LABOR: The New Force

The most important politician at the Democratic convention in Chicago this week is, very probably, a labor leader.

The labor leader is Sidney Hillman, 57, of Manhattan, for 30 years the president of the rich and powerful Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Hillman’s importance derives from the biggest new fact in U.S. politics: the C.I.O.’s Political Action Committee, of which he is chairman.

The tone and approach of P.A.C. is apparent in the very first sentence of its Political Primer for All Americans (2,000,000 copies have already been distributed). Says the Primer: “Politics is the science of how who gets what, when and why.” This is a full 2,000 years and many miles of Marx-marked thought away from Aristotle’s “The good of man must be the end of the science of politics.” But, though neither idealistic nor pious, the Primer’s opening shocker is unquestionably as American and up-to-date as the word “realism.”

The Primer continues: “To the average American, politicians are crooks. . . . The truth is that politicians are no more corrupt than the people who elect them. The people corrupt the politicians. . . . Let’s quit blaming the politicians and face the responsibility of full citizenship. . . . Let’s become politicians ourselves.”

P.A.C.’s attempt to turn at least part of C.I.O.’s 5,000,000 members into politicians is something unique in American labor, and in American history. It is the first sophisticated, thoroughly professional entry of labor into politics. It is everything which all of labor’s political movements in the past were not. P.A.C. is not even a third party, except germinally. It does not intend in the foreseeable future to nominate its own men for office, nor to try to get on the ballot. But P.A.C. is the most formidable pressure group yet devised by labor—a pressure group backed with money, brains and an army of willing workers.

In many a community P.A.C. has received help from the A.F. of L.—although Bill Green sneers at P.A.C.—and the Railroad Brotherhoods. Last week P.A.C. further broadened its scope by setting up a National Citizens Political Action Committee, studded with the names of radicals, movie stars, authors and liberals of all shades that ranged from George Norris to Paul Robeson.* Partly the reason for this was to get around the Smith-Connally Act by having the new committee collect and disburse contributions. Partly the reason was that shrewd Sidney Hillman, looking ahead, wants to get a broader base for his party than labor unions—just as the British Labor Party gradually came to include peers and peeresses, from Lady Noel-Buxton to the late Lord Wedgewood.

The Record. How effective can P.A.C. be? The old axiom was that no one can deliver the U.S. labor vote. Most recent example: John Lewis’ failure in 1940 to swing the C.I.O. to Willkie.

P.A.C.’s record to date in its few tries at the polls has been up & down. Its strength was suddenly dramatized by the defeat or abdication of Congressmen Joe Starnes, John Costello and Martin Dies—all from the South, where P.A.C. is least powerful. But Congressmen John Rankin and Gene Cox, also from the South, handily won renomination despite P.A.C., and their colleagues in the House generally breathed a little easier.

Last week P.A.C. backed a sure thing, Boston’s handsome Mayor Maurice Tobin for the Democratic nomination for Governor in Massachusetts. Tobin won a thumping victory, which proved nothing about P.A.C., but in central Massachusetts P.A.C. lost in its attempt to unseat Congressman Philip J. Philbin. In the labor-conscious state of Washington, most of its candidates came out on top in the Democratic primaries. An active, aggressive left-winger named Hugh de Lacy won out over seven other Democratic candi dates for Congress. In an earlier election, P.A.C. was very helpful to ex-WLB Member Wayne Lyman Morse, a Republican, in an unexpected triumph over bumbling, ex-isolationist Senator Rufus Holman in Oregon.

Generally, P.A.C. has not squandered its money and effort in places where it had little chance of success. But it did all it could, which was not enough, to oust Massachusetts’ egregious Congressman James Michael Curley.

P.A.C.’s real test will come on Nov. 7.

Even then, unless the election is very close, its actual national strength will be difficult to gauge. This will be all right with Strategist Hillman. For his first task is to establish P.A.C. as a threatening force, to which Congressmen and politicos in both parties must pay attention.

$3,000,000. Under the Smith-Connally law, which forbids union contributions to final election campaigns, but not to primaries, P.A.C. paid money directly to its favorites’ primary campaigns. To date, it has spent $300,000 (mostly for salaries and printing), which it considers a mere drop in the bucket. In its treasury is another $400,000 contributed by powerful C.I.O. unions.

The P.A.C. technique for the campaign now beginning is different. Here C.I.O. drops out, and P.A.C.’s new National Citizens Committee will handle the funds.

This group hopes to collect and spend up to $3,000,000, the legal limit. This will be raised by passing the hat and by making appeals in newspaper advertisements. But just to make sure, P.A.C. has passed down word that it expects at least $1 from each C.I.O. member. A slogan already in vogue : “A Buck for Roosevelt.” Most of this money will indeed go for the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, for P.A.C.’s main strength will be thrown into the Fourth Term effort.

