[3] Quill worked various odd jobs to make ends meet, including at one point bootlegging alcohol, as prohibition was still in effect at the time.

[4] Eventually by 1929 he returned to New York City where his uncle arranged for him a job with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), first as a night gateman, then as a clerk or "ticket chopper".

[4] Connolly had been a revolutionary and high profile labor activist in Ireland until his death in 1916 following the Easter Rising, an event that eventually sparked the two wars in which Quill had participated.

[5] The Communist Party was at that time in the last years of its ultrarevolutionary Third Period, when it sought to form revolutionary unions outside the American Federation of Labor.

Another source of the core membership of what became the TWU were the Irish Workers' Clubs, setup by James Gralton who had been essentially exiled from Ireland for his left-wing political activities in 1933.

Given the level of surveillance, and consistent with the conspiratorial traditions of Irish political movements, the union proceeded clandestinely, forming small groups of trusted friends in order to keep informers at bay, meeting in isolated locations and in subway tunnels.

In the meantime the new union continued its patient organizing campaign, conducting a number of brief strikes over workplace conditions, but avoiding any large-scale confrontations.

Former allies such as O'Shea attacked Quill and the CP, both in the publications of rival unions, such as the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees, and in testimony before the Dies Committee.

National CIO leaders and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration intervened in 1941 to avert a subway strike with an ambiguous agreement that preserved TWU's right to represent its members, even though the City continued to deny it exclusive representation.

These pressures fell especially hard on the TWU: the government arrested Santo for immigration law violations, and began proceedings to deport him.

Foster, then the general secretary of the CPUSA, told him that the party was prepared to split the CIO to form a third federation and that he might be the logical choice for its leader, Quill decided to break his ties to the CP instead.

He was able to enlist new Mayor of New York City William O'Dwyer (a native of County Mayo back in Ireland), to his support, winning a large wage increase for subway workers in 1948, thus cemented his standing with the membership.

Unlike some others, such as Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, "Red Mike" Quill remained on the left within the labor movement — albeit in a political atmosphere in which the boundaries had shifted drastically during the Cold War — after his split with the CP.

From the outset, the TWU vowed to support workers ‘regardless of race, creed, color or nationality’, making it an anomaly in the still racially segregated America and amongst other Trade Unions in New York City.

Two years later he spoke at dozens of workplace meetings in New York, warning of the consequences for all workers of the wave of race riots then occurring in the US.

[6] In the 1940s, Quill spoke out against the Anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Priest of Irish ethnicity who had become a sensation in the United States on the radio.

[4][1] King's speech, ‘Segregation must die if democracy is to live’, was published in pamphlet form and sent to TWU branches across the United States with instructions from Quill that it be widely distributed and discussed.

In July 1963, just prior to the March on Washington, Quill told his union’s membership that the battle for civil rights was the key question facing America.

In 1965 a large number of TWU members joined with King on the Selma to Montgomery marches in one of the pivotal moments of the civil rights era.

I don’t think any leader since Abraham Lincoln has done as much to unite the American people, black and white, as Dr. King has done in the past fifteen years.

Dr. King adopted the methods of the great Mahatma Gandhi, who after a hundred years, freed the Indian people from Imperialism by his special and unusual tactics.

[3]The TWU did not have the same good relationship with the administration of John V. Lindsay, a liberal Republican who had rebuked Quill shortly before taking office in 1966, as they had had with Mayor Wagner.

[7][8] When the TWU's contract with the city expired and Lindsay did not immediately accede to the union's specific pay raise demands, Quill called a strike which lasted twelve days.

The City obtained an injunction prohibiting the strike and succeeded in imprisoning Quill and seven other leaders of the TWU and the Amalgamated Association, which joined in the stoppage, for contempt of court.

He was interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, after a funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, his casket draped by the Irish tricolor.