The Daily Worker's front page blazes with labor strife as textile workers battle bosses and police in Passaic, New Jersey. Strike leader Albert Weisbord has been arrested on the bizarre charge of 'introducing a speaker' — specifically Communist Party member Bertram Wolfe — at a union meeting, with bail set at an astronomical $10,000. Wolfe fires back in a scathing declaration, calling the charge absurd and challenging authorities: if introducing him is a crime, why arrest Weisbord instead of him? Meanwhile, 8,000 striking textile workers pack a meeting in neighboring Wallington after being banned from Garfield, cheering Weisbord for ten minutes as he brands court injunctions 'scraps of paper' that 'cannot make cloth.' The strike enters its thirteenth week with picket lines still marching and not a single new scab crossing the lines despite mill owners' threats.

This front page captures America in 1926 at a crossroads between old-world labor organizing and modern corporate power. The Passaic textile strike was one of the era's most significant labor battles, involving 16,000 workers fighting wage cuts in an industry that was moving South for cheaper labor. The heavy involvement of Communist organizers reflects the Red Scare tensions still simmering from the post-WWI Palmer Raids, while the creative use of injunctions shows how courts were becoming weapons against organized labor. This was Calvin Coolidge's business-friendly America, where 'the business of America is business' — but workers weren't going quietly into that good night.

• Bertram Wolfe's 'crime' was giving a speech using the banner slogan 'Bosses open your books and show us your profits' — he had researched textile companies' corporate reports to expose their millions in profits before wage cuts
• The Roseville Fire Company of Saddle River township voted to let strikers use their fire hall for meetings, showing unexpected solidarity from local institutions
• AFL President William Green personally intervened in the furriers' strike, calling a conference and agreeing to address striking fur workers at a mass meeting on Wednesday
• Mayor Samuel Nelkin of Wallington offered his town's grounds for striker meetings after free assembly was banned in neighboring Garfield
• The paper's subscription rate was $6.00 per year outside Chicago — about $100 in today's money for a Communist daily newspaper

• Albert Weisbord, the strike leader facing $10,000 bail for 'introducing a speaker,' would later break with the Communist Party and form his own tiny Leninist League — proving even revolutionaries can't agree on revolution
• The Passaic textile strike was happening just as the industry was beginning its massive migration to the South — within a decade, most of these New Jersey mills would be shuttered
• Bertram Wolfe, the 'dangerous' speaker who caused all this fuss, would eventually become a leading anti-Communist scholar and write the classic 'Three Who Made a Revolution' about Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky
• The paper mentions defending the Soviet Union at a May Day meeting — this was just three years after Lenin's death and Stalin was still consolidating power over Trotsky
• That $10,000 bail for Weisbord equals about $170,000 today — an outrageous sum for introducing someone at a meeting, showing how seriously authorities took the 'Red threat'