The Paterson Pageant

About three and a half months into the Paterson silk strike, the strikers were hungry and New York's press had largely moved on. The journalist John Reed, working with the IWW and with Greenwich Village allies including Mabel Dodge, proposed an extraordinary intervention: stage the strike itself as a pageant in Madison Square Garden. On June 7, 1913, more than a thousand strikers crossed into Manhattan and reenacted their own struggle before an audience of thousands—walking out of a painted mill, confronting police, and staging the funeral of Valentino Modestino, a bystander killed during the strike. The pageant was an artistic triumph and a financial disappointment; it raised little money, and the strike collapsed that summer. But the production planted the idea of workers' theater in American avant-garde culture for a generation.