Steven Fraser's Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor

...Hillman's frequent failures on the mobilization front and his inability to do any more politically than fend off an antilabor triumph in 1944 make grim reading...

...Unlike the Amalgamated, the AFL had been largely shut out of scientifically managed industry...

...In fact, Hillman found prospects for his New Deal aspirations brightest on the international front...

...Hardman, Bessie Abramovitz (who later married Hillman), Anzuino Marimpietri, Aldo Cursi, and many more...

...The aspirations of immigrants, whom he joined in the American garment and textile centers, nurtured the growth and unique role of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America...

...Fraser explains their failure with a provocative, if not entirely persuasive, cultural interpretation of the commitment of the immigrants' children in heavy industry to Franklin Roosevelt...

...Who will shape a new social leadership to rebuild America...

...At the age of twenty-eight Hillman was elected president of a breakaway union that was destined soon to become the most influential labor organization in the land...

...Within less than a decade the triumphant "free market" economy showed signs of physical decay and permanent underemployment, reminiscent of 1937-38...

...Throughout the twenties, the young union nurtured progressive electoral politics, developed extensive educational programs for its members, built its own housing projects (the famous coops), created its own bank, and meticulously compiled and published its own documentary history...

...The congressional victories most important to them had come while Hoover was president: the NorrisLaGuardia Act and the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage law...

...What will its solutions offer working people...

...The Socialist International, at the pinnacle of its strength, had failed to halt the outbreak of war, and its largest member parties had rallied behind the armed forces of their own governments, in opposition to other armies filled with their former comrades...

...The first is that the militaryindustrial complex that has dominated the country ever since took control of Washington during the "Good War...

...Fierce divisions within the American Labor party, triggered by Stalin's murder of bundist leaders Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, were followed by a successful mobilization of Democratic conservatives against the renomination of Vice-President Henry Wallace...

...The last quarter of Labor Will Rule is devoted to Hillman's efforts as a government functionary to combine economic mobilization for total war with a recharging of the New Deal's reform energies...

...Although the embattled union drew strength from the garment industry's diverse work cultures, it needed to channel the militancy unleashed by union strength into formalized contractual relations...

...The union grew dramatically during World War I and forced the government to include labor standards in its military procurement contracts...

...Two major arguments run through this detailed account of the war...

...The ideological confrontation culminated in an orgy of race-baiting and red-baiting, unleashed by Thomas E. Dewey's campaign ("Clear it with Sidney" cast Hillman in the role Willie Horton played for George Bush...

...It was only after these influences had committed the ruling Democrats to the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, and the Works Progress Administration that John L. Lewis punched the Carpenters' William Hutcheson at the AFL's Atlantic City convention and the CIO was born...

...Moreover, Fraser couches his analysis in terms that deliberately avoid the familiar categories of left, center, and right...

...By 1930, some Amalgamated districts had even fallen under the domination of racketeers (whose activities Fraser analyzes brilliantly...

...The point is far from original, but Fraser develops it well...

...Nevertheless, clothing workers in Philadelphia responded militantly and effectively to an organizing drive in 1930 despite catastrophic unemployment, and surgical strikes directed from the headquarters displaced Louis Lepke's mobsters in New York...

...Most important of all, it survived the widespread employers' counterattack of the depression years, 1920-21, to remain an island of effective trade unionism in the treacherous seas of an open-shop economy...

...Surrounded by military officers and dollar-a-year corporate executives who despised him, "Hillman's actual power to determine the contours of public policy declined in inverse proportion to his official position and prestige...

...The dramatic mass struggles that attended its birth, Fraser would contend, have obscured its umbilical cord to the political alliance then ascendant in Washington...

...The veterans of the great Chicago and New York strikes in men's clothing, who rebelled against AFL practices and launched a militant, WINTER • 1992 • 97 visionary industrial union, surrounded their new president with some of the ablest individuals ever to grace the pages of American labor history: Joseph Schlossberg, Dorothy Jacobs, Augusto Bellanca (who later married Jacobs), J.B.S...

...The Amalgamated organized sufficient strength in New York, Rochester, Chicago, Cleveland, and elsewhere, despite the violent hostility of police and judges, to secure the eight-hour day, improved wages, and an end to such familiar horrors as coal-heated, thirty-five-pound pressing irons, dismally lighted bushel shops, and bosses who absconded leaving workers with no pay at all for work they had done...

