The American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey, is also known as The
Botto House, and that’s because for generations that’s what it was: the home of the Botto family.
On this week's Labor History Today podcast: This unassuming house, sitting on an ordinary-looking street in a quiet residential neighborhood, played a key role in American labor history when it became the heart of the 1913 Patterson Silk Strike as tens of thousands of silk workers – most of them immigrants and many of them young children – demanded an eight-hour day and improved working conditions.
They were supported by the IWW and the strike drew leaders like Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who spoke from that balcony at the Botto House, and recently LHT host Chris Garlock finally had a chance to make his own pilgrimage to this iconic labor landmark, for a personal tour with Education Director Evelyn Hershey.
And, on Labor History in Two: The year was 2005; that was the day the labor movement lost a man who was willing to go to jail to fight for the rights of working people.