In The Story of an Experiment, written by the editors on the occasion of our 25th anniversary (TIME, March 8, 1948), TIME said:

News is made not by "forces" or governments or classes, but by individual people. The world's movers and shakers, said [TIME'S original'] prospectus, are "something more than stage figures with a name. It is important to know what they drink. It is more important to know, to what gods they pray and what kind of fights they love." Stories told in flesh & blood terms would get into the readers' minds when stories told in journalistic banalities would not.

David Dubinsky, the subject of TIME'S Aug. 29 cover story, seems to me a first-rate example of telling the news, whenever possible, through people. Dubinsky and his union, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, also serve, I think, to illustrate the way TIME has kept its readers informed over the years on the significant news of scores of continuing stories.

Looking back over the record of our coverage of Dubinsky and the I.L.G.W.U., I was interested to find that TIME'S first mention of them occurred two decades ago. Those two decades cover all but six years of the span of TIME itself. In its Aug. 19, 1929 issue youthful TIME took note of David Dubinsky for the first time. He was then acting president of I.L.G.W.U. The story gave an account of his efforts to raise a $250,000 bond issue to finance a strike of 45,000 Manhattan dressmakers. From that time on, as Dubinsky and his union made more national news, they figured in scores of TIME stories.

Dubinsky became president of I.L.G.W.U. (TIME, June 22, 1932) and, as the New Deal came along, publicly renounced his membership in the Socialist party and became a staunch supporter of Franklin Roosevelt (TIME, May 11, 1936). An advocate of industrial unionism, he removed his union from the craft-unionized A.F.L. (TIME, Sept. 14, 1936) and joined the C.I.O. However, he also believed strongly in a unified labor movement and, when the obstinacy of John L. Lewis made peace between C.I.O. and A.F.L. impossible, he denounced Lewis in open forum (TIME, Jan. 24, 1938). Then Dubinsky led I.L.G.W.U. out of the C.I.O. (TIME, Nov. 21, 1938).

Dubinsky and the I.L.G.W.U. returned to A.F.L. pretty much on their own terms (TIME, June 17, 1940). They fought hard to clean out the racketeers in A.F.L. (TIME, Dec. 9, 1940) and advanced I.L.G.W.U.'s cause by such moves as: 1) getting Manhattan dress manufacturers to agree to penalize themselves for inefficiency, as defined by the union (TIME, Feb. 24, 1941); 2) persuading employers in the cloak & suit industry to pay $2 million a year into a workers' old-age insurance fund (TIME, June 7, 1943).

That is a necessarily brief summary of TIME'S continuing story of David Dubinsky and the I.L.G.W.U. When the editors decided last month to round out this chronicle by means of a cover story, TIME correspondents in ten cities in the U.S. and Canada went to work digging into I.L.G.W.U.'s far-flung activities. Correspondent Windsor Booth, labor reporter from our Washington bureau, and Researcher Anne Lopatin, who spent days talking to garment workers, concentrated on the union's headquarters in New York. National Affairs' A. T. Baker gathered his own first-hand impressions of the garment section and Dubinsky before he sat down to write the story. On the night that the story went to press, David Dubinsky stayed late in the I.L.G.W.U. headquarters in Manhattan to answer last-minute questions.

As for the final results, true to form it told the story of I.L.G.W.U. in terms of the actions, character and motives of its president. It was another chapter in the continuing story of David Dubinsky and his union, which TIME will keep on reporting as it continues to unfold.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.