Profiles
Management Representative: Moses Strauss, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of Paterson
You are a successful manager of two Paterson ribbon mills, one of which employs male weavers on German looms and the other female weavers on high-speed looms. You believe that skilled male weavers will be gone in fifteen to twenty years because capitalism is bringing change to the industry through technological advances. You expect owners to get rid of the slower German looms and replace them with high-speed looms requiring less skilled weavers. You have little sympathy for the complaints of the male workers. In fact, you support owners who have diversified their businesses over the last ten years by locating some work in Pennsylvania where workers are paid less, giving owners the upper hand with dissatisfied Paterson workers. Male weavers who complain about conditions in the mills are told that if they continue to gripe, they will be fired. As for female workers, your perception is that married women are dependent on husbands for financial support. Your company paternalistically supplies instructions to wives on how to stretch a meager paycheck. It was somewhat shocking to you, therefore, when some 200 women and girls walked out of one of the mills in early March in sympathy, you supposed, with male weavers. In your opinion, these women have nothing to complain about because they never told you about any grievances. You can only assume they have been spellbound by "Wobbly" ideology when a group of your "girls" turns up with a list of demands bearing the stamp of IWW local 152. You are amazed that workers would close the mills and associate themselves with the IWW.
Management Representative: Henry Doherty, Owner of Several Broad Silk Mills in Paterson
You are an aging mill owner who began at the bottom of the silk industry and worked your way to the top. Arriving in Paterson as a young weaver from Macclesfield, England, in 1868, you soon rose to become a shop foreman. Observing the ease with which one could move into one's own business, you formed a partnership with Joseph Wadsworth in late 1879. Starting with one loom, your business quickly expanded to 100 looms and 250 workers within two years. By the turn of the century, you had total control of the company and had added several more mills. In 1910, you built your newest mill, the biggest in Paterson, equipping it with state-of-the-art looms that have the automatic warp stop motion that nearly eliminates production slowdowns. You increased the loom assignment of some of your workers from two to four to see how it would work. Pennsylvania mills had already put weavers on four looms some time ago. Perceiving possible worker complaints despite the increase in wages, you sought and received prior approval from the AFL's United Textile Workers Union, the recognized union of most weavers at that time. The new textile technology excited you almost as much as the estimated future profits you expected to receive from greater production. Your high expectations were deflated, however, when, in spite of your best efforts to appease workers, they went out on strike after you implemented the four-loom assignment. You really could not understand why workers were striking, especially when you were willing to keep all of your mill operatives in Paterson and not spread them into Pennsylvania like other owners were doing.
Meanwhile, you noticed several other mills had started their weavers on four-loom assignments. Maybe, you thought, it was just a matter of time and the weavers would come around. Shockingly, you saw your weavers march out of your finest mill in January of this year after turning to IWW local 152 for support. As the strike spread and the months rolled by, your business suffered greatly. Finally, you made an offer to the workers; they could run the mill for you provided they guaranteed you 5% profit, repudiated the IWW, and worked ten-hour days on four looms. They refused your offer.
Management Representative: Samuel McCollom, Leader of Paterson's Silk Industry Manufacturers
You are representative of the newer breed of manufacturers in Paterson who decided some years earlier to diversify the locations of your silk operations. Recognizing the increasing difficulty the Silk Association of America and the Paterson Board of Trade had keeping control over unionization and strikes, you and many of your colleagues moved several of your larger factories into Pennsylvania. You and other silk manufacturers have come to the conclusion that workers should not be permitted to interfere with production or dictate how your business should be operated. You support without question your right to hire and fire whomever you please. Spreading your factories to different locations allows you to protect your operations from the whims of supersensitive immigrant workers.
A master must direct and success must depend upon skilled direction: this principle led you to assume the leadership of the Paterson manufacturers' move to unite and put down the most determined effort ever made by silk workers to organize themselves. You see their action as having revolutionary aims intended to repudiate all distinctions between owners and workers. Your opposition to any union, even one that is a member of the AFL, is grounded in the concept that unions interfere with business.
