The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

by Jacob A. Zumoff

This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.

 

248 pages, Hardcover

Published July 16, 2021

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zumoff reconstructs the 1926-27 Passaic Textile Strike from beginning to its bitter defeat. This North Jersey industrial town strike, not far from the site of the more famous Paterson silk strike 15 years before, stands in contrast and the crossroads of where labor and the left would short turn. Despite only in recent years the strikes of the interwar period organizing, particularly the West Virginia Mine Wars, the radical-led '34 militant strikes, and the CIO revolution of the late 30s, the Passaic Strike is mostly forgotten. Indeed, it was organized and led by the Communist Party before the CP took a turn towards mostly becoming lock-step with the Moscow-based Comintern and thus fracturing with its purges of both the Trotsky-wing (in the US, Cannon's followers) and the Bukharin-wing (which meant Lovestone's people) for William Z Foster's Stalin aligned group and later Earl Browder. This is before all that, when the main competitors on the left were the Socialist Party, and the party was still relatively not locked into a singular labor organizing strategy (as they would during the Third Period of building "red unions" or the Popular Front of getting involved with the CIO unions.) Here, they organized unions where the AFL union, the UTW, had failed to make itself at all a presence: the textile industry of North Jersey. 

The strike, under the leadership of Albert Weisborg, was led by an organizing committee, who hoped to bring the AFL union into the strike, even as the AFL harshly expressed anti-communist rhetoric. The organizing committee functioned much like a union, as 15,000 strikers challenged the wool mill corporations that dominated the lives of immigrant workers throughout North Jersey. At times, a bit disjointed, as the chapters tend to go by theme instead of a straight narrative telling of the strike, Zumoff does show how long a struggle the Passaic strike was, and how the choice to "bore from within" and take over AFL unions both was a strength and a hindrance to the strike, since the UTW ultimately settled for paltry gains once the Communists stepped away from leadership of the strike. Still, the ability of thousands of workers to sustain the strike over a year is impressive, especially in the anti-labor and anti-radical atmosphere of the 1920s United States.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good research with use of many deeply buried archival sources, although I did find it strange that local news accounts came almost entirety from one of Passaic’s daily newspapers even though the other is also very accessible.

Unfortunately the book suffers from a disjointed narrative, which is the main reason I deducted stars.

I found the descriptions of industrial-era Passaic, even if the context was limited to the mills, more interesting than some of the material about the strike itself which detailed petty backroom politics that are probably not of much general-readership interest today. Internal and external politics of the nascent American communist party were a particular focus.

The author’s sympathies are with labor but I didn’t find the presentation to be unduly one-sided, certainly not polemical.