Sidney Hillman

...It is a pity, though, since both excelled in grasping the minds of labor and of management and the social topography of America, and both employed the same "trial and error" method...

...To Hillman and to the other Jewish leaders in the garment trades, the Roosevelt leadership of the country meant the ascendancy of the very humanitarian group which they had found so responsive since their first contact with the social settlement workers in the days of their early struggles...

...The book is a first-class contribution to American history in depicting how this remarkable ex-rabbinical student usually managed to keep the descendant of the Dutch patroons on the main road in their joint task of making America into a land more pleasing to the eye of a "Christian and a Democrat," and how Hillman kept coming up with new devices such as the Political Action Committee to help keep his beloved humanitarian in office...

...The book thus depicts a unique merger of two "culture streams" and of the coordination in action of two bold reformers...

...Hillman's anti-Gomperism is, therefore, easily understood...

...Few of the intangibles have escaped him...

...We say that, in truth, we are.the Americans, and they the foreigners, whether they know it or not"— doubtless meaning that they were foreign to the spirit newly stirring in the land and in its labor movement...

...Reviewed by Selig Perlman OF the "Men of the Roosevelt Era," the Chief not excepted, Sidney Hillman alone brought into what turned out to be the grandiose enterprise of making over the social contour of America, a pragmatically tested insight into what men...

...want, or better, into what they can be made to want...

...At the formation in 1914 of the Amalgamated—soon destined for glory and acclaim as America's model union—Gompers had already been through more than a decade of gruelling counter-attack by the union-hating employers, in steel and in the metal trades in general, in which America's specific industrial genius especially shone...

...In Josephson's account, Hillman's sojourn in the heart-break house when he, having given unstintingly of himself toward the war effort, suddenly found himself a sort of "forgotten man"—and his later retrieving of his leading role—is handled with all the delicacy the subject merits...

...The writer of this review cherishes the memory of a visit to his home by Hillman in the late twenties, and vividly recalls his self-description as an American labor leader, probably evoked by the still prevailing though quite inaccurate conception of the "Wisconsin School" of labor interpretation, founded by John R. Commons, as statically Gompersian...

...Hillman's foreign-manned Amalgamated Men's Clothing Workers' Union of America, a revolt against the American-born leadership of the United Garment Workers of America, had been irrevocably stamped by Gompers as "illegitimate...

...Josephson writes with competence and devotion...

...Hillman's leadership cashed in on the socialist idealism of his people, himself included, brought over as recent participants in the abortive Russian Revolution, and on his early and permanent alliance with the humanitarians, Jane Addams and her kind...

...He far above the others possessed an expertness in "institution-building" acquired during two decades of bold and ceaseless effort in his own industry...

...Consequently the "big capitalism" that Hillman encountered could be influenced by the voice of moral censorship of the humanitarians and was eventually grateful for Hillman's industrial house-cleaning...

...They," said he, meaning those upon whom the Gompers mantle had fallen, "think of us as foreigners...

...By contrast, in Hillman's industry, or rather in the garment trades as a whole, the "writ of capitalism" ran to a much lesser degree—it was indeed a much "softer" capitalism, one in which the more responsible big employers were conscious of the shame of the sweat shop and personally and as a group felt more vulnerable than their non-Jewish confreres in other industries who generally could count in their labor disputes on the support of the conservative forces...