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Chapter 1

Fighting “Union Dictation”: Birth of the Open-Shop Movement

In no case with which I am familiar has the demand for a union shop been accompanied by a proposition for benefit to the employer, except perhaps that he may, by conceding to the demand, hope to avoid the persecution of the local union to which his men belong.

—William H. Pfahler, “Free Shops for Free Men,” 1903

To properly understand the open-shop movement’s birth, one must explore the lives of the colorful individuals who built the organizations that drove it, shaped labor-management relations, and impacted community and national affairs. These employer-activists presented themselves publicly as concerned not only with their own economic challenges, but also with the interests of the country, their communities, and their workers. They organized open-shop groups because they believed that unionists were selfish, often lawless figures responsible for creating a host of problems for independent workers, business owners, and the economy generally. In the public sphere, practically all open-shop proponents claimed they wanted to establish and oversee profitable workplaces built around principles of fairness and meritocracy. One can generalize further: they tended to be ambitious, community-oriented, socially conscious, and uncompromising in their belief that, as employers, they must have final say over matters of management. Yet they seldom presented themselves as, say, purely self-interested figures disconnected from the masses of wage earners or from the public generally. Overall, they believed that confronting labor union excesses, lawlessness, and monopolies was a community rather than an individual undertaking. Some held the opinion that their collective efforts represented the very best traditions of American patriotism. As proud defenders of open shops, they saw themselves as fair-minded Americans determined to find solutions to community, national, and industry problems.

This chapter explores the contexts in which these forward-thinking individuals emerged. It examines the local, national, and trade-based origins of the open-shop movement, noting its multiple roots, which can be traced to the ideas and actions of employers from numerous regions. It also illustrates the widespread popularity and effectiveness of the movement across industries. The movement grew relatively quickly, and most employers across a range of industries agreed with its central message. The clearest sociological pattern that emerges from an examination of turn-of-thecentury organized employers is that they tended to share a belief in the importance of defending private property and management rights while insisting that workers must enjoy the freedom to refuse membership in labor unions. They believed that, by working together, they could achieve these goals and help reform American society generally.

“A force for good”: Employers in the Foundry and Metal-Working Industries

The final years of the nineteenth century are an appropriate starting point to understand both employers’ collective frustration with, and nationwide attempts to solve, labor unrest. Historians have written extensively about the massive, often destructive, and frequently violent strikes that unsettled the nation in the decades after the Civil War. There is no reason to revisit the causes, characteristics, and results of these titanic battles, but it is worth pointing out that, taken together, these protests forced observers to confront what many Gilded Agers called “the labor question.”¹ For mostly self-interested reasons, employers often took the lead in addressing what was undoubtedly one of the central concerns of the period.

Consider first the case of the American Foundrymen’s Association (AFA), a trade organization comprising foundry owners and managers principally concerned with matters related to research, innovation, production, and profits. Formed in 1896, the AFA was not chiefly interested in labor-management matters, but much of its membership, in the face of an emboldened labor movement, was forced to come to terms with, in the words of a Foundry magazine writer in 1897, “the inconveniences inseparable from labor troubles.”² As union protests spread, foundry owners discovered that there was a genuine need for the establishment of a professional, rigorous, and well-focused organization because the AFA had, according to an Iron Trade Review article in 1898, “limited itself to the discussion of technical questions and the betterment of practice in the shop.”³ In practice, labor troubles meant serious production-and distribution-related difficulties, which in turn harmfully impacted customers and reduced earnings. Solution-minded AFA members responded to such troubles by beginning the process of building what they called a “defense association” in 1896.⁴ They had models to emulate. Stove builders, for instance, had previously illustrated how to establish labor peace with iron molders as a result of creating the Stove Founders National Defense Association (SFNDA), which emerged in 1886 in the face of a nationwide strike wave. That organization, the first national employers’ association, enjoyed years of give-and-take negotiations with leaders from the Iron Molders Union (IMU), which resulted in long-lasting peace and stability.⁵

In late 1896, three AFA members, Pittsburgh’s William Yagle, E. H. Putnam of Chattanooga, and Philadelphia’s William H. Pfahler, began the formal process of building a new, more inclusive organization, one that promised to effectively respond to the nagging labor problem. All three came from highly industrialized communities that experienced periodic outbursts of labor troubles, which in practice generally meant momentary periods of social unrest, loss of income, and a breakdown of goodwill between workers and their bosses. Each of the men saw themselves as capable and resilient leaders, determined to find solutions to these managerial and financial challenges, set an example through their leadership, and ultimately inspire others to follow their examples. They met privately, discussed labor-management matters at length, prepared a report, and submitted it to the AFA’s general delegation. According to an 1897 article in Railway Age and Northwestern Railroader, AFA delegates responded favorably to the organizers’ efforts, unanimously holding the view that the creation of an effective defense association “would be of greater importance to the foundry business and possess greater possibilities for good than anything else that could be suggested at this time.”⁶

As the three conducted their tasks, AFA affiliates, including the Philadelphia Foundrymen’s Association, continued to discuss labor matters. One member spelled out the problem explicitly in early 1898: “When we realize that 90 per cent of all that enters into the cost of our products is labor, we must take it seriously into consideration. If we can convince labor that lower prices must prevail, then we are all right for the future.”⁷ From their collective viewpoint, the central problem was that labor unions naturally functioned, in part, to raise wages for their members, which, very simply, tied the employer’s hand and ultimately hurt his bottom line. Simply put, they felt a sense of urgency to do something meaningful to reduce labor costs and increase profits.

Their conclusions, detailed in trade publications, suggest their preparedness to approach the labor question diplomatically in ways that mirrored the SFNDA’s strategy.⁸ They believed there was little reason to antagonize their employees because many, though hardly all, held membership in the IMU, a politically moderate union with a long history of representing craftsmen. Labor-management relations were hardly perfect, but foundry operators and union leaders tended to believe in compromise, recognizing the benefits, fairness, and long-term stability of cooperation. The three men wanted, at first, to perfect a system of negotiations in order to ensure mutual rewards and thus reduce workplace strife. At the AFA annual meeting in May 1897 in Detroit, they spoke boldly about “the necessity of meeting organization with organization” and “adding strength and dignity to any arrangements that might be amicably concluded between all parties.” Above all, the committee sought to persuade the delegation to support the creation of an organization that would, in essence, help reduce the number of strikes and ultimately give manufacturers greater peace of mind. Collective action made good sense, they realized, because strikes often caused “a host of indirect disasters” that created “false conditions, utterly unwarranted by the general state of trade or by any principle of abstract justice.” In other words, labor unionists engaged in activities that threatened the fundamental laws of economics and thus challenged the expertise of diligent managers. To avoid these unfavorable consequences, the committee proposed finding ways to build trust with union leaders, full-time figures who negotiated with employers, helped enforce contracts, and in the process often established friendships with management. This solution was commonsensical: one could reduce workplace conflict by taking “a few hours or a few days for calm deliberation.”⁹ The general body agreed, and the National Founders’ Association (NFA), as a writer for The Iron Trade Review explained in 1898, had become “a fruit of the American Foundrymen’s Association’s efforts.”¹⁰

It is worth looking more closely at the men behind the NFA’s creation. As established business owners and community leaders, they had earned admiration from the AFA general membership. Pfahler served as an officer and treasurer of the Abram Cox Stove Company, a vast, five-story manufacturing establishment in Philadelphia’s densely populated and heavily industrialized north end. The company’s 400 employees built stoves and furnaces that were sold, according to an 1890 issue of Manufacturer and Builder, throughout “the entire country from Maine to California.”¹¹ Yagle stood on the other side of Pennsylvania, where he led the Yagle Foundry and Machine Company, near the Allegheny River that received industry-wide admiration for its “original Black crusher.”¹² In the somewhat sparsely industrialized South, Putnam held a high-level management position at the Chattanooga Plow Company, one of East Tennessee’s most productive, profitable, and sizable manufacturing establishments. A structurally imposing worksite spread over six acres, the Chattanooga Plow Company supplied cane mills, chilled plows, evaporators, and hay presses to markets throughout the globe. According to a 1913 book on Tennessee industries, this company, which began operations in 1878, was “the largest industry of its kind in the south, and may be considered one of the corner-stones of Chattanooga’s industrial prosperity.” The same source bragged that “the sun never sets upon Chattanooga plows.”¹³

