to have determined the industrial fortunes of
more than 40,000 New York workers for the following year opened on
Thursday morning, July 28, in a small room in the Metropolitan Life
Building. Mr. Brandeis was in the chair. On one side of a long table sat
the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a
member of the _Vorwaerts_ staff, and the Secretary of the International
Garment Workers' Union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual
faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and
principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives
of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly Americanized; and three older
men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with
the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can
give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to
"scabs," a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an
unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop--a subject
which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed in the conference. All
these men, with the exception of their attorney, Mr. London, had cut and
sewed on the benches of the garment trade. On the other side of the table
sat the ten representatives of the manufacturers, some of them men of
wide culture and learning, versed in philosophies, and prominent members
of the Ethical Society, some of them New York financiers who had come
from East Side sweat shops. Perhaps the most eager opponent of the
closed shop in their body was a cosmopolitan young manufacturer, a
linguist and "literary" man, interested in "style" from every point of
view, who had introduced into the New York trade from abroad a
considerable number of the cloak designs now widely worn throughout
America. This man felt the keenest personal pride in his output. He is
said at one time to have remarked, _"Le cloak c'est moi"_ And, bizarre as
it may seem to an outsider, a really sincere reason of his against
accepting workmen on the recommendation of the Union was that the cloak
manufacturer as an artist should adopt toward his workers "the attitude
of Hammerstein to his orchestra." One of the manufacturers had been a
strike leader in 1896. "Your bitterest opponent of fourteen years ago
sits on the same side of the table with you now," said one of the older
cloak makers, in a deep, intense voice, as the men took their places.

Mr. Brandeis opened