0 men and women in the New
York garment trade joined the Cloak and Suit Makers' Union.

These crowds poured into the three Union offices, filled the building
entries, the streets before them, reached sometimes around the
block--great processions of Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans,
Italians, Galicians, and Russians, the last two nationalities in the
greatest numbers, men and women who had been driven out of Europe by
military conscription, by persecution and pillage, literally by fire and
sword, bearded patriarchs, nicely dressed young girls with copies of
Sudermann and Gorky under their arms, shawled, wigged women with children
clinging to their skirts, handsome young Jews who might have stood as
models for clothiers' advertisements--cutters, pressers, operators,
finishers, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors; for these, too, struck
with all the rest. In watching these sewing men and sewing women
streaming through the Union office on Tenth Street--an office hastily
improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a
bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue
stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds--it seemed to an onlooker
that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised
elements so very catholic and various. Who could lead such a body? How
could the position of their great opponents, from day to day, be made
known to them? As a matter of fact, no one man can be said to have led
the 60,000 New York cloak makers. In the absence of such control, the
corps of more prominent Union officers and their attorney, Meyer London,
and through these men the multitudes of the Union members, were virtually
guided by an East Side Yiddish paper, the _Vorwaerts_.

In the meantime, while these multitudes were flocking into the Union
early in July, the Cloak Manufacturers' Association, representing
beforehand about seventy-five houses, had by the inclusion of many
smaller firms extended its membership to twelve hundred
establishments.[25]

Soon after the formation of the alliance, it became apparent to the
smaller firms that the larger ones were not in any haste for settlement.
The latter felt that they could beat their opponents by a waiting game;
while the smaller firms, with their lesser capital, scarcely more able
than their workers to exist through a prolonged beleaguering of the cloak
makers, felt that the present stand of the larger manufacturers invo