These were some of the reasons why Sidney Hillman is one of the most important men in Chicago this week. The gentle, chronically ailing labor leader is not a delegate to the convention; he is not even a registered Democrat. But behind the scenes his power is great.

Nothing Highfalutin. P.A.C. was formed at a C.I.O. executive committee meeting in July 1943. The Smith-Connally bill had just been passed; antilabor Congressmen were riding high & hard. Organized labor, its name blackened by John Lewis’ four wartime strikes, was under attack from every quarter. And labor was angry at Franklin Roosevelt: his War Labor Board had stopped every drive for higher wages.

The young hotheads advocated forming a third party and to hell with both the G.O.P. and Franklin Roosevelt. C.I.O. President Phil Murray offered some cool advice. Third parties, he said, are not practical. And Sidney Hillman warned: “Don’t come along with any highfalutin organization that may work out 25 years from now, or may not.” Murray and Hillman well knew how third parties have failed in the U.S.: the Populists, the Socialists, the Communists, “Big Bill” Haywood’s Wobblies (the I.W.W.), whose theory of progress was to dynamite the social order; or even old Bob LaFollette’s 1924 Progressives, the most successful of all but never strong enough nationally to dent the two-party system. They had seen the 1936-40 failure of John Lewis’ Labor’s Non-Partisan League, of which they themselves were a part. And they remembered the late Sam Gompers, the cigarmaker from London’s East Side who ruled the A.F. of L. for 37 years and who held that labor should do no more and no less than “reward its friends and punish its enemies.”

With history in mind, Phil Murray proposed an organization which would promote labor’s interests within the two-party system, but which would have a platform and party workers of its own. The choice of Sidney Hillman as head of the P.A.C. was obvious—he had long been labor’s shrewdest, most pragmatic politicker, with connections in the White House.

The Cutter. Some of Sidney Hillman’s journalistic biographers, notably the apostate leftist, Benjamin Stolberg, who profiled him in the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, insist that Hillman’s sole talent is to coast along on the influence of his friends.* This is not wholly true, though Hillman indubitably has made his friendships work for him.

The first instance came in the famed Chicago garmentworkers’ strike of 1910. Until then Sidney Hillman had been just an $8-a-week pants cutter. Born in Lithuania, son of a mill owner, grandson of a rabbi, he had studied Russian, absorbed some revolutionary doctrines, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, aged 20.

The strike started when 16 female button sewers at a Hart Schaffner & Marx factory, earning $3 to $8 a week, walked out over a 4¢ reduction in piecework pay. (One of the 16 strikers was round-faced, Russian-born Bessie Abramovitz, whom Hillman later married.) For three weeks, more & more workers left their sweatshops until the 16 strikers had become 41,000. Each night there were meetings, usually at Hull House, addressed by Welfare Worker Jane Addams, Lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the strike leaders.

But Hillman, a brash young man in high lace shoes, who spoke hopelessly fractured English, persuaded the strikers to ask for modest terms. This was a great accomplishment. He gained the friendship of Joseph Schaffner, who took a sudden vow to better conditions in all his factories. Finally, Sidney Hillman slipped a clause into the strike settlement calling for a permanent arbitration board, an almost revolutionary innovation in labor relations.

“Lochinvar.” The fame of Sidney Hillman spread. A few years later, at a United Hebrew Trades dinner in Manhattan, he was introduced as a “Lochinvar from the West.” In Manhattan the needletrades’ Lochinvar made friends with Louis D. Brandeis, soon to be named to the Supreme Court, and the late Morris Hillquit, then the Grey Eminence of Socialism. When a new needletrades union was formed, Hillman became its president.

Under Hillman, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers remained an independent union until 1933, when it joined the A.F. of L., only to switch three years later to the C.I.O. It has grown from 40,000 members to 300,000. It started its own banks, housing developments, unemployment insurance system. In most of its dealings, it followed the Hillman line: be reasonable. To impatient members, disgusted with compromises, Sidney Hillman explained: if you destroy the employer you destroy your job.

Now Hillman spends only half an hour a week in Amalgamated’s offices overlooking Manhattan’s labor-famed Union Square. The union is in the hands of his old friend of Chicago strike days, spade-bearded Russian-born Jacob Potofsky, who casually, and habitually, refers to his boss as a genius.

