During the course of the strike, approximately 1,850 strikers were arrested, including Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Class division, race, gender, and manufacturing expertise all caused internal dissension among the striking parties and this led many reformist intellectuals in the Northeast to question their effectiveness.

On February 25, 1913, the first day of the strike, the IWW's prominent feminist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested after giving a talk on uniting strikers across racial boundaries.

[7] Before the Senate Commission on Industrial Relations, police captain Andrew J. McBride upheld these charges, claiming that the revolutionary air among the textile mills was caused by and could be attributed to the IWW.

[8] Paterson's mayor at the time, Dr. Andrew F. McBride, also supported the idea that the strikes were primarily the result of the IWW's propaganda.

[2] Bill Haywood, a founding member of the IWW, helped Paterson strikers create democratically organized strike committee, representing all of the workers’ nationalities and not subject to the supervision of other more conservative and centralized labor groups.

In response, sixty weavers struck, beginning a string of union meetings with business agents to negotiate wages for silk workers in Paterson.

Two weeks into the strike, all types of weavers united to create a list of demands directed to mill owners and employers, ranging from minimum age restrictions to protect children to abolishing the multiple-loom systems to ensure the presence of jobs.

[14] In an effort to support the strike financially and gain public support, several radical artists and intellectuals in New York City including Walter Lippman, Max Eastman, Mabel Dodge, and John Reed sympathetic to the striker's cause came up with the idea to organize a pageant play in which the events of the strike were reenacted.

[15] Haywood and the strike committee worked closely with John Reed on the writing and staging of the pageant, which integrated the strikers' ideas and lived experiences.

Still the IWW managed to help the hungry strikers children into foster homes to ease their way of life and provide food and aid while their parents and workers were striking.

It is commemorated today at the Pietro and Maria Botto House National Landmark in Haledon, New Jersey, which served as a rallying point during the strike.