David Dubinsky: 1892-1982
RASKIN, A.H.
Perspectives DAVID DUBINSKY: 1892-1982 BY A. H.RASKIN David Dubinsky was a Seventh Avenue "original"-a style-setter for all that was best in organized labor, an extender of its horizons into...
...Dubinsky, then a knee-pants operator in a nonunion shop in Brooklyn, marched with tens of thousands of weeping mourners in the funeral parade for the Triangle victims...
...The building blocks of the Dubinsky concept of unionism as a quest for social betterment were set in place while he was a teen-age prisoner in the Tsarist jails of Russian Poland, just after the Revolution of 1905...
...That will not happen to our union...
...David Dubinsky summed up his credo in the final words of hisautobiography, written with full knowledge that the tide of imported garments from low-wage sanctuaries overseas and a host of other challenges had put many of his proudest gains in jeopardy: "Business is profit...
...Roosevelt emerged the winner by a margin of only 2,130,000 to 2,104,000, and the uncommonly low total of 101,859 votes recorded on the Socialist line confirmed the Socialists' conviction that the theft of their ballots put him in...
...His designation as a Roosevelt elector was seized upon by the Republicans and the Hearst papers as the springboard for a campaign of vilification based on a $5,000 gift the ILGWU had made to an international labor fund for medical aid to victims of the Spanish Civil War...
...the union is idealism, commitment, service...
...as aKrem-lin agent who would speak for Moscow in the White House????this in the face of Dubinsky's long record of battling Communists inside the garment union as betrayers of the workers' interests...
...It was plain that the Democrats were surveying the returns elsewhere to discover how many extra votes they needed to load onto Roosevelt's total to guarantee his victory over Albert Ottinger, the Republican candidate...
...They became partners in forming a new party designed to provide a haven for other pro-Roosevelt Socialists and liberals who shared their aversion to pulling down a Tammany lever...
...And more than anything else, an intimate concern for people that made D.D...
...A.H.Raskin, for many years the chief labor correspondent of the New York Times, is a frequent contributor to The New Leader, and the co-author of David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor...
...They were there as trade unionists, and the obligation of a union when the country was at war was to support the country...
...What gave it all a unique flavor was the gusto of his volcanic personality...
...Neither did that of the Jewish Daily Forward, which had great influence among the union insurgents...
...found that theprisonsys-tem-for all the brutality and venality of its guards????had been converted by incarcerated Socialist intellectuals into an underground workers' college dedicated to the principles of freedom and economic justice...
...Dubinsky's achievements in lifting his union members out of the sweatshop, civilizing his chaotic industry, crusading against racketeers everywhere in labor, and promoting social responsibility on a global scale are elements in a glowing saga too familiar to require rehearsal in this magazine, which he always held so dear...
...It would be an exaggeration to pretend that a burning determination to advance those principles impelled the 18-year-old Dubinsky to come to the United States after escaping from a prison column in Siberia...
...Dubinsky's basic loyalty to the Socialist Party remained intact until the Presidential election of 1928 when he felt he could not in conscience support Norman Thomas over Alfred E. Smith, who as New York's Governor had done much to help the ILGWU in several critical periods...
...Yet overriding this imperiousness was a radiance of independent spirit, a zest for life...
...Instead, the young greenhorn lost no time in identifying with an insurgent faction challenging the reactionary old-guard leadership of the local...
...How different history would have been had this vote-stacking not given FDR his jumpseat to the Presidency four years later...
...Perspectives DAVID DUBINSKY: 1892-1982 BY A. H.RASKIN David Dubinsky was a Seventh Avenue "original"-a style-setter for all that was best in organized labor, an extender of its horizons into reaches of enduring benefit to every worker and every citizen...
...Locked up for leading a Bundist strike against his father's bakery, D.D...
...Fearful that the calumny would injure Roosevelt, D.D...
...By 1936, however, Roosevelt's accomplishments as architect of a more equitable society and revitalizer of a prostrate union movement had converted Dubinsky and Waldman into enthusiastic champions of FDR's election to a second term in the White House...
...The 1928 election proved no exception...
...That slogan stood on its head the age-old union rule that seniority was the supreme determinant of who worked, no matter how narrow this made the circle of those getting full pay checks while the rest got nothing for weeks on end...