It appears that Pfahler, Yagle, and Putnam had their eyes on more than their own immediate economic successes. They each displayed a sincere desire to assist the industry, their colleagues, and their communities. Accounts of their lives suggest that they were not exclusively inspired by the supposed joys of materialistic individualism or the emotional pleasures of ego building. Yet they certainly were ambitious. In addition to holding an AFA leadership position, Yagle had served on the Pittsburgh Board of Education and was highly active in the Pittsburgh Foundrymen’s Association.¹⁴ Seeking to share his deep knowledge of the industry, Putnam wrote for the Tradesman, a Chattanooga-based trade publication that promoted economic development throughout the South. Founded by future New York Times owner Adolph Ochs in 1879, the Tradesman contained statistics and detailed information about innovations and industrial output as well as details regarding the establishment of new factories and the accomplishments of older industrial plants within the borders of the numerous jewels of the “new South”: Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Louisville, New Orleans, and, above all, Chattanooga. According to an 1897 article in the Chattanooga Daily Times, also owned by Ochs, the Tradesman offered “the most complete, exhaustive, and valuable review of the South.”¹⁵ And finally, Pfahler was a visible social reformer in his community. This public-spirited individual played a leadership role in Philadelphia’s Committee of Seventy, a municipal reform organization that, in its own words, sought to “keep watch and ward over the public interest.”¹⁶

The NFA did not emerge to “fight” labor. Instead, its members initially promised to negotiate honorably and dispassionately with union heads while offering fair working conditions to employees irrespective of union status. They sought to establish an atmosphere of shared trust and cooperation at their worksites, and they occasionally distanced themselves from the nation’s most excessively exploitative employers. Putnam, for instance, strongly criticized those who presumably felt no shame in employing young females in heavy industry. Writing in 1899, he lashed out at “The man who can be satisfied with industrial conditions that drive girls into the foundry in the struggle for existence.” In the Tradesman’s pages, Putnam complained that such a manager “certainly ought not to be satisfied with his own moral condition; and if he is satisfied therewith, society ought to be so dissatisfied with him as to make it known in no uncertain terms.” Putnam, echoing the moral outrage expressed by growing numbers of gender-conscious reformers, realized that a minority of these immoral employers “would work their own grandmothers in the foundry if they could make a little profit by it. This is the most mischievous class of people in industrial society. They are much harder to manage and far more injurious in their influence upon trade than the trades-union can be when under unwise direction.”¹⁷

Fellow employers, Putnam held, had an obligation to use sound judgment, which in part meant barring women, children, and the elderly from laboring in grimy and often hazardous foundries. By mentioning the malevolent deeds of these “unjust” employers—the unnamed members of the “mischievous class”—Putnam illustrated that he was not merely interested in leading an organization designed to minimize labor unrest; he also sent a clear message that he was wholly unafraid to sharply criticize examples of what he called “scavenger business” practices.¹⁸ The new employers’ association, led by righteous critics of both labor radicalism and employer abuses, professed that it had no tolerance for the “mischievous class.”

The most pressing dilemma facing these agents of industrial change was effectively making and sustaining lasting peace with a mostly grown-up workforce of men. NFA leaders believed that offering benefits and creating a respectful rapport with wage earners made for sound policy in a context in which fewer employees enjoyed upward mobility of the sort that was apparently commonplace for hardworking men in the nineteenth century’s first half. Consider the words of Pfahler, a Civil War veteran who served as first NFA president—his 1908 obituary credited him for “first propagating the theory of defense associations of manufacturers.”¹⁹ By 1898, when the NFA officially started, Pfahler had come to realize the sharp decline in the number of top managerial positions in the country—and this process seemed irreversible. No longer could every focused, diligent man climb his way to the top. “With that incentive taken away,” Pfahler argued, “it was important that conciliation should prevail.”²⁰ Such structural changes, including the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few—a process accelerated by the turn of the century’s great merger movement—meant that employers needed to play their part in modifying, even lowering, the workforce’s expectations. The fifty-six-year-old Pfahler, whose devotion to the Republican Party had been put to the ultimate test on the battlefields in the 1860s, no longer unconditionally believed that the party’s early free labor ideology—a doctrine professing that hard work in a free, non-slaveholding society would eventually translate into financial success and independence, including business ownership—reflected the reality of late nineteenth-century America. Yet workers’ lower prospects, he reasoned, must not translate into frustration, misery, cynicism, or, worst of all, raw outbreaks of workplace conflict. Pfahler, who would soon serve as a leader of the National Civic Federation (NCF)—an organization comprising leaders from business, labor, and the general public that promoted union-management cooperation—did not break with free labor ideology completely; he continued to believe that ambition, efficiency, and skill mattered. But “reward” signified something markedly different at the end of the century from what it meant in the era of the Civil War. Simply put, Pfahler had come to accept the limits of upward class mobility.²¹ The Iron Trade Review recommended that workers take Pfalher’s assessment seriously: “Let us hear more of the desirability of being successful as an employe.”²²

Pfahler, like Putnam, sympathized with the predicaments of shop floor employees and rejected the harshest features of Social Darwinism, the cutthroat theory shared by numerous corporate moguls and their elite friends on both sides of the Atlantic. This cold-hearted concept, which applied the eminent biologist Charles Darwin’s famous views to the free market, stressed that only the fittest economic actors, a tiny minority, could achieve extraordinary financial success—and such success came at the expense of ordinary people. The theory, in essence, helped legitimize an industrial society shaped by stark class divisions. Social Darwinists, including both business leaders and a handful of elite academics, sought to justify their own wealth and power, believing they essentially owed nothing to the laboring masses.²³ Pfahler, unlike insensitive Social Darwinists, believed employers needed to show goodwill by reaching out to employees, patiently listening to them, and, when possible, helping resolve their grievances. In essence, he wanted fellow NFA members, some of whom stood near, but not at, the apex of industrial society, to ensure they were basically fair to their employees.²⁴ Rather than view wage laborers as, in the words of historian Sven Beckert, “‘the dangerous classes’ who threatened the rights of property holders,” Pfahler’s public statements suggest he perceived employees, both unionists and nonunionists, as potential partners—albeit junior ones—in a future shaped by cross-class harmony and prosperity.²⁵ One of his colleagues even claimed in 1903 that this Philadelphian was “one of the most earnest friends of organized labor.”²⁶

But creating an atmosphere in which employees thrived and experienced feelings of fulfillment was not enough. Pfahler and his comrades realized the importance of building and maintaining trust with the IMU leadership, relatively privileged individuals who tended to conduct their tasks from comfortable offices, not grubby shop floors. These individuals, Pfahler realized, were critical, even necessary, to ensuring industrial peace. And meetings between the NFA and the IMU culminated in the 1899 New York Agreement, a labor-management settlement promising to usher in years of industrywide harmony similar to the arrangements reached by the SFNDA. In other words, Pfahler, in consultation with his colleagues, realized that routine, courteous conferences with labor representatives served a productive purpose. Pfahler, writing in 1903, understood that the NFA must use its connections with the union leadership wisely to prevent rebellious rank-and-filers from violating labor-management agreements and disrupting the production process:

It is true that at first the members of local unions, led by some wild agitator, would make a demand upon their employer, and, failing to enforce the demand, would quit work; but the national officers of the union would require them to return to work at once and await the usual and proper means of adjustment.²⁷

Union leaders, Pfahler acknowledged, were often largely responsible, fair-minded figures who exercised a certain amount of control over the potentially “wild” rank and file. The labor leadership, by ensuring contract enforcement, were colleagues, rather than adversaries.

