Chapter Seven

The “New Unionism” and the “New Economic Policy”

Steve Fraser

In 1922, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) concluded an agreement with the Supreme Council of National Economy of the Soviet Union (the Vesenkha) and with the All-Russian Cothing Syndicate to jointly operate and modernize nine clothing and textile factories in Moscow and Petrograd. Lasting only a few years, this joint venture, the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC), eventually employed more than 15,000 workers in twenty-five plants in eight Russian industrial centers and accounted for 20 to 40 percent of the new capacity of the Soviet clothing industry created during the initial phase of the New Economic Policy (NEP). By itself, the episode was critical neither to the long-term development of the ACW nor, of course, to the history of Bolshevism. It was nevertheless an exemplary experience, encapsulating a systematic response to those historic problems of culture, organization, and political economy confronting the whole of the industrial world in the aftermath of World War I.¹

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Everywhere the crisis of state and society that accompanied and followed the war erupted with particular force across the contested terrain of the industrial workplace. If the disturbance was most profound in Russia and perhaps least severe in the United States, it was nonetheless true that the unsettled and unsettling issues of industrial authority and authority over industry ranked high on the social and political agendas of both countries. Throughout Europe and even in the U.S., revolutionary parties, trade union bureaucracies, and political and business elites reexamined and struggled over the customary prerogatives of management and the “rights” of the managed. The relationship between democracy and industrial organization, between public institutions of the state and the private institutions of the economy, were subjected to an unprecedented social inspection and criticism.²

“Workers’ control” and “industrial democracy,” two enormously evocative and equally imprecise formulations, aptly express the era’s sense of possibility and uncertainty and its attempt to domesticate the energies released as the old order disintegrated. “Workers’ control” was a concept subject to numerous interpretations depending on the historic context in which it emerged. When most parochial and essentially conservative, it involved the reassertion by localized work groups of traditional and exclusivist prerogatives over particular skills and workshops. In other circumstances, it was associated with the revitalization of the movement for workers’ cooperatives. Where revolutionary solutions were seriously debated, it implied the democratic mass management of particular industries or even a reconstituted polity and political economy. Often enough, it meant a complex combination of these and other plans and practices.

“Industrial democracy” was also a complex metaphor whose meaning varied according to the social grammar into which it was incorporated. For those networks of militant shop stewards organized in works councils and factory committees, it suggested a system of syndicalist management of the shopfloor by the rank and file. Trade union elites, momentarily allowed into the corridors of power during the war, saw in “industrial democracy” a scheme for the co-management of particular enterprises or whole industries by democratically constituted bureaucracies representing management, trade unions, and the public power. Corporate managements, anxious about democratic enthusiasms and seeking ways to restore authority on the shopfloor, invented elaborate democratic charades that sometimes came complete with mock industrial parliaments, and described these “employee representation” plans as another form of “industrial democracy.”³

Europe experienced the most radical and prolonged challenge to its prevailing institutional structure. However, plans to reconstruct the foundations of politics and economics, including every sub-species of industrial democracy, were mooted about in the U.S. as well.

Memories of pre-war unrest and the aggravated antagonisms that accompanied the period of global war, revolution, and reconversion caused severe anxiety, not only among radicals and social reformers, but among industrial and political elites as well. The erosion of managerial authority on the shopfloor, the undermining of commercial and industrial stability by an unregulated marketplace, and widening inequities in the distribution of the national wealth, all serious in themselves, together comprised a political crisis for the future of liberal democracy in America. How was it possible to restore managerial authority, regulate the market, and redistribute income in the interests of mass consumption while preserving the formal institutional framework of a democratic politics. Faced with this crisis of legitimacy, social liberal businessmen, social engineers and social workers, and progressive political reformers had begun to experiment with methods of redeploying authority, sometimes through coercion, but more often through mechanisms of compliance that would complement the embryonic system of state directed capitalism.⁴

Recasting the relationship between work, the economy, and the state was, however, not simply a straightforward matter of substituting manipulative for authoritarian modes of social control. Erecting a new kind of rational-bureaucratic and administrative institution, charged with the responsibility of resocializing the experience of work, depended on the active collaboration of worker elites otherwise interested in shifting the balance of political power on the shopfloor away from the centers of managerial autocracy. Plans and programs, some quixotic, some not, proposing various forms of social “partnership” and “participation” entailed, to a more or less significant degree, the delegation of authority and the real sharing of power, albeit within the accepted groundrules of capitalist enterprise. But if “industrial democracy” thus at times implied more than a piece of tactical cleverness imposed from above, it also envisioned an internalized system of self-restraint and an indigenous structure of authority capable of commanding obedience to the precepts of productivity and efficiency.⁵

The New Republic, a forum for social liberalism, was well aware that democracy was being subjected to “tests of unprecedented severity throughout the world,” and concluded that its future “depends . . . upon the capacity of employers and workers to harmonize democratic ideals of freedom with the voluntary self-discipline essential to efficient production.” The editors could happily report that “no group of men in America has a keener appreciation of this fact that the ACWA.”⁶

Indeed, during its brief history the ACW had emerged as a social laboratory in which the organizational and political chemistry of “industrial democracy” was perfected. By the end of the war, this “new unionism” had managed to orchestrate an alliance between the informal traditions of “workers’ control” from below and the rational bureaucratic procedures of co-management from above. The union’s leadership expressly associated the practice of co-management and workers’ participation with the wartime fascination with workers’ control, suggesting that the innovative grievance procedures and apparatus of impartial arbitration pioneered by the ACW were, in part, designed to equip the rank and file to assume direction of the industry itself, perhaps in partnership with the state.⁷

ACW President, Sidney Hillman, along with other ideologues of social liberalism, viewed “industrial democracy” as a kind of political prophylaxis and therapeutic. He warned that if the nearsighted opposition to “industrial democracy” continued, the recent revolutionary turmoil in Russia would be repeated elsewhere. Initially pessimistic about the Bolshevik seizure of power, Hillman favored the “evolutionary road” opened up by the British Labour Party.⁸

However, as much as Hillman might have hoped to quarantine the union against the contagion of revolution, it was irrepressibly infectious. The overthrow of the Russian autocracy was welcomed with delirious enthusiasm by the heavily Jewish and socialist membership as well as by vocal clusters of Italian syndicalists and Slavic nationalists. A crescendo of stoppages, slowdowns, and other forms of shopfloor rebellion was sparked by the Bolshevik triumph.

