Today In Labor History April 3, 1913: Pietro Botto, socialist mayor of Haledon, N.J., invited the Paterson silk mill strikers to assemble in front of his house. 20,000 showed up to hear speakers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Upton Sinclair, John Reed and others, who urged them to remain strong in their fight. The Patterson strike lasted from Feb. 1 until July 28, 1913. Workers were fighting for the eight-hour workday and better working conditions. Over 1800 workers were arrested during the strike, including IWW leaders Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five were killed. Overall, the strike was poorly organized and confined to Paterson. The IWW, the main organizer of the strike, eventually gave up.

Today in Labor History January 4, 1883: Radical writer and publisher Max Eastman was born. In the 1910s, he edited “The Masses,” one of America's leading socialist periodicals. Contributors included Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Reed, Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair. During this period, he advocated for free love and birth control. In 1917, he co-founded “The Liberator” with his sister Crystal Eastman. In that periodical, he published Hellen Keller, John Dos Passos, Hemingway and Cummings. The U.S. government indicted him twice under the Sedition Act. Both times his lawyers got him acquitted. In 1917, he raised money for John Reed, who was in Russia, reporting on the Bolshevik Revolution. He published Reed's articles from Russia, later collected as “Ten Days That Shook the World.” In the early 1920s, Eastman lived in the Soviet Union. He witnessed Stalin’s Great Purge and became highly critical of Stalinism, and then of communism and socialism in general. He moved back to the U.S. and became a staunch anti-communist and an advocate of free market capitalism.

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Today In Labor History April 3, 1913: Pietro Botto, socialist mayor of Haledon, N.J., invited the Paterson silk mill strikers to assemble in front of his house. 20,000 showed up to hear speakers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Upton Sinclair, John Reed and others, who urged them to remain strong in their fight. The Patterson strike lasted from Feb. 1 until July 28, 1913. Workers were fighting for the eight-hour workday and better working conditions. Over 1800 workers were arrested during the strike, including IWW leaders Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five were killed. Overall, the strike was poorly organized and confined to Paterson. The IWW, the main organizer of the strike, eventually gave up.