AMERICA
An American Dream
By MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
MR. David id Dubinsky has retired after more than thirty years as president of our International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a life which had very little to do with our history of social change and a great deal to do with our history of cultural survival.
He had come here from the Polish pale in 1909, a time when New York dress workers were terribly sweated and underpaid; he retires now after three decades while their union's majesty and wisdom has been a continual source of public homage and most of its workers still have to work harder than some dockers and are paid less than apprentice truck drivers. Then most of them were Jews working for Jews; now most of them are Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Italo-Americans working for Jewish employers and represented by Jewish labour leaders.
Their union was an object of reverence because, under Mr. Dubinsky's leadership, it had never done a scandalous thing or presented an employer with an outrageous demand. It was celebrated as the only model of co-operation between labour and management which satisfies the national ethic, since it is both convenient and incorruptible. Mr. Dubinsky was generally admired—even among the oppressed.
And yet the saddest thing in all the stories about David Dubinsky's retirement was the report that he had told the President of the United States about it before he told anyone in his union. It seemed unfair that life should have left an honourable man that lonely. Was there no old friend left with whom David Dubinsky had bnrne the battle and to whom he could automatically turn and share the sadness and the contentment of the moment it ended? No, there were only strangers; and he chose the most august. There was the irresistible memory of those cartoons which appear on our television screens every January to remind the alien that it is time for him to make his annual report on his whereabouts and his conduct to the district office of the Bureau of Immigration. Mr. Dubinsky had risen to that place in America where President Johnson was his immigration commissioner.
The very dimension of the hyperbole which attended his departure expressed the condescen- sion which established society retains towards men of his class and his origin. The other Ameri- can in my lifetime who got himself written about in the tone by now appointed for David Dubin- sky was George Washington Carver, who was the Negro who worked hard and was humble, as Dubinsky was the immigrant who was a patriot and the labour leader who was honest.
It is a national snobbery surviving the national illusion of classlessness to be surprised to find a Negro who is hard-working or an immigrant who is patriotic; most Negroes have to work hard and most immigrants are excessively patriotic. Even most labour leaders are honest. But George Wash- ington Carver and David Dubinsky were saints with the grace to know their place; and those are the universally-recognised saints, since nothing makes a saint endurable like our knowing that we are at least his social betters.
And yet it was hard to be sure that David Dubinsky really knew his place or properly appreciated it if he did. His place was the heroic,
lost Jewish community of Poland, and it is under- standable that his feelings about it would be a mixture of tremendous fidelity and slight contempt, as for something at once noble and other-worldly. He was anything but embarrassed by the superficial things about that community which set it apart from what is customary in the New World; from mere pride in origin, he clung to the accent which proclaimed that English was his second language as to the banner of his youth.
But at the same time, he had a special rever- ence for the New World; he was proud of having been in prison in Poland and he would have been ashamed to have been in prison in America. For America was not just a free country; it was also a success. Still the democratic Jewish Socialists of Central Europe remained the family for which he would do everything but listen. He was their rich uncle. And, because he dearly loved a Lord, he extended his tolerance and beneficence to all the Socialists of Europe; he was the most generous patron Lion Blum's French Socialist party had after the war and was always glad to see Stafford Cripps, even when Cripps was even more woolly- beaded about the Soviet ruling class than Mr. Dubinsky was about his own.
But there remained the difference that he was a success and the people who were closest to his heart were people he thought were failures. He had no equals, only inferiors and superiors. Such men can have every virtue but the democratic orates; the day he retired, Mr. Dubinsky said with entire seriousness that he knew he would have to stay around and advise his successor—president of the union, a man sixty-four years old and of subtle intelligence. He remained incapable of treating any grown man in his union as anything but a child.
He loved the America outside that family as few of his fellow citizens could; but it was another country which only he could explain to his children and from whose scorn and distrust only he could protect theni. He created the image they should show the world; we understand that image when we notice his boast that- the garment workers' pension fund has grown so rich that it can loan money to the Rockefellers. In the America of David Dubinsky, a labour leader's pride is not in the size of the pension a worker gets but in the prestige of the debtors to his pension fund. That is the greatest social change wrought by the years since Roosevelt: the poor remain the poor, but now they can lend money to the rich.
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