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by communists to try to organize labor in certain trades and industries. Of course, they began very shrewdly in trades that either were not organized at all, or were very badly and unsatisfactorily organized, which was the case with the textile unions in New England. They had a very rundown union and people had no respect for it.
So far as I know we didn't strike that in New York State. Nothing comes to my mind where the Trade Union Unity League showed its hand, except in New York City. There there were always spew-ups down on the East Side, but they never amounted to anything and they never got any kind of a strike going.
The laundry workers had a little left-over union from a big movement that had been in Troy about 1910 or so. There was a strike in Troy and they called themselves the United Laundry Workers. Leonora O'Reilly led it. If ever there was something right out of a J. M. Synge play, it was Leonora O'Reilly. She was wonderful! She was just wonderful! She was a dramatic Irishwoman - gaunt and haggard. She could have sat for Kathleen Houlihan. She “hanted” you. She was really wonderful. She made the most impassioned and the most charming radical, labor, rabble-rousing speech I ever heard. She was wonderful. She'd draw tears out of a stone image.
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