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Chapter 2

“For the Protection of the Common People”: Citizens, Progressives, and “Free Workers”

American public opinion is more liable to be with the underdog. In other words, it is more apt to sympathize with the demands of organized labor than with the demands of organized capital, because of an indefinable feeling that capitalists are able to take care of themselves, while labor is less able to do so. For this reason the employers’ associations usually make studious and intelligent efforts to so regulate their conduct as to inspire the sympathy and assistance of public opinion as reflected by the Citizens’ Alliance.

—J. C. Craig, Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Citizens’ Industrial Association of America, 1904

Although the open-shop movement was led chiefly by employers with recognizable financial and managerial interests, numerous others from outside industrial relations settings played their own important roles in strengthening it. This chapter describes the multiple ways well-known reformers in the areas of higher education, journalism, law, politics, and religion, combined with nonunion workers, assisted management by embracing policies, joining organizations, and making statements that promoted what they considered the open-shop principle’s virtues. Together, broad coalitions of citizens, led by employers, sought to illustrate that this principle was fundamentally fair to Americans as a whole, rather than simply serving the interests of the elite. What follows below is a series of biographical sketches and case studies, beginning with the 1902 anthracite coal strike and its immediate aftermath, that highlight efforts to convince the general public of the open-shop principle’s evenhanded, class-neutral, and reformist character.

The Square Deal?

The 1902 anthracite coal mine strike, an enormous protest that dragged on for more than five months and involved as many as 147,000 demonstrators in northeastern Pennsylvania, was undoubtedly one of American history’s most significant labor-management confrontations. Protestors, represented by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), harbored numerous grievances—low pay, irregular work schedules, long workday hours, and the inability to bargain collectively. They demanded a 20 percent wage increase, an eight-hour workday, and closed shops. The region’s mightiest railroad and coal companies, embroiled in this conflict, flatly refused these demands. They were especially unwilling to recognize the UMWA as the miners’ exclusive bargaining unit. As attorney Clarence Darrow, who represented the UMWA during the conflict, explained, the owners were motivated by more than a desire to save money and maintain existing work hours; fundamentally, the showdown was based on “a question of mastery—nothing else; because they felt and they believed that upon this contest depended the question of whether they should be the masters or whether the men should be the masters.”¹

The coal company employers were accustomed to winning strikes, but they typically had to battle for their victories. Consider the words of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company president, George Baer, whose workplaces were affected by this, and previous, strikes. In 1901, he claimed that labor conflicts always have “and, perhaps, always will result in the ‘survival of the fittest’.”² During the 1902 strike, Baer, who served as a spokesperson for a number of the besieged mine managers and owners, including J. P. Morgan, remained confident that his side, by effectively employing strikebreakers and guards while ensuring class solidarity, would, yet again, demonstrate that it was indeed the country’s economically fittest. The coal miners, Baer arrogantly wrote in 1902, “will be protected and cared for—not by labor agitators, but by the Christian gentlemen to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.”³

As the disruptive, increasingly violent, and seemingly intractable conflict continued into the fall, reformers took notice. The (Kansas City) Independent, annoyed by both sides, contended that “the public interest in this and similar struggles is paramount to that of either employers or workmen.” Above all, the newspaper argued, the public needed “to protect itself against either or both parties to the controversy.”⁴ It maintained that ordinary people, particularly consumers, were hurt by both the strikers’ actions and “the stubborn Baer and his associates.”⁵

Not all commentators faulted both sides. And few captured the strike’s sense of drama better than muckraker Ray Stannard Baker, whose somewhat probing and lengthy article about the conflict was published in McClure’s, a widely circulated magazine popular with a middle-class readership. Baker was one of McClure’s most prolific writers, and he established a reputation for himself partially by writing “The Right to Work”—a decades-old slogan that some employers and their allies had used as an attempt to personalize the plight of non-strikers, individuals who faced organized labor’s unforgiving wrath on picket lines.⁶ Rather than draw attention to northeastern Pennsylvania’s widespread poverty, stark class divisions, the repressive coal mine police, or the undiluted arrogance articulated by Social Darwinists like Baer, Baker’s fourteen-page article—which appeared in print shortly after the strike’s conclusion—focused on the ways nonunion men, numbering approximately 17,000, faced what Baker called the multiple “tragedies of the great coal strike.”⁷ Baker depicted cases of unrelenting viciousness, describing how strikers verbally and physically abused strikebreakers. He offered many anecdotes, allowing the nonunionists to speak for themselves; such victims faced multiple horrors, including aggressive attacks against themselves, their homes, and their families. He discovered that the nonunion workmen were loyal to their employers, proudly independent, lawful, and patriotic. Baker sincerely believed that these humble sufferers, who “did not believe in the strike,” needed protection from union activists.⁸

