47 Facts About Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for President Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party.

Sidney Hillman was born in Zagare, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on March 23,1887, the son of Lithuanian Jewish parents.

Sidney Hillman's father was himself an impoverished merchant, more concerned with reading and prayer than with his faltering business.

From a young age Sidney Hillman had shown great academic promise, mastering the rote memorization upon which the cheder education of the day was based.

The study circle's members read radical literature and books on political economy, and Sidney Hillman was here exposed to the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer in Russian translation.

Early in 1903, Sidney Hillman passed from the training grounds of the Marxist study circle to fully fledged membership in the Bund, a revolutionary socialist union of Jewish workers within the Pale in conflict with the Tsarist authorities.

Sidney Hillman became a leading activist in the Bund, leading the first May Day march ever conducted by the organization through the streets of Kovno in 1904.

Sidney Hillman was arrested shortly thereafter for his revolutionary activities and sat in prison for several months, where he learned more about revolutionary social theory from fellow prisoners.

Sidney Hillman played only a minor local role during the Russian Revolution of 1905, engaging in the distribution of leaflets, raising funds for the revolutionary organization, and informally speaking on the streets to groups of workers.

Sidney Hillman joined the exodus of revolutionaries from the country in October 1906, traveling under a false passport through Germany to Manchester, England, where he joined his uncle, a prosperous furniture dealer, and two brothers already living there.

Sidney Hillman's prospects were poor in New York and he soon set out for Chicago, where a friend and a more favorable job market awaited him.

In Chicago, Sidney Hillman worked briefly picking orders in a warehouse for $6 a week.

Sidney Hillman remained in that position for nearly two years before being fired in the spring of 1909 during a downturn of business.

Sidney Hillman had taken the position of Chief Clerk within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York in early 1914.

Sidney Hillman found that job, in which he tried to maintain the stability imposed on a ferociously competitive industry by the Protocols of Peace, and in which the internal rivalries within the union threatened to flare up into all-out conflict, frustrating.

Sidney Hillman was one of the original leaders of the 1910 strike, an important figure in union politics and his fiancee.

Sidney Hillman accepted and left the ILG after less than a year.

Sidney Hillman helped the Amalgamated solidify its gains and extend its power in Chicago through a series of strikes in the last half of the 1910s and to extend the union's membership into important garment centers in Baltimore and Rochester, New York, where the union had to overcome divisions within garment workers on ethnic lines and the opposition of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Sidney Hillman was particularly receptive to the opportunities that government intervention in labor relations presented the union; he not only did not have the ingrained distrust of governmental regulation that now marked Samuel Gompers and other leaders of the AFL, but had a firm belief in the sort of industrial democracy in which government helped mediate between labor and management.

Sidney Hillman had strong ties to many progressive reformers, such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow, who had assisted the Amalgamated in its early strikes in Chicago in 1910 and New York in 1913.

Sidney Hillman favored "constructive cooperation" with employers, relying on arbitration rather than strikes to resolve disputes during the life of a contract.

Sidney Hillman led the union into a joint business project with the Soviet Union that brought western technology and principles of industrial management to ten clothing factories in the Soviet Union.

One of his allies within the ACWA was Abraham Beckerman, a prominent member of the Socialist Party with close ties to The Forward, whom Sidney Hillman used to inflict strongarm tactics on his communist opponents within the union.

In 1931 Sidney Hillman resolved to act against Buchalter, Beckerman, and Orlofsky.

Sidney Hillman did claim to have murdered a factory owner and labour opponents of Hillman at Hillman's behest, a claim which was never corroborated.

Sidney Hillman was a supporter of the New Deal and Roosevelt from the outset.

Sidney Hillman was one of the original founders in 1935 of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, an effort led by John L Lewis, and became Vice-President of the CIO when it established itself as a separate union confederation in 1937.

Sidney Hillman played a role in nearly every major initiative of the CIO in those years.

Sidney Hillman oversaw, and provided major financial support for, the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which sought to establish a new union for textile workers after the disastrous defeat of the United Textile Workers' strike in 1934.

Sidney Hillman played a decisive role in mediating the internal disputes that nearly destroyed the United Auto Workers in its infancy in 1938 and helped create the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America through the CIO's Department Store Workers Organizing Committee.

Sidney Hillman remained in it, still the second most visible leader after Philip Murray, Lewis' successor.

Dubinsky later split from the Labor Party over personal and political differences with Sidney Hillman to found the Liberal Party of New York.

Sidney Hillman was a strong opponent of Nazi Germany and a supporter of US aid to England and France.

When FDR created the War Production Board in 1942, he appointed Sidney Hillman to serve as the head of its labor division.

Sidney Hillman was unable to persuade the Board to debar labor law violators but did help introduce arbitration as an alternative to strikes in defense industries.

Sidney Hillman believed in the need for unions to mobilize their members politically.

Sidney Hillman was the first chair of the CIO Political Action Committee, founded in 1942, as well as of the National Citizens Political Action Committee.

In July 1943, Philip Murray of the CIO led formation of the CIO-PAC, of which Sidney Hillman was the first head.

In Roosevelt's last election in 1944, Sidney Hillman raised nearly $1 million on behalf of the Democrat national ticket.

Sidney Hillman was credited with grass roots activities, registering labor voters and bringing them in heavy numbers to the polls.

Sidney Hillman, who had been sick for some time, died of a heart attack at age 59 on July 10,1946, at his summer home in Point Lookout, New York.

Sidney Hillman's body was interred in a mausoleum located at Westchester Hills Cemetery, 20 miles north of New York City.

Sidney Hillman was a pioneer in integrating union power with major political powers on a national level.

The New Deal had proven a bonanza for union membership growth, and beginning with the 1936 presidential election, Sidney Hillman pushed hard for labor to give systematic nationwide support to Roosevelt and the New Deal cause.

The American Labor Party that Sidney Hillman had helped create passed out of existence in that same year.

Sidney Hillman is the namesake of the Sidney Hillman Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and part of Cooperative Village in Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation, established in his honor, gives annual awards to journalists and writers for work that supports social justice and progressive public policy.