Trailblazing Jewish Democrat #8: Sidney Hillman

Jason Attermann — May 11, 2011 – 4:05 pm | Jewish American Heritage Month 2011 Comments (0) Add a comment

Sidney Hillman was a leading union organizer and helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. As a close advisor to President Roosevelt, he helped give the labor movement an influential voice in national politics.

Sidney Hillman was born in Lithuania on March 23, 1887. Arrested twice for his involvement in the Bund, a Jewish trade union, Hillman immigrated to England in 1906 and ultimately arrived in Chicago in 1909. While working at a garment factory in 1910, he joined a citywide garment strike against poor working conditions and quickly rose as a leading spokesperson for the strikers. He successfully forced the company to recognize the union chapter Local 39 of the United Garment Workers (UGW).

Having been inspired by the strike’s successes and other Progressive Era leaders who supported the garment worker’s cause, Hillman began his career as a national labor leader. In 1914, he was elected as the first President of the newly-formed Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Under Hillman’s leadership, the ACWA gained national prominence. The ACWA supplied army uniforms during World War I, and by 1920, had contracts with 85% of the nation’s garment manufacturers.

Because of his work for the ACWA, President Roosevelt asked him to join the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 (in the midst of the Great Depression), and then the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. Hillman worked closely with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to create the Fair Labor Standards Act, and assisted Senator Robert Wagner in drafting the National Labor Relations Act.

In 1937, Hillman helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) with John L. Lewis. The CIO was a union confederation separate from the older American Federation of Labor (AFL). He was elected as its first Vice President. In this role, he was in charge of its Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which in 1939 formed into the Textile Workers Union of America - an organization with over 100,000 members. He also oversaw the CIO’s Department Store Workers Organizing Committee which led to the creation of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America.

In 1940, as World War II loomed in Europe, Roosevelt asked Hillman to sit on the National Defense Advisory Committee. The following year, Roosevelt named him associate director of the Office of Production Management. To oversee all of the different agencies involved in war production, Roosevelt established the War Production Board in 1942. Roosevelt named Hillman to serve as the head of the labor division of this Board.

Because of his leadership in labor, Hillman became one of the leading supporters of President Roosevelt. In 1936, 1940 and 1944, he mobilized union members to support the Democratic candidate. In 1942, the CIO created a political action committee (CIO-PAC) and chose Hillman as its leader.

By 1944, he had become one of, if not the most, trust political advisors of Roosevelt. According to a famous story, when Roosevelt in 1944 was asked how to choose a vice presidential candidate at the Democratic Convention, he told the party’s leadership, “Clear everything with Sidney.”

Hillman married Bessie Abramowitz in 1916 after meeting her during the 1910 strike. The couple had two daughters. He died in 1946 in Point Lookout, Long Island, New York. The Sidney Hillman Foundation was established to award journalists and writers for work on social justice and progressive public policy.

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