Baker, whose article added a layer of legitimacy to the burgeoning open-shop movement, was not the only well-known figure concerned with protecting the rights of nonunionists in and around the tumultuous coalfields. President Theodore Roosevelt, distressed by picketers’ interference with nonunionists and fearing the devastating consequences of a prolonged strike involving the winter fuel supply, was determined to end the strife. After all, major cities relied on anthracite coal as a heating source. There was, from Roosevelt’s perspective, a profound sense of urgency, and like others before him, he could have opted to mobilize federal troops to break the protest. Instead of following the examples of earlier presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes or Grover Cleveland, executives who had dispatched armed forces against railroad strikers in 1877 and 1894 respectively and thus played a critical part in ensuring that the affected capitalists were, in the context of these disputes, “the fittest,” Roosevelt plotted a significantly more diplomatic path, one that considered the workers’ grievances, the owners’ interests, and the public’s overall well-being.⁹ Roosevelt and his administration reached out to J. P. Morgan—who owned most of the coal mines affected by the strike—and oversaw the establishment of a commission, which was designed to put pressure on both the union and management, including the cantankerous Baer, to resolve the conflict amicably.¹⁰ Roosevelt’s intervention, historian Perry Blatz notes, marked “the first time in American history” the federal government responded evenhandedly to a private sector labor-management conflict.¹¹ Impressed by Roosevelt’s willingness to get the warring sides to find common ground, the UMWA’s John Mitchell, a leading member of the class-collaborationist National Civic Federation (NCF), called off the strike in mid-October. He had come to believe that the seven-person body, consisting of Judge George Gray, General John M. Wilson, E. W. Parker, Thomas H. Watkins, Bishop John L. Spalding, Carroll D. Wright, and E. E. Clark of the Order of Railway Conductors—a union with a long history of opposing strikes—would resolve the issues fairly.¹²

Several high-profile reformers, including Boston-based attorney Louis D. Brandeis, sought to help the commission—led by Gray, a former U.S. senator, corporate lawyer, and millionaire from Delaware—reach a mutually acceptable settlement. Brandeis was certainly no stranger to the labor question. More than twenty-five years earlier, while in Louisville in the summer of 1877, the recent Harvard University law school graduate joined a businessmen-led volunteer militia, carried a rifle, and helped guard the city’s railroad property from hordes of ill-tempered striking Louisville and Nashville Railroad employees and their pugnacious supporters.¹³ But Brandeis felt no need to arm himself during his trip to northeastern Pennsylvania. In fact, he expressed sympathy with the region’s working classes, and believed the protestors deserved improved conditions, increases in pay, and greater overall respect from the operators. Visiting the region in December, Brandeis pointed out that coal miners’ work schedules were often irregular, complaining to Darrow that “one of the great evils from which the employees suffer is the lack of continuous occupation.”¹⁴ Brandeis insisted that the employers had the financial resources to employ workers for additional weeks at higher rates, but he stopped short of calling for them to officially recognize the UMWA as the exclusive bargaining unit. Yet Gray’s commission refused to listen to Brandeis’s suggestions, prompting him to leave northeastern Pennsylvania disappointed.¹⁵

The commission held a series of meetings and interviewed hundreds of strikers, strikebreakers, and witnesses. Commissioners also read reports, including Baker’s sensational essay about the strikers’ confrontational picket-line conduct. Gray was especially agitated by this particular article. After reading it and listening to testimony from over 100 nonunionists, Gray berated Mitchell for refusing to expel any of the “mob” participants, for failing to denounce “these evident misdeeds,” and for Mitchell’s unwillingness to promote “law and order.”¹⁶ Gray, selectively criticizing striker violence while ignoring the brutality of mine guards, told the New York Times five years after the conflict that he had truly wanted to “find an alternative to violence and the strong hand.”¹⁷