At the union’s May 1920 convention, delegates wildly applauded socialist Charles Ervin’s fraternal greetings to the Soviet Revolution and called on the General Executive Board (GEB) to mobilize public opposition to the Western blockade of the Soviets, which it proceeded to do with enthusiasm throughout the civil war. In addition to its political support, the union provided a continuous stream of food, clothing, and medical supplies during the period of economic paralysis and famine that followed the war.⁹ Writing in the Liberator, Mike Gold, soon to join the American Communist Party, described this convention as a “soviet of the sweatshops,” and concluded that the union was “bringing in the social revolution in America as fast as it can be brought.”¹⁰

The union leadership, however, was not contemplating “social revolution,” and Hillman sometimes worried publicly about the more extravagant rhetoric of union cadre, especially as the Red Scare shifted the balance of power decisively against the surviving circles of social reform. But in general, membership and leadership continued to speak the same language, albeit with diverging intentions. They shared, for example, an enthusiasm for the cooperative movement. This was perhaps the last time that the cooperative ideal presented itself as a serious historical alternative to the political economy of liberal, industrial capitalism. From the vantage point of the rank and file, notwithstanding some opposition from the left, the cooperative idea was an included feature of a broader urban populist antipathy to industrial capitalism. It had been part of the vocabulary of Jewish radicalism since the late nineteenth century, and cooperative undertakings, run by skilled craftsmen, had always found nourishment in the protean sea of small-scale enterprise characteristic of the garment industry. A traditional, if anticapitalist, ideology whose values, styles, and nostalgic tone remained disconnected from the new processes and institutions of modern industrial society found in the cooperative movement a congenial ally.¹¹

From the standpoint of the union elite, cooperatives—whether in the realm of manufacturing, distribution, or finance—opened up another avenue along which to advance the material interests of the membership while pursuing the possibilities of collaborative economic management with enlightened businessmen, technocrats, and social reformers. Drawing on the union’s successful experience operating seven cooperative commissaries during the protracted New York lockout of 1920, Hillman began advocating the creation of large cooperative enterprises as a central feature of the “new unionism.” Impressed by the success of consumer cooperatives in Britain and Scandinavia, and at the same time sensitive to the messianic mood of the membership, Hillman presented the cooperative idea as a device for training workers to control production with the ultimate objective of assuming full responsibility for directing the social economy.¹²

Together, then, the élan of postwar rebellion, the special sympathy for the Russian revolution, the still live hopes for class detente, and the specific tactical initiatives represented by the “new unionism” and the cooperative movement, constituted the historic environment in which the RAIC was born and matured.

Plans to undertake a joint manufacturing venture originated in a series of consultations between Hillman and the Bolshevik leadership, including several discussions with Lenin as well as Trotsky, Radek, Kamenev, and various trade union officials. The General Secretary of the International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions, Losovsky, had earlier sent a message congratulating the union on the settlement of the bitter New York lockout. The message invited the ACW to join the new Red International of trade unions and suggested Hillman visit Russia.¹³

Hillman first conferred with Kamenev. The latter headed the All-Russian Committee for Relief and the two men discussed the immediate need for emergency aid. The ACW was already providing such help and Hillman pledged continued assistance.¹⁴ More important, Hillman met with Lenin at the end of September when the ACW relief ship arrived and at the same time attended a session of the Supreme Soviet of Labor and Defense at which the NEP was debated. Hillman was impressed by the NEP’s committment to planning, technological advance, efficiency, and above all its “realism.” Lenin and Radek explained that “war communism” was but an interlude, necessary to destroy the vestiges of feudalism and to consolidate the revolution. Lenin emphasized the NEP’s critical need for technical knowledge and skilled workers. At the same time, he argued that NEP did not contradict the fundamental purposes of the revolution: “We are willing to pay out to foriegn capital hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in order to get them to develop Russia economically for us. We are willing to pay for technical knowledge, technical skill, and for anything that will help us build up Russia.”¹⁵

Hillman returned to America a staunch defender of the Bolshevik revolution against the “small imperialistic clique” that sought to destroy it. He carried with him greetings from Lenin, “one of the few great men that the human race has produced, one of the greatest statesmen of our age and perhaps of all ages.”¹⁶

On his way to and from the Soviet Union, Hillman traveled throughout western Europe, which he described as a political and economic insane asylum on the verge of collapse. It was, he reported to the overflow audiences that came to hear about the heroic Bolsheviks, hopelessly corrupt and selfish, its population demoralized and without the most elementary democratic rights. By contrast, the Soviets represented the only truly stable regime in all of Europe and the Bolsheviks the only vehicle of political and social cohesion preventing the sort of political dismemberment that was then well under way in China. He especially admired the Bolsheviks’ practicality and flexibility, their concern for efficiency and respect for the “facts”—qualities frequently cited by others to characterize Hillman.¹⁷

Most of all, Hillman was pleased with the Bolsheviks’ new approach to economic reconstruction and reported the apparent widespread support for the NEP’s departure from the practices of “war communism.” He noted that the policies of “war communism,” including the suppression of the free market, rationing, and the centralization of employment, had generated great discontent and proved unworkable. The NEP, on the other hand, provided economic incentives for all classes and thereby held out real hope for economic revival.¹⁸

Privately, Hillman mentioned to the GEB the possibility of entering into a partnership with the Russian government to operate its clothing industry. He told his colleagues the Russians had great confidence in the ACW, that they were in desperate need of capital as well as technical and managerial experience, and that they were prepared to make guarantees with respect to preferential access to raw materials, export licenses, and special banking relations. Hillman had spent part of his visit inspecting clothing factories in Moscow and Petrograd, and apparently it was he who first broached the idea of a cooperative manufacturing venture in his meetings with the Bolshevik leadership. Indeed, in an interview published in Izvestiia shortly before his departure Hillman remarked that the ACW was not only interested in the already established Soviet clothing industry: “Our aims are much higher; we will begin with this industry and then grant credits to the other trusts.”¹⁹

Back home, preparations for the formal creation of the RAIC coincided with the union’s initial venture into the business of labor banking, in which Hillman saw the “germs of a new cooperative commonwealth.” The RAIC too was designed as a cooperative enterprise. Under the guidance of American experts, Soviet clothing factories were to be reorganized along the most modern lines of technology and labor organization. The ACW had pioneered in these areas, often in active collaboration with the largest American clothing manufacturers as well as the leading exponents of the scientific management movement.²⁰

Hillman unveiled the actual plan for the RAIC near the end of the 1922 convention. Hillman’s speech captured the delegates’ prevailing sense of revolutionary determination. He accused the Allies of “attempting to starve the Russians into submission to the rule of international financiers” and argued that disaster would result if “the masses were prevented from determining for themselves the course of economic reconstruction.” Cooperation with the Soviets was not a question of being “for Bolshevism or against Bolshevism, but of being for or against the slaughter of millions of people.” He expressed his confidence in the Bolshevik approach to labor organization and in the work ethic and “iron discipline” of the Russian proletariat. The latter, together with the great natural wealth of the Soviet Union, made it perhaps the most promising place to invest in all of Europe.²¹

