The Vorwaerts printed the result of the Marshall conference with deep concern.  It maintained a neutral attitude.  The editorials urged that the readers consider the whole document soberly, discuss it freely in local meetings, and vote for themselves, on their own full understanding, after mature conviction on each point.

Tremendous crowds surged around the Vorwaerts office.  They almost mobbed the East Side leaders, with their voluble questioning about the preferential Union shop.  Thousands of men and women and children called out pleas and reproaches and recriminations in an avid personal demonstration possible only to their race.  “Oh, you wouldn’t sell us out?” they cried desperately.  “You wouldn’t sell us out?  You are our hope.”

Imagine what these days of doubt, of an attempt to understand, meant to these multitudes, knowing no industrial faith but that of the closed shop which had failed them absolutely, wanderers from a strange country, turning wildly to their leaders, who could only tell them that they must determine their own fates, they must decide for themselves.  These leaders have been blamed at once for their autocracy and for not mobilizing and informing and directing these multitudes more clearly and firmly.  Their critics failed to conceive the remarkably various economic and political histories of the enormous concourse of human beings engaged in the needle trades of New York.

However that may be, when the workers and their families surged around the Vorwaerts office and asked the leaders if they had betrayed them, Schlesinger, the business manager, and the old strike leaders addressed them from the windows, and said to the people, with painful emotion:  “You are our masters.  What you decide we will report back to the association lawyers.  What you decide shall be done.”

Terrible was the position of these men.  Well they knew that the winter was approaching; that the closed shop could not win; that the workers could not hear the truth about the preferential Union shop, and that the man who stood avowedly for the preferential shop, now the best hope of victory for the Union, would be called a traitor to the Union.

In great anxiety, the meetings assembled.  The workers had all come to the same conclusion.  They all rejected the Marshall agreement.

Soon after this, the tide of loyalty to the closed shop was incited to its high-water mark by the action of Judge Goff, who, as a result of a suit of one of the firms of the Manufacturers’ Association, issued an injunction against peaceful picketing, on the part of the strikers, on the ground that picketing for the closed shop was an action of conspiracy in constraint of trade, and therefore unlawful.