Maurice Sugar

Maurice Sugar (1891 - February 15, 1974) was an American political activist and labor attorney. He is best remembered as the General Counsel of the United Auto Workers Union from 1937 to 1946.

Maurice Sugar was born August 12, 1891 in Brimley, Michigan (now Superior Township), the son of ethnic Jewish parents who had emigrated to America from Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian empire. Maurice's father, Kalman Sugar, worked as a storekeeper, selling general provisions.

Maurice's parents were not politically radical, with his father a staunch supporter of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s. Kalman Sugar eventually joined the Socialist Party of America in 1918, but it was under the influence of his son, not vice versa, as in the more typical case of so-called "red diaper babies."

Growing up in Brimley, Sugar was exposed to the culture of a variety of nationalities, as a large number of immigrants from French Canada, Sweden, Finland, and Germany were employed in the dominant timber industry of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The cultural diversity left its mark upon him, his biographer notes:

"While Sugar would retain a Jewish identity, growing up in a largely non-Jewish environment created in him a strong melting-pot outlook. But his family associated mainly with fellow immigrants of non-English backgrounds and hence did not seek assimilation in an 'Anglo-conformity' manner... They therefore put a premium on interethnic ties through which they built their identities as Americans."

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