The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America have won great power in the men’s clothing industry, through aggressive but constructive leadership.  The nucleus of the union seceded from the United Garment Workers, an A.F. of L. organization, in 1914.  The socialistic element within the organization was and still is numerically dominating.  But in the practical process of collective bargaining, this union’s revolutionary principles have served more as a bond to hold the membership together than as a severe guide in its relations with the employers.[80] As a result, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers attained trade agreements in all the large men’s clothing centers.  The American Federation of Labor, however, in spite of this union’s success, has persistently refused to admit it to affiliation, on account of its original secessionist origin from a chartered international union.

The unions of the clothing workers have demonstrated how immigrants (the majority in the industry are Russian and Polish Jews and Italians) may be successfully organized on the basis of a broad minded industrialism.  On the issue of industrialism in the American Federation of Labor the last word has not yet been said.  It appears, though, that the matter is being solved slowly but surely by a silent “counter-reformation” by the old leaders.  For industrialism, or the adjustment of union structure to meet the employer with ranks closed on the front of an entire industry, is not altogether new even in the most conservative portion of the Federation, although it has never been called by that name.

Long before industrialism entered the national arena as the economic creed of socialists, the unions of the skilled had begun to evolve an industrialism of their own.  This species may properly be termed craft industrialism, as it sought merely to unite on an efficient basis the fighting strength of the unions of the skilled trades by devising a method for speedy solution of jurisdictional disputes between overlapping unions and by reducing the sympathetic strike to a science.  The movement first manifested itself in the early eighties in the form of local building trades’ councils, which especially devoted themselves to sympathetic strikes.  This local industrialism grew, after a fashion, to national dimensions in the form of the International Building Trades’ Council organized in St. Louis in 1897.  The latter proved, however, ineffective, since, having for its basic unit the local building trades’ council, it inevitably came into conflict with the national unions in the building trades.  For the same reason it was barred from recognition of the American Federation of Labor.  The date of the real birth of craft industrialism on a national scale, was therefore deferred to 1903, when a Structural Building Trades’ Alliance was founded.  The formation of the Alliance marks an event of supreme importance, not only because it united for the first time for common action all