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 President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party.

Sidney Hillman was born in Žagarė, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on March 23, 1887, the son of Lithuanian Jewish parents.

[1] From a young age Sidney had shown great academic promise, mastering the rote memorization upon which the cheder education of the day was based.

While in Slobodka, Hillman began to regularly attend the secret meetings of an illegal study circle headed by a local druggist.

[3] The study circle's members read radical literature and books on political economy, and Hillman was here exposed to the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer in Russian translation.

[4] 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.

[7] Hillman 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.

[9] In the summer of 1907, Hillman emigrated once again, this time setting out for America aboard the White Star liner Cedric, arriving in New York City on August 8.

He then found a slightly better-paying job as a clerk in the infants' wear department of Sears, Roebuck & Co.[10] Hillman remained in that position for nearly two years before being fired in the spring of 1909 during a downturn of business.

That strike was a bitter one and pitted the strikers against not only their employers and the local authorities, but also their own union, the United Garment Workers, a conservative AFL affiliate.

He found that job, in which he tried to maintain the stability imposed on a ferociously competitive industry by the Protocols of Peace, and in which the internal rivalries within the union threatened to flare up into all-out conflict, frustrating.

The AFL refused to recognize the new union and the UGW regularly raided it, furnishing strikebreakers and signing contracts with struck employers, in the years to come.

The government's interest in maintaining production and avoiding disruptive strikes helped the Amalgamated organize non-union outposts such as Rochester and control the cutthroat competition that had prevailed in the industry for decades.

Hillman had strong ties to many progressive reformers, such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow, who had assisted the Amalgamated in its early strikes in Chicago in 1910 and New York in 1913.

This put Hillman and the ACW leadership at odds with the strong anarcho-syndicalist tendencies within the union's membership, many of whom believed in direct action as a principle as well as tactic.

The mechanism for this interaction was the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) at 31 Union Square, New York City, launched by Hillman with Max Lowenthal as his attorney.

While Hillman's relationship with the Communist Party ultimately broke up in the conflict over whether to support Robert La Follette, Sr.'s candidacy for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, Hillman never faced the sort of volcanic upsurge that nearly tore apart the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union during this period and never undertook the wholesale purges that David Dubinsky and other leaders of the ILGWU used to stay in power.

The garment industry had been riddled for decades with small-time gangsters, who ran protection and loansharking rackets while offering muscle in labor disputes.

One of his allies within the ACWA was Abraham Beckerman, a prominent member of the Socialist Party with close ties to The Forward, whom Hillman used to inflict strongarm tactics on his communist opponents within the union.

In the course of that strike the union picketed a number of trucks run by Buchalter's companies to prevent them from bringing finished goods back to New York.

Hillman was unable to persuade the Board to debar labor law violators but did help introduce arbitration as an alternative to strikes in defense industries.

Hillman's prioritization of emergency production for national defense over labor radicalism brought him criticism from others within the CIO,[citation needed] as when he stood with the Roosevelt administration's decision to send in troops to break a wildcat strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California in 1941.

According to labor historian David Brody, Hillman built upon the conservative job-oriented unionism that dominated the American scene, discarding his youthful radicalism and opposition to capitalism.

Under Hillman's leadership, the Amalgamated became an active partner in the men's clothing business, building two banks, fostering low-cost unemployment insurance, and setting up internal educational and social support programs for union members.

Hillman's broader perspective gave him a leading role in forming the CIO and establishing entirely new mass-production unions that confronted not small local Jewish capitalists but world-class corporations.

His main rival was John L. Lewis, who broke with Roosevelt, and with the CIO, leaving Hillman the central labor politician in the national Democratic Party.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation, established in his honor, gives annual awards to journalists and writers for work that supports social justice and progressive public policy.