At the request of President Wilson, Gompers had urged the strike committee to postpone the strike until after the meeting of the national industrial conference called by the President in October, but the committee claimed that it could not have kept the men back after a summer of agitation and feverish organization had they even tried.  The President’s conference, modelled upon a similar conference which met earlier in Great Britain, was composed of three groups of representatives equal in number, one for capital, one for labor, and one for the general public.  Decisions, to be held effective, had to be adopted by a majority in each group.  The labor representation, dominated of course by Gompers, was eager to make the discussion turn on the steel strike.  It proposed a resolution to this effect which had the support of the public group, but fearing a certain rejection by the employer group the matter was postponed.  The issue upon which the alignment was effected was industrial control and collective bargaining.  All three groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group, advocated collective bargaining,—­but with a difference.  The labor group insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the national trade union.  In the absence of a powerful protector in the national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel themselves on a bargaining equality with their employer, nor can they be represented by a spokesman of the necessary ability if their choice be restricted to those working in the same plant.  The employers, now no longer dominated by the War-time spirit which caused them in 1917 to tolerate an expansion of unionism, insisted that no employer must be obliged to meet for the purpose of collective bargaining with other than his own employes.[89] After two weeks of uncertainty, when it had become clear that a resolution supported by both labor and public groups, which restated the labor position in a milder form, would be certain to be voted down by the employer group, the labor group withdrew from the conference, and the conference broke up.  The period of the cooperation of classes had definitely closed.

Meantime the steel strike continued.  Federal troops patrolled the steel districts and there was no violence.  Nevertheless, a large part of the country’s press pictured the strike by the steel workers for union recognition and a normal workday as an American counterpart of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia.  Public opinion, unbalanced and excited as it was over the whirlpool of world events, was in no position to resist.  The strike failed.