Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
From Rebel to Bureaucrat
By Irving Howe
Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor
by Steven Fraser
Free Press, 688 pp., $29.95
In 1903, at the age of sixteen, in an obscure Lithuanian shtetl, Sidney Hillman, the son of poor, Yiddish-speaking parents, joined the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement of Russia and Poland, taking as a first assignment the smuggling of his local group's hectograph from one hiding place to another. Some forty years later he would be a high official in the United States government during the Second World War, serving as labor's representative on various boards where he collaborated, if not quite on equal terms, with William Knudsen, head of General Motors. Chastened by American experience, the young revolutionary had become a 'labor statesman.' Yet it's an essential part of his story that Hillman never felt entirely at ease in his new role. He saw himself as a 'half intellectual' hard pressed to compete with Franklin Roosevelt's advisers and, all the while, inescapably marked by a thick Yiddish accent.
Review, 4031 words
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