Spoiled Silk The Red Mayor and the Great Paterson Textile Strike

Spoiled Silk is the story of two immigrants from the Rhineland, William Brueckmann and his wife, Katherine, who started a new life in the American industrial city of Paterson, New Jersey. Committed to a socialist dream, they struggled to improve the lot of their fellow immigrants and, at the same time, to raise a family in the midst of the turbulence surrounding them. Their efforts contributed to the long-lived struggle to improve working conditions in American mills, but their dream of a socialist America was never to be realized.

George William Shea, the grandson of William and Katherine Brueckmann, was Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center from 1970 to 1985. Now a Professor of Classics at Fordham, he has written books and articles on the ancient world