Hillman concluded by outlining the concrete plans for the corporation, emphasizing that Soviet assurances respecting preferential access to raw materials and government contracts made it a sound business as well as fraternal undertaking. In fact, Hillman was well aware that from the Soviet point of view as well, the venture was principally an industrial experiment, ideological promissory notes notwithstanding. Lenin and Hillman “did not discusss the revolution in the U.S. or even in Russia. We did not discuss any theories. . . . It is much more important to have a proper policy than a great deal of noise.” The union president told his GEB that “If Russia believed our tendency was to become a communist organization the real government would not make the arrangements with us.” He furthermore reassured GEB members worried about the riskiness of the investment that Lloyds of London felt confident enough about the arrangement to insure it.²²

Once the convention voted its general approval, Hillman returned to Russia in the late summer of 1922 to negotiate specific contractual arrangements. The Corporation was to issue stock selling for $10 a share with the expectation of raising $1 million, although in the end subscriptions never amounted to more than $300,000. Arrangements were codified in three contracts: a general agreement with the Council of Labor and Defense authorizing the RAIC to do business in the Soviet Union and underwriting the RAIC’s contracts with other Soviet agencies; an agreement with the Vesenkha pledging a minimum annual dividend of 8 per cent and the return of the principal should either party choose to dissolve the venture after an initial three-year period; and a profit-sharing arrangement with the All-Russian Clothing Syndicate that included a provision for the reinvestment of all earnings over 10 per cent.²³

The agreements established a Control Board composed of representatives of the RAIC and the Soviet government, with voting power proportional to the size of each party’s investment in the enterprise. In a formal sense, this meant the ratio of voting strength was 7 to 2 in favor of the Russian Clothing Syndicate. But because the Soviets were above all interested in securing the technical and administrative experience of the Americans, actual management was quickly turned over, in large measure, to ACW personnel. In fact, the ACW even supplied skilled workers and industrial engineers to plants functioning outside the Syndicate.²⁴

The RAIC agreement established fifteen branches around the country that channeled capital equipment, managerial expertise, and skilled labor from RAIC to various clothing and textile plants. Although the original negotiations covered plants in Moscow and Petrograd only, the final arrangements included factories in Kazan, Nizni, and smaller industrial centers, and established operational procedures quite similar to ones set up with other Western corporations, as for example between the Soviet government and General Electric.²⁵

RAIC plants were valued at between $2.5 and $5 million and were equipped to manufacture suits, coats, shirts, underwear, caps, gloves, and overcoats, as well as certain textile products. Hillman was sanguine about the RAIC’s commercial prospects, especially given the fact that it would not have to contend with the problems of seasonality that chronically disrupted the American industry. He anticipated an annual turnover of $40 million and was supported in his judgment by financial adviser Leo Wolman and legal advisers Max Lowenthal and Maxwell Brandwen, all of whom had come to work for the ACW on the recommendation of Felix Frankfurter.²⁶

The assistance of Lowenthal and Wolman was indicative of the broad support offered this newest innovation of the “new unionism” by those circles of progressive reformers with whom the ACW had established close working relations over the previous decade. The New Republic editorialized on behalf of the RAIC.²⁷ Earl Dean Howard, labor manager for Hart Schaffner & Marx, who had collaborated with Hillman on installing the first impartial arbitration machinery after the great strike of 1910, accompanied Hillman on his second trip to Russia. Although the company maintained that Howard’s trip was for strictly personal reasons, he did meet with people associated with the RAIC, and it is reasonable to surmise they explored the contribution of the “new unionism” to efficient factory administration. George Soule of the New Republic went to work promoting the RAIC. And Felix Frankfurter, who had privately expressed to Hillman his support for the project, allowed Soule to publicize that fact. Indeed, before it was announced publicly, the plan for the RAIC was examined and approved by Frankfurter, Florence Kelley of the National Consumers’ League, Frank Walsh, who chaired the Industrial Commission of 1914, before which Hillman had testified, and Grace Abbott, Chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau.²⁸

There were of course those who denounced the venture, among whom, not surprisingly, was Samuel Gompers, whose anxiety about the shadows of Bolshevism in the American labor movement was further aggravated by the outlaw status of the ACW in the eyes of the AFL. Much displeasure was also expressed from within the union by elements associated with the Jewish Foward and those circles of right-wing Jewish socialism that had by this time become resolutely anti-Soviet, although it was delivered in voices muted by the overwhelming rank-and-file sentiment favoring aid to those who had overthrown the tzar.²⁹

That the union weathered this opposition and the country’s pervasive anti-Bolshevik mood suggests that its commitment was, however pragmatic, not merely expedient. If Hillman could befriend the Bolshevik experiment and communists do likewise for the ACW, it was also due to a more basic if temporary affinity between Bolshevik policy during the period of the NEP and that of the “new unionism.” While Hillman had long since given up the revolutionary enthusiasm of his youth, his anomalous position outside the legitimate precincts of the American labor movement provided space within which to maneuver and experiment programmatically on behalf of the social aspirations of the “new unionism.” Moreover, the grammatical substructure of the “new unionism” was, in certain essential respects, akin to the lingua franca of Bolshevism.

To begin with, the ACW elite was firmly implanted in those socialist traditions that affixed the tempo and timing of socialism to the inexorable rhythms of industrial and social development under capitalism. While continuing to declare itself at war with contemporary society, this “scientific” socialism increasingly shared a set of operating assumptions with currents of social liberalism that sought to meliorate the crisis of industrial society. Thus “history” and its “progress” were to be the ultimate arbiters of the class struggle. Sophisticated technologies, the concentration of capital, the rationalization of the labor process were as necessary to the socialist future as they were hallmarks of advanced capitalism. Collaborations with business and political reform elites were scripted prologues in an unfolding socialist or cooperative drama, epilogues to capitalism’s denoument. As the ideology of “progress” came to be more comfortable with and in need of the perspicacious observations of Marxism, much of Marxist practice unambiguously expressed the premises of ‘modernization.”³⁰

As part of this general historical perspective, the ACW elite had during its formative years made its peace with Taylorism. Just as the liberal wing of the scientific management movement was committed, by the time of Taylor’s death in 1915, to the perspective of achieving shopfloor discipline and efficiency by “consent,” Hillman was prepared to embrace scientific management so long as greater efficiency was accompanied and accomplished by mechanisms of democratic—i.e., union—control.³¹

This accommodation with Taylorism, occurring a decade before most of the rest of the organized American labor movement made a similar adjustment, need not be interpreted as an acquiescence in the inevitable. While in other industries and in other countries trade unions often had little choice if they were to survive the new rigors of domestic and international competition, in the case of the ACW the initiative lay as much with Hillman as it did with industrial engineers and businessmen. Indeed, this “democratic Taylorism” was often fiercely resisted by the mass of petty entrepreneurs whose tiny, technologically primitive, and commercially marginal shops continued to occupy much of the clothing industry.

