plying the sinews of war. In the New York lockout of 1918-1919, the Chicago members took the back pay granted them in Hart, Schaffner and Marx, to the amount of $60,000 and sent it to their fellows in New York who were not working. Again in the great New York fight of 19201921, when the cost of conducting strikes had mounted and the union was hard pressed in Baltimore and Boston as well, Chicago, in the midst of a period of widespread unemployment, raised $600,000 and sent the money to the aid of New York. Toward peaceful enterprises the Chicago Joint Board has been equally generous. Only recently, a short period after the New York assessment, it raised and contributed $62,000 to the relief of the Russian famine victims.

From Chicago, also, go the representatives of the national office to organize the clothing workers in the surrounding cities. Organization activities in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Paul, Milwaukee, are all carried on from Chicago as a center. Frank Rosenblum, a general organizer of the national office, an active member of the Chicago union since before the strike of 1910, skilled in the art of organization, directs from Chicago this work of organization in the outlying districts. To his aid he enlists such men and women as Isowitz, Kroll, Skala, Rissman, Krzycki, Johannsen, Grandinetti, Nettie Richardson, seasoned organizers, trained in the Chicago struggles, to carry the spirit and achievements of Chicago to men and women who are still battling for emancipation.

In common with the policy of the national organization, the Chicago Joint Board has from the first established friendly connections with the rest of the American labor movement. Although an independent union, in that it is not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, it has not hesitated to do all in its power to cement its relations with other labor organizations. In the city of Chicago and in the State of Illinois it has both received and given support from 1910 on. Between such men as Fitzpatrick and Nockels and the Chicago union there has always existed

mutual sympathy and cooperation. The story of the great Chicago clothing strikes cannot be written without tribute to the services of these men in the cause of the strikers. As the Chicago Joint Board itself grew in power and resources it was able to lend aid to those who needed it. To the steel strikers of 1919 it gave $72,000. But its real contribution to the general labor movement lies deeper. The Chicago Joint Board for ten years has been a vast, experimental laboratory in American trade unionism. In it experiments in internal government and in industrial relations have been prosecuted and have yielded illuminating results. Νο greater service can be asked of a pioneer organization than that it has blazed a trail upon which others may follow.

This history of the organization of Chicago clothing workers leaves it not at the end but at the beginning of its career. Much has been accomplished in the short space of ten years. But always the clothing workers look for new fields to conquer and for new burdens to assume. Plans for the construction of a new home on the site shown as the frontispiece to this volume and of a building on the northwest side are now under way. Their completion makes possible new undertakings which the inadequacy of the present offices of the union has forced to be postponed. Within only the past few months the preliminary steps were taken for the organization of a cooperative bank financed and organized by the members of the union. The present crisis of unemployment has led to the establishment of a loan fund for the support of the indigent unemployed. The educational activities of the union are expanding. New problems of the industry will arise and old ones will assume a new and unfamiliar form. May the future of this organization retain the vigor and insight that have characterized its past.