This leadership also saw the benefits of industrial peace. Writing about the NFA’s development, the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine explained in 1901, “This splendid situation is indeed a rift in the clouds that have lowered over the industrial world throughout a generation in most lines of business.”²⁸ And an IMU spokesperson, writing in early 1898, affectionately welcomed the new employers’ association partially because of Pfahler’s involvement:

we have looked with favor upon the efforts of Mr. Wm. H. Pfahler and his colleagues of the American Foundrymen’s Association to organize a protective organization among the foundrymen, which, working in harmony with the Iron Molders’ Union, would endeavor to fix yearly, or otherwise, the wage rate and thus avoid the possibility of a strike and its attendant inconvenience to both parties.²⁹

While the NFA leadership recognized the value of meeting and negotiating with union leaders, Pfahler and his colleagues also held firm to the belief that the employers must have the option of hiring and firing men irrespective of union status. In practice, foundry operators employed mostly unionists because local IMU chapters often represented the majority of the skilled employees in the industry. Yet NFA members were perfectly willing to hire nonunionists, including strikebreakers, during industrial disputes.³⁰

At the same time, most had peace on their minds. And several AFA activists, understanding the need for workplace stability and the necessity of collaborating with politically moderate labor leaders, followed Pfahler’s lead by helping to build the new defense association. In a short period, the NFA had become a formidable team, consisting of, in the 1916 words of its early chronicler, Margaret Loomis Stecker, “some of the best-known manufacturers of heavy machinery and other casting iron specialties.”³¹ The organization included, for example, executives from General Electric and the American Locomotive Company, two large, highly prosperous, multilocation workplaces. Employers attached to more modest-sized, standalone establishments also paid their membership dues and volunteered their time to the cause. Numerous figures joined the association apparently because, as The Iron Trade Review explained in 1898, they took a liking to Pfahler’s “affable and charming manner” and because they shared his faith “that bringing together all the brains that have developed the manufacturing interests of this country, must be a force for good.”³²

The recruitment process was fairly straightforward, involving face-toface contacts between men from roughly the same class. In meetings with foundry owners, many of whom were clubby, AFA-affiliated individuals, recruiters provided membership cards and requested assistance as they built this “force for good.” Some organizers were paid; others donated their time. In 1898, Pfahler hired John A. Penton, the AFA secretary and the former president of the Detroit-based International Brotherhood of Machinery Molders Union, a rival to the IMU before the two unions merged in 1893, to organize full time.³³ By most accounts, the Paris, Ontario-born Penton was a sensible pick. The New York Times explained in 1902 that he was once “a practical molder and consequently understands every question of the foundry as one without a knowledge of the work could not.”³⁴ His union-organizing experience gave him a degree of credibility possessed by few others, and he used his connections wisely, recruiting dozens from the AFA. One NFA member named Penton “the early propagandist” in 1903.³⁵ Yet his former IMU adversaries, recalling previous conflicts, called him “something of a hustler” in 1897.³⁶

Penton certainly hustled, enlisted many, and received help in the process. He explained in 1899 that “if your secretary has achieved any measure of success in the work of obtaining new members, it has been in the main owing to the very substantial assistance he has received from time to time from our other members and officers.”³⁷ Volunteers from Buffalo, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Pittsburgh, and Pfahler’s home town of Philadelphia also played a key part in this process, conducting what some referred to as “missionary work.”³⁸ Audiences in these and other locations heard Penton, Pfahler and their colleagues deliver impassioned speeches about the necessity of joining together in order to protect themselves and their workmen from demanding unionists and the notorious walking delegates, the labor leaders responsible for calling strikes and therefore creating unnecessary turbulence and economic hardships.³⁹ P. W. Gates, NFA president after Pfahler’s brief term and head of the Chicago-based Gates Iron Works, a successful manufacturer of mining machinery, performed “yeoman service in strengthening the association and making it a force in the foundry world.”⁴⁰ Pittsburgh’s Isaac W. Frank, owner of the large United Engineering and Foundry Company, which employed about 2,000 men, helped by meeting with his contacts in foundries and social clubs throughout Western Pennsylvania. In addition to his business activities, Frank, a prominent individual in the city’s Jewish community, earned a reputation as a generous philanthropist.⁴¹ Ogden P. Letchworth, director of the giant Pratt and Letchworth Company, a malleable iron and steel castings manufacturing establishment in Buffalo, convinced dozens to join in his community. In Buffalo, Letchworth enjoyed a reputation as a socialite and as a benevolent welfare capitalist.⁴² As a result of the organizing carried out by Pfahler, Yagle, Putnam, Penton, Gates, Frank, Letchworth, and others, the NFA “added to its membership many of the most extensive foundries in the country.”⁴³ Their traveling, networking, agitation, promises of greener pastures, and occasional good humor paid off handsomely: the NFA tripled in size from 1899 to 1900. The NFA gave voice and support to the nation’s leading manufacturers and community leaders. These “men of affairs” were fully “determined,” as The Iron Trade Review insisted in 1900, “to oppose injustice by employers and employes.”⁴⁴ Together, NFA members promoted themselves as honest brokers, promising to challenge both working-class troublemakers and management’s most abusive exploiters.

Some activities were unavoidably messy. Strikebreaking coordination, usually orchestrated by Penton, was considerably more challenging than recruitment. The organization’s leadership recognized that breakdowns in negotiations often resulted in temporary work stoppages, which led to financial inconveniences and social disorder, forcing managers to scramble. Yet strikes did not mean that production must cease altogether. Penton had requested that the membership help out during these emergencies, explaining at the NFA’s second annual conference in 1899, “When men are wanted to take the place of strikers, much assistance can be rendered if each member will take it upon himself to offer the secretary the services of any volunteers whom they may secure in their own establishments, or of those applying for work who are willing to go to such positions.”⁴⁵ Penton wanted his colleagues to remain vigilant by carefully monitoring the job market structure, recognizing that labor surpluses in one region could very possibly help beleaguered employers facing strike-related shortages in other sections. Managers could aid considerably, Penton maintained, by establishing relationships with loyal workmen willing to travel distances to break strikes. By pointing out how to resume production during industrial emergencies, the former union chief helped foundry owners understand the value of collective problem solving.

Recognizing the labor problem’s widespread adverse impacts on a variety of workplaces, NFA members sought to build defense networks beyond the foundry industry. Pfahler remained especially critical. In fact, he was principally responsible for laying the groundwork for the establishment of the National Metal Trades Association (NMTA), which included employers active in all types of metal-working activities and emerged in late August 1899 in response to a New York City pattern-makers strike. At the NMTA’s 1905 conference, the Philadelphian reminisced about the context surrounding the association’s creation. But instead of presenting a clear, detailed explanation of the specific conversations, disagreements, and strategies adopted by the men present at these initial meetings held in English-style gentlemen’s clubs, Pfahler noted that they came together because they developed “a feeling” about the usefulness of working “collectively.”⁴⁶ Pfahler’s rather vague, yet upbeat, comments should not be surprising. The era’s reporters noted that NMTA members, a group of sentimental joiners, ambitious industrialists, and forward-looking reformers, concealed most of the details of their activities from the general public, “pledging themselves to secrecy.”⁴⁷

The two organizations shared much in common. While the NFA and the NMTA believed that they must enjoy the right to hire whomever they wanted irrespective of union status, members initially chose to bargain with organized labor’s representatives. They acknowledged that they could both negotiate with “responsible” union leaders and insist on the right to employ nonunionists. For years, the two groups, seeking to resolve grievances in mutually satisfactory and peaceful ways, met regularly with union leaders to discuss issues relating to workloads, hours, wages, and recognition. But an undercurrent of dissatisfaction recurrently afflicted each side during bargaining sessions. Union heads often made demands that irritated employers’ association leaders, and rank-and-file workers regularly staged strikes, failing to uphold their contractual obligations. In light of these tensions, both the NMTA and the NFA, unlike the SFNDA—which continued to bargain with unionists—ultimately decided to reject negotiations altogether following intense strikes in 1901 and 1904 respectively.

