archives.nypl.org -- Rose Pesotta papers (original) (raw)

Correspondence and papers, 1916-69, reflecting Pesotta's long career as a garment industry and CIO labor organizer in the United States and Canada, and as a union official, anarchist, and writer. Included are general correspondence dealing with Pesotta's activities as a garment worker, general labor organizer, and union official; letters by Emma Goldman, love letters of Powers Hapgood (with a few copies of Pesotta's letters), letters of the anarchist refugees, Molly Steimer Flechine and her husband, Simin Flechine; and family letters and papers. There are also financial accounts; diaries; papers relating to Pesotta's involvement in the anarchist movement and her activities on behalf of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Spanish Republicans; writings, notes and speeches by Pesotta and others, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers; photographs; subject papers; clippings; and Spanish Civil War, anarchist, antifascist, and Polish revolutionary posters.

The papers of Rose Pesotta span the years, 1916-1969, and document her life and work chiefly during the Depression Era as a sewing machine operator in the garment industry, as an organizer for the International Ladies' Garment Worker's Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations; as a philosophical anarchist; and on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, Emma Goldman, the Spanish Republic, and political refugees, particularly two anarchist colleagues and friends, Mollie and Simin Flechine.

The Rose Pesotta papers are arranged in fifteen series:

• Invoices, vouchers, sales statements for Pesotta's books Bread Upon the Water and Days of Our Lives, canceled checks, rent book, convention expenses, and insurance certificates.
• Includes Minutes of the General Executive Board, 1934-1943; reports on labor conditions in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, and Canada; reports to the General Executive and to the National convention; report of the Pacific Coast Convention; financial statements; resolutions; list of shops visited and complaints adjusted; receipts for strike pay; budgets, etc. There also are miscellaneous papers dealing with Los Angeles Locals 96, 266, and 384
• Chronology of the Sacco-Vanzetti case; financial report of Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee; bulletins, broadcast, newspapers, pamphlets, and clippings; memorabilia; and miscellany.
• Papers relating to La Confederación Nacional de Trabajo y La Federación Anarquista Ibéroca; Boletins de Infomacion, ; Las Mujeres Libres; and photographs of the funeral of Buenaventura Durruti, Emma Goldman in Barcelona, and bomb damage in Barcelona; newspaper clippings; and miscellany.
• Message from President Truman; articles; pamphlet; abstracts of addresses made at the Institute on Puerto Rican Problems; excerpts concerning Puerto Rico from the Congressional Record; Senate hearings on proposed Bill S. 981; Congressional hearings on political, economic, and social conditions in Puerto Rico; proposed resolutions and bills; speeches; school attendance statistics; and El Organizador: Boletin Informativo por la Union International de Trabajadoras de Aguja.
• Articles, bills and vouchers; ephemera; magazines; memoranda; minutes; pamphlets; report of the United Nations Committee on Palestine; and miscellany.
• Composed of papers relating to organizations, individuals, and topics. Among others are the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Jewish Labor Committee, National Religion and Labor Foundation, biographical information on Pesotta, racial bigotry and anti-Semitism, union democracy in America, and the Workers' Defense League
• Pamphlets include Alexander Berkman on the Kronstadt rebellion, a memorandum submitted by Nation Associates to the President of the United states petitioning for the recognition of the Spanish Republic, Michael Cohn, John Dos Passos, and Henry Harrison on Sacco and Vanzetti, Arturo Elias on the Mexican people and the Catholic Church, Emma Goldman on the place of the Individual in society, Hippolyte Havel on Anarchism, Charles A. Madison on Emma Goldman, Joseph North on the Earl Browder case, reports to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Songs of the Workers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (50th anniversary edition), Bartolomeo Vanzetti's Story of a Proletarian Life and The Background of the Plymouth Trial, the Bulletin of the Women's Bureau relating to women's jobs. Included in the newspapers and periodicals are the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin (1919), Anarchy 21 (1962_), Black Worker_ (1949), Bulletin of the International Peasant Union (1950_), Bulletin of the Joint Committee for the Defense of Revolutionists Imprisoned in Russia_ (1924, 1925), Challenge (1950, 1951), Maratima, Organo del Sindicato Nacional del Transporte Maritimo (Barcelona, 1938), Countercurrent (La Controcorrente), (Boston, 1940, 1942, 1944), Cultura Proletaria; Periodico de Ideas, Doctrina & Combate (New York, 1938), Free Society (London, 1921), Golos Truzenika (The Toiler's Voice) Russian Monthly of the International Workers of the World (Chicago 1927), Man! (San Francisco, 1933, 1934, 1935), Revolt (1916), Road to Freedom (1931, 1932), Tierra! (1934), Workers Age (1935, 1936). Boxes 41-43.
• Rose Pesotta; Powers Hapgood; Emma Goldman; David Dubinsky, Mollie Steimer Flechine; William Green, picketing, union meetings and conventions, etc.
• Newspaper clippings
• Illustrated history of ILGWU.
  Life Magazine.
  Composition books.
  German revolutionary calendar.