An arm of iron in a sleeve of silk. The Lyons of America. Silk City. So was described Paterson, New Jersey. Situated some eighteen miles northwest of New York City, Paterson was founded in 1791 as a "national manufactory,” a planned industrial city that would grow up around the site where Alexander Hamilton and his associates in the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM) began to harness the water power of the Great Falls of the Passaic River. A century ago Paterson was proudly hailed the cradle and capital of the American silk industry. The city was known nationally as the birthplace of the Rogers Locomotive Works (1832) and the Colt Patent Arms Manufacturing Company (1842), and it was the home of other significant industries. John Ryle, an immigrant silk worker from Macclesfield, England, began the successful manufacture of silk in Paterson by 1840. By the turn of the century more than two-thirds of the 30,000 silk workers in the state of New Jersey were employed in the 175 silk-manufacturing and dyeing firms of Paterson, the population of which had soared from about 20,000 in 1860 to 105,000 in 1900. Yet the Paterson silk industry has traditionally been thought of by historians only in connection with the mammoth, disorderly, and protracted 1913 strike, a struggle that involved the dreaded Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and such prominent radicals as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William D. (“Big Bill”) Haywood, John Reed, and Carlo Tresca. The 1913 strike made the industry national news and since than found its way into most chronicles of American economic history. But the history of the Paterson silk industry itself seemed to pale by comparison with the labor unrest of 1913 and be forgotten. In the 1960s Prof. Herbert G. Gutman rekindled interest in industrial Paterson through two seminal essays. The six studies in Silk City offer the fruits of recent academic research on the Paterson silk industry from 1860 to 1940, shedding light on the life cycle of the industry and the roles of people and technology, entrepreneurship and organized labor. - Dust jacket.