with John L. Lewis, who broke with Roosevelt in 1940, and his eventual split with Dubinsky showed the steel beneath the conciliatory manner.
His marriage to Bessie Abramowitz Hillman was also a partnership in the labour movement; she had helped lead the 1910 walkout herself, worked for the union for decades as an unpaid volunteer, and after his death became the Amalgamated’s paid vice-president for education. They had two daughters, Selma and Philoine.
Last years and legacy
After the war Hillman helped found the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1945. His health, however, had been failing for some time. On July 10, 1946, he died of a heart attack, his fourth, at his summer home in Point Lookout, New York, at the age of fifty-nine. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, whom he admired, led the kaddish at his funeral, and he was laid to rest in a mausoleum at Westchester Hills Cemetery.
That November the Amalgamated established the Sidney Hillman Foundation in his memory; since 1950 its Hillman Prizes have honoured journalism that serves the common good. Hillman’s deeper legacy lies in the institutions he helped create: the industrial unions of the CIO, the legal right to organise and bargain collectively under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage, and the model of an organised labour vote in American elections. A boy who had memorised the Talmud in a Lithuanian shtetl had helped write the rules of work for a nation.
Sources & further reading
Sidney Hillman, Wikipedia · Sidney Hillman (1887–1946), Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University · Sidney Hillman, EBSCO Research Starters · About, Sidney Hillman Foundation · 10 Things You Should Know About Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, Jewish Women’s Archive · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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