Carlo Tresca was an Italian-American newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer and activist who was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1910s. He is remembered as a leading public opponent of fascism, Stalinism, and Mafia infiltration of the trade unions for the purposes of labor racketeering and corruption.
William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood was an American labor organizer and founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, Haywood was involved in several important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
Jacob Barsimson was one of the earliest Jewish settlers at New Amsterdam, and the earliest identified Jewish settler within the present limits of the state of New York. He was an Ashkenazi Jew of Central European background.
The 1913 Paterson silk strike was a work stoppage involving silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey. The strike involved demands for establishment of an eight-hour day and improved working conditions. The strike began in February 1913, and ended five months later, on July 28. During the course of the strike, approximately 1,850 strikers were arrested, including Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Benjamin Harrison Fletcher was an early 20th-century African-American labor leader and public speaker. He was a prominent member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a left-wing trade union which was influential during his time. In an era when few African Americans were permitted in American unions and fewer still belonged to more left-wing organizations, Fletcher was nationally known. Fletcher co-founded and helped lead the interracial Local 8 branch of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.
Adolph Lessig was the business agent of the Industrial Workers of the World.
A silk mill is a factory that makes silk for garments using a process called silk throwing. Traditionally, silk mills were concentrated in Japan, England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Italy and Switzerland.
The Paterson Armory, an armory in Paterson, New Jersey, was a facility of the New Jersey National Guard and an arena. The building at 461-473 Market Street was long disused and in a state of disrepair when on November 10, 2015, a fire damaged it heavily. As of November 16, 2015, the armory was in the process of being demolished. Certain decorative features, such as the keystone in the arch at the entrance, may be chiseled out and given to the Paterson Museum
Maria Roda (1877–1958) was an Italian American anarchist-feminist activist, speaker and writer, who participated in the labor struggles among textile workers in Italy and the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Arthur Patrick L. "Pat" Quinlan (1883–1948) was an Irish trade union organizer, journalist, and socialist political activist. Quinlan is best remembered for the part he played as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1913 Paterson silk strike — an event which led to his imprisonment for two years in the New Jersey State Penitentiary.
Ida Rauh was an American suffragist, actress, sculptor, and poet who helped found the Provincetown Players in 1915. The players, including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Eugene O'Neill, and others, first performed in a structure owned by Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later, the group moved to a theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Rauh directed the first production of O'Neill's one-act play Where the Cross Is Made for the opening of the permanent Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street in November 1918, and in the Village she became known for her intensely emotional acting.
The United Textile Workers of America (UTW) was a North American trade union established in 1901.
The Strike That Changed New York is a history book about the New York City teachers' strike of 1968 written by Jerald Podair and published by the Yale University Press in 2004.
The Lawrence Textile Strikes were part of a series industrial strikes in the garment and textile industries of the American East from 1909 to 1913. The participants of these strikes were largely immigrant factory workers from southern and eastern Europe. Class division, race, gender, and manufacturing expertise all caused internal dissension among the striking parties and this led many reformist intellectuals in the Northeast to question their effectiveness. A major turning point for these labor movements occurred in 1912 during the Lawrence Textile Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where laborers were able to successfully pressure mill owners to raise wages, later galvanizing support from left-leaning intellectual groups. In 1913 the Paterson Silk Strike also referred to as the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1913 took place in Paterson, New Jersey. This strike was a work stoppage involving silk mill worker.
John Golden was an American textile worker and trade union leader. He was elected president of the United Textile Workers of America (UTW) each year from 1902 until shortly before his death in 1921. At the time of his death, he was declared as important to textile unionism as John Mitchell was to mining unionism.
The 1913 Studebaker strike was a labor strike involving workers for the American car manufacturer Studebaker in Detroit. The six-day June 1913 strike, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), is considered the first major labor strike in the automotive industry.
Hazel Manross Whitman Hertzberg was an American historian. Her scholarship focused on the Indigenous people of North America. She was a professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
The 1912–1913 Little Falls textile strike was a labor strike involving workers at two textile mills in Little Falls, New York, United States. The strike began on October 9, 1912, as a spontaneous walkout of primarily immigrant mill workers at the Phoenix Knitting Mill following a reduction in pay, followed the next week by workers at the Gilbert Knitting Mill for the same reason. The strike, which grew to several hundred participants under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), lasted until January the following year, when the mills and the strikers came to an agreement that brought the workers back to the mills on January 6.
A strike of silk dyers in Paterson, New Jersey, from April to June 1902, spilled over into the wider New Jersey textile industry.
