"The leading forces in the CLS were textile union labour leader Albert Weisbord, a former Socialist Party youth leader, 1924 graduate of Harvard Law School and member of the Workers Party of America from that same year, and his wife Vera Buch, an activist in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party from 1919 and member of the Communist Party of America from 1920.The pair had made names for themselves as leaders of the 1926 Passaic Textile Strike, a walkout of nearly 15,000 New Jersey workers in the wool and silk mills of the town of Passaic and its environs.