As it turned out, the situation was broadly similar in the new Soviet state. Bolshevism of course did not share the more fatalistic predispositions that otherwise dominated the Second International, and it is furthermore true that before the revolution Lenin bitterly denounced Taylorism as the “scientific method of extortion of sweat.” As early as 1916, however, Lenin had made extensive notes on Taylor’s experiments in rationalizing work and in particular studied Gilbreth’s motion studies, which he came to see as a means to enhance the technical transition from capitalism to socialism. Shortly after October the exigencies of the civil war and acute economic distress produced a fundamental shift in orientation converging on the politically sanitized approach to Taylorism already adopted by the ACW. Increasingly, Lenin chose to emphasize the virtues of centralized management, efficiency, and labor discipline, and the critical importance of productivity and the intensification of labor if the revolution were not to perish. “We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes.” Very much like Hillman, Lenin avoided becoming the prisoner of theoretical pronouncements made for other times and purposes.

It is therefore arguable in the Soviet case, given the drastic loss of skilled workers to the civil war and to the new state institutions and where industry had to be developed with some considerable speed just to reestablish exchange with the countryside (especially in industries like clothing and textiles), that efficiency methods imported from the West were vastly superior to anything then available in Russia. All discussions and struggles over the form and extent of “workers’ power” could only ignore these historic constraints at their peril. The adoption of “democratic Taylorism,” whether by the ACW or in the Soviet Union, would accelerate the disintegration of preindustrial craft and workers’ control traditions and on occasion prompt serious resistance. Yet, however much their passing was mourned, such practices scarcely represented a realistic organizational and political strategy either in the United States or in the Soviet Union. Indeed, at least during the early period of the NEP, as compared with subsequent developments, importing a version of the ACW’s union-supervised Taylorism may have democratized production practices more than might otherwise have been the case.

In any event, Taylorism in Russia was thus reassessed, and its “scientific” discoveries, including the “analysis of mechanical motion during the work process . . . the elimination of superfluous and awkward motion . . . [and] the introduction of the best systems of auditibility and control,” were systematically applied to the reconstruction of the Russian economy, subject to the harmonizing influence of Soviet direction. Both Lenin and Trotsky were, moreover, prepared to override the objections of the trade unions, the factory committees, and “left communists” especially opposed to the piece-work norms associated with Taylorism. By April 1918, the Central Council of Trade Unions had assumed some of the responsibility for this drastic change in labor policy, so that beginning with the period of war communism, production norms and piecework became standard features of Soviet industrial organization. The Bolshevik elite came to view such innovations as the only way to establish modern labor discipline among a proletariat still attached to the more traditional rhythms and “incentives” of peasant life. So too had the ACW elite found it necessary to disrupt the preindustrial structures of behavior and belief characteristic of its Jewish, south Italian, and Slavic membership.³²

Bolshevik commitment to scientific management continued into the period of the NEP, especially since two-thirds of new Soviet industry was built with the aid and guidance of American engineers and businessmen familiar with its methods. A new technical elite began to share political and administrative power in the factories with less technically expert “Red Directors.” Under the guidance of the Russian “bard of Taylorism,” Alexei Gastev, scientific management became a kind of messianism of the machine. Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labor, whose researches into the reorganization of work were expressly aimed at creating a culture of work that would include a “severity, a postponement of immediate satisfaction which may be called conditioning for work” and that would create a “Soviet Americanism.” The Institute operated under the auspices of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (and at the same time was responsible to the Gosplan), so that Russian trade unions, despite some internal opposition, found themselves shouldering the responsibility for instilling the new labor discipline—a role already familiar to the ACW.³³

It is true that under the NEP, as part of its general policy of loosening statist controls of the economy, the state functions of the trade unions were reduced. However, while the latitude for collective bargaining as a legitimate trade union function had thus been extended, this did not mean any lessening of trade union responsibility for maintaining order on the shopfloor or increasing productivity. The labor code of 1922 called for a guaranteed minimum wage in return for a guarantee with respect to output, with quotas to be fixed jointly by factory management and trade union representatives. The latter procedure closely resembled the prevailing arrangements for determining “production standards” in those portions of the men’s clothing industry supervised by the ACW.

As the NEP developed, the trade union bureaucracy more and more became the mediating agency between the state and factory administration on the one side and the shopfloor on the other. Because light industry recovered most quickly under the NEP, collective bargaining concessions in that sector, in particular wage rates, were considerable. This was the case in the trade unions in the clothing and textile industries in the Soviet Union. However, although strikes were permissible, they were to be avoided, in favor of conciliation and impartial arbitration, as was also the case in the U.S. Conciliation courts and “comradely disciplinary courts,” composed of representatives of the factory administration and the trade union, were established to adjudicate shopfloor grievances and handle violations of work rules, including lateness, absenteeism, rudeness and failure to meet group and individual production quotas. Both the kinds of grievances and violations and the methods of resolving them resembled the work of grievance boards and boards of impartial arbitration inaugurated by the ACW.³⁴

The Bolshevik elite was also coming to terms with the marketplace. NEP was designed in part to promote cooperative enterprise, especially in the realm of trade. Lenin envisioned, at least as an interim arrangement, a “cooperative capitalism,” distinct from private commercial institutions and at the same time a species of state capitalism under Soviet control. Industrial cooperatives were encouraged, granted some autonomy from direct state regulation, and provided with credits. Moreover, because the NEP was conceived in part to repair the complete breakdown of exchange between town and country, it particularly emphasized the consumer goods sector of industry. The most viable enterprises in specific industries were assembled together in trusts and operated according to commercial principles, which included a rigorous rationalization of the production process. Trusts were not governmental but economic units operating on the basis of contractual arrangements with the state, although their managements were appointed by the Vesenkha. The largest such organization was the textile trust employing 54,000. In general, the NEP enjoyed its greatest successes in light industry.³⁵

