John C. Chase

John Calvin Chase (1870–1937) was an American trade union activist and politician. In 1898 Chase was elected mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts, becoming the first socialist to be elected mayor of an American city. Although re-elected in 1899, Chase was defeated in the 1900 campaign. He later ran without success as a Socialist candidate for governors of Massachusetts and New York and as a Congressional candidate in Ohio.

John Calvin Chase was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire on May 27, 1870 to a working class family. When John was just 1 year old the family moved to the small town of Ossipee, where his father Levi M. Chase met with an accident that caused his death. John and his four siblings were left in the care of his mother Lynthia, who relocated to yet another small New Hampshire town, this time Milton Mills to work in the woolen mills there.

John followed him mother into the mills, going to work for the first time at the age of just 9 years old. The family relocated frequently in search of steady work, living also in Sanford, Maine and Barnstead, New Hampshire.

At the age of 13 he went to work in a shoe factory for the first time. He joined the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union in 1888 and was subsequently elected as a delegate to that organization's annual convention.

Chase moved to the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1890 to work in a shoe factory there. Chase's trade union activities soon lead to his being made unemployable in the shoe industry, so he instead helped to establish a cooperative grocery store in Haverhill, which provided him a source of work.

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