Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor

by Steve Fraser

Book by Fraser, Steve

Genres: Labor, History, Biography

Paperback

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

Steve Fraser is an author, an editor, and a historian whose many publications include the award-winning books Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. He is senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the American Prospect.

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography is a fascinating look at a figure that was a fascinating link of the history of the US labor movement in the 1st half of the 20th century. Sidney Hillman helped found the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was its President from 1914 to his death is 1946. Hillman was a Jewish Lithuanian and committed socialist who fled the Russian Empire after the Czar organized pograms. He came to America. He helped found the ACWA after conservative AFL unions failed to help workers. Hillman emerged as a militant leader in the 1910s who was committed to social unionism and building a larger industrial democracy.

The biography goes to great lengths to demonstrate both Hillman's contradictions and his development. He was a fabian socialist, who believed in gradual reforms to transform society, yet pushed for rank and file militancy within the bureacratic discipline of the union. He straddled the world between American progressivism like Jane Addams and Jewish socialism which he came from, working extensively with the Daily Forward. He was a 2nd international socialist party man, yet admired the Soviet Union and formed alliances with the Communist Party as needed which enabled the ACWA to escape unscathed from the needle wars of the 1920s when Communist-Socialist civil wars badly harmed the other majority Jewish needle and textile unions.

Above all, he believed in securing access for his members to a better life over building larger class power. He became known as the Labor Statesman in the 1930s as he maneuvered an alliance with labor and FDR's Democratic Party, which he stuck to when forming the CIO with the David Dubinsky's ILGWU and the John Lewis's United Mineworkers, outlasting both of them in the CIO. He came to embrace social democratic Keynesian economics and envisioned the CIO as a muscular wing of the New Deal coalition, prefeferring militants as front line organizers while making deals with the government to secure labor's place. Ironically, he began to lose influence in labor the more he became part of the government labor boards. By the end of his life in 1946, he was at once regarded by militants as a sell-out, a boogyman by conservatives for being a socialist Jew who had too much influence in the federal government, and a labor statesman by liberals who was seen as a reasonable labor leader. He made his name as a social unionist who wanted to transform the lives of ordinary workers, yet helped sap the militancy of the labor movement by wedding it to the NLRB and the Democratic Party.

Understanding Sydney Hillman is key to understanding the four decades of transformation the labor movement underwent. Worth picking it up.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very long and boring. It just seemed like a data dump of historical facts.

[RYD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sidney Hillman was one of the giants of American labor, and yet he is largely forgotten today. Like many labor histories, this book can be depressing, knowing how it ends in modern America.

[William Snow · Rating 4 out of 5]

*N.B.: I actually read Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor, but that book (written 1952) is not listed on Goodreads!*