1913 Paterson silk strike

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 six months later, on July 28.

The strike began on February 25, 1913. During the course of the strike, approximately 1,850 strikers were arrested, including Industrial Workers of the World leaders William Dudley Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

In an effort to support the strike financially, many artists based in Greenwich Village, New York, organized a pageant play in which the events of the strike were reenacted. The pageant was held at Madison Square Garden, and drew a large crowd.

Paterson's strike was part of a series of industrial strikes in the garment and textile industries of the American east from the years 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. The successful strike helped attract interest from intellectual circles in Paterson’s labor movements and gave union organizers confidence in also achieving improved working conditions and wages for Paterson’s silk weavers.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was the main outside agent behind both the Lawrence Textile Strike and the Paterson silk strike and was primarily faulted with causing the disruptions by law enforcement authorities. On February 25, 1913, the first day of the strike, the IWW’s prominent feminist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested after giving a talk on uniting strikers across racial boundaries, the authorities falsely charging her and her fellow speakers with inciting violence through radical speech. Before the Senate Commission on Industrial Relations, police captain Andrew J. McBride upheld these charges, claiming that the revolutionary air among the textile mills was caused by and could be attributed to the IWW. Paterson’s mayor at the time, Dr. Andrew F. McBride, also supported the idea that the strikes were primarily the result of the IWW’s propaganda. Regardless, the strikes were carried out for months even after the arrest of IWW leaders, dispelling the notion that the workers were only agitated by outsiders.

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