Gray was not alone, and he and his colleagues participated in many contentious and polarizing gatherings throughout the winter months. The result of these meetings, according to most contemporary and historical accounts, was a genuinely fair resolution, which the commission issued on March 21, 1903. Both sides, not just Baer’s, claimed victory—a noteworthy departure from previous labor-management conflicts. While workers won a 10 percent wage increase and a nine-hour day, operators were under no obligation to formally recognize the UMWA as the workers’ exclusive bargaining agent—and they did not.¹⁸ The commission, insisting that “the rights and privileges of non-union men are as sacred to them as the rights and privileges of unionists,” framed its refusal to grant a closed shop in the language of America’s virtuous presidential past: “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.’ This is as true in trade unions as elsewhere.”¹⁹ Roosevelt shared this sentiment and called the agreement the “Square Deal,” proclaiming that it constituted a victory for everyone, including consumers, unionists, coal operators, nonunion workmen, and strikebreakers.²⁰ Nonunionists, the commissioners proudly declared, had “the right to remain at work where others have ceased to work, or to engage anew in work which others have abandoned.”²¹ This statement, legitimizing the democratic right of nonunionists to refuse to succumb to union pressure, was perfectly consistent with the position demanded by the owners, embraced by the nation’s judiciary, and unreservedly championed by the planners of the budding open-shop drive. Importantly, Roosevelt had given his full blessings to the open-shop principle.

Employers in the vanguard of the emerging open-shop movement responded to Roosevelt’s endorsement with undisguised enthusiasm. In 1905, emboldened employers began publishing a monthly magazine named after it, and intellectuals and activists from various employers’ associations wrote articles for the Square Deal, “a magazine devoted to industrial peace,” which was edited by novelist and Union-side Civil War veteran Wilson Vance. James Van Cleave, manager of St. Louis’s Buck’s Stove and Range Company and one time National Association of Manufacturers president, announced in 1907 that the settlement offered a clear template of how to properly settle “all future labor difficulties.”²² More than almost any other figure, Roosevelt, by agreeing that the open-shop principle was, above all, morally sound and impartial, rather than underlining its economic advantages for management, gave organized employers and their allies decades of powerful ammunition in their public relations campaigns against an increasingly embittered, closed shop-demanding labor movement.²³ Employers keenly embraced Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and they invoked it repeatedly to build a highly inclusive, flexible, often liberal-sounding, and lasting open-shop movement publicly committed to safeguarding the rights of nonunion workers and business owners. Increasingly, organized employers and their allies distanced themselves publicly from the class-dominant ideas embedded in Social Darwinism while embracing the class-neutralsounding Square Deal.

Roosevelt actually provided the public-relations-conscious employers’ inspiration on more than one occasion. In late 1903, the president, building on the model created by the Gray-led commission, brought his open-shop advocacy to the public sector Government Printing Office, where he reinstated William A. Miller, a nonunion bookbinder who had lost his job in the face of union pressure.²⁴ Upholding a culture of solidarity, printers in this office practiced a “no union card, no work” rule. Roosevelt and his assistant in the Department of Labor and Commerce, George B. Cortelyou, an NCF member, apparently cared little about whether government printers held a union card, and decided to reinstate Miller over the union’s strong objections. This act of rehiring, Roosevelt insisted, was fundamentally moral and just. In his autobiography, Roosevelt reflected on the controversy, insisting that “the non-unionist like the unionist, must be protected in all his legal rights by the full weight and power of the law.”²⁵ His open-shop advocacy, framed in the language of inclusion and fairness, represented a blow to unionized printers and to the labor movement in general. And unionists, unsurprisingly, responded bitterly. The Cigar Makers’ International Union’s J. M. Barnes called the president’s intervention a “slap in the face.”²⁶

While Roosevelt disillusioned and disappointed labor activists, organized employers were, unsurprisingly, elated by his actions. In October 1903, Ernest F. Du Brul, the energetic National Metal Trades Association organizer, responded to Roosevelt’s involvement in the Miller controversy by campaigning for similar open-shop rules in Cincinnati, his hometown. Speaking about one of the chief goals of the recently formed Cincinnati Employers’ Association, whose open-shop agenda mirrored that of the NMTA, the National Founders’ Association, and the NAM, Du Brul announced, “The members [of the employers’ association] are determined to wipe out the discrimination on public work in Cincinnati the same as President Roosevelt has done in Washington.” Flying the flag of civic reform, Du Brul found organized labor’s impact on public services as obnoxious as its involvement in impeding the productivity of factories and foundries: “we expect to put boycotting completely out of business, and see to it that public utilities are not tied up by strikes.”²⁷ Here Du Brul, like Roosevelt, presented himself as a concerned, antidiscriminatory citizen, championing the interests of nonunionists and the larger public’s rights over organized labor’s supposedly selfish interests.

