A union of many cultures: Yiddish socialism and interracial organizing in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, 1913--1941.

This dissertation revolves around a remarkable phenomenon of interracial union building during the Great Depression. Beginning in the early 1930s, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers in a predominantly Jewish-led and Jewish- and Italian-populated union through a broadly-conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, most of whom were women, into racially-integrated local unions. The Dressmakers' Local 22 of New York City was the largest local union to do so. Local 22 opened several branch offices in the communities where members lived including a West Harlem section for Blacks and an East Harlem section for Spanish-speaking workers. Local and International union education departments formed a dizzying array of cultural activities that were open to the families of union members as well.This study of the form of union organization in the ILGWU, called social unionism, is a dramatic exposure of the way in which race and culture intermingled at a critical place in American political and social development. I focus on the 1930s when modern unions were forming and beginning to influence public policy on a grand scale. I argue that the educational, recreational, social, and cultural programs and events produced in the ILGWU were an essential element in the rebuilding of the union from 1934--1937. The strength of the movement they envisioned was predicated on the inclusion of workers from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. They did not mean the inclusion of races and ethnic cultures to be a blending or absorption of cultures, but rather a celebration of the workers' many distinct cultures. Using manuscript collections and oral history interviews, I explore the Yiddish Socialist roots of social unionism in the ILGWU and I examine the cultural products of the union's programs in the 1930s and 1940s. I reveal how gender roles and politics dominated the context in which these programs and activities emerged and waned, and how the meanings of some activities changed over time.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2003.School code: 0190