It is worth considering the two agreements before more fully exploring the individuals behind these organizations. The Murray Hill Agreement, signed by the NMTA and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) in May 1900, called for a nine-hour day to take effect the following year. Questions of wages were to be determined individually between workers and employers in their respective workplaces. Yet shortly before the agreement was to go into effect, the IAM’s James O’Connell demanded that the employers also provide an across-the-board pay raise of twelve and a half cents per hour and accept national arbitration. The NMTA flatly refused, prompting 45,000 machinists to leave their stations; this national work stoppage lasted from late May to June 1901. In the face of this insurgency, the NMTA’s Henry F. Devens nonchalantly summed up the employers’ response: “This will close our relations with the International Association of Machinists. We are not going to bother with them further.”⁴⁸

The NFA’s New York Agreement, signed with the IMU in 1899, lasted longer. The organization continued meeting with IMU leaders ritualistically until spring 1904, when the leadership became too annoyed to continue in the face of repeated demands from union leaders and routine eruptions of strikes. In fact, the agreement called for a prohibition on strikes and lockouts, but walkouts over pay and hours broke out regularly before the agreement ended. Over the course of four years, leaders from both sides, illustrating various levels of patience, had sought to resolve their differences through negotiations. Yet the meetings became increasingly acrimonious as the two sides found themselves disagreeing over a host of issues, including wages, hours, the number of apprentices employed in shops, the subject of labor saving technology, and the employment of strikebreakers—the most contentious issue of all. Under the leadership of the Minneapolis-based Otis P. Briggs, one of the owners of the sprawling Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company, the NFA decided to put a formal stop to negotiations following an especially aggressive molders’ strike in Utica, New York, in 1904.⁴⁹ Briggs, Penton’s successor, had come to regret the years of cooperation:

The entire undertaking was a complete failure so far as concerns arriving at any agreement whatever with the Iron Molders’ Union—a sad commentary upon the boasted broadmindedness of the union leaders. At the close of these conferences it was plainly evident that instead of meeting the foundrymen in any spirit of conciliation whatever it was the union’s sole purpose to force still more unreasonable conditions upon them.⁵⁰

Both the NMTA and the NFA had become, in the face of a growing, more militant labor movement—one that seemed to them to have been directed by both unmanageable rank-and-file activists and “unreasonable” leaders—what Clarence E. Bonnett called in 1922 “belligerent” associations.⁵¹ Amid this uptick in working-class combativeness, employers, unambiguously and passionately asserting their preference for undiminished control, sought to provide their members with helpful services: shipments of strikebreakers during periods of labor unrest, management consultants, attorneys, and spies. They also circulated joint publications, including the aptly named Open Shop, which began in 1903. Speaking in 1910, Dayton’s John Kirby, Jr., who had helped develop one of the nation’s first citywide open-shop organizations ten years earlier, explained that “these two great National organizations of employers stand as a unit for the open-shop, and against union dictation in their shops.”⁵²

Hundreds of metal-working and foundry employers found the era’s upsurge of working-class protests worrisome, joined these self-proclaimed defense associations, paid their dues, lent a hand in union avoidance campaigns, and spoke favorably to their colleagues about the open-shop principle’s emancipatory potential. Started in 1899, the NMTA, the slightly larger of the two groups, leaped from 423 firms in March 1905 to 523 in March 1906. By March 1907, under the leadership of Cleveland’s Walter D. Sayle, the membership grew to 755. The NFA remained a more modest-sized group, growing to a peak of 536 in 1903. Its numbers fell in subsequent years, but the organization remained a formidable outfit committed to solving the labor question in the nation’s foundries.⁵³

Yet despite Bonnett’s claim, few members saw themselves as “belligerents” after declaring their refusal to negotiate with organized labor’s representatives. Instead, they viewed themselves as agents of managerial and technological progress, publicly spirited men eager to help the nation reap the benefits of industrial improvements and an expanding economy. Biographical sketches reveal that many were respected civic leaders and well-regarded members of the engineering elite. For instance, one of the NMTA’s first presidents, Edwin Reynolds, also served as head of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the preeminent society of professional engineers.⁵⁴ Reynolds, the general manager of Milwaukee’s sizable and profitable Allis-Chalmers Company, developed the company’s popular immobile pumping engines. “All of the large builders,” a fellow ASME member explained in 1899, “have adopted Reynolds’s pumping engines.”⁵⁵ He became NMTA president in 1901, and served as one of three chief negotiators responsible for the short-lived Murray Hill Agreement.⁵⁶ Equally notable was John E. Sweet, an ASME founder, former Cornell University mechanical engineering professor, and inventor of the Sweet Measuring Machine. In 1879, following his teaching career, Sweet began running the Straight Line Engine Company, a machine shop in Syracuse specializing in gray iron castings. Under Sweet’s management, the Straight Line Engine Company received numerous prizes for its impressive castings, including a gold medal at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. In Syracuse, Sweet headed the NMTA branch and held membership in the NFA.⁵⁷

Table 1: NFA and NMTA, 1899–1914: Growth and Consolidation

Source: Howell J. Harris, “Research Note”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dipyO77UdrOk27VhqCSFYHITw7NcpAUoIvsIK4Y1jEg/edit?pli=1.

Reynolds, Sweet, and numerous other engineers most likely hungered for the prestige and financial compensation that resulted from their hard work and technological innovations, and their involvement in employerled defense organizations indicates their profound desire to help prevent the many types of union troubles—boycotts, organizing campaigns, nettlesome shop floor demands, and strikes—from interfering with their goals. After all, like the NFA’s original organizers, they had businesses to run, patents to develop, clubs to visit, and money to make. Yet their active involvement in research and development, combined with their participation in employers’ associations, demonstrates their broader commitment to what they most certainly believed benefited the general public.

Some in this growing movement apparently went above and beyond the call of duty, including Henry N. Covell, a well-connected engineer who had attended the original meeting that launched the NMTA. Born in Troy, New York, in 1862, Covell was reportedly a prominent NFA member and, since 1889, superintendent of the large and enormously lucrative Brooklyn-based Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company, a producer of steam engine castings and logging machinery that formed in 1873. A Yale University graduate and former National Guard member, Covell hobnobbed with several economically privileged, intellectually curious, and socially active individuals as a young man; he held memberships in various organizations, including the Brooklyn Engineers Club. He was also involved in the more socially oriented Brooklyn, Hamilton, and Midwood Clubs, where he participated on various entertainment committees. His business and social pursuits naturally brought him into contact with other prominent Brooklynites and occasional outside visitors. Some fellow clubmen joined him as he helped build and lead the NMTA’s New York City branch.⁵⁸

Yet Covell did not limit his activities to Brooklyn or Manhattan, and union opponents from outside New York treasured his sociability, community services, foresight, and involvement in the NMTA’s formative period. Speaking at the association’s 1903 conference in Buffalo, British-born William Lodge, an illustrious engineer himself and president of the Cincinnatibased Lodge and Shipley Company, praised the sacrifices and “brains [Covell put] into the inceptionary work of this Association.” Lodge, who was partially responsible for forming the Machine Tool Builders Association in 1902, explained that Covell could have made “thousands of dollars if he had spent the same time in his business” that he spent organizing the NMTA.⁵⁹ Here Lodge emphasized Covell’s apparent selflessness, noting that he had broader goals than his own financial achievements. Lodge clearly saw Covell as fundamentally duty-bound, compelled to act in order to protect the interests of a virtuous, forward-thinking brotherhood, one that was interrelated by layers of educational, economic, military, and social networks. Indeed, Lodge himself was a core member of this honorable partnership, which was led by, as the NMTA’s Bulletin declared in 1903, “the wisest heads and the most skillful hands.”⁶⁰

One of the movement’s “wisest heads” was Ernest F. Du Brul, the NMTA’s principal organizer. He often gave stirring speeches, including one at the 1903 ASME convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. Here he spoke shortly after Frederick W. Taylor presented one of his influential talks on “Shop Management” to the group. An observer noted that Du Brul “made a strong plea for the organization of employers.”⁶¹ While Taylor spoke methodically, Du Brul talked passionately, insisting that those without an NMTA membership card needed to fill one out immediately and contribute to the employer-led open-shop movement, a campaign designed to transform America’s workplaces by helping employers reestablish full control, profitability, and ultimately harmony. Too many workmen, Du Brul and his colleagues realized, had not become, as The Iron Trade Review had put it, “successful as employees.” Their acts of insubordination, expressed most sharply by demands for exclusive bargaining rights often accompanied by outright rebellion, meant employers needed to take a tough stance. Instead of employing and negotiating with unionized labor, open-shop supporters like Du Brul insisted on the need to secure “free men,” individuals who, as Pfahler had explained earlier that year, “prefer to control the sale of their own labor according to its value, rather than at a price fixed by a body of men whose purpose is to create a standard of wages based upon the ability of the incompetent workman.”⁶² By the time Du Brul gave his talk, NMTA activists had uniformly come to oppose closed shops, which they found costly and burdensome to themselves, and fundamentally unfair to their “free men.” How, Du Brul implied, could one talk about “shop management” without first responding to a more profound crisis—the aggressive and utterly unwelcome penetration of trade unions into America’s workplaces?

