End of Strife

Stumping the country in 1944, John Bricker declared: "Sidney Hillman's convention cared no more for the Democratic party than for the Constitution of the United States. Power and greed to dominate his fellow men are the motives back of his political activity."

Abuse, patient Sidney Hillman had learned, was often the measure of his effectiveness. Candidate Bricker's attack was a high point in the softspoken, bespectacled labor leader's strifebound career.

That career had started more than 40 years before in a Czarist cell, where he had been jailed for revolutionary activities. Son of a Lithuanian merchant, grandson of a rabbi, he migrated from Russia to England and thence to the U.S.

In 1910 he walked into the first of the disputes which were to occupy him for more than three decades of labor wars. Curiously, he was not a violent man. He was an earnest schemer who believed that most things could be settled by compromise. A young man in button shoes, speaking broken English, he brought about settlement of a strike at Hart Schaffner & Marx which became the basis for peace in the company for 35 years.

He became president of the infant Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Under his astute guidance, it grew into a prodigious union with 350,000 members, the source of Sidney Hillman's power. "Enemy of the Working Class." He became the model of a labor statesman in a capitalist world. He rejected Marxism, accepting instead the theory that the best way to improve labor's lot is to improve management. With funds of the A.C.W. he pulled many a manufacturer out of bankruptcy. He helped them increase the efficiency of their business. He established industry-wide insurance programs.

Communists attacked him. When he presided with Automaker William Knudsen over U.S. war industry, as associate director of 0PM, the Reds railed: "What is Mr. Hillman's little game now? He has cooperated shamelessly with Big Business. . . . He is an enemy of the working class."

John Lewis mocked him. Hillman had joined with Lewis in 1936 in the rebel C.I.O. movement. When Hillman suggested later that the schism from A.F.L. might be healed, Lewis thundered: "And now comes the piercing wail and the laments of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers," and fumingly invited Hillman to get out of C.I.O. But in the end it was Lewis who got out.

In March 1944, Hillman was assailed by A.F.L. rivals for collaborating with New York Communists in the American Labor party, which he helped organize. That year the abuse that Sidney Hillman seemed to love reached its climax. As head of C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee and the great & good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, Hillman had become a political power. "Clear it with Sidney" rang around the hustings.

Whether Roosevelt said it or not (the story has been denied) Hillman's refusal to "clear" Jimmy Byrnes for the Vice Presidency ended in the nomination of a man more acceptable to labor--Harry Truman.

Smiling and unruffled, Hillman went on his way. He went to Paris and helped organize the World Federation of Trade Unions and threw U.N. delegates into angry debate by proposing that W.F.T.U. be permitted a voice in U.N. councils.

He worked without stint in P.A.C. He held the dissonant factions together and patiently built it into a potent political machine. He was its guide, strategist and catalyst.

Tough of mind, weak of body, he rested when he could, which was not often. His retreat was a modest cottage on Long Island, where he lolled around in a linen cap and pastel-colored beach robe. There, last week, in the small cottage, Sidney Hillman suffered a heart attack and died. He was 59.

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