[1] An immigrant to the United States from Yugoslavia with his father when he was three years old, Widick attended the University of Akron in Ohio, graduating with a degree in economics in 1934.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, Widick became active in the political left, first as a sympathizer with the Communist Party USA, then as a participant in the American Trotskyist movement.
In the 1940 split of the Trotskyist movement, however, Widick went with the minority current of dissidents led by Max Shachtman and helped found the Workers Party, writing for its periodicals Labor Action and New International, often under pseudonyms.
By the end of the 1950s, as the movement fragmented, Widick was mostly aligned with Michael Harrington and Bogdan Denitch, who would later establish the Democratic Socialists of America.
[citation needed] Nelson Lichtenstein has written that Widick "was a synthesizer more than a truly original thinker," but that "his authority as writer and teacher was rightly enhanced by his rich engagement with a generation of shop militants and union leaders, which he deployed to frame and popularize for postwar labor-liberals key issues facing the unions in an era of racial tension, industrial conflict and urban decline.