Dr. Henry Moskowitz, an effective non-partisan leader in achieving the settlement of the strike, was an eye-witness and student of all its crises, and the outline of its history below is mainly drawn from his chronicle and observation.

Between the cloak makers and the manufacturers of New York a contest waged in numerous strikes had continued for twenty-five years.  The agreements reached at the close of these strikes had been only temporary, because the cloak makers were never able to maintain a Union strong enough to hold the points won at the close of the struggle.  The cloak makers had always proved themselves heroic strikers, but feeble Unionists, lacking sustained power.  Again and again, men and women who had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend Union meetings, fail to pay Union dues; and the organization, strong in the time of defeat through the members’ zeal, would weaken through their negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success.

The main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the Cloak and Suit Manufacturers’ Protective Association.  The majority of the manufacturers in the association are men of standing in the trade, controlling large West Side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the New York output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses of New York.  These cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and fourteen hundred, most of them on the East Side and the lower West Side, manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing.  Such smaller houses had frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers.  Many small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests.

On this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers’ agreements.  On the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms which enabled them to undersell their competitors.  For this reason the manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers’ agreements.  With this mutual suspicion, the strike of 1910 began in June in two houses, an East Side and a West Side house.  From the first house the workers went out because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on account of lockout.

On the 3d of July, a mass meeting of 10,000 cloakmakers gathered in Madison Square Garden.  It was decided that the question of a general strike should be put to the vote of the 10,000 Union members.  Balloting continued at the three polls of the three Union offices for two succeeding days.  Of these 10,000, all but about 600 voted in favor of the strike, and of these 600 the majority afterward declared that they, too, were in sympathy with the action.