You had also been responsible, in part, for the earlier restructuring of the local city government by weakening the powers of the labor-supported Board of Aldermen and creating the more powerful non-elected Board of Commissioners. As tensions grow with expansion of the strike, you continue to urge your fellow manufacturers not to budge, to stand united. You support supplementing the police department with private detectives from the O'Brien Detective Agency to protect property and aid workers willing to cross picket lines. You maintain that law and order must be upheld. Your attitude is that disobedient workers must be punished in full and that the blacklist must be utilized extensively if the strike is to be broken.
Conciliator for Both Sides: John Golden, President of the United Textile Workers Union (AFL)
You have been a member of your union for many years and appreciate what unified workers can accomplish. As a member of the board of directors of the Militia of Christ, a conservative Catholic organization trying to stamp out radical unionism, you were appalled at the success of IWW hotheads in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike. To you, IWW leaders are all immigrants willing to sabotage businesses to accomplish their aims. When trouble started brewing in Paterson, you stepped in to break the workers off from IWW influence and to act as a conciliator. Your union, the United Textile Workers Union, is conservative and more open to compromise. You set up two offices in Paterson in an attempt to recruit workers. You made an agreement with the manufacturers to enroll 5,000 workers who would repudiate the IWW, thus paving the way for the start of negotiations between employers and employees. You hold the olive branch of compromise in your hand.
Unfortunately, you have had little success with your recruitment efforts, in part because many weavers see you as a collaborator with manufacturer Henry Doherty to put the four-loom system into operation. You are perceived by the workers as being manipulated by the manufacturers' interests. You perceive the workers as pawns in the hands of IWW leaders who want to destroy the AFL's longstanding record of cooperation. You believe that the four-loom system is inevitable. Your attitude is to accept the inevitable and try for the possible: fewer hours and better pay.
Labor Representative: Edward Zuersher, Member of the Executive Strike Committee
You are the son of a ribbon weaver and began working in Paterson in 1903. Your family came from Germany, but you were born in Yonkers, New York. In the late 1880s, your family moved to Paterson to work in the silk mills. You are a socialist and a militant member of the IWW. You maintain that local workers possess the skill and the practical knowledge to run the strike and plan it through the strike committee. IWW leaders are needed only to address mass meetings so the local workers will not be blacklisted when work resumes.
Labor Representative: Adolph Lessig, Leader of IWW Local Union 152
You are a broad silk weaver of German descent who has been weaving both cotton and silk since the 1880s. Upon moving to Paterson in 1902, you joined the AFL's United Textile Workers Union for a time, but switched to the IWW shortly after it was founded in 1905. You felt the IWW was more open and allowed all immigrants to join. The IWW emphasized democratic control of the union and shop floor. Now, in 1913, you are employed at the David mill as a broad silk weaver. When Doherty mill workers agreed to walk out over the four-loom issue, you helped question local 152 members in other mills about supporting a general strike. Encouraged by a favorable response, you called a series of mass meetings and formed the Executive Strike Committee.
Labor Representative: Carrie Golzio, Skilled Broad Silk Weaver
You are a second-generation weaver who began learning the craft at your father's machine at age ten. Your parents had been involved in labor disputes in their native Piedmont region in northern Italy, as well as in Paterson. As a young woman in her twenties and an experienced weaver, you are prepared to fight to advance yourself and others like you. You have pride in the quality of your work and believe that the four-loom assignments will only lead to an inferior silk product. As a skilled craftswoman, this bothers you. It also bothers you that mill owners like Henry Doherty are beginning to take broad silk weavers for granted and always seem to be hassling people of Italian descent. A similar attitude drives you and your friends to cooperate with Jews, who are similarly treated. By 1913, a rather powerful alliance between Italians and Jews exists.
Labor Representative: Scully Bell, Dye Worker
You are an unskilled immigrant who felt lucky to find work as a dyers' helper in one of Paterson's largest dye houses. It is horrible work that often has you working double shifts just to stay employed. Of all the silk workers, you are the most replaceable because your job can be learned in a week. You add chemicals to large tubs of boiling water in order to produce dyes for coloring silk. The dye house is dirty and always filled with steam and fumes. Sometimes you have to check chemicals by tasting them. At other times, skin peels off your hands when it is splashed by boiling chemicals. When local 152 of the IWW began to talk about working eight-hour days and increasing your pay beyond $11 a week, you listened and joined the union. When there was a call for a strike, you walked out immediately.
NOTE: Profiles are based on information contained in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