The Statesman. Hillman’s salary as Amalgamated’s president is $15,000 a year —he gets nothing from P.A.C. He lives in a five-room, $120-a-month apartment on Manhattan’s 20th Street. Chief room in the apartment is his book-lined den (like half a million other middle-class Americans, he subscribes to the Book-of-the-Month Club). His wife, Bessie, a plump, warm-hearted person, cooks all the meals, although she is also the fulltime, unpaid educational director of the Laundry Workers Union, an Amalgamated affiliate. She sees to it that there is always a bowl of borsch and sour cream in the icebox.

This Term IV summer, Sidney Hillman works in a big corner office overlooking the East River, P.A.C.’s national headquarters in Manhattan. There, aided by P.A.C.’s assistant chairman, Calvin Benham (“Beanie”) Baldwin, onetime Farm Security Administrator, he directs the work of P.A.C.’s headquarters staff of 59, and its 14 regional offices.

“Love Thy Neighbor.” P.A.C.’s work starts at the bottom, as realistic politics always does. Its first drive was to register voters, on the theory that a big vote means a Democratic vote. In many a city it moved registration booths right into factories, and registered the workers 100%. It has plastered the country, including the war-plant bulletin boards, with 120,000 posters, graphically painted in the “social protest” style. It has distributed 138,000 buttons, used up 9,900 pounds of newsprint and 22,000 pounds of paper for pamphlets and broadsides. The pamphlets are far & away the slickest political propaganda produced in the U.S. in a generation. They are written in blunt, two-syllable words, and edited by an ex-Harvard economist, the C.I.O.’s grey, handsome J. Raymond Walsh. Example, telling precinct workers what to do: “Become part of the caucus to select a candidate. . . . Nominate a friend as delegate to the convention and have him nominate you. Nominate your wives as alternates. If this shocks you, remember the choice is between your policy and your man and the opposition’s policy and man.”

Another broadside tells canvassers what to do: “Don’t try to lay down the law. Try to gain your neighbor’s confidence. Remember to make your visit brief. Don’t interfere with family affairs. Leave them smiling. Whatever else you do, never get into an argument.” As a slogan, P.A.C. recommends: “Love Thy Neighbor, and Organize Him.”

P.A.C. is also skillful on the radio. A handbook advises PACsters how to get radio time. In the California primary, P.A.C. was especially effective against Congressman Costello with a transcription, broadcast at hourly intervals:

Phonograph Record: “I was absent I was absent I was absent. . . .”

Woman: “Stop that record. It must be broken. Nobody could be absent that many times.”

Announcer: “Oh yes, Congressman Costello actually was. He holds the Congressional record for absenteeism. On 20 vital issues, he was absent eleven times. . . .”

This was corny, and it worked.

In Los Angeles, too, the United Auto Workers has completed an animated cartoon. This shows a race between two trains, the “Win-the-War-Special,” on which the engine is a caricature of F.D.R. and the “Defeatist Limited,” whose engine looks like a cartoon Senator, blowing hot air out of his stovepipe hat. In the nick of time, Citizen Joe throws the switch, derailing the Defeatist Limited, sending the Win-the-War-Special to Washington.

World to Come. Phil Murray, who has come a long way since his nonpartisan A.F. of L. days, has said: “What the Government gives, the Government can take away.” P.A.C. well knows that labor’s major dealings now and in the future are primarily with the Government, no matter how much unions might yearn for the simple days when they had only to deal with employers, P.A.C.’s program for 1944 is also aimed at making sure that the New Deal will not withdraw the generous hand it has held out to labor for eleven years.

But beyond its 1944 objective, P.A.C. has a far-sighted purpose. From now on, labor has political ambitions of its own. P.A.C.’s young thinkers—the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, C.I.O. Secretary Jim Carey, Economist Ray Walsh—are already skeptical of the ability of private enterprise to provide full employment after the war. They argue that without Government initiative the U.S. cannot be effectively mobilized for peace; they are prepared to accept—and even seem eager for a postwar world in which the economic initiative belongs to the Government. P.A.C.’s 1944 platform is a specific blueprint calling for a planned economy, federally controlled—including everything from raising the standard of living in backward nations by granting them large credits, to free hot lunches for the 20,000,000 U.S. school children.

This is a lot more than Sam Gompers or Bob La Follette or Bill Green or John Lewis ever thought of. But if P.A.C. ever wins its objective, and becomes the balance of power in U.S. elections, the U.S. voters will hear a lot more about P.A.C.’s long-range plan.

* Others: Louis Adamic, Marc Connelly, Zara du Pont, Ben Hecht, Dr. Frank Kingdon, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward G. Robinson, Lillian Smith (Strange Fruit), Orson Welles.

** In his latest book, a biography of Hillman’s great needle trades rival, Dave Dubinsky, Stolberg calls Hillman “a typical ham Machiavelli who almost always outsmarts himself.”