Economic paralysis also caused the Bolsheviks to look to the West for fresh infusions of capital. By 1921, the first experiments with “mixed companies,” formed jointly by foreign capital and agencies of the Soviet state, had begun to supply the vital capital equipment and technical help necessary to develop Russian resources as well as produce items for mass consumption.³⁶

The formation of cooperative trusts and “mixed companies” was accompanied by the return of U.S. emigrees who reportedly organized “American Departments” that used the “last work in efficiency methods” in order to create “a genuinely American attitude to work.” Thus, for example, a group of thirty-six American tailors joined the Moscow Tailoring Combine, originally established during the revolution by a returned Baltimore garment worker, Borgrachov. Pravda noted that they “have raised its work to such a level of efficiency that the Combine has become a model establishment . . . there are now six cutters to 150 machines, where as formerly there were 50 cutters when hand machines were used.” After the RAIC was established, the ACW supplied this experimental factory, which included its own cooperative stores, with an experienced manager from a unionized plant in Rochester. Another group of 120 U.S. deportees, armed with 200 sewing machines, took over an old clothing factory and established the Third International Clothing Works.³⁷

NEP thus encouraged the institutional and economic environment in which an industrial experiment like the RAIC could flourish. And the RAIC, in turn, crystallized a perspective on policy amenable to both Bolshevik and ACW elites. That perspective included the elaboration of a system of rational and formally democratic labor relations and the invention of machinery for the co-management of the industry in the interests of planned production and consumption. The union leadership was as receptive to strategies for rationalizing an underdeveloped clothing industry as the Bolsheviks were attracted by Western administrative and technical practices that promised to modernize an underdeveloped country. In a sense, the Bolshevik RAIC and the ACW’s “new unionism” were each other’s mirror image: the RAIC as the embryo of what Hillman characterized as “state” and “cooperative” capitalism germinating within the womb of war communism; and the “new unionism” as the kernel of state capitalism concealed within the husk of free enterprise.³⁸

Moreover, the actual operating experience of the RAIC further confirmed this historic convergence. As it turned out, even more valuable than the modern machinery transported to the Soviet Union was the accumulated expertise in industrial engineering, technological innovation, and personnel relations that Hillman had pledged to make available. Skilled cutters from the most advanced factories in Rochester, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were sent to Russia to provide technical advice and training. They reported to scientific management expert Otto Beyer that in every essential respect the revitalized Societ clothing factories resembled modern, unionized plants in the United States. Not only was the machinery up-to-date but so was the system of resolving shopfloor grievances through arbitration. Workers’ representatives participated in the fixing of rates and poured over books by Taylor and Gannt on industrial efficiency.³⁹

Garment manufacturer Abraham Cohen also visited the Russian clothing syndicate and observed that most of the critical skilled positions were manned by Americans from companies like Hart Schaffner & Marx, Sonneborn & Co., and Snellenburg & Co., which had pioneered, in collaboration with the ACW, the introduction of scientific management reforms in the men’s clothing industry. Cohen noted that piece work and the eight-hour day were the rule in all RAIC factories.⁴⁰

Paralleling Hillman’s ideal scenario for the American clothing industry, RAIC plants were supervised by joint union-management councils that cooperated in fixing “scientific” standards of production and rates of pay. Ultimate authority, however, resided in the Vesenkha, a scheme of which Hillman approved—since he acknowledged that trade unions by themselves were too parochial and stubborn to take into account industrywide and general economic needs. At the same time, Hillman was pleased to report that strikes were not uncommon, as he considered them a positive sign of “democratic vitality.”⁴¹

The latter issue concerning the extent of trade union autonomy and freedom of action continued to interest Hillman throughout the life of the RAIC. At the end of 1925, when the RAIC was coming to an end, he was still sanguine about the prospects. He reassured the GEB that “fundamentally . . . there is trade union control. Nothing can be done without the support of the trade unions. In five years there will be a live trade union with responsibility for production. It is to be expected that cooperative and government control will remain.”⁴²

Whether or not Hillman was whistling in the dark in this case, his concern about the position and power of Soviet trade unions serves as a cautionary note about exaggerating the degree and significance of the resemblances between NEP and the “new unionism.” By 1924, Soviet trade unions had become in many essential respects the creatures of state and party labor policy. That is to say, their very conditions of existence and their role in the political economy were both more fundamental and at the same time far less independent than those of the ACW or, for that matter, the labor movement at large in the United States. While Hillman had every reason to underestimate if not ignore the inherent tension between workers’ control and scientific management, it is also true that the unique relationship between party and trade union in the Soviet Union was only just then emerging, and it would take some time to make clear the special consequences of party domination. Nevertheless, the similarities are illuminating and perhaps none more so than the historic resistance encountered by both the RAIC and the ACW as they attempted to introduce rationalized methods of industrial management and labor relations.⁴³

Skilled American workers, on loan to the RAIC and charged with importing a modern sense of industrial work discipline, reported that the Soviets had to overcome the same artisan and preindustrial traditions of work confronting proponents of “industrial democracy” in America. Given that the population of factory-employed, male clothing workers in Petrograd, for example, had been decimated (perhaps by as much as 90 percent) by the revolution and civil war, it is not surprising that the re-manning of the industry necessarily called upon a reserve of village workers still enmeshed in the prewar craft traditions of custom tailoring.⁴⁴

The “new unionism” confronted a similar milieu, composed mainly of skilled work groups accustomed to regulating the pace and quantity of production informally and semiautonomously. Still surviving precariously in tiny shops and under factory roofs, but mortally threatened by a degrading standardization of tasks, these artisan-syndicalist groupings sought to preserve their independence and skills and an older law of shopfloor discipline. However, the practices and procedures initiated by “industrial democracy” threatened the integrity of artisan democracy. They depended on the workers’ willingness to accept new work rules, technical innovations, standards of performance, disciplinary procedures, and new codes of shopfloor behavior that were designed first of all to maximize efficiency, regardless of whether or not that disrupted the internal hierarchies and moral codes of artisanal solidarity. Above all, the “new unionism” called upon work groups to relinquish their customary “right” to strike whenever they felt justice or self-interest demanded they exercise it.⁴⁵

Shopfloor militance on behalf of traditional rights to regulate the pace of production, to control the level of expected output, to police the introduction of new machinery, and so on was not in itself irretrievably inimical to management and union objectives. In fact, the creation of the ACW helped to reinforce and formalize many such prerogatives. However, the behavioral and even characterological change sought by “industrial democracy” demanded that such popular sentiments be rechanneled, transformed, and encoded in a new rhetoric of workers’ demands and perceptions emphasizing economic self-interest, contractual obligation, and industrial equity.⁴⁶

