Pins & Needles

TAILOR'S PROGRESS--Benjamin Stolberg--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

The man whom New York Times Reviewer John Chamberlain calls "one of the great journalists of our times" has written one of the most important books about U.S. labor. Benjamin Stolberg's Tailor's Progress is a history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (I.L.G. W.U.--membership: 310,000), a keen commentary on U.S. social politics, a detailed, sometimes brilliant biography of an outstanding social politician, I.L.G.W.U.'s President David Dubinsky.

Also included are thumbnail sketches (written with fluoroscopic understanding of the trade-union mind) of many of Dubinsky's predecessors and contemporaries. Tailor's Progress is one of the few readable books about labor, due in part to Stolberg's lifelong familiarity with his subject, in part to his clearly thought-out philosophic position (he was Harvard-trained under Professor Emeritus of Philosophy William Ernest Hocking), which strengthens his thinking without getting in the way of his writing, in part to a gift for phrase typified by Stolberg's famed comment on NRA: "So far the New Deal has accomplished nothing that might not have been done better by an earthquake. A first-rate earthquake from coast to coast could have reestablished scarcity much more effectively . . . with far more speed and far less noise than the New Deal."

Success Story. But, above all, Tailor's Progress is a success story for democracy in the areas in which democracy is most threatened--the relations of capital and labor. This success story divides itself into two parts. Part i includes the early struggle of the needle trades workers to be born and survive as a union. Part 2 includes I.L.G.W.U.'s long struggle with the Communists, who sought to use it as an organ of class struggle, its final defeat of this totalitarian influence under Sigman's and Dubinsky's leadership, and the union's decision to act not as a disruptive organization but as a highly responsible part of the democratic process. It is this story which makes Tailor's Progress required reading for all those who are aware that traditional politics is more & more becoming social politics.

Most of the social politicians who have made the history of our time what it is spent the greater part of their lives in a shady obscurity. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler were known chiefly to the police before they caused the deaths and changed the destinies of millions of people. Similarly, the leaders of the I.L.G. W.U., who, through the union they created and through its role in the New Deal, influence the lives of millions of Americans, are scarcely known to most U.S. readers. But a synoptic history of the

I.L.G.W.U. can be sketched in terms of their thumbnail biographies:

Joseph Barondess, one of the Founding Fathers (in 1900) of the I.L.G.W.U. A Russian-born Jew, the son of a family of rabbis, Barondess endeared himself to needle trades proletarians by his "golden voice," "hypnotic powers over an audience," his habit of "quoting the Bible in the manner of a cultivated freethinker." He spent "the last decade of his life as an insurance agent, selling policies to the workers in the needle trades. . . ."

John Dyche, known as the "Jewish Gompers." Dyche was the "first leader of [the] modern type in the needle trades. . . . He decried all militancy as doctrinaire and unrealistic, opposed all partisan and revolutionary involvements, and advocated a steady, slow, conservative and 'responsible' trade union policy. He came to despise the class struggle as a form of 'ignorant bellicosity.' . . . Even when he was discovered in secret dealings with the manufacturers, no one doubted his motives. . . ."

Morris Hillquit, labor representative on the I.L.G.W.U. and Manufacturers Board of Arbitration. A distinguished lawyer and second only to Eugene Debs as a leading figure in U.S. Socialism, he was one of the founders of the I.L.G.W.U. and its "Gray Eminence of the conference room."

Meyer London, also a lawyer, a Socialist and for 30 years the "good shepherd" of the needle trades. London was "an unreconstructed idealist, one of those rare spirits whose goodness was felt by all who came in contact with him." When he veered toward liberalism, the left-wing needle trades union called him "a deserter." "This wounded his moral self-esteem," and he resigned in "disgust with the whole mess." Benjamin Schlesinger, president of the I.L.G.W.U. Born in Lithuania, Schlesinger began his U.S. life as a boy match peddler in the Chicago slums. "The really dominant emotional undertone in Schlesinger's long career was a deep, almost fierce devotion to this country and its democratic institutions." For him "America was liberty." Later, in the I.L.G.W.U. 's long civil war of right wing v. left wing, Schlesinger fell a political victim to the Communists, died a "broken man." Morris Sigman, Schlesinger's successor as president of the I.L.G.W.U. Sigman was "a real proletarian, a type rare among labor leaders." He "fought Communist disruption on the left and at the same time undertook to clean up some of the political machines on his own side of the fence. . . . This relentless honesty was one of his great drawbacks as a leader. . . ." David Dubinsky, now president of the I.L.G.W.U., who finally drove the Communists out of the union, made the I.L.G.

W.U. "a right wing progressive union" which "would bring about the most far-reaching changes only within our democratic framework." Dubinsky, says Stolberg, is a social politician equal to his times. For he understood that "the New Deal signalized a drastic reorientation in our society. It marked a real break with the past. The old voluntaristic drives, the 'rugged individualism' of both capital and labor, had lost their momentum. ... In its original impulses the New Deal was an American variant of European collectivisms -- trying to function within our traditional system. Labor is at the very center of this social revolution. It furnished the mass base for the New Deal." Though he later broke with C.I.O., Dubinsky played a big part in furnishing this mass base for Franklin Roosevelt ("the greatest labor leader of them all," says Stolberg).

Two men who later became famous were also connected with the struggles of the I.L.G.W.U.: Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who in his early days was a kind of compromising needle trades Henry Clay.

"He was a master of the kind of reform which obliquely seeks power." Later he achieved it as "the leading elder statesman of the left-wing New Dealers. He had a veritable genius for bureaucratizing good will among men." Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, sometime co-consul with William Knudsen of the OPM.

Said an oldtime needle trades worker: "I don't remember much about Hillman.

He worked at pants for a couple of months and then he became right away a statesman." Underworld. One of the most informative sections of Tailor's Progress describes in great detail the connections between the needle trades and the underworld.

When the 1926 strike began, the manufacturers hired the Legs Diamond gang to break it. The Communists hired Little Augie's gang. Later they called in New-York's most ruthless, ambitious, astute racketeer, Arnold Rothstein, to call off Legs Diamond.

He took down the telephone; Diamond's gangsters disappeared. The Communists then told Little Augie's gangsters that they were no longer needed. Little Augie's gangsters refused to leave. The strikers appealed to Rothstein again, discovered that he controlled both gangs. He called off the Brooklyn mobsters and the strike soon ended.

To the White House. Author Stolberg also has some highly interesting and provocative sections on the I.L.G.W.U.'s honeymoon with the New Deal and its final disillusion with, and divorce from, the C.I.O. And he describes at length the intensive educational program which has made the union outstanding. One fruit of this program was Pins and Needles, the proletarian musical that became a Broadway smash hit, kept two companies on the road for four years, played a command performance in the White House. This Washington performance was almost a measure of the long hard road to maturity and strength that the I.L.G.W.U. had come in the 44 years of its existence. It was a far cry from the sweat shop.

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