Others were equally inspired by Roosevelt’s moral convictions in the face of labor union pressure. In nearby Dayton, the National Cash Register Company’s John H. Patterson, an influential welfare capitalist and NCF member, noted in 1905 that Roosevelt’s support “stamped him as a man and a courageous American citizen of the highest type.” According to Patterson, Roosevelt’s “sense of justice and his regard for the law have caused him to take a firm stand for the open-shop.”²⁸ As Du Brul and Patterson presented matters, concerned employers’ association activists and upstanding citizens leading the federal government, not labor unionists, were the nation’s genuine reformers. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s policies and rhetoric, employers sought to illustrate that they were the foremost public-spirited men who selflessly attempted to implement the president’s policies into their own communities and workplaces. The enthusiasm expressed by Van Cleave, Du Brul, Patterson, and others underlines the importance of both the Square Deal and the Miller decision, which, according to a 1905 article in North American Review, gave “a strong impetus to the open-shop movement.”²⁹

Indeed, the industrial relations involvement of Roosevelt and the Gray commission, combined with Baker’s journalistic contributions, helped align the open-shop system of management with traditions cherished by many Americans, including respect for individual rights, fairness, and policies designed to uphold law and order and peace. Moreover, the roles played by these and growing numbers of other high-profile academics, journalists, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians brought the controversy over open versus closed shops to larger audiences, giving renewed meaning to the labor question. Such figures effectively drew attention to, and helped build sympathy for, the plight of nonunionists, insisting that they, more than union members, constituted society’s true underdogs.

Securing support from Roosevelt, Baker, Gray, and numerous other influential figures is precisely what open-shop employers desired. Employer activists aggressively sought allies from both within and outside industrial relations settings. Outside observers, after all, had the ability to reinforce the employers’ position and thus provide this managerial system with a veneer of respectability. Improving public relations was critical, and employers embraced two basic strategies to win greater support for the open-shop philosophy in Roosevelt’s America. The first approach was organizational. In addition to building associations made up exclusively of employers, they formed hundreds of reformist-sounding, inclusive, and supposedly class-neutral citizens’ associations. Furthermore, employers helped promote the establishment of organizations of nonunion workers; such associations promoted the righteousness of the open-shop policy from below, demonstrating that the movement was not built or led exclusively by merchants, manufacturers, coal operators, or railroad owners.

Second, employers and their supporters ambitiously approached members from the general public, including distinguished figures, in an attempt to make this management system more palatable. Recognizing the importance of securing allies from politics, higher education, journalism, and the broad reform community, employers and their allies mailed millions of journals, pamphlets, and books about the moral superiority of the open-shop principle to journalists, academics, university presidents, teachers, clergymen, and fellow employers.³⁰ In some cases, their direct mail campaigns included reprinted articles, including Baker’s “The Right to Work.”³¹ Additionally, employers invited community supporters to address meetings of open-shop activists. The results of the employers’ multipronged public relations efforts were impressive. By the mid-1910s, numerous figures from across the political spectrum had concluded that the open-shop principle was fairer to workers than closed-shop unionism, the most efficient way to run businesses, and in many cases an expression of American patriotism. Moreover, influential public figures, as Roosevelt’s Square Deal demonstrates, helped magnify the reformist, rather than the repressive, character of the open-shop principle. Together, employers and reformers used language and supported policies designed to promote workplace harmony in terms favorable to themselves and nonunion wage earners while proclaiming a desire to de-escalate class conflict. Some even denied the existence of class divisions. As a NAM member put it in 1914, “We have no classes in our country.”³²