This struggle, in large measure a protracted process of linguistic socialization, was inevitably fought out in the political arena as well. In Russia, the left “Workers Opposition” carried on the workers’ control movement, many of whose leading militants dispersed after 1917 into the new institutions of the state and economy. It tried to protect both the trade unions and the revolutionary factory committees against encroachment by the state and party. Although the early revolutionary decrees on workers’ control had, at least formally, left the proprietary position of managements largely untouched, in practice it was not at all uncommon for workers to assume operational control of local factories, even in defiance of directions from the central organs of the Soviet economy. The NEP, however, accelerated the elimination of the last vestiges of workers’ control, while simultaneously augmenting the authority of factory managements. This process paralleled the struggle within the more circumscribed circles of the technical intelligentsia over the issue of Taylorism. For a technical elite committed to a policy of rapid industrial modernization, the aversion to industrial discipline and the persistence of seasonal and rural work habits and religious inhibitions among Russia’s newly proletarianized peasantry was an intolerable obstacle to the application of time-and-motion studies, incentive pay systems, and other methods of labor intensification. While the “Workers’ Opposition,” elements of the trade union movement, and even a minority of technocrats denounced the pampering of the specialists, the political victory of the latter was ensured first of all by Lenin and later by Stalin.⁴⁷

The political struggle in the Soviet Union was of course more complex and extended across a broader range of issues than is indicated here. Nevertheless, it does suggest the nature of the tension between the modernizing elite directing the RAIC and at least some of its workers recruited from the towns and villages of the Russian countryside. Syndicalist currents particularly were opposed by the Bolshevik majority as profoundly conservative. While this was not an entirely implausible judgment, and one to be expected from a vanguard whose announced purpose was to bring Russian society forward into the twentieth century, it also functioned as a rationalization for making alternative methods of industrialization ideologically and socially illegitimate. It is in any event apparent that a party ostensibly committed to a specific kind of modernizing project still contained within its ranks a cadre with a historically divergent view of the future.

Hillman fully agreed that the syndicalist animus was essentially nostalgic and conservative. Interestingly enough, so did the leadership of the newly formed American Communist Party. Moreover, the American party’s position was not simply a knee-jerk reaction to impulses from abroad but grew out of the experience of a sizeable fraction of the leadership during the previous decade of socialist politics. It is not surprising therefore, that alongside the Bolshevik faction fight there developed an internal political struggle in the ACW that joined together the RAIC and the question of Taylorism and created a temporary alliance between the union elite and the American equivalent of the Bolshevik inner circle. The latter, like the Russian Bolsheviks, found itself at odds with its own rank and file.⁴⁸

During the same conventions of 1920 and 1922, when fraternal sympathies and more practical gestures toward the Russian Revolution were exhibited freely, the union leadership faced the most concerted resistance to its policy of cooperation with scientific management. While the forms of factional opposition were diverse, eventually the Socialist Party cadre in the union directed this struggle against Taylorist “production standards” and combined it with an attack on the close working relationship established between the Hillman group and the Communist Party’s trade union organization, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL).⁴⁹

It is true that until the middle of 1924 an alliance between the ACW leadership and the TUEL cadre within the union delivered tactical advantages to both sides. Not only did Hillman provide political and material support for the Bolshevik revolution, he also extended the union’s administrative protection to the TUEL caucus then under attack by the Socialist Party right. In return, the party leadership assisted in the introduction of “production standards” by disciplining those segments of its own shopfloor membership that were otherwise inclined to oppose the further rationalization of the industry.

Just as the Bolshevik and ACW cadres in Russia found themselves at odds with surviving artisan practices and attitudes, so too the leadership of the American Communist Party stood outside the social and cultural universe of its own constituency. While party propagandists argued that “production standards” were not a concession to antilabor Taylorism, TUEL members on the shopfloor considered it a kind of counterfeit piece work and a return to an “old slavery.” The American party, together with Hillman, made deliberate and successful use of the RAIC to morally embarass these TUEL cadre into muting their instinctive hatred of “production standards” at a decisive moment in the union’s internal life. Thus, while the issues and alignments were by no means identical, there emerged a substantial similarity in the political dynamics set in motion by the RAIC and the “new unionism.”⁵⁰

For all intents and purposes, the RAIC experiment was over by the end of 1925, as was the union’s alliance with the American Communist Party. Hillman remained optimistic about the prospects of doing businesss in the Soviet Union. During his last trip to Russia in 1925, the Bolsheviks offered new investment opportunities despite their intentions to liquidate the RAIC. Hillman wrote from Moscow that despite the. fact he was not any longer “personna gratta politically [sic],” business relations were excellent, notwithstanding the death of Lenin, “without whom I could not have gotten anything done on my last two visits.” In fact, as late as 1928, ACW banks—which during the life of the RAIC had been used to transmit dollars to the Soviet Union for the purchase of raw materials and machinery for the clothing trust—were involved with the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Bank of Italy in an effort to float a Soviet bond issue in the United States. The State Department ultimately thwarted the attempt.⁵¹

However, Hillman did lose all interest in collaborating with communists in the United States once the American party broke with the LaFollette presidential campaign, which Hillman had helped to organize. As a social and industrial experiment, the RAIC hardly lasted long enough to prove much about the future of “cooperative” or “state” capitalism. The Russians, who were in any event about to revamp the administrative and political structure of all the industrial syndicates, eventually returned the original investment as promised and the agreement was terminated amicably. Indeed, so long as the business relationship with Hillman lasted (through most of 1925), the Bolsheviks assiduously avoided discussing with the ACW president the nasty details of Hillman’s falling out with the American party—much to the displeasure of the U.S. communist leadership.

Thus the RAIC was decidedly not the victim of an otherwise extraneous political struggle, and on the part of the ACW its dissolution may have had more to do with the depletion of the union’s treasury by the protracted International Tailoring strike of 1925. An ephemeral episode, the RAIC was significant, however, insofar as it reflected more fundamental processes reshaping the world of work, politics, and labor organization in the decade before the Great Depression.⁵²

Notes

For their valuable suggestions and criticisms I want to thank Jill Andresky, Melvyn Dubofsky, Stan Engerman, Joshua Freeman, Herb Gutman, Paul Milkman, Joan Scott, and Carmen Sirianni.

1. Anthony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917–1930 (Stanford, 1968), 225–238.

2. Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), passim; Carmen Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in the Era of World War I: A Comparative Analysis of the European Experience,” Theory and Society 9, no. 1 (1980).

