The non-Communist unions also had their cultural and social programs, some of which predated the Communist-led efforts. The anti-Communist ILGWU, whose leaders came from the Socialist Party, had been offering health and credit services to members, as well as educational and recreational activities, since before the First World War. The ILGWU Unity Centers had gyms, dances, sports teams, lecture programs and music performances. The union operated a summer vacation camp, Unity House, in the Poconos, where guests could attend lectures or shows. It presented shows, one of which, "Pins and Needles," became a big Broadway hit. It also made loans to companies that employed union members.
The ILGWU operated what it claimed to be the largest union health center with 21 clinics on two floors of a block long building on Seventh Avenue between 25th and 26th Street. At the end of 1945, it bought the building from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to expand operations. At the time, the union stated the clinics had provided services to 126,000 in-patient visits in the prior year and expected that number to double in the current year. The city's Communist-dominated CIO unions were causing trouble by attempting to cajole health care workers at the center to leave their AFL affiliated union and join the CIO. Meanwhile, as the battle between the Communists and non-Communists in the labor movement intensified, the ILGWU supported Walter Reuther in his successful battle against the Communists in the CIO-affiliated Auto Workers union.
In October 1945, the ILGWU acquired radio stations in four cities, including New York. The plan was to sell commercial time for about half of the programming to make the stations self-sustaining. The balance of the time would be devoted to social, cultural and spiritual programming. They promised not to make the stations outlets for union propaganda.
In March the Daily Worker attacked ILGWU leader David Dubinsky for crossing a picket line at the Waldorf-Astoria to attend a city dinner honoring visiting former Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill, who only a few months before was lauded by the Communists as Stalin's ally, but was now the enemy. You could say Churchill had provoked the feud by delivering his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Missouri in March, which had called forth a bitter denunciation from Stalin in Pravda. The Stalinist faithful rallied to organize a protest against Churchill's presence in New York City. The protesters denounced the city dignitaries attending the event as stooges of the British imperialists. While the Stalinists posed as champions of free speech and civil liberties when the speech in question followed the Party line they did not extend these freedoms to any who dared criticize Stalin, the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. These heretics, like Churchill, were to be run out of the city. Dubinsky replied that he did not honor political picketing noting that the only prior picket line he had crossed had been the Stalinist pickets in front of the White House denouncing FDR as a warmonger at the time when Stalin was cosy with Hitler.
Dubinsky was one of the major forces behind the Liberal Party, the anti-Communist spinoff from the American Labor Party. In May, Dubinsky announced his hope of forming a new national political party uniting the non-Communist left, New Deal Democrats and the liberal wing of the Republican party. The new party would exclude the Southern racist reactionaries housed within the Democratic Party and the Republican anti-union industrialists and isolationists. Dubinsky had little use for Henry Wallace, the darling of the fellow travelers, whom Dubinsky felt too often parroted Stalinist propaganda.