He Grew With His Union
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
He Grew With His Union The World of David Dubinsky. Reviewed, by Ben B. Seligman By Max D. Danish. Contributor, "Dissent," "Commentary,'World. 347 pp. $4.75. "Diogenes," "Labor and Nation" It...
...Danish takes the story through the war years, Taft-Hartley, recent racketeering attempts, literally up to labor's present troubled time...
...How close that relationship really is may be seen in Max Danish's eminently readable, friendly biography...
...The Depression's icy blasts howled through Manhattan's canyons, and there was doubt in some quarters that unionism itself could long survive...
...This was in the early 1930s, and those who were close to the needle trades at the time will recall what a jungle it was...
...Three years later, Benjamin Schlesinger, the ILGWU's ailing, tempestuous president, was dead, to be succeeded, at the insistence of virtually all the officers, by Dubinsky...
...Like the subject of his book, he came to the United States from Tsarist Russia as a youngster to find a new way of life on American soil...
...Danish was himself part of the same labor story of which he writes...
...While the book has at times the quality of a Festschrift, something which may affect its usefulness in some quarters, it remains, nevertheless, a worthy addition to recent labor literature...
...However, says Danish, this was not entirely so, for the NRA was a time when the ILGWU also moved "with a speed and force seldom equaled in its history...
...Naturally, the author had access to the union's archives and he has used them judiciously and well, bringing to his self-appointed task a sense of the immediate that might have been denied to another historian...
...Time and again, the reader is taken into the heart of a convention debate or some public issue in a way that reveals the essence of the ILGWU position in a forceful if at times truncated way...
...To say that the history of that famous union, and of much else in the labor movement in recent years, is closely connected with Dubinsky's own story would be a marked understatement...
...And, like so many of the garment workers whose cause he served for over 35 years, Danish found an opportunity to satisfy his own urge for education and knowledge by working his way through night classes until he had earned a law degree...
...For example, the late Benjamin Stol-berg's Tailors' Progress, written in a decidedly more melodramatic style, ends just about where Danish begins...
...Diogenes," "Labor and Nation" It is now a quarter of a century since David Dubinsky took over the leadership of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, an event recently signalized at a huge Madison Square Garden rally...
...The author has an interesting sidelight on this period: He quotes John L. Lewis as having virtually claimed full credit for realizing the explosive potentialities of Section 7A...
...The outlines of that story are too well known to require retelling here, but it must be said that Danish makes quite clear the various elements that motivated Dubinsky to cooperate at first with Lewis and his corps of dissidents and then move out of the CIO, remaining independent for a while before rejoining William Green's house of labor...
...He first joined the ILGWU staff in 1912 and in 1918 began to edit the union's newspaper, Justice...
...He thus had an excellent close-up view of the attainments of Dubinsky, whose career he so loyally sketches in this book...
...To round off the story, there are several chapters which attempt to portray Dubinsky as an individual rather than labor leader and public figure...
...But Dubinsky (as well as other alert labor men) saw his chance in the famous Section 7A of the National Recovery Act and moved quickly to organize successfully a trade all but shattered by Communist incompetence (the wounds of the disastrous 1926 leftist-led cloak strike were still visible) as well as depressed economic conditions...
...A very interesting part of the book deals with the establishment of the CIO and Dubinsky's role in that critical phase of American labor history...
...Consequently, the value of the latter's book lies in what it has to say about ILGWU history since 1929, the year Dubinsky was selected as the union's secretary-treasurer...
...Nor does the author overlook the numerous innovations in trade-union practice for which the ILGWU is so well known...
...In one sense, Danish's book is an excellent complement to other extant popular histories of the needle trades...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 47