3. Maier, passim; Sirianni; James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973); Larry Peterson, “The One Big Union in International Perspective: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 1900–1925,” in this volume. There is a considerable amount of literature on industrial democracy and labor relations policy in the U.S. in this period including the following useful selection: Norman J. Wood, “Industrial Relations Policies of American Management, 1900–1933,” Business History Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 1960) James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in the 20th Century (New York, 1980); David Brody, Workers in Industrial America (New York, 1980), especially chapter 2; David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York, 1979), especially chapter 4; Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years (Boston, 1972).

4. Louis B. Wehle, “War Labor Policies and Their Outcome inPeace,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 33, no. 2 (February 1919); Morris Cooke, “Modern Manufacturing: A Partnership of Idealism and Common Sense,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (hereafter cited as Annals), Sept., 1919; Robert D. Cuff, “The Politics of Labor Administration during World War I,” Labor History 21, no. 4 (Fall 1980); Paul Douglas and F. E. Wolfe, “Labor Administration in the Shipbuilding Industry during World War I,” Journal of Political Economy 2, no. 3 (March 1919); Brody, chapter 2; James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968), 214–241; Haggai Hurvitz, “Ideology and Industrial Conflict: President Wilson’s First Industrial Conference of October, 1919,” Labor History 18, no. 4 (Fall 1977), John S. Smith, “Organized Labor and Government in the Wilson Era, 1913–1921: Some Conclusions,” Labor History 3, no. 3 (Fall 1962); Waste in Industry, a study prepared by the Committee on the Elimination of Waste in Industry of the Federated American Engineering Societies, 1921. The two industrial conferences sponsored by the Wilson administration and the conference on unemployment and on waste in industry organized by Commerce Secretary Hoover were indicative of this continuing interest in reform.

5. Steve Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal” in Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz eds. Working-Class America, (Champaign, Ill., In press); “Works Councils in the U.S.,” National Industrial Conference Board (NICB) Report no. 21, October, 1919, and “Experience with Works Councils in the U.S.,” NICB report no. 50, May, 1922; Cooke, “Modern Manufacturing”; James Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State (Chicago, 1972); Milton Derber, The American Idea of Industrial Democracy, 1865–1965: Urbana, Ill., 1970); George Bell, “Production the Goal,” Annals, Sept. 1919; Morris Cooke, Samuel Gompers, and Fred J. Miller, eds., “Labor, Management, and Production: An American Industrial Program,” Annals, Sept., 1920; Willard E. Hotchkiss, “The Bases of Industrial Stability,” Annals, Sept., 1920; William E. Leiserson, “Collective Bargaining and its Effects on Production,” Annals, Sept. 1920; Sidney Kaplan, “Social Engineers as Saviours: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 3 (June, 1956); Felix Frankfurter, “Social Unrest,” Current Affairs 10, no. 35 (1920); Bulletin of the Taylor Society, December, 1919.

6. New Republic, Feb. 1, 1919.

7. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; Morris Cooke to Sidney Hillman, June 18, 1919, Oct. 10, 1922, June 7, 1919, Sept. 10, 1919, April 5, 1920. Morris L. Cooke Papers, Box 9, Files 73–90, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library; “Hart, Schaffner, and Marx Labor Agreement—Cases Decided by the Board of Arbitration” (HSM Cases) and “Men’s Cothing Industry Board of Arbitration—Chicago Market” (Chicago Cases); Ray Stannard Baker, “Shop Council Plan Covers the Entire Clothing Industry,” N.Y. Evening Post, Feb. 14, 1920; New Republic, May 6, 1920.

8. New Republic, Feb. 1, 1919; The Advance, Feb. 8, 1918 and March 22, 1918—Hillman speech to Montreal workers; The World, July 27, 1919; Sidney Hillman to John E. Williams, Jan. 2, 1918, Jacob Potofsky Papers, Martin P. Catherwood Library of the New York School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University; Hillman speech to Annual Convention of the Industrial Relations Association, May, 1920, ACWA Papers, Cornell.

9. Hillman testimony before the Chicago Arbitration Board, Dec. 13, 1919, Chicago Cases; William Z. Ripley to Hillman, Sept. 4, 1918 and Sept. 20, 1918 and Nov. 18, 1918, Sidney Hillman Papers, Cornell; William Z. Ripley, “Loading the Olive Branch,” The Survey, Sept. 1, 1922; William Z. Ripley, “Bones of Contention,” The Survey, April 29, 1922, Proceedings of the 4th Biennial Convention of the ACWA (Conv. Proc), May 1920; Hillman appeal to ACW membership, Nov. 10, 1920; Hillman telegram from Berlin, Aug. 16, 1921, and from Moscow, Sept. 17, 1921, to the General Executive Board; Soloviev, President of the Russian Red Cross to the ACWA Convention, May 8, 1922; Lenin to Hillman, Oct. 13, 1921—all reprinted in Sidney Hillman, “Reconstruction of Russia and the Tasks of Labor,” an address before the 5th Biennial Convention, May 11, 1922; Documentary History of the ACWA (hereafter cited as Doc. Hist.) 1920–22.

10. Conv. Proc., 1920; Syndique communiste, 1921, Red Books clippings file, ACW Papers; Mike Gold, The Liberator, July, 1920, and June, 1922.

11. Hillman to Joseph Schlossberg, April 16, 1920, Hillman Papers; Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor (New York, 1952), chapter 9; Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; Irving Howe interview with Paul Novick, March 29, 1968, YIVO Archives; Trade Union Educational League leaflet in Charles S. Zimmerman Records, ILGWU Archives, Box 40, file 5; Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A., 2 vols. (New York, 1950), vol. 1; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976).

12. Josephson, chapter 10.

13. Losovosky’s message and invitation was actually transmitted through William Z. Foster, then in Russia discussing his TUEL; FBI File no. 61–9899, Internal Security File on Sidney Hillman, released under an FOIPA request, including “Report from D. M. Ladd to J. Edgar Hoover,” June 26, 1946 and George J. Starr report to the FBI, Nov. 14, 1922.

14. Doc. Hist. 1920–22.

15. Josephson, chapter 9; N.Y. Call, Nov. 22, 1921.

16. Daily News Record (hereafter cited as DNR), Nov. 18, 1921; Hillman speech on his Russian trip at Carmen Hall, Nov. 18, 1921.

17. Doc. Hist. 1920–22; DNR, April 18, 1921. Many years later, J. B. S. Hardman recalled the deep affinity Hillman felt for the Bolsheviks in this early period of the revolution. Just before he left for Russia, when asked what he wanted to discover there Hillman explained to Hardman and to the Bolshevik head of the Jewish section of the Russian Communist Party (then visiting in the U.S.) that “If I can find out that it can hold power, I don’t care very much what you are telling this man [Epstein, the Bolshevik representative] about his party. I’m not interested in his party. But if it can’t hold power, even if the party is perfect, what use do I have for it.” J. B. S. Hardman Papers, Box 6, file 47A, Oral History, p. 67, Tamiment Library.

