The manufacturers were willing to make this agreement.  But the representatives of the Union received it with a natural suspicion bred by years of oppression.  “Can the man who has ground us down year after year suddenly be held by a sentiment for the organization he has fought for a quarter of a century?” they asked.  “Between Union and non-union men, will he candidly give the preference to Union men of equal ability?  Will he not rather, since the question of ability is a matter of personal judgment and is left to his judgment, prefer the non-union man, and justify his preference by a pretence, in each case, that he considers the skill of the non-union man superior?”

Nevertheless, a majority of the leaders of the cloak makers were willing to try the plan....  A minority refused.  This minority was influenced partly by its certain knowledge that the 40,000 cloak makers would never accept an agreement based on the idea of the preferential Union shop, and partly by its complete distrust of the good will of the manufacturers.  The minority was trusted and powerful.  It won.  The conference broke.

The Vorwaerts printed a statement that the preferential shop was the “open shop with honey.”  The news of the Brandeis conference reached the cloak makers through the bulletins of this paper; and during its progress and after its close, frantic crowds stood before the office on the lower East Side, waiting for these bulletins, eager for the victory of the closed shop, the panacea for all industrial evils.

After the decision of the leaders, after the breaking of the conference, the cloak makers who had settled gave fifteen per cent of their wages to support those standing out for the closed shop, and volunteered to give fifty per cent.  The Vorwaerts headed a subscription list with $2000 for the strikers, and collected $50,000.  A furore for the closed shop arose.  Young boys and bearded old men and young women came to the office and offered half their wages, three-quarters of their wages.  One boy offered to give all his wages and sell papers for his living.  Every day the office was besieged by committees, appointed by the men and women in the settled shops, asking to contribute to the cause more than the percentage determined by the Union.  These were men and women accustomed to enduring hardships for a principle, men and women who had fought in Russia, who were revolutionists, willing to make sacrifices, eager to make sacrifices.  Their blind faith was the backbone of the strike.

This furore was continuing when, in the third week in August, the loss of contracts by the manufacturers and the general stagnation of business due to the idleness of 40,000 men and women, normally wage-earners, induced a number of bankers and merchants of the East Side to bring pressure for a settlement of the strike.  Louis Marshall, an attorney well known in New York in Jewish charities, assembled the lawyers of both sides.  They drew up an agreement in which the preferential union shop again appeared as the basis of future operations, formulated as in the Brandeis conference.