In 1903, the year Du Brul delivered his ASME address, organized labor staged roughly 3,500 work stoppages nationally. The immediate question facing employers from across industries was how best to respond, regain workplace control, and set a moral example for others to follow. In Du Brul’s plainspoken words, “To-day we must take into account a very important factor, and one which did not enter very largely into shop questions until recent years: the factor of unionism.” He continued, “Individually the manufacturer cannot oppose the Unions excepting at a tremendous cost, and even if he wins his fight alone he establishes no precedents and he has peace only for a time.” Organized manufacturers, Du Brul believed, needed to begin the process of looking to one another for support and thus realize their potential to stop strikes and hence minimize their economic consequences. Du Brul offered three reasons why, in his opinion, holding NMTA membership was necessary: “First, for the purpose of defense. Second, for purposes of educating themselves, their workmen and their foremen.” And finally, “From motives of patriotism. In the matter of defense it is self-evident that with the whole power of organized labor concentrated on one individual firm there is much danger to that firm in individual resistance; collective resistance to injustice, however, has never yet failed.” A careful observer of economic developments and industrial relations throughout the western world, Du Brul often invoked history and used fear tactics, arguing that if American manufacturers failed to unite against trade unionism, then labor relations would soon resemble the poor state of conditions in England, where “industrial prosperity” was “disappearing” in the face of merciless strikes.⁶³ Though it is unclear how many engineers Du Brul converted, his influence at this meeting eclipsed that of Taylor’s.⁶⁴

It is possible that Du Brul garnered more interest at this gathering than Taylor, whose influence on workplace management has interested multiple generations of scholars, because the open-shop advocate spoke to a problem that concerned practically all manufacturers, not just those interested in adopting scientific management techniques. Indeed, some employers organized their workplaces on Taylor’s methods, but plenty of others did not. In the midst of the 1903 strike wave, the open-shop system promised to address the more immediate needs of managers overseeing workforces of various sizes and types. One could not make the same point about Taylor’s ideas, even though, as historian Hugh G. J. Aitken claimed, Taylor’s methods constituted “an allegedly complete system of management.”⁶⁵ The multifaceted labor problem, experienced intimately and often agonizingly by the nation’s manufacturers, united both disciples of Taylor’s methods and those with no, or only a passing, interest in his ideas.

Observers of the nascent open-shop movement recognized that Du Brul was a gifted leader and organizer, called “an enthusiast in the employers’ association movement” by The Iron Trade Review in 1903.⁶⁶ Born in 1873, he, like Pfahler, Penton, and Covell, traveled considerable distances and devoted enormous amounts of time to establishing the movement principally by offering talks like the one he delivered in Saratoga Springs. With an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, where he obtained a classical liberal arts education and played football, and graduate course work under his belt from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied politics and economics under some of the country’s most distinguished scholars—including future president Woodrow Wilson—Du Brul became the NMTA’s first vice president and commissioner in 1902, impressing his colleagues with his values, educational background, good character, and strong opinions.⁶⁷ He was a partner of the Cincinnati-based firm Miller, Du Brul, and Peters Manufacturing Company, a very large plant that specialized in the construction of cigar and cigarette machines, established partially by his father, Napoleon.⁶⁸ Napoleon Du Brul’s oldest son quickly became an influential leader in what was, at the time, one of the nation’s most productive centers of machine tool manufacturing.⁶⁹ Ernest F. Du Brul’s interest in collective endeavors was likely influenced, at least in part, by his peers, men who created a number of elite organizations during the nineteenth century.⁷⁰

It is noteworthy that Du Brul was a devoted follower of the Catholic faith leading a largely, though hardly exclusively, Protestant membership. In a previous generation, Du Brul’s Catholicism would have likely barred him from participating in elite organizations; many Protestants in the 1850s, for example, believed the growing Catholic community in the United States placed their devotion to the Pope above their respect for the nation’s republican values. This was certainly not the case half a century later with respect to the open-shop movement. The ambitious Cincinnatian’s central involvement in open-shop campaigns, like the participation of Frank, a Jew, demonstrates the movement’s cultural and religious pluralism. In short, White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) hardly commanded total control over the nation’s prominent businessmen-led organizations at this time. One’s religious beliefs and practices clearly mattered less than one’s commitment to a managerial philosophy that called for the full protection of business owners and independent workmen against “union dictation.”⁷¹

Du Brul shared the lessons he learned in northern Indiana, Baltimore, and Cincinnati with manufacturers throughout much of the country, vigorously proselytizing about the open-shop principle’s defensive, educational, and patriotic virtues. He traveled long distances, lectured on matters related to the political economy, and pressured manufacturers to join the NMTA. He visited factories, gentlemen’s clubs, and meetings of professional groups, sharing his deep knowledge of economics, history, and business etiquette. “Probably more than the average manufacturer,” The Iron Trade Review observed in 1902, “Mr. Du Brul has acquainted himself with the history of industrial and social movements.”⁷² He was confident, and occasionally even arrogant. Following several trips, Du Brul boasted about the NMTA’s righteousness and influence. “We have been tried by the fire,” he declared in early 1903, “and found true steel.”⁷³ “When they [trade unionists] tangle up in a fight with this association,” he remarked less than a year after addressing the ASME meeting, “they are in for a fight to the finish, and the finish has only been one way, and that is our way.”⁷⁴

Figure 1. Ernest F. Du Brul as a student at Notre Dame University. Courtesy of Notre Dame University archives.

Certainly nothing helped the movement grow more than effective battles, which involved both the direct breaking of labor protests at the point of production and the use of propaganda to legitimize such actions. Open-shop proponents tended to portray trade union campaigners as incurable troublemakers while almost always insisting that employers and independent workers were innocent victims. But the movement succeeded in minimizing casualties, and spokespersons further illustrated that salaried members of employers’ associations, enjoying access to large supplies of nonunion strikebreakers, constituted a consistent source of enormous help. And the grateful and often community-spirited beneficiaries of their mobilizations, excited by the prospects of long-term labor peace, then joined the movement. The lessons embedded in these tedious narratives are unambiguous and rather simple: led by noble warriors, the open-shop movement was fundamentally a force of good against evil.

