| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert D. Parmet. The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement. New York: New York University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 436. $45.00.

Robert D. Parmet's superb biography of David Dubinsky provides the first scholarly book on one of the central players in twentieth-century American labor history. Parmet details Dubinsky's tenure as president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) from 1932 to 1966 and places Dubinsky at the center of the key shifts and controversies involving organized labor in these years. Well written and exhaustively researched, this study is destined to be the authoritative work on Dubinsky's career. It fills a void in the scholarly record, since the standard previous account was a 1977 co-authored autobiography, entitled A Life With Labor, which Dubinsky produced in conjunction with New York Times labor reporter A. H. Raskin (1977). Compared to the laudatory nature of that study, Parmet's book offers a balanced assessment of Dubinsky's career. The president of the ILGWU, as he appears in this work, was made up of equal parts of idealism, pragmatism, and ambition for power. Summing up Dubinsky's influence on the union, Parmet writes, "pragmatism would outweigh ideology, but personality would often overwhelm both" (p. 80). Dubinsky was, Parmet explains, "Active, aggressive, but nondoctrinaire, he was a fighter who preferred to bargain with management rather than walk the picket line" (p. 82).

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