Lens, Sidney

LENS, SIDNEY (1912–1986). For five and a half decades, Sidney Lens was active as a labor organizer, writer, and peace agitator. Born Sidney Okun in Newark, New Jersey, Lens changed his surname in the mid-1930s when he was blacklisted for union activity. The only child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lens was three when his pharmacist father died and his mother entered New York City’s garment-district sweatshops to support herself and her son.

After graduating from high school at age seventeen, Lens worked as a waiter at an Adirondack resort. In the summer of 1930 he led a strike of fellow waiters and, as a result, was dragged from his bed one night, beaten, and abandoned in the woods by the local sheriff and his deputies. This launched Lens upon his career as a labor organizer. During the Depression he helped organize advertising writers at New York’s Hecht Bros., sit-down strikers for the United Auto Workers in Detroit, and cab drivers in Washington, D.C.

In 1934 Lens joined James P. Cannon’s Communist League of America, a precursor of the Socialist Workers Party. Soon thereafter, the League merged with pacifist and labor agitator A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States. Deeply influenced by the pacifism of Muste, Lens nevertheless remained active in Trotskyist groups such as the Revolutionary Workers League, which he joined in 1936. After the 1930s, however, he became a largely unaffiliated radical who felt a new socialist party had to be created with labor as its core. To this end he encouraged various third-party efforts for the rest of his life, including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s People’s Party in the early 1970s and Barry Commoner’s Citizens Party in the early 1980s. He was a member of both.

In 1941, Lens successfully organized waiters and retail clerks into Local 329 of the United Services Employees Union (an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations) in Chicago, ridding the union of old Capone mob influence in the process. He became the local’s director in 1942 and, until his retirement in 1966, Local 329 remained his base of operations. In 1946 he took Local 329 into the American Federation of Labor’s Building Services Employees International Union to counter isolation from the mainstream of the labor movement.

In 1949, Lens published Left, Right, and Center: Conflicting Forces in American Labor, which examined the failures of “business unionism” and which was the first of his twenty books. Other major books included The Counterfeit Revolution in 1952, which analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of Stalinism; Radicalism in America in 1966, a history of radicalism from before the Revolution to the 1960s; The Military-Industrial Complex in 1970; Poverty, Yesterday and Today and The Promise and Pitfalls of Revolution in 1974; and Unrepentant Radical, a 1980 autobiography.

In the 1950s, Lens helped found the journals Dissent with Irving Howe and Liberation with A. J. Muste. At the same time, he began contributing regularly to the Progressive and became a contributing editor of the magazine in the late 1960s. In 1978 Lens was named senior editor of the journal, a position he held until his death.

Lens opposed America’s entry into World War II, viewing it as an imperialist conflict, and for the rest of his life he attempted to combine labor organizing with agitation for peace. In 1960 he was a cofounder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and soon thereafter became a leader in the anti–Vietnam War movement. In 1962 he was an unsuccessful peace candidate for Congress and in 1980 he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as the Citizens Party candidate in Illinois. During the 1960s he was co-chair of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and in 1976 he became a founder of Mobilization for Survival, an antinuclear peace organization. Lens remained active as a respected leader of Left and peace groups until his death, helping to organize New York’s first Conference on Socialism and Activism, in 1985.

Lens, Sidney. Unrepentant Radical. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.

Sidney Lens Discusses His Autobiography “Unrepentant Radical” and Labor Organizing. May 29, 1980. Studs Terkel Radio Archive. https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/sidney-lens-
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