These leaders
have been blamed at once for their autocracy and for not mobilizing and
informing and directing these multitudes more clearly and firmly. Their
critics failed to conceive the remarkably various economic and political
histories of the enormous concourse of human beings engaged in the needle
trades of New York.
However that may be, when the workers and their families surged around
the _Vorwaerts_ office and asked the leaders if they had betrayed them,
Schlesinger, the business manager, and the old strike leaders addressed
them from the windows, and said to the people, with painful emotion:
"You are our masters. What you decide we will report back to the
association lawyers. What you decide shall be done."
Terrible was the position of these men. Well they knew that the winter
was approaching; that the closed shop could not win; that the workers
could not hear the truth about the preferential Union shop, and that the
man who stood avowedly for the preferential shop, now the best hope of
victory for the Union, would be called a traitor to the Union.
In great anxiety, the meetings assembled. The workers had all come to the
same conclusion. They all rejected the Marshall agreement.
Soon after this, the tide of loyalty to the closed shop was incited to
its high-water mark by the action of Judge Goff, who, as a result of a
suit of one of the firms of the Manufacturers' Association, issued an
injunction against peaceful picketing, on the part of the strikers, on
the ground that picketing for the closed shop was an action of conspiracy
in constraint of trade, and therefore unlawful.
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