Background on Carroll H. Bush
A silk textile worker and union activist, Carroll Herman Bush was born in Northampton, Mass., on Mar. 5, 1901, the son of a native of Vermont, Charles W. Bush, and Marie (Lemieux), a French Canadian immigrant. At eighteen, still living in his parents' home at 4 Hampton St., Bush was recorded as working as a knitter at a silk hosiery company, probably at the nearby Belding Silk Co., however during the five years following, he was listed in the Northampton city directories as an auto mechanic.
After what appears to have been a short stint working in Chicago in 1926 and 1927, Bush returned to Northampton, married a woman named Florence (1928), and settled at 19 Edwards Square of King Street, between the Armory and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish. The couple had two sons, Carroll, Jr. (b. ca.1929), and Charles (born ca.1934), and for a while, at least, took care of Bush's mother.
A political radical, Bush was Secretary of the Northampton Socialist local during the Depression years and was suspected of distributing Communist literature. A strong member of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, an AFL affiliate, he was evidently part of the faction that bristled at the conservatism of the AFL and likely supported the split with the UTWA in 1936 and formation of the CIO affiliate, the Textile Workers Organizing Committee.
Although Bush's post-Depression career is less well known, he moved to New Jersey in about 1939, and he was listed in the federal census for 1940s as a textile worker at a hosiery factory in Linden, N.J. Bush is recorded as dying in Citrus, Fla., on Mar. 17, 1985.
