Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman was born March 23, 1887, in Zagare, in the Lithuanian part of the Russian Empire, into a family that studied Talmud rather than trade — he had memorized whole volumes of it by thirteen and was marked for the rabbinate. Secret study circles introduced him to Marx and Darwin instead. He joined the Jewish Labor Bund in 1903, was arrested for revolutionary organizing, and fled Russia on a false passport in 1906, reaching the United States by way of Manchester in 1907. He found work at the Chicago garment maker Hart Schaffner and Marx, and within three years was leading the shop floor rather than sweeping it.

Hillman's leadership of a 1910 walkout by 45,000 Chicago garment workers made him the obvious choice to head the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America when it split from the AFL's craft unions in 1914. He ran it for the rest of his life, building cooperative housing, unemployment insurance and, in 1923, the union's own Amalgamated Bank, benefits almost no American union offered its members at the time. He co-founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 and became a labor adviser inside Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, helping draft pieces of the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. In 1944, asked about the vice-presidential nomination, Roosevelt reportedly told party officials to clear it with Sidney, and the line became a Republican attack on organized labor's reach into the White House.

Hillman's rise required compromises that outlasted their necessity. In the early 1920s he backed a joint venture rebuilding Soviet clothing factories, work that gave lifelong ammunition to critics who called him a fellow traveler even after he broke publicly with the Communist Party in 1924. He was slower to move against organized crime: the gangster Louis Buchalter operated inside Amalgamated locals through the late 1920s before Hillman purged corrupt officials from Local 4 in 1931, and no evidence of a deal between the two men ever surfaced despite years of opponents looking for one. The union he spent thirty years building could not save the industry itself, either — American clothing manufacturing was already moving south and overseas by the time he died, chasing lower wages than the ones his own union had won.

Hillman died of a heart attack on July 10, 1946, at fifty-nine, at Point Lookout, New York, and Roosevelt had died the year before, and the alliance between organized labor and the White House the two men had built did not survive either of them intact. Within a year Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over union objections, rolling back some of what Hillman had spent his career winning. The Sidney Hillman Foundation, endowed in his name, still awards annual prizes to journalists whose work advances social and economic justice, closer to how he described the labor movement's job than the wage table alone.

Sidney Hillman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America company
  Pioneered cooperative housing and unemployment insurance for members 1914
• Amalgamated Bank company
  The first union-owned bank in the United States 1923
• Congress of Industrial Organizations company
  Co-founded with John L. Lewis 1935
• CIO Political Action Committee company
  The first labor PAC, chaired by Hillman until his death 1943

• March 23, 1887 aged 0 Born in Zagare, Russian Empire
• 1903 aged ~16 Joins the Jewish Labor Bund and is arrested for revolutionary activity
• 1906 aged ~19 Flees Russia on a false passport
• 1910 aged ~23 Leads a 45,000-worker strike at Chicago garment shops
• 1914 aged ~27 Elected founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
• 1935 aged ~48 Co-founds the Congress of Industrial Organizations
• July 1943 aged 56 Becomes first chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee
• July 10, 1946 aged 59 Dies of a heart attack at Point Lookout, New York

• John L. Lewis 1880–1969
  Union leader who built the United Mine Workers and helped found the CIO, expanding industrial unionism and collective bargaining. co-founded CIO with
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. advised
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. worked with
• A. Philip Randolph 1889–1979
  Labor and civil-rights leader who pressured presidents to desegregate defense work and the armed forces. contemporary of