Spoiled Silk: The Red Mayor and the Great Paterson Textile Strike 9780823296668

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SPOILED SILl(

Spoiled Silk The Red Mayor and the Great Paterson Textile Strike

GEORGE WILLIAM SHEA

Fordham University Press New York 2001

Copyright© 2001 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shea, George William. Spoiled silk : the Red mayor and the great Paterson textile strike I George William Shea.-1st ed. p. em. Includes index. ISBN 0-8232-2133-4 (hardcover)- ISBN 0-8232-2134-2 (pbk.) 1. Brueckmann, William. 2. Brueckmann, Katherine. 3. Socialists-United States-Biography. 4. Mayors-New JerseyHaledon-Biography. 5. Silk Workers' Strike, Peterson, N.J., 1913. I. Title HX84.B726 S54 2001 331.892'87739'0974923-dc21

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This book is dedicated to my grandparents: William Brueckmann, Katherine Ruhren, Sadie Long, and George Shea

CONTENTS Preface

1. Like Just Yesterday

IX

1

2. The Cedar Cliff Hotel

20

3. The Business and the Party

28

4. Stubborn Dutchman

36

5. Strike in the Paterson Mills

49

6. The Haledon Meetings Begin

56

7. Desperation Takes Hold

68

8. The IWW on Trial

72

9. A Question of How You See It

79

10. The Strike Ends

89

11. Family Matters, Party Matters

101

12. The War

114

13. Good Times

120

14. Loss

128

15. A Visit to Morrissee Avenue

134

16. Bad Times

141

17. Just Not in Him

152

18. I Had a Son

160

19. New Family

167

20. Sunday Walks, Sunday Mass

175

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CONTENTS

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Retired Now

184

22.

Things Run Down

194

23.

The Last Walk

198

Index

203

PREFACE

about the radical left movement that flourished in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Most identifY it with romantic figures like John Reed, the journalist who left the United States to join the revolutionaries in Russia who were forming the Soviet state, or with the bitter strikes and union actions that frequently resulted in violence. With the advent of the Cold War, the far left was so thoroughly discredited and demonized that few saw beyond the caricature of leftist politicians and thinkers, let alone understood the vision of men and women who had embraced the Marxist social agenda in the United States in earlier years. Few socialists were in fact either romantic intellectuals or violent subversives and spies. They were, on the whole, quite average citizens. Many were recent immigrants who were, with difficulty, carving out a life for themselves and their families in America. They had relatively little interest in the international Marxist movement. They had been attracted to the socialist dream in Europe while living under regimes that, in many cases, denied them economic opportunity and access to significant political power. Many of them felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were being denied these things in their adopted country as well and that the solution to the problem, here as in Europe, was the establishment of a socialist system. My maternal grandparents, William and Katherine Brueckmann, were two such people. As this memoir will tell, they came to the United States from the Rhineland at the end of the nineteenth century. Because they were weavers, they settled in Paterson, New Jersey, then a major center of textile manufacturing. They raised a family there and became deeply involved in socialist politics. William Brueckmann became the mayor of the neighboring suburb of Haledon and played an important role in the famous silk strike of 1913, in which the Socialists joined with Big Bill Haywood's Industrial Workers of the World to champion the workers' cause. PEOPLE KNOW RELATIVELY LITTLE

X

PREFACE

The events of that famous strike make for an exciting story, but the strike itself failed. Its failure was, in a way, symptomatic of the broader failure that the left would suffer in the coming decades, a failure precipitated by nativism and xenophobia during the First World War, hastened by the prosperity of the twenties, and sealed at last by the attacks of the extreme right during the Cold War. The story of William and Katherine Brueckmann is the story of two new U.S. citizens who had no taste whatever for violence or subversion but who embraced a political and social agenda that they believed would improve the lives of their fellow citizens. They hoped that they could, through democratic means, change their new country for the better. They struggled to do this and failed. Eventually, in order to survive, they were forced, in their actions at least, to compromise and to accept the capitalist system of the United States. Like many people who make such compromises, they never quite abandoned the idea, however, and imagined, even after having achieved considerable financial success, that they were still socialists at heart. In telling their story, I have decided not to confine myself to their public life. That public life is, of course, both stirring and significant, but the effect it had on their private life is perhaps even more interesting. And so the second part of this book tells the story of how their political disappointments and compromises changed their family and their community. This part of the story must be a two-fold tale--one that describes the effect of their disappointments on their private lives and one that examines as well the contradictions and problems of the society they had somewhat grudgingly accepted, problems that contributed, it seems to me, to their tragedy. And it was a tragedy. Here were, after all, two basically good people, dedicated to a vision of a better society, each unhappily subject to weaknesses of character, which were aggravated and magnified by the turmoil and frustration that engulfed them. For him the weakness was a certain rigidity of mind, a stubbornness, and an insensitivity to the weaknesses of others; for her it was an excess need to love and be loved, along with a tendency to enfold and overprotect and, perhaps, to forgive too easily. But their story is not just a personal tragedy. It raises, I think, larger social and ethical issues that still haunt the U.S. culture, its economic life, and its political system. In the twenties, William and Katherine Brueckmann accepted a society that was based on the idea

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