A few cases illustrate this point. For instance, managers at Columbus, Indiana’s Reeves Pulley Company, a wood split pulley manufacturing establishment that occupied over 300,000 square feet, expressed a great amount of indebtedness for the NMTA’s services after it helped transform their city from a place plagued by trade union radicalism to a center of labor peace and affluence. How? Faced with labor troubles in 1903, a Reeves manager “went personally to Cincinnati,” where he requested Du Brul’s assistance. After Du Brul promised help, the manager “immediately made application for membership.” The thrilled man, a beneficiary of trainloads of strikebreakers, shared his experiences with fellow manufacturers. “Our labor troubles,” he proclaimed to a room full of supporters, “began to subside, and the unions have decided to carry the labor agitation in Columbus no further.” Like civic boosters speaking in the aftermath of natural disasters, Reeves, no longer hampered by labor troubles, promised long-term calm and prosperity for manufacturers and community members.⁷⁵

Other victims joined the movement for similar reasons. W. O. Bates of the Joliet, Illinois-based Bates Machine Company, constructors of power-transmitting machinery and the Bates-Corliss Engine, became a dedicated NMTA member, “thanks to the association’s successful efforts in the handling” of a strike.⁷⁶ In 1904, strikebreakers and guards, dispatched from the NMTA’s Cincinnati headquarters, kept Bates’s factory, one of Joliet’s largest, running consistently during the conflict. The demoralized unionized workforce, confronted by formidable strikebreaking actions, had lost its bargaining power. For several years, the IAM maintained a strong presence in the shop. In 1901, before Bates joined the NMTA, IAM activists forced him to accept a closed union shop, which granted workers the nine-hour day.⁷⁷ Now an NMTA member, Bates was emboldened, no longer willing to make costly and inconvenient concessions. Backed by a network of professional union-fighters, he now managed unilaterally, voiding previous agreements that had covered pay rates and hours, a practice that presumably became contagious in this community. Spokespersons were confident of a future free of union-provoked mayhem, proclaiming that “Joliet is today in a position to practically guarantee industrial peace not only to her own manufacturers, but also to future site-seekers.” Those who harbored a desire to invest in Joliet had Bates and the NMTA to thank for creating inviting and peaceful business conditions. Like Reeves, Bates and movement spokespersons interpreted successful union breaking as a community accomplishment rather than as a narrow workplace victory.⁷⁸

Not all recruits became members because they heard speeches by organizers or because they contacted activists after reading the movement’s voluminous output of antiunion propaganda. Nevertheless, the NMTA played a part in helping such employers caught up in labor troubles. Sometimes “free men,” wage earners who rejected unionism, encouraged employers to discover the virtues of the open-shop philosophy. In the South, J. W. Glover, head of the Marietta, Georgia-based Glover Machine Works, the region’s foremost maker of locomotives and hoisting engines, joined the NMTA shortly after suffering through what appears to have been an especially debilitating strike. Yet no NMTA organizers engaged in any recruitment campaigns in this part of the nation prior to Glover’s conflict. Nevertheless, in a matter of a few short years, Glover became a regional leader.

An ostensibly timid industrialist who had never before given a public speech, Glover addressed the NMTA annual conference in Cleveland in 1906 about the profound impact the group had on his career and morale after his IAM encounter. Alarmed by the viciousness of the strikers, Glover complained his factory nearly closed down. “I have tried to build up my little business down in a small town in Georgia,” he remarked in an exaggeratedly humble fashion, “and the Machinists’ Union tackled me last July.” Unionists were ruthless, he reported: “they laughed at me like a little chicken.” Glover needed assistance—and a renewed sense of confidence—but knew nothing about the NMTA until an unnamed antiunion employee told him about the group in the midst of the conflict. After learning about its vision and services, Glover traveled to the association’s Cincinnati headquarters, where he spent hours talking to William Eagan and Robert Wuest, the NMTA’s commissioner and secretary respectively, pleading for aid.⁷⁹

Eagan and Wuest agreed to help, ordering nonunionists from two of the association’s hardest-working secretaries, Philadelphia’s D. H. McPherson, a former NMTA organizer, and New York’s Henry C. Hunter, an activist who had mastered the craft of strikebreaking in New York and New Jersey shipyards.⁸⁰ The leadership’s generosity, combined with the organization’s efficient and reliable union-busting services, warmed Glover’s heart and transformed him into an open-shop ideologue: “I feel that you gentlemen ought to know what a good work you have done for a poor little devil like me.” In reply, the audience, consisting principally of mechanical engineers, proprietary capitalists, and veteran union fighters, broke into laughter.⁸¹

Glover learned that his largely northern-based comrades were a supportive and amusing bunch. That Glover lived hundreds of miles from the majority of the NMTA’s membership did not matter; the NMTA was organized on class and industry rather than geographic lines. The IAM established locals and staged nationwide protests; the NMTA leadership learned that, in order to perform its union fighting effectively, it too needed to maintain chapters in southern cities. It appears that Glover had less self-assurance and fewer acquaintances than his more educated, seemingly more experienced and cosmopolitan Yankee brothers, though he shared their concern over the labor movement’s growth and combativeness. More importantly, he shared a willingness to fight and reform his community. One certainly did not need a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering to hold membership in the NMTA and win battles against trade unions.

Glover had become a dedicated NMTA member, served on committees, and recruited fellow employers in his home state of Georgia. In 1906, he began serving as secretary of the newly formed southern district, based in Atlanta, where he helped build an open-shop presence in the heart of the “New South.” No longer intimidated by abusive labor activists, he was now part of a proud alliance enjoying the discretionary power of managing unilaterally. By testifying about the association’s help, Glover reinforced the organizing by Du Brul and his successor, Eagan.⁸²

The movement’s successes continued to multiply in the second part of the decade. According to NMTA secretary Wuest, the association responded to 126 strikes in 1907, winning all but four.⁸³ Not coincidentally, 1907 was a year of significant growth. Of course, such effective strikebreaking and membership increases occurred in the context of a deep recession. High levels of unemployment meant a larger pool of potential strikebreakers, which certainly assisted the organization’s union-breaking operations. In July of that year, Wuest, who had helped place many nonunionists in struck workplaces, reported that “practically all of the strikes called in the shops of our members have failed in their purpose.”⁸⁴ Victory rates of over 90 percent compelled employers, both organized and independent, to take notice. After triumphant campaigns, numerous employers became eager open-shop advocates, acknowledging that their labor problems could be solved with help from professional antiunionists. Employers like Reeves, Bates, and especially Glover, toughened and educated by their experiences, became collaborators in this national movement because they profited personally from it. They were in awe of the NMTA’s strikebreaking operations, thankful to the panoply of participants, and grateful to have managerial hegemony restored, and as members, they too were prepared to engage in further campaigns designed to reform their communities against “union dictation.” And Bates, Reeves, Glover, and hundreds of others saved money in the process. According to Cleveland’s Sayle, a leader of both the NFA and the NMTA, members paid their union-free workforces “a low average rate of $2.50 per day.”⁸⁵ The NMTA, effectively using strikebreakers, guards, and management consultants in the interests of its members, had proved itself a central player in the open-shop movement. Writing about the NMTA in 1922, Bonnett observed that “the Association has reduced the combating of strikes to a science.” Other historians have more recently referred to its activities as an “art.”⁸⁶

“We too must organize”: The Movement Spreads

Employers from other sectors of the economy demonstrated equal annoyance with organized labor’s activities. And by mid-decade, large numbers from coast to coast had elected to follow the lead of the NMTA and the NFA. Organizers formed both city- and trade-based associations. Some of the more influential groups included the National Association of Manufacturers, the Laundrymen’s National Association, the National Association of Employing Lithographers, the National Erectors’ Association, the Building Trades Employers’ Association (BTEA), and the American Anti-Boycott Association (AABA), led by lawyers determined to use the courts against organized labor’s boycott drives and demands for closed shops.⁸⁷

The AABA chief organizer, Bridgeport, Connecticut-based attorney Daniel Davenport, was especially active, pointing out, as he asserted to a room full of employers in 1904 “the duty, the importance, and the necessity of standing firmly for the right of the individual to run his own business.” Davenport, known in part for his endorsement of women’s suffrage rights, insisted that employers must feel no obligation to succumb to union pressure because the courts had routinely upheld the legality of the open-shop system of management. By providing legal support and by pointing out the significance of decades of judicial backing, Davenport had reminded employers they were far from alone.⁸⁸

But the presence of anti-union laws did little to discourage labor leaders from making what open-shop proponents believed were outlandish demands. And few felt more overwhelmed by such demands than building contractors in places like New York City. Take, for instance, the circumstances surrounding the BTEA’s decision to follow in the NMTA’s footsteps. Like the NMTA, it spent the twentieth century’s first few years bargaining with union leaders. But its members increasingly found the process unnecessarily laborious, frustrating, and ultimately fruitless. In 1903, speaking in front of a crowd of over 700 men, Charles L. Eidlitz, a well-known building architect and NCF leader, pointed to what he considered the repetitiveness of preposterous union demands:

