The Passaic Textile Strike Documentary: The Role of Film in Building Solidarity

From January 1926 through March 1927, more than 15,000 textile workers in New Jersey struck against a wage cut, for shorter hours, and for better conditions. Remembered as the Passaic strike, it also involved wool and worsted workers in nearby Garfield and Clifton, and silk dying workers in what was then East Paterson. The largely unskilled workers—mainly immigrants from East and Central Europe and Italy, and half women—organized mass pickets and near-daily meetings in the face of police violence. Just to give a sense of this violence: on 2 March 1926, a dozen mounted policemen and 65 policemen on foot attacked a 2,000-strong picket. During the strike, police arrested more than 1,000 strikers. The Passaic strike was the first mass workers’ struggle in which the Communist Party (CP) played a leading role. At the time, the CP had not fully embraced Stalinism and both James P. Cannon, the future American Trotskyist, and Jay Lovestone, the future leader of the pro-Bukharin Right Opposition, remained in leading positions. Since the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), the textile union recognized by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), refused to help the wool workers, Communists organized the United Front Committee of Textile Workers (UFC), which led the strike. The most famous Communist was the head organizer of the UFC, Albert Weisbord, a New York native who had recently graduated from Harvard Law School.