...Right-wing writers like Morgan Reynolds and New Deal liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Irving Bernstein have always spotlighted Washington's nurturing role, but they have drawn different conclusions from it...

...Fraser notes that, although Hillman's early training in the yeshiva, the Bund, and the revolution of 1905 equipped him with the polemical skills, concern for organizational detail, the "semiintellectual" mentality that reappeared often in his behavior as an American union and government official, and his adherence to Martov's Mensheviks rather than the Bund, prefigured his abiding estrangement from the distinctively Jewish centers of socialism (especially those around the New York Forward...

...In part this is because, though Hillman always kept important ties to socialist and communist parties, both he and his union cherished their independence from all of them...

...At the same time, the quest both for union standards and production standards that characterized the New Unionism drew into the Amalgamated's orbit a constellation of social scientists and social engineers, including Morris Cooke, Mary Van Kleeck, Wesley Mitchell, Leo Wolman, and Ordway Tead, along with business leaders like Edward Filene and Henry Dennison, for whom stimulation of mass consumption was a more compelling objective than absolute mastery over their employees...

...The main enemies of the New Deal were to be found in the "securities bloc" of declining and producers' goods industries and their mighty financiers in the banking world...

...During the second downturn of the depression (1937-9) the reinvigoration of threatened ethnic elites and Catholic trade unionists under the banner of "anticommunism" challenged the New Deal in the North, while a counterattack of the southern oligarchy stymied reform in Congress and smashed the organizing drive of Hillman's own Textile Workers' Organizing Committee-CIO in Dixie...

...Rather than linking the CIO to a legacy of struggles for industrial unionism, cultivated by the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) through the mass strikes of 1934, Fraser situates its origins in a 98 • DISSENT political culture that blended workers' aspirations for security and a voice in shaping their own destinies with the mass-market orientation of the growth sectors of interwar industry and finance, the maturing of a generation of Americanized children of immigrants, the consolidation of scientific management, the professionalization of welfare work, the coupling of secular visions of social improvement with faith in government's coercive power, and the total absence of commitment to rugged individualism among ethnic professional and business elites, when they were faced with a depression...

...The New Unionism, of which the Amalgamated was the flagship, sank one root in immigrant cultures and another in the Progressive Era reform impulses of his adopted country...

...In a deeper sense, it is because the many attempts of the left to form its own electoral movement in the traditional third-party style recounted in this book were all stillborn...

...Fraser analyzes rigorously and concisely the ideological currents among Jewish workers in the Russian Empire and in the United States, though his interpretation of Italians and Lithuanians at times seems to be trapped in stereotypes...

...Fraser detects its origins in the illusory character of the labor-New Deal victory of 1944...

...Their strength during the twenties had resided within competitive, localized markets of small producers, not in domains of mass production and mass marketing: Dave Beck's teamsters in the Pacific Northwest provided their great success story...

...Hillman also drew frequently and effectively on the support of other groups whose goals were quite different from his own...

...Hillman and his colleagues learned to cultivate and collaborate with the desire of major manufacturers to suppress those competitors who survived only by sweatshop practices...

...The Chicago clothing workers' strike of 1910 found Hillman an apprentice cutter at Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and catapulted him to prominence as the intermediary between the immigrants who wanted a closed shop that would nullify the employers' power to hire and fire and the city's influential progressive reformers' desire to rationalize industrial practice...

...Hardly five years had passed since young Hillman had come to the United States from the land of the czars...

...His energies, talent, and vision reinvigorated despite recent massive heart attacks, he gave himself unstintingly to the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU...

...His second thesis will stir more controversy: it is that the cold war began within the United States before the falling out of the WINTER • 1992 • 99 Books United States with the Soviet Union...

...Together they cultivated what Fraser calls "microregulation" of the economy: securing high earnings, raising productivity, evening out seasonal patterns of layoffs, introducing company-based unemployment insurance, policing the behavior of subcontractors, and creating a cadre of experienced arbitrators, whose decisions introduced an element of predictability into industrial relations...

...That alliance, also invigorated by Soviet Russia's New Economic Policy, encouraged the Amalgamated to establish nine cooperative clothing and textile factories there...

...The industrialized society that produced that union then occupied but a small portion of the northern hemisphere, but it was no longer in its infancy...

...That lesson is Fraser's outstanding contribution to our assessment of our present situation and prospects...

...Death overtook him in July 1946, not long before his own CIO ("quintessentially political creature" that it was) aligned itself with cold-war foreign policy, expelled those constituents it considered friendly to communism, and seceded from the WFTU...