At first you were asked simply to take down the bar from the door. Later the chain was to be taken off. Still later the key must be left on the outside. All these demands and many others were granted. And now, what is asked of you? That the door shall be taken off the hinges and thrown into the street. What will be your answer to this request?⁸⁹

Inspired by his colorful and dramatic analogy, the men in attendance, who, according to its Bulletin, had links to “various building trades representing eighty percent of all the building interests of New York,” had finally recognized the slippery slope nature of negotiations and thus reached the same conclusions drawn by the NMTA two years earlier: “By a unanimous vote it was determined to solidly unite and stand for the rights of employers to manage their own business.”⁹⁰

This same impulse inspired thousands of others to form locally based employers’ associations. Defense associations of the sort that Pfahler, Penton, Davenport, Du Brul, and Eidlitz helped build had sprung up in large and small cities throughout the country. By late 1903, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Louisville, Minneapolis, Omaha, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Worcester had become movement hubs.⁹¹ And some of these urban-based employers’ associations were led by individuals outside the heavy manufacturing and the building trades. The Chicago Employers’ Association, for instance, was launched largely by John G. Shedd of department store Marshall Field’s in 1902. “Labor is organized,” Shedd announced. “We, too, must organize.”⁹²

There was, from the perspective of Chicago’s merchants and manufacturers, a profound sense of urgency. Chicago’s participating employers obtained the help of attorney Frederick W. Job, a former member of the Illinois State Board of Arbitration. As ambitious as Penton and Du Brul, Job sent notices to Chicago’s employers, explaining the importance of unity in the face of a relentless uptick in strikes, boycotts, and organizing campaigns. His persistent activities bore fruit, resulting in the creation of forty “sub-associations,” including the Building Owners’ Association, the Laundry Owners’ Association, and the Manufacturing Confectioners’ Association. All functioned under the umbrella of the larger Chicago Employers’ Association. With a growing and increasingly confident membership behind them, Job and Shedd promised to supply struck workplaces with “independent” replacement workers, and they appealed to local politicians, such as Mayor Carter Henry Harrison Jr., to provide police protection. Harrison, once organized labor’s ally, honored their request, and in April 1904, more than 1,000 members of Chicago’s police force helped strikebreakers travel to struck workplaces. In the period of just a few months, this employers’ association, numbering about 1,000 firms by early 1904, had helped give renewed confidence to the city’s diverse business community. According to the magazine World’s Work, “The employer has been educated to appreciate the value of organization.”⁹³

One of the most powerful, inclusive, and effective groups to support the open-shop principle and spread its underlying message was the NAM. Formed in response to the 1893 depression, the NAM held its initial meeting in 1895 in Cincinnati, where delegates, including future president William McKinley, discussed the necessity of expanding economic development in part by increasing foreign trade. The organization, representing mostly locally controlled, midsized workplaces that employed somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners, enjoyed a close relationship with the Republican Party. Chroniclers of the NAM’s early history have long pointed out that the membership under its first two presidents neither formally discussed, nor took positions on, matters related to the management of labor.⁹⁴ Unlike others, it did not develop as a labor-fighting, or union-containing, “defense association.”

Yet under the leadership of Indianapolis’s David M. Parry, the organization, in response to widespread labor unrest and agitation from recruiters like Du Brul, had established itself as a leading participant in the movement. Parry had clear, class-based reasons to oppose organized labor. Immensely wealthy and well connected, he headed Indianapolis’s enormous Parry Manufacturing Company, which built several different types of wagons and employed roughly 2,000 employees, including at least some union sympathizers. According to a historian of Indiana, his towering, capital-intensive workplace was “bigger than the next five biggest carriage factories in the world.”⁹⁵

The NAM’s anti-union activities officially began in 1902 and involved intensive political lobbying and letter writing directed at policy-makers in Washington, where it ultimately succeeded in blocking the American Federation of Labor-backed proposal for an eight-hour workday on government contracts. Parry and his colleagues, some of whom enjoyed profitable contracts with the U.S. navy, found the prospect of such “class legislation” wholly obnoxious. “The right to say how long men shall work,” Parry declared, “is a right which belongs to private agreement between employer and employe, and we deny the justice of government endeavoring to regulate those matters which come within the province of industrial adjustment.”⁹⁶

The NAM’s aggressive anti-union efforts under Parry’s leadership, defended under the banner of protecting personal “rights,” should not surprise us in part because Parry himself had confronted several organizing drives orchestrated by Indianapolis’s Central Labor Union. In 1901, a union spokesperson, citing low pay, frequent firings, and a generally dispiriting atmosphere, claimed “that conditions there are worse than in any factory in the city.” And by August of that year, the union stated that it had the support of 75 percent of the labor force. Insisting that he compensated his men “better” than most employers, Parry dismissed the union’s number as simply absurd, doubting that its lead organizer, John Blue, could identify “1 per cent of the men ready to go into a union.”⁹⁷

This seems more like wishful thinking on Parry’s part than a truly honest appraisal of his workforce’s views on the matter. While it may be correct that fewer than 75 percent signed union cards, it is difficult to believe Parry’s claim that only 1 percent supported the organizing effort. But Parry wanted observers to believe that he took the high road, insisting that, as a goodhearted American, he did not care if the individual worker joined a labor union, “the Odd Fellows,” or “The Presbyterian Church,” provided “he does not molest anybody else.” That “anybody else” did not merely mean him. Yet as the owner, he felt a responsibility to prevent the creation of a closed shop—a truly nightmarish industrial relations scenario that, in his view, would lead to falling levels of productivity and the growth of an increasingly incompetent labor force. As he explained, “I do not propose to have it run by any labor union or these fakers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.” For Parry, unscrupulous outside dissenters and charlatans, rather than grievance-holding workmen, were responsible for triggering the unnecessary controversy. Whatever its source, Parry succeeded, demonstrating his unwillingness to “tolerate [the union’s] dictatorial policy.”⁹⁸

Less than two years later at the NAM annual conference in New Orleans, Parry forcefully professed that his organization was committed to solving the labor problem nationally by strenuously backing efforts to establish thousands of open-shop workplaces like his own. Here he helped to usher in a period that labor leaders disparagingly called “Parryism.”⁹⁹ In front of over 200 delegates, including Pfahler and Du Brul, Parry delivered a speech as passionate and as pointed as anything given by Du Brul, insisting that organized labor posed a singular threat to “liberty-loving people” and thus challenged “the whole social, political, and governmental systems of the Nation.” He made his points almost selflessly, explaining that the reinvented organization’s principal goal was emancipatory, designed to help “thousands of men to shake off the shackles of unionism.”¹⁰⁰

Figures from both sides of the open-shop question immediately understood the significance of the NAM’s evolution under Parry’s tenure. According to one labor activist, “Trade unionists who imagine that Mr. Parry and his colleagues have merely organized to give pink teas or chowder parties will find that they are sadly misinformed.”¹⁰¹ Employers at this momentous event, reflecting on what they considered onerous contracts, organized labor’s unreasonable demands, pushy business agents, and occasional outbreaks of labor turmoil, affectionately greeted this development. Indeed, the fervent responses to Parry’s speech in Tulane Hall, which found expression in repeated eruptions of loud applause, indicate that the delegates understood the extent of the problem and saw the possibilities of resolving it. Parry’s thunderous declarations gave inspiration to many rank-and-file employers who sincerely cherished his bold and steady leadership. As word spread of the organization’s transformation into a confident, union-fighting outfit, hundreds of employers flocked to it. The organization counted 1,900 dues-paying members in 1902; a year later, that number climbed to 2,700.¹⁰² Dayton’s Kirby, excited that the NAM had placed union breaking at the center of its program, called Parry “the Abraham Lincoln of the twentieth century.”¹⁰³

At first glance, this comparison seems far-fetched. Yet Kirby was apparently dead serious in making it, noting that Parry was one of the most vocal, visible, and determined proponents of the emancipation of independent wage earners and employers from what they viewed as the burdensome reality of closed-shop unionism. Like antebellum slaves, business owners and nonunion workers were, according to his logic, unfairly, even brutally, constrained by the oppressive rules that prevented them from achieving their economic goals and full freedom, which laissez-faire capitalism was supposed to ensure. The movement activists who catapulted Parry to this elevated position clearly saw him as a transformative visionary capable of leading employers away from the morass of union-run corruption and closed-shop oppression.