18. N.Y. Call, Nov. 22, 1921; DNR, Nov. 18, 1921.

19. General Executive Board Minutes, December, 1921; DNR, May 13, 1922; Sutton, 227.

20. Josephson, chapter 10; Draft of “The Labor Banking Movement in the U.S.” by Sidney Hillman, ACW Papers.

21. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; Conv. Proc., 1922.

22. Conv. Proc., 1922; Hillman, “Reconstruction of Russia”; General Executive Board Minutes, January, 1923; FBI File no. 61–9899 contains a RAIC circular noting that “Investments will bring you dividends in hard cash and also dividends in the health and happiness of the Russian people.”

23. Chicago Daily News, Nov. 11, 1925; Doc. Hist., 1922–24; FBI File no. 61–9899; “Certificate” issued by the Chief Committee of the Council of Labor and Defense in Matters of Concessions and Limited Companies, Nov. 4, 1922, “The Decision of the Council of Labor and Defense,” Nov. 4, 1922, signed by Acting President L. Kamenev and Secretary L. Fotieva, “Memorandum of Agreement entered into between the Supreme Council of Public Economy of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Russo-American Industrial Corporation,” all in ACW Papers; DNR, Sept. 1, 1922; The Chronicle, Nov. 3, 1923.

24. Hillman, “Reconstruction of Russia”; DNR, Nov. 29, 1922; Sutton, 229; Nation, Nov. 7, 1923.

25. Sutton; DNR, Nov. 5, 1922.

26. Hillman, “Reconstruction of Russia”; Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1922; Doc. Hist. 1922–24.

27. New Republic, May 31, 1922.

28. New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Nov. 4, 1922; Felix Frankfurter to Hillman, June 6, 1922 and George Soule to Frankfurter, June 26, 1922, Box 103, Felix Frankfurter Papers, Library of Congress; FBI File no. 61–9899.

29. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; The Survey, May 20, 1922; General Executive Board Minutes, August, 1922.

30. Conv. Proc., through 1924; Biographical sketches of founding union members in ACW Papers; David Saposs interviews with ACW leaders in Saposs Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society.

31. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; Gilbert, Samuel Haber, Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1964); Derber, pp. 134–136, 244–245; Milton J. Nadworny, Scientific Management and the Unions, 1900–1932 (Cambridge, 1955), 98, 105, 110, 118–119, 126–128, 133, 135.

32. Rainer Taub, “Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of Scientific Management in the (Early) Soviet Union,” Telos 37 (Fall 1978); Judith Merkle, Management and Ideology (Berkeley, 1980), 107, Lenin as quoted pp. 113, 114, 115, 119; Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, (Princeton, 1978), 37–38, 50, 59.

33. Merkle, 122; Bailes, Technology and Society, 62; Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1977), 62.

34. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–23, vol. 2 (London, 1952), 207, 220, 228, 319–320, 325–326; Margaret Dewar, Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917–28, (London, 1956), 83–84, 90–92, 97, 102–104, 110.

35. Peter G. Filene, ed., American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917–65, (Homewood, Ill, 1968), 56–60; Sutton, 279; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, 299, 302, 304–310, 335–337, 342; Eugene Zaleski, Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–32, trans, and ed. Marie-Christine MacAndrew and G. Nutter (Chapel Hill, 1971), 14, 20–21, 29.

36. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, 279, 281, 351, 353.

37. Sutton, 227, quoting Pravda, Aug. 6, 1922; The Liberator, December, 1923; Nation, Nov. 7, 1923.

38. Hillman’s Carnegie Hall speech, Dec. 1, 1922, and Hillman’s speech before the Foreign Policy Association, Feb. 3, 1923, ACW Papers.

39. Mary Agnes Hamilton interview with Hillman in Contemporary Review, February, 1927; Hillman’s Carnegie Hall Speech, Dec. 1, 1922; New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Nov. 18, 1922; Soviet Russia Pictorial, April, 1924.

40. N.Y. World, Oct. 20, 1922. DNR, Nov. 26, 1923.

41. Hillman’s Carnegie Hall speech, Dec. 1, 1922. In this talk, Hillman also noted the ease with which the union in Russia could have officers of the trust recalled, as well as its attempts to provide the workers with free housing and day care services; Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 2, 1922; DNR, Nov. 26, 1923.

42. General Executive Board Minutes, December, 1925.

43. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev”; Dewar, 102, 120.

44. George Soule article in New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Nov. 8, 1922; DNR, Nov. 18, 1921; Soviet Russia Pictorial, April, 1924.

45. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; HSM Cases and Chicago Cases.

46. Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal.”

47. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, 220, 226; Bailes, Technology and Society, 37–38, 59, 62; Zaleski, 15; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev”; Taub, “Lenin and Taylor.”

48. Carr, passim; Daniel Bell Collection, Boxes 2, 3, and 9, Tamiment Library.

49. Conv. Proc., 1920 and 1922; Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal”; Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, 1960), 65–66, 70–71; Daniel Bell Collection, Box 9, Bell interview with Earl Browder.

50. Daniel Bell Collection, especially précis of J. B. S. Hardman article, “Needle Trades–1920’s,” Box 3, written in 1922, and Bell’s interview with Browder, Box 9, and Bell’s “Notes on TUEL Minutes, 1923–27,” Box 3, especially March 7, 1924, and Browder’s minutes, May 1, 1924. Epstein, Jewish Labor, vol. 2, 64–66, 110–111, 115, 123, 130–131, and passim; Author’s interview with Samuel Liptzin, Feb. 2, 1980, transcript in possession of author; Oral History Collection, Charles Zimmerman file, Box 6, Nov. 13, 1964, YIVO Archives; Samuel Liptzin, Tales of a Tailor (New York, 1965), 167–172; “Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America,” Box 5, Bell Collection; Melech Epstein, “Profile of Sidney Hillman,” Bund Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement, Atram Center for Jewish Culture.

51. Doc. Hist, 1924–26; Hillman to Jacob Potofsky, Oct. 3, 1925, Hillman Papers; Sutton, 290–291.

52. “National Committee of the TUEL Box 5, Bell Collection; Report to the Red International of Labor Unions,” Sept. 27, 1924; Trade Union Committee of the Box 3, Bell Collection; Central Executive Committee telegram to Losovsky, Sept. 30, 1925, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 12, 1924; Chicago Daily News, Nov. 11, 1925; The Advance, Nov. 27, 1925; DNR, Nov. 25, 1926.