History
Book Club
Wednesday,
January 27, 2016
History
of Labor Movements
in
America
David Dubinsky and the ILGWU
Robert D. Parmet, The Master of
Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement; New York:
New York University Press, July, 2005. 436 pages, 19 illustrations
David
Dubinsky (L) and President Roosevelt at performance of
ILGWU
Musical “Pins and Needles” at the White House, 1938
David
Dubinsky (born David Isaac
Dobnievski; February 22, 1892 in Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire ---now Brest,
Belarus) was only five feet, four inches tall, but became a giant in the
American labor movement.
He started life in the family of a
devout Jewish father who preferred to have the rest of his family do the hard
work of running a bakery.
David
mixed school with work at the bakery. He
studied Polish, Russian and Yiddish.
During the Russian Revolution of 1905 he attended a mass meeting which
led to his joining the Jewish Bund, a socialist organization. By age 15, David
was a committed socialist. In 1907 he
was arrested for planning a bakers’ strike. He was jailed, and released. Then he was arrested again and at age 16,
sent to Chelyabinsk, Siberia. He walked
out of the camp, hid in the city for a time, and then used a ticket his
brother, already in America sent him, to sail to New York.
He
arrived in New York in 1911, and soon got a job as a garment worker. It was there that he was introduced to the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
He joined Local 10 as a cutter of large bolts of cloth.
Dubinsky
married Emma Goldberg in 1915. She died in 1974.
With
his wits and fluency in several languages, he found himself on the Local 10
Executive Board in 1918. He became an ardent supporter of America’s entry into
World War I, and urged opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He
became the local’s vice-president in 1919 and chairman in 1920, then present
and general manager in 1921. Soon he was elected a vice president of the ILGWU
and a member of the international’s general executive board in 1922. He was elected
President of the ILGWU in 1932, and served there until 1966.
Dubinsky began as
a Socialist until 1928, but always fought communism, and communist efforts to
capture leadership of his union all his life.
Dubinsky became
president of ILGWU at just the right time, less than a year before Franklin
Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States. After Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, not to
mention a roaring Depression, the nation was ready for FDR, and he began a
massive conversion to liberalism. When
Dubinsky became president the union was riven with factionalism, communists
fighting socialists. The treasury was empty and the union deeply in debt. There
were 45,000 members. Dubinsky later said he thought he had been elected to look
after the burial of the union.
With FDR came a
deluge of social programs. The National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed the
right of workers in interstate commerce to collective bargaining and the union
ranks swelled, and money came pouring in. By the end of the Depression there
were 300,000 members. Dubinsky was a great supporter of Roosevelt, and
tremendously grateful for “the blue eagle” of the NRA. At about that time
Dubinsky attended a labor congress in Vienna, Austria, and saw the efforts of
an Austrian socialist union in providing for its members. That launched Dubinsky on a program that
created all kinds of social benefits for ILGWU members, including schools,
health clinics, affordable housing, a vacation hotel in the Catskills, and even
a school in the New York theatre district that allowed workers to learn music
and dance. The union developed a musical, “Pins and Needles” which became
enormously popular, ran on Broadway with the longest run of any musical up to
that time (1938). Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, great supporters of the
union, had the cast perform the musical at the White House. All of the cast
were regular workers in the clothing industry, but some left that to become
full-time dancers and singers.
Dubinsky was
labor advisor to the NIRA, and became a key leader in the American Federation
of Labor. In 1935 he joined with John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers to
form the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL and CIO battled each other for years,
one of the points of contention being membership of blacks.
Today, it is hard
for us to appreciate the force that communism had in the 1930s, with Stalin
running the USSR, and the Comintern sending out operatives all over the world.
The slogan “Workers of the World—Unite!” was a communist war cry that many
labor unions in America had heeded.
Author Parmet lists the unions that had become communist. John L. Lewis
had been an ardent opponent of communism, and now he was going soft on it. Were
it not for Dubinsky and others, much of our labor force could have fallen under
the sway of Moscow.
