Hillman addressing a 1944 political rally
Young union president Sidney Hillman as he appeared in 1922.
The mausoleum of Sidney Hillman in Westchester Hills Cemetery.
Sidney Hillman was born in the Lithuanian village of Zagare. He was the second of seven children in a family of long-established rabbis. His grandfather, Rabbi Mordecai Hillman, was the governing figure of the village and an important influence in Sidney Hillman’s life. Hillman's father was himself an impoverished merchant, more concerned with reading and prayer than with his faltering business.
From a young age Sidney had shown great academic promise, mastering the rote memorization upon which the cheder education of the day was based. By the age of 13, Hillman had memorized several volumes of the Talmud. His parents resolved that it was Sidney who would carry on the family tradition and study to be a rabbi. In 1901, at the age of fourteen, he was sent to the Kovno (Kaunas) yeshiva, a distinguished center of Jewish studies. At Kovno, Hillman was suddenly exposed to a range of fresh ideas and new possibilities. He began secretly to take Russian lessons from an assimilated Jewish friend, Zacharias Matis. One year later he left the rabbinical college to pursue his nonreligious studies.
Early in 1903, Hillman passed from the training grounds of the Marxist study circle to fully fledged membership in the Bund, a revolutionary socialist union of Jewish workers within the Pale in conflict with the Tsarist authorities. Hillman became a leading activist in the Bund, leading the first May Day march ever conducted by the organization through the streets of Kovno in 1904.He was arrested shortly thereafter for his revolutionary activities and sat in prison for several months, where he learned more about revolutionary social theory from fellow prisoners.
By 1905 Hillman had come to identify himself with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), identifying in particular with the internationalism of Julius Martov. He played only a minor local role during the Russian Revolution of 1905, engaging in the distribution of leaflets, raising funds for the revolutionary organization, and informally speaking on the streets to groups of workers. Hillman joined the exodus of revolutionaries from the country in October 1906, traveling under a false passport through Germany to Manchester, England, where he joined his uncle, a prosperous furniture dealer, and two brothers already living there.
In the summer of 1907, he emigrated once again, this time setting out for America aboard the Cunard liner Cedric, arriving in New York City on August 8.Hillman's prospects were poor in New York and he soon set out for Chicago, where a friend and a more favorable job market awaited him. In Chicago, Hillman worked briefly picking orders in a warehouse for $6 a week. He then found a slightly better-paying job as a clerk in the infants' wear department of Sears, Roebuck & Co.. Hillman remained in that position for nearly two years before being fired in the spring of 1909 during a downturn of business.
The unemployed Hillman found work in the garment industry as an apprentice garment cutter for Hart Schaffner & Marx, a prominent manufacturer of men's clothing It would prove to be Hillman's last job as a worker at the bench.
In 1935 Hillman helped to found the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a new body for the steel, automobile, rubber, shipyard, and radio workers.
He was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.
Hillman and Dubinsky founded the American Labor Party in 1936, an ostensibly independent party that served as a halfway house for Socialists and other leftists who wanted to support FDR's reelection but were not prepared to join the Democratic Party, with its alliance with the most reactionary white elites in the South. Dubinsky later split from the Labor Party over personal and political differences with Hillman to found the Liberal Party of New York.
Hillman was a strong opponent of Nazi Germany and a supporter of U.S. aid to England and France. Roosevelt appointed Hillman to the National Defense Advisory Committee in 1940 and named him associate director of the Office of Production Management in 1941. When FDR created the War Production Board in 1942, he appointed Hillman to serve as the head of its labor division.
Hillman also believed in the need for unions to mobilize their members politically. He and Lewis founded Labor's Non-Partisan League, which campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 and again in 1940, even though Lewis himself had endorsed Wendell Willkie that year. Hillman was the first chair of the CIO's Political Action Committee, founded in 1942, as well as of the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) (which co-founded the 1948 Progressive Party).
In July 1943, Philip Murray of the CIO led formation of the CIO-PAC, of which Hillan was the first head. In Roosevelt's last election in 1944, Hillman raised nearly $1 million on behalf of the Democrat national ticket. Hillman was also credited with grass roots activities, registering labor voters and bringing them in heavy numbers to the polls.
Hillman and Bessie Abramowitz were married in 1916 and had two daughters.