By invoking Lincoln, Kirby demonstrated consistency with other reformers in this period. Lincoln’s strong leadership at a time of an unprecedented national crisis inspired several prominent early twentieth-century figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. As historical sociologist Barry Schwartz notes, “Progressives promoted Lincoln as a model for their era of reform.”¹⁰⁴ In the eyes of Kirby, and presumably other employers, Parry, by helping to lead the movement, had reached the conclusion that provocative language and industrial warfare constituted the soundest, and perhaps only, choice in the face of an increasingly rebellious and radical labor movement intolerant of the rights of the “free worker.”

The movement took on a new urgency around the time of the NAM’s transformation. No longer did organized employers merely complain about what a member of the AFA called in 1897 “the inconveniences inseparable from labor troubles.”¹⁰⁵ By 1903, employer activists, led partly by Lincolnesque visionaries like Parry, viewed the labor problem, expressed most sharply by demands for closed shops, as more than simply “inconvenient.” Rather, they warned about the creeping threats of dictation and domination, and argued that the nation’s rich diversity of employers—corporate heads, proprietary capitalists, practitioners of scientific management, self-made men, and products of nepotism—had a moral “duty” to fight back. C. W. Post, multimillionaire breakfast cereal mogul, explained the urgency at the NAM historic New Orleans conference. “That duty,” Post maintained, “lies toward the innocent children made fatherless by the tyranny of union laborers; toward the wives made widows from the same cause; towards the small tradesmen throughout the country, whose business has been ruined; towards manufacturers whose property has been destroyed.”¹⁰⁶

Du Brul described his “duty” in patriotic terms, declaring that he joined the open-shop movement because it was “a call on my patriotism, just as much as if it were a call to shoulder arms in defense of our country’s institutions from any other sort of an attack.”¹⁰⁷ The stakes involved were, as Du Brul, Post, Parry, and others made abundantly clear, significantly weightier than their own inconvenient financial struggles. In this spirit, organizers sought to recruit and motivate hundreds more, explaining to them that, together, they had the power to stop the irredeemable forces of immorality and economic destruction by building organizations that publicly prioritized the interests of ordinary people and the nation as a whole over the demands of any particular class. Their statements clearly indicate that they chose to fight unions not because they wanted to limit their employees’ rights while maximizing profits, but rather because they felt a moral obligation to defend what they defined as the labor movement’s most vulnerable targets: innocent children, widows, small tradesmen, modest-sized business owners, and, above all, “free” workers.

The movement leaders announced that they were especially active in defending nonunionists. Open-shop employers from coast to coast, Parry eagerly told his colleagues in 1904, had finally stepped up and come to the rescue of these “liberty loving people”:

Shop after shop has been opened to the non-union man, and protection has been given him against the sluggers in most of our industrial centers. I believe that fully one thousand manufacturing establishments have, in the last year, abandoned the closed shop and thrown their doors open to workmen without regard to their membership or non-membership in a union.¹⁰⁸

These victories ignited renewed feelings of confidence and clarity of vision. And there was little public disagreement about the overall soundness of the open-shop system in management circles across the country’s diverse industrial landscape. As one unnamed observer explained in The Iron Trade Review the following year,

the “open-shop” idea is becoming very much more prominent in the minds of all manufacturers. They no longer debate the question; they have given up feeling timid over the issue, and when the alternative of the open-shop is placed before them they are ready to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to maintain the open-shop and will not listen to any other method of conducting their business.¹⁰⁹

Importantly, the movement’s primary contribution was not that it was somehow responsible for educating thousands of diverse employers about the magnitude of the problem; in most cases, they were painfully aware of it. Instead, Davenport, Du Brul, Job, Parry, Pfahler, Post, and many others contributed most meaningfully by providing their likeminded colleagues with practical resources, emotional reassurance, and strategic guidance as they charted a new course. They had, essentially, armed their comrades with the confidence and the tools necessary to solve this many-sided problem. And in return, together, they enthusiastically welcomed the development of an advanced stage of employer empowerment. The optimism was immensely contagious.

But what about the NCF, a joint labor-management organization formed in 1900 committed—at least publicly—to trade agreements and peaceful collective bargaining in a spirit of mutual respect? Did its merchants, manufacturers, corporate moguls, and railroad operators—a very prosperous fraternity—abandon closed-shop agreements like so many others? Based on the conclusions reached by generations of scholars, it would appear that it was the least inclined of any association of employers to support the open-shop movement’s efforts.¹¹⁰

We must resist the temptation to view the NCF businessmen as genuine supporters of organized labor’s main, workplace-centered goals in light of both the documentary record and simple common sense. In essence, like other organized businessmen, the NCF employer members believed that union demands for exclusive bargaining rights were unfair to nonunionists and, like all employers, dreaded eruptions of labor militancy. Of course, this class-collaborationist organization hardly spoke with one voice on the issue of the open versus closed shop—its union representatives understandably wanted recognition and collective bargaining rights. But a number of its employer members were unrepentant Parryites, holding overlapping membership in hardcore open-shop associations, including the NFA, the NMTA, and the NAM.¹¹¹ Pfahler, for example, was an especially influential open-shop proselytizer. He actually spoke positively about trade unions and defended the employer’s right to employ nonunionists. In fact, few of these people publicly said that unions should not exist; yet they still tended to insist that closed shops were un-American, dictatorial, tyrannical, and so on.

But let us consider additional evidence, including the role played by the NCF’s full-time secretary and strategist, Ralph M. Easley, who occasionally sought assistance from leaders in the emerging open-shop movement to help suppress strikes. For example, in summer 1902 he secured Du Brul’s aid in settling a New York City strike of skilled blacksmiths; Du Brul made the lengthy trip from Cincinnati shortly after becoming NMTA commissioner.¹¹² The circumstances surrounding Easley’s hire are noteworthy: the NCF secretary decided to employ Du Brul a year after the NMTA ceased all formal negotiations with the IAM. Indeed, it is highly difficult to imagine that Easley, who was well-connected in the world of business and had studied labor questions carefully, was somehow unaware of Du Brul’s principled and vocal opposition to closed-shop unionism.¹¹³

Finally, we must ponder the words and actions of the NCF’s employers at meetings. Writing about the organization’s fall 1903 gathering in Chicago, the journal World’s Work, for example, described an absolutely polarized atmosphere, noting that “every employer [at the conference] favored the open shop, and every union man opposed it.”¹¹⁴ Furthermore, consider the case of Eidlitz, a leader of both the BTEA and the NCF. Eidlitz apparently felt only mildly reluctant about making a provocative speech in front of mixed company, including the AFL’s Samuel Gompers and the United Mine Workers of America’s John Mitchell, in late 1903. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I have been told to make it funny, but I can’t be humorous, for I have something that I am boiling to say.” Recognizing the controversial nature of his subject, Eidlitz claimed that “I am speaking my personal views.” Less confident and combative than Du Brul or Parry, Eidlitz nevertheless went on: “when organized labor interferes with the rights of a free white man over twenty-one who lives in this country something must be done, and I hope the Civic Federation is going to do it.” As an NCF member, perhaps Eidlitz appreciated organized labor’s campaigns against child labor, but he believed that the same forces were misguided to interfere with the rights of nonunion white adults. Echoing Du Brul, Parry, and Post, Eidlitz called on fellow employers to offer them protection. In essence, he wanted the businessmen in the room, many of whom had experienced their own rather unpleasant brushes with strikes and boycotts, to acknowledge what growing numbers had already concluded: that the open-shop principle constituted a progressive and just solution that promised to protect the individual rights of employers, workers, and Americans generally. How did the crowd respond? Rather favorably, according to a report in the Building Trades Employers’ Association Bulletin: “There was a sharp buzz of comment when Mr. Eidlitz sat down. He got considerable applause, and there were one or two cries of ‘You’re right’!”¹¹⁵