All during World
War II Dubinsky was involved in many national and international projects and after
the war he was instrumental in sending financial aid ($3 million in cash and
relief supplies) to the new state of Israel and to Italy. They built an
orphanage in China and a trade union school in France. He was a tireless fighter to keep racketeers
and organized crime out of the unions, as well as communism.
By 1957 the ILGWU
had grown to 450,000 members.
In 1966, after 34
years as president of ILGWU, Dubinsky resigned.
He continued to be active politically, supporting the election of Mayor
John Lindsay and others.
Dubinsky died in New York City in 1982. He and Emma are
survived by their daughter, Jean Appleton, and granddaughter, Ryna Segal, both
of Manhattan.
Dubinsky and JFK
The Union of
Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), North
American trade union formed in 1995 by the merger of the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and
the Amalgamated
Clothing and Textile Workers Union.
The union represents apparel workers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Headquarters are in New York City.
-end-
Future
History Book Club Topics
Here
is a list of topics for 2016. Feel free to comment on these topics, and to
suggest additional or substitute topics.
Wednesday,
February 24, 2016: History of Money and Banking in America. Wampum, potlatch,
Jefferson and Jackson and the quasi-central banks, Civil War and the monetary
system, the Federal Reserve, The Crash of 1929, The New Deal and Banking,
Bretton Woods, The Gold Standard, more.
Wednesday,
March 30, 2016: “The End of the World” –History of Doomsday Forecasts. Arrival
of the Antichrist, Swedenborg and the Last Judgment, the Millerites of 1844,
the End Times, Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven’s Gate Cult, Armageddon,
more.
Wednesday,
April 27, 2016: History of Journalism and the Media. Benjamin
Franklin, Horace Greeley, Yellow Press, “Acta Diurna” in Ancient Rome; “Notizie
Scritta in Venice; The Manchester Guardian; Jonathan Swift; more.
Wednesday,
May 25, 2016: Modern Life in the Middle East and the Islamic State.
Iraq from its formation after WWI, Syria, the Caliphate, Origins of conflict,
Sunni vs. Shii vs. Kurds vs. Alewhites Vs. Wahabi vs. ? Modern technology with Seventh-century
ideas, Impact of USSR and U.S. in Afghanistan, U.S. combat in Iraq; Arab
Spring; Turkey and Islam, Jordan, The Gulf States, Egypt, much more.
Wednesday,
June 29, 2016: Africa since 1900. Colonization
by Belgium, France, Britain, Germany and Portugal; End of Colonialism; Democracy
and Dictatorship; Rwanda; Jomo Kenyatta; Apartheid and South Africa; Congo;
Angola; more….
Wednesday,
July 27, 2016: American Foreign Policy from the Barbara Pirates to today. Civil
War alliances by both Union and Confederacy; Gunboat Diplomacy;
Spanish-American War; “He Kept Us out of War!”; Britain and the U.S. in WWII; The Cold War;
more.
Wednesday,
August, 31, 2016: Germs and Plagues: A history of epidemics in the world. Plague
of Athens (429 BC), Plague of Justinian (541 AD), “Black Death” in 1346,
Cocoliztli Epidemic in Mexico (1528), Wampanoag Smallpox in 1616, 1918 Flu
Pandemic, more.
Wednesday,
September 28, 2016: Scaremongering and Witch Hunts in America. Salem
Witch Trials, House Un-American Activities Committee; McCarthy Investigations;
more.
Wednesday,
October 26, 2016: Political Parties in
America. Whigs, Know-Nothings, Federalists, Copperheads;
Communists, Socialists, Republicans, Democrats, more.
Wednesday,
November 30, 2016: Colonization in America. Jamestown,
Plymouth, Gloucester, St. Augustine, Junipero Serra, Roger Williams, Quebec,
Nieuw Amsterdam, more.
December: No Meeting
Contact: scoulbourn1@verizon.net
