He bent every effort to that end
Two or three of the other smaller unions supported McIver’s employees with sympathetic strikes. But the success or failure of Jake Vodell’s campaign quickly turned on the action of the powerful Mill workers’ union. The commander-in-chief of the striking forces must win John Ward’s employees to his cause or suffer defeat. He bent every effort to that end.
Sam Whaley and a few like him walked out. But that was expected by everybody, for Sam Whaley had identified himself from the day of Vodell’s arrival in Millsburgh as the agitator’s devoted follower and right-hand man. But this unstable, whining weakling and his fellows from the Flats carried little influence with the majority of the sturdy, clearer-visioned workmen.
At a meeting of the Millsburgh Manufacturing Association, McIver endeavored to pledge the organization to a concerted effort against the various unions of their workmen.
John Ward refused to enter into any such alliance against the workmen, and branded McIver’s plan as being in spirit and purpose identical with the schemes of Jake Vodell. John argued that while the heads of the various related mills and factories possessed the legal right to maintain their organization for the purpose of furthering such business interests as were common to them all, they could not, as loyal citizens, attempt to deprive their fellow workmen citizens of that same right. Any such effort to array class against class, he declared, was nothing less than sheer imperialism, and antagonistic to every principle of American citizenship.
When McIver characterized Vodell as an anarchist and stated that the unions were back of him and his schemes against the government, John retorted warmly that the statement was false and an insult to many of the most loyal citizens in Millsburgh. There were individual members of the unions who were followers of Jake Vodell, certainly. But comparatively few of the union men who were led by the agitator to strike realized the larger plans of their leader, while the unions as a whole no more endorsed anarchy than did the Manufacturing Association.
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