...Unexpectedly, Dubinsky found himself a storm-center...
...His formidable entrepreneurial talents????a gift for figures, for salesmanship, for efficient management-Might readily have induced him to pursue thepath taken by many of the resourceful among his fellow immigrants: a quick jump from top-skilled jobs as garment cutters, the aristocracy of the trade, into the ranks of owners of factories manufacturing women's coats and suits or dresses...
...offered to quit as an elector but the President would not hear of it...
...He could be autocratic...
...The candidate in trouble that year was a political novice with a famous family name, Franklin D. Roosevelt, running to succeed Smith as Governor...
...Along with B. Charney Vladeck and Alex Kahn of the Forward, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Max Zaritsky of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers, they launched the American Labor Party...
...Those were the days of paper ballots, and Tammany was accustomed to stealing Socialist votes whenever it needed them in a close race for state or municipal office...
...that rarest of leaders, one who cared so deeply that, at the end, he could still weep...
...That was all the encouragement the President's detractors needed to strike at Roosevelt by endeavoring to depict D.D...
...Indelible memories of that disaster reshaped his sense of mission, even though a blend of f akery on D. D.' s part and a bit of intrigue by his eldest brother, a business agent of the Bakers Union, soon got him into the elite ranks of the ILGWU Cutters Union and thus gave him a preferred handhold had he chosen to concentrate on making a personal fortune...
...But the immediate effect on Du-binsky, unawareof the profound alterations Roosevelt's New Deal would eventually bring in his own destiny and that of his union, was to revive all his distrust of the crooked Democrats...
...What gave D.D.'s life an irresistible and irreversible push in the opposite direction was the fact that his arrival at Ellis Island on New Year's Day, 1911, preceded by less than three months the monstrous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, in which 146 women perished behind doors locked to keep out union organizers...
...His disposition to cast his personal ballot for Smith caused such disquiet within the party that he decided not to register but to content himself with performing his usual Election Day tour as a Socialist watcher in the Fourth Assembly District on the East Side...
...The Socialist Party's anti-war stance did not end with this country's active involvement...
...Without the faith of our members, we lose what we have built...
...But that long withdrawal from the spotlight has done little to dim the vividness of the testimony his career provides, in this era of almost universal cynicism, to the continuing reality of the American dream...
...The test came very sharply immediately after the United States entered World War I. As an ardent Socialist soapboxer, Dubinsky had preached opposition to participation in the War at nightly rallies on countless street-corners...
...The Socialist watchers made their customary complaint of fraud when the count was resumed and they saw huge batches of votes being switched from one column to another, but nobody listened...
...After that inversion of history had passed with a quarter-million votes cast on the ALP line, Dubinsky's troubles involving the Communists centered on their penetration of the party...
...his rages were fearsome...
...The rebels' rallying cry was "equal division of work" as a democratic way of sharing the misery caused by periodic large-scale layoffs in the cutting rooms...
...When the question arose as to whether the local should buy Liberty Bonds, Du-binsky took the floor to argue that its members were not there to serve the interests of the Socialist Party or the Forward...
...That was the start of the Liberal Party and the beginning of the end for the ALP...
...After the polls closed an order came to stop the counting in the Fourth District and other Tammany strongholds...
...The effect was identical on the candidate from whom the votes were purloined, Louis Waldman, another young emigre from the Tsar's Russia who had gone into Socialist politics after working as a garment cutter and who, by coincidence, died at age 90 in the very same week as Dubinsky...
...He and Alex Rose of the Hatters fought valiantly to keep the Communist influence from becoming dominant????a battle both gave up as hopeless when the pro-Communists and their allies came out on top in the 1944 primary...
...One reason for his ascent was the respect he had won from all factions in the local by demonstrating that he would put the best interests of the union ahead of any doctrinaire political position...
...His death last September 17 at the age of 90 came a full 16 years after he stepped down as president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...
...One of four Socialist Assemblymen who had been expelled from the New York State Legislature in 1920 as part of the Right-wing hysteria that followed the Armistice, Waldman in 1928 was making the first of three unsuccessful bids for the governorship...
...The stand-patters ridiculed the reformers' target as "equal destruction of work," but the newcomers eventually prevailed and Dubinsky moved up to the local's presidency in 1921...
Vol. 65 • October 1982 • No. 18
