Like fifteen million other veterans returning from military service after World War II, Brooklyn-born Tony Mazzocchi needed a job. He was a high school dropout, from a union family, who enlisted at age sixteen and then survived the Battle of the Bulge as a combat infantryman.

After his discharge, Mazzocchi worked in construction and in several manufacturing plants. He got hired at a Long Island cosmetics factory, with a local union in need of revitalization. By 1953, he had been elected its president and, over the next twelve years, turned this affiliate of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) into a catalyst for new organizing, progressive political action, and contract victories like winning one of the first union-negotiated dental plans in the country.

Mazzocchi later became one of the best-known labor radicals in the country, but he was not an outlier in the postwar era. In the 1950s and ’60s, tens of thousands of World War II veterans could be found on the front lines of labor battles in auto, steel, electrical equipment manufacturing, mining, trucking, and the telephone industry.