Biography
Louis Francis Budenz was a labor organizer and executive secretary of the American Workers Party during the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike. He encouraged mass picketing despite Judge Roy R. Stuart's injunction. On May 23 sheriff's deputies arrested and jailed him as the strike confrontation escalated. Budenz later joined the Communist Party in 1935 and edited the Daily Worker. He renounced communism in 1945 and became an anti-Communist witness in federal investigations. He was born on July 17, 1891, in Indianapolis and died on April 27, 1972.
1931 Clifton/Paterson strike arrest and bail account
Edward Wright’s first-person article, “We Go to Prison for Striking,” names Louis Budenz and Ch. S. Zimmerman leading strikers toward the Doherty mill in Clifton. It describes fifteen leading pickets being arrested, detention at the police station and a lawyer reporting a charge of atrocious assault and battery with $500 bail specifically for Budenz. This is a separate 1931 New Jersey strike context from the existing 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite case. Wright recounts fourteen detainees obtaining bail before the next morning’s hearing, renewed detention after referral to the county court, transfer to the Paterson county jail and release after supper. Those collective departures are not independently assigned as Budenz’s exact release or merged across the intervening bail gap. The article supplies no calendar day for this incident, no completed individual duration or final judicial disposition; none is inferred.
The Revolutionary Age, August 29, 1931, original page 3. Contemporary political/legal allegations are attributed to the paper.
In 1931 Louis F. Budenz was arrested while picketing the Henry Doherty silk mills in Clifton, New Jersey, during the Paterson silk strike. He said police denied counsel for hours and he was released on bail after ten hours in jail. The cases were transferred to Paterson and the charge changed from disturbing the peace to loitering. The August 15 report does not date the arrest or release. This episode is separate from his 1934 Toledo imprisonment. Ten hours is the reported actual jail time, not an imposed sentence or an exact whole-day total. The report has no dated dispatch or relative anchor establishing an arrest month.
Pages 1 and 3 report his actual May 23, 1934 jailing after his Auto-Lite plant-gate address and the injunction-defying picket campaign. He is described as American Workers Party executive secretary. This corroborates the existing Toledo arrest and supplies the party’s own account of the campaign; no discharge or completed duration is given.
