Socialists, Communists, and the Struggle for the ILGWU

This book explores how a near-certain union victory in a 1926 eleven-week cloakmakers’ strike that would have delivered control of one of America’s largest unions to the Workers’ (Communist) Party instead ended in catastrophic defeat due to the collision of union, party, and industry pressures.

Drawing on union records, party documents, and firsthand accounts largely unused in prior scholarship, the book moves beyond the ideological assumptions that have long shaped these accounts to offer the first sustained institutional analysis of the event which devastated the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and destroyed the Communists’ best chance to dominate American labor. It explores the chronic disorder of the garment industry’s jobber–contractor system, the fragmented authority of the ILGWU, factional warfare and Comintern subordination within the Workers’ Party, and the impossible position of union leaders caught between irreconcilable obligations.

The book will appeal to historians, sociologists, and political scientists interested in American Communism, American labor, immigration, radicalism, Jewish-American life, organizational failure, and institutional authority.