Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

AMALGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS OF AMERICA. Born out of the great risings of needle-trades workers that erupted between 1909 and 1913, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was officially founded in 1914 as a new industrial union. Samuel Gompers and the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) condemned it as an illicit dual unionist breakaway from the Federation’s craft affiliate in the men’s clothing industry, the United Garment Workers (UGW).

In fact, the Amalgamated originated earlier, during a 1910 mass strike in Chicago against the industry’s leading manufacturer, Hart, Schaffner and Marx. The strike was reluctantly endorsed and quickly abandoned by the nativist and corrupt UGW. Like the “Rising of the 20,000” in New York City the year before, the strike had been triggered by accumulated miseries of sweated labor: the petty tyrannies of foremen, the endless hours, the filth and stifling air, the niggardly piece-rates always subject to arbitrary reductions, the precariousness of a livelihood dependent on the wild seasonal and cyclical oscillations of a business subject to the whims of fashion. The strike enlisted the help of middle-class progressives like Jane Addams and the Women’s Trade Union League, who were both repelled by the medievalism of the industry and worried that if these abuses were left unchecked the new immigrants of the “rag trade” would become permanently estranged, a chronic source of social instability and even revolution.

Indeed, the rank-and-file garment workers who actually led the strike and the institution to which it gave birth were, without exception, political radicals for whom trade unionism was but part of larger designs for social transformation. Among its founding cadre, nearly every variety of left-wing politics was represented: Lithuanian revolutionary nationalism, Bohemian free-thought, Italian syndicalism, the revolutionary unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World, Jewish and Italian anarchism, the orthodox socialism of the American Socialist Party and Second International, and the tactically bolder socialism of the Jewish Bund. The Wobblies were particularly conspicuous during the Hart, Schaffner and Marx strike and continued to exert influence during the union’s formative years. But organized Jewish socialism, in both its Second International and Bundist versions, actually dominated the evolution of the Amalgamated—not surprising for an industry where Jewish workers constituted a plurality of the labor force and included within their ranks a disproportionate number of experienced trade unionists and socialists.

All radicals agreed that the AFL was afflicted by a fundamental elitism, craft parochialism, political conservatism, and anti-immigrant nativism. But the Socialist Party, which included such Jewish notables as Morris Hillquit and Abraham Cahan, was also committed to a strategy of “boring from within,” hoping to gradually convert the AFL, if not to socialism, then at least to a position favoring industrial unionism. Cahan and the Jewish socialists who led the trade-union affiliate of the AFL, the United Hebrew Trades, therefore exerted pressure on the fledgling leadership of the Amalgamated to compromise its differences with and rejoin the UGW. But the young men—they were almost all young and male despite the fact that the industry’s labor force was nearly half female and, more to the point, that many of the shop-floor leaders at the outset of the Hart, Shaffner and Marx strike were women—were not about to surrender their bitterly contested organizational independence in the higher strategic interests of Abraham Cahan’s socialist Tammany Hall on Union Square.

Many, although by no means all, of these founding figures were refugees from the 1905 Russian Revolution, including the new union’s president, Sidney Hillman. Like Hillman, they had belonged to the Bund and were familiar both with the tactics of the mass strike and the more centralized discipline of a semi-clandestine political party. Together with a smaller complement of Italian socialists and one-time Wobbly organizers—the Bellanca brothers, Emilio Grandinetti, and others—they fashioned a militant, semi-industrial, and ethnically mixed union that by 1919 managed to consolidate its position in most of the industry’s major markets, a remarkable accomplishment when one considers the previous history, stretching well back into the 1890s, of repeated failures to establish a lasting organizational presence among the men’s clothing workers.

World War I created an environment conducive to this early success and in several crucial respects was pivotal in the formative life of the union. Because of its wartime concern with labor shortages and unrest, the government sanctioned collective bargaining and actually exerted pressure on uniform manufacturers to negotiate with the Amalgamated. At the same time, echoes of Bolshevism and the radical democratic movements for workers’ control, which spread across Western and Central Europe, resonated within the ranks of the Amalgamated. At its founding convention, the union had adopted a militant, class-struggle preamble for its constitution, lifted almost verbatim from the credo of the Socialist Labor Party. (The union’s general secretary, Joseph Schlossberg, had in fact until recently been a leading figure in the party.) The risings of Soviets in Germany and Hungary, the factory occupations in Italy, and the strikes in France all made the most improbably apocalyptic dreams seem suddenly imminent. The Jewish rank and file, in particular, greeted the overthrow of czarism with delirious enthusiasm.

However, the war also generated countercurrents within the union’s hierarchy. Hillman depended on the government’s support and developed close relations with officials like Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, and Louis Brandeis, all of whom were sympathetic to trade unionism, even to industrial unionism, but who were averse to radical working-class politics. Frankfurter and others were ideological proponents of “industrial democracy,” an antidote to the pervasive crisis of authority in the workplace that recognized the need for autonomous vehicles of working-class representation, but also sought to incorporate such institutions within a broader collaborative program premised on expanded and efficient production and mass consumption. Hillman embraced “industrial democracy” wholeheartedly as the “British road” to industrial equity and peace; that is, as the preferred alternative to the tyranny of the “Prussian method” and the social chaos of Bolshevism. The Amalgamated was quickly lionized by middle-class progressives everywhere as the pioneer of the “new unionism” with a social conscience. It combined innovations in collective bargaining—especially the creation of an elaborate democratic apparatus of grievance mediation and impartial arbitration—with a broader interest in social welfare. Thus, during the twenties, the Amalgamated was heralded for its introduction of unemployment insurance, cooperative housing, labor banking, and consumer cooperatives.

Even before the Great Depression, then, the contest between reform and revolution was firmly decided in favor of the former. A series of factional battles in the mid-twenties eliminated most anarchist and Communist opposition to the union leadership, an opposition that in any event was itself not always averse to the basic logic of the “new unionism.” By 1929 the Amalgamated’s “new unionism” foreshadowed the fundamental transformations authored by the New Deal and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), both in the field of industrial labor relations and in the wider arena of social welfare. The Wagner, Social Security, and Fair Labor Standards acts encoded in federal statutes reforms first enacted in microcosm by the Amalgamated. Orchestrating the diverse motivations of numerous ethno-occupational groups into a coherent movement for industrial justice and economic well-being was the Amalgamated’s central accomplishment, one that paved the way for all the new industrial unions of the CIO.

For all these reasons, Sidney Hillman played a conspicuous role during the New Deal and World War II and embodied the critical political link between the CIO and the New Deal Democratic Party. He staunchly defended the New Deal against all its enemies on the Right and Left. As the chairman of the CIO political action committee he helped institutionalize the relationship between the new labor movement and the Democratic Party. Hillman’s career and that of the Amalgamated encapsulated the political trajectory of much of the industrial labor movement in mid-twentieth-century America. Beginning as an avowedly socialist union, excluded from the mainstream of American industrial and political life, it had become, by 1945, integrated into a new industrial order, renouncing its more visionary aspirations for a share in the cornucopia of mass production and consumption.

Fraser, Steven. “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal: Shop-Floor Insurgents, Political Elites, and Industrial Democracy in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.” In Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community and American Society, edited by Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Fraser, Steven. “Sidney Hillman: Labor’s Machiavelli.” In Labor Leaders in America, edited by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Josephson, Matthew. Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952.

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Records, 1914-1980. Guide. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. Cornell University Library. https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05619.html