...Contrary to Fraser's argument, their "capitulation to scientific management" was purely rhetorical...

...Nor were they delighted by the New Deal's political culture...

...New social alignments do not just happen: they are created by persistent and deliberate human activity over long periods of time...

...Although industrial democracy meant alternatively to different people collective bargaining, company-initiated representation plans, and worker self-management, the term was most readily identified during and after the Great War with the New Unionism...

...The splendidly ambiguous phrase "industrial democracy," which had been imported to the United States by academic admirers of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, seemed to encompass both aspirations...

...Although the dominant unions of the AFL had welcomed the National Industrial Recovery Act, they resisted the growing government guidance of collective bargaining, especially when the first two years of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections saw 75 percent of the victories go to the CIO...

...In the 1930s, he contends, the new social alliances that had been nurtured by the New Unionism used governmental powers to reopen the "sclerotic arteries" of an economy that had been "all but dammed shut by 'inflated capital values.' " Fifty years later Ronald Reagan's planners would use state power to "unleash enterprise" from the economic mechanisms inherited from the New Deal, which had bogged down in stagflation...

...The consolidation of corporate power within the enlarged machinery of state, which the war had made possible, now reshaped national political discourse so as to make anticommunism its accepted point of departure and bury the CIO's dreams of economic planning...

...Indeed, the attempts of Soviet trade unions to introduce arbitration mechanisms and production standards in the face of persistent strikes in urban Russia before 1928 made the affinity between the young Amalgamated and its Soviet counterparts even closer than Fraser appreciates...

...he Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), contends Steven Fraser, "was a quintessentially political creature whose origins and fate were entirely bound up with the rising and receding of the `second New Deal.' " The career of Sidney Hillman provides Fraser, who is the executive editor of Basic Books and co-editor of the important anthology The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989), with a vehicle for exploring the ties that bound the new union movement to other efforts at social reconstruction through the political order...

...As he rightly contends, the AFL's old guard had built its bridges to the Irish and German urban machines of the Democratic party, including such foes of the CIO as Jersey City's Frank Hague and Memphis's E. H. Crump...

...Where no employers' associations existed to deal with the union, the Amalgamated organized the bosses...

...Hillman's Political Action Committee of 1944, with its triumphally statist program of national planning, national child and health care, and fair employment legislation, mobilized votes for the Democrats with special effectiveness in the country's multi-ethnic, steel-producing centers...

...As the twenties progressed, business agents and labor educators replaced shop stewards as the driving force of the young union, and communists were driven into opposition and marginalized after the 1924 LaFollette campaign...

...In Fraser's analysis, socialist and labor parties get short shrift, and the IWW is discussed with the contempt one might expect from an early Amalgamated organizer...

...With it went the ability to tell the difference between the role of the courtier and that of the labor statesman...

...Hillman had no time for ideals divorced from power...

...Fraser adds that as Hillman "drew ever closer to the center of power, he tended to forfeit his birthright, that obsidian sense of Yiddish irony vulcanized through centuries of shtetl privation and persecution...

...As business regained its mastery over the country's political climate, the Amalgamated became the main bearer of the country's left-liberal hopes...

...Fraser shares this assessment, but his analysis of the way social power is created and used, and of the intimate relationship between labor movements and the way the country is governed contributes valuably not only to current historical controversies but also to discussions of the present predicament of American democracy...

...Most noteworthy was the assistance he received from the Communist party, when Amalgamated craftsmen defended their shop traditions against Hillman's efforts to impose production standards...

...The rebels of 1968 charged that the structures of power created by Hillman's generation— in the East and in the West—had suffocated the ideals in whose name they were forged...

...Every stage of Hillman's life linked him with networks of men and women who then transformed American life...

...Lshort, the argument of Labor Will Rule is that the change in the orientation of government that followed the economic collapse of 1929 had been prefigured by a new convergence of social interests and a gathering of individuals from many different walks of life, from whose ranks the personnel of a new social directorate was drawn...

...Enterprises with five to ten thousand workers had become commonplace, urban working-class neighborhoods teemed with people of diverse backgrounds but similar circumstances, trade unions had become a force to reckon with in every European and North American country west of the czarist autocracy and the Balkan states, and virtually everywhere the unions' own cautious and rigid practices were challenged by a massive revolt of the unskilled, as well as an irrepressible hunger for collective power among their own members...