The wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the 10,000 workers assembled at Madison Square Garden was evinced by the fact that within the next week an army of over 40,000 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 involved, not only beating the Unionists, but driving themselves, the weaker manufacturers, out of the industry.

One by one, they left the association, sought the Union headquarters, and settled with the cloak makers.  The profit reaped by these firms starting to work induced others to meet the workers’ demands.  By the end of July and the first week in August, six hundred smaller firms, employing altogether 20,000 cloakmakers, had settled.[26] In many instances the men and women marched back to their work with bands of music playing and with flying flags and banners.