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Dreiers over in Brooklyn and say, “What about giving us some money to have a little union room where the girls can come after work; where we can give them some coffee and talk over the union problems; where we can get the union focused and organized.”

I think the Dreiers got into it that way. At any rate, they were fully in and both of them were deeply involved in what was called the Woman's Trade Union League before I ever saw it. The Woman's Trade Union League was formed because there were not enough women in any one union to be of any strength at all. So the Women's Trade Union League was an attempt to take every union and let all the women who were in that union belong to the Woman's Trade Union League, so that they would strengthen each other, help each other and stand by each other.

The Woman's Trade Union League was just barely getting started when some act of particular ferocious atrocity in one shirtwaist shop - something like the man refusing to pay wages, or holding back two weeks' wages - which infuriated the people, brought about a spontaneous strike. You read the writers and listen to the speeches of Congressmen in the early days of the New Deal and you would think that the thing that makes people strike is just an emotional outburst. They just get emotionally disturbed and they walk out. There is one school of thought