All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism

Epilogue: Cosmopolitan Unionism and Mutual Culturalism in the World War II Era

232 | Epilogue Cosmopolitan Unionism and Mutual Culturalism in the World War II Era Ideas of mutual culturalism that were derived from Yiddish socialism and integral to the practice of social unionism appealed to people on the margins of society: sweatshop workers, unskilled and semiskilled factory workers, immigrant Jews and Italians, Hispanics, African Americans, and women. But leaders of the ILGWU felt themselves moving from the margins of society to its center after their success in rebuilding the union and participating in Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, most importantly with the 1937 Supreme Court decision upholding the National Labor Relations Act. The context within which social unionism had meaning for leaders such as Sasha Zimmerman changed. The Communist Party diminished as a serious competitor to socialists and non-Stalinist Communists in the ILGWU during the Popular Front period. As ILGWU leaders gained access to political power, they began to accept the dominant American culture, which was English speaking; celebrated class mobility and middle-class consumption; encouraged leisure as a personal or family endeavor; and promoted individual solutions to social problems. Jewish leaders began to subordinate distinct ethnic cultures to a national American culture, abandoning one of the principal tenets of Yiddish socialism. Mutual culturalism remained the dominant tendency in the Jewish labor and socialist movements, including the ILGWU, until passage of the Wagner Act stabilized labor relations and reduced the need for shop-floor militancy. Once the union leadership believed they no longer required the same level of rank-and-file activism, they did not feel the same urgency to appeal to workers as members of distinct racial-ethnic cultures. The relief of political tensions within the ILGWU eased competition between left factions , making International officers less intent on encouraging local educational programs, particularly those that promoted the celebration of dis- | 233 Figure E.1. These young women are socializing under a banner that expressed the ILGWU’s economic and social agenda during World War II. Union goals narrowed from a broad social agenda and celebrating a “union of many cultures” to pure and simple unionism of jobs, wages, and a dominant “American” culture. Undated. (Photo by Harry Rubenstein for Justice, Cornell University, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, ILGWU Records, collection 5780p, box 9, file 8) 234 | Epilogue With the advent of World War II, Local 22 and the International drastically changed the focus of their educational programs. The departments geared programs toward inculcating patriotism and reinforcing more restrictive gender roles. On May 20, 1942, the Education Committee of Local 22 reported, “Since war was declared, the policy of the Education Department has been to organize as many classes as possible to enable our members to be prepared in the National Emergency.”2 Local 22 offered classes in first aid, home nursing, and nutrition and formed the Women’s Health Brigade. The International turned Labor Stage into a canteen where servicemen could dance with female ILGWU members. In the 1930s, the Union Defenders Committee (UDC) included many women whose vigilance maintained gains won through strikes and contract agreements. When union leaders reorganized the UDC for civil defense, they recruited men almost exclusively. In these ways, union leaders emphasized women’s role as valuable supports to tinct racial-ethnic cultures. With the fate of millions of European Jews at stake and an impending world war, union leaders began to identify themselves and their political aims very differently. Moderate political ideas gained traction among Russian Jewish leaders, including a preference for cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The radical political and social agenda of the Jewish labor movement was transformed into a more liberal agenda beginning around 1937 and accelerating through World War II. The ILGWU began to promote a singular American working-class identity at the expense of multiple cultural identities, and the CIO strategy that Lizabeth Cohen calls the “culture of unity” dominated the ILGWU’s cultural agenda after 1937.1 Led by President David Dubinsky and the General Executive Board, the power center in the ILGWU shifted from semiautonomous locals to the International. With only a few exceptions , male leaders kept women, who were critical activists in the locals, frozen out of power on the International level. The ILGWU often discouraged women from taking leadership roles. By the late 1930s, union leaders increasingly sought to build a union affinity rather than a class consciousness among their members and tended to appeal to members more as...