This formulation was referred to the strike committee. It was accepted by
the strike committee, and went into force on September 8.
The _Vorwaerts_ posted the news as a great Union victory. At the first
bulletin, the news ran like wildfire over the East Side. Multitudes
assembled; men, women, and children ran around Rutgers Square, in tumult
and rejoicing. The workers seized London, the unionists' lawyer, and
carried him around the square on their shoulders, and they even made him
stand on their shoulders and address the crowd from them. People sobbed
and wept and laughed and cheered; and Roman Catholic Italians and Russian
Jews, who had before sneered at each other as "dagoes" and "sheenies,"
seized each other in their arms and called each other brother.
Now that the men and women have returned to their shops, it remains for
all the people involved--the manufacturers, the workers, the retailers,
and the interested public--to make a dispassionate estimate of this new
arrangement. Is the preferential shop so delicate a fabric as to prove
futile? Has it sustaining power? Will the final agreement prove, at last,
to be a Union victory? Will both sides act in good faith--the
manufacturers always honestly preferring Union men, the Union leaders
always maintaining a democratic and an inclusive Union, without autocracy
or bureaucratic exclusion? Undoubtedly there will be failures on both
sides.
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