Organized employers had reasons to cheer Roosevelt’s involvement in both settling the anthracite coal strike and in reinstating Miller. Like Roosevelt, employers in the emerging open-shop movement spoke the language of reform. But they had much catching up to do in the early twentieth century, when organized labor, strengthened by the support of clusters of middle-class liberals, had long positioned itself as a leading carrier of the banner of progressivism.³³ Indeed, organized employers remained continuously fearful of the prospect of growing forces on their left, which found expression at the point of production, in voting booths, and in the press. Politically, they saw the nation threatened by pro-union activists who sought to move the country leftward. In fact, several politicians had proposed various forms of what open-shop supporters derided as “class legislation.”³⁴ Some such legislation, typically advanced at the state level, was comparatively mild, designed to protect women and children from long hours and unsafe working conditions. Such reforms generally enjoyed support from both within and outside labor union circles. Other proposals called for fewer hours and an end to court injunctions against strikers.³⁵ Employers felt most uneasy by the threat of protests from below, fearing their economic and social impacts, especially the radical ideas that these movements helped generate. Could open-shop employers successfully compete with the cacophony of calls for working-class solidarity or the growing popularity of, say, socialism?³⁶ Could they offer attractive alternatives to organized labor’s decades-old insistence, amplified persistently by the Industrial Workers of the World, that “an injury to one is an injury to all”? They tried, and in the process found others willing to champion the virtues of individual hard work and labor-management harmony while criticizing instances of labor solidarity and outbreaks of working-class militancy. Open-shop proponents were clearly determined to play a meaningful role in shaping the very character of the era itself, in part by methodically steering public opinion against what the NAM’s David M. Parry called in 1904 “the closed shop and other Socialistic schemes.”³⁷

Open-shop employers realized that effective framing and information dissemination were important years before Baker, Roosevelt, or the Gray commission defended nonunionists’ “right to work” and therefore helped inspire the movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they went to great lengths to illustrate that their managerial activities were not at all based on their narrow class interests as employers. Publicly, they seldom insisted that they wanted open shops because this management system was, say, the most cost-effective and profitable way to run businesses. Nor did they draw attention to their own power and privilege relative to the working classes. Instead, they sought to demonstrate that the critical divisions in society were not between hostile classes, but rather between individual employees and monopoly-imposing unionists and between law-abiding Americans and criminality. Simply put, the open-shop movement was not, they argued, against unions. Indeed, in 1901, the two-year-old NMTA passed a resolution prohibiting “the word ‘non-union’ in all official documents.” Instead, the association’s leadership required that rank-and-filers use the words “free men” and “free shops” when describing nonunionists and open-shop workplaces.³⁸ The underlying message was clear enough: open shops were nondiscriminatory, allowing both unionists and “free men” equal access to employment. According to this logic, open-shop workplaces protected workers’ individualism, allowing them to refuse pressures to join monopoly-imposing labor unions.

The Citizens’ Industrial Association of America

Acknowledging the need to tighten relationships between employers and nonemployers, as well as recognizing the importance of gaining greater respect for themselves and for “free workers,” open-shop proponents formed new, reformist-sounding organizations, including city-based citizens’ associations and the national Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA), during the early twentieth century. Proposed by Kansas City employers in early 1903 and led by Parry—the Lincolnesque figure who helped transform the NAM into an open-shop-crusading powerhouse—the CIAA opened its membership to a multi-class and multioccupational assortment of figures: doctors, professors, lawyers, judges, religious leaders, fellow employers, and even nonunion workers. “Let us not array class against class,” remarked the Reverend William J. H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and movement organizer from Shelbyville, Indiana, at the CIAA inaugural conference in Chicago.³⁹

Yet the CIAA was not led by a cross-class partnership of employers and “free workers.” Seasoned employer activists, a somewhat insular fraternity with shared managerial interests, served in most leadership positions, and the fourteen figures Parry tapped to help direct it included a number of the nation’s most visible union fighters: Denver’s J. C. Craig, Detroit’s E. M. McCleary, Brooklyn’s J. T. Hoile, Cincinnati’s Du Brul, Dayton’s John Kirby, Jr., Chicago’s Frederick W. Job, Battle Creek, Michigan’s Charles Post, New York’s Berkley R. Merwin, Kansas City’s Philip R. Toll, Minneapolis’s J. L. Record, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania’s W. C. Shepherd, and Evansville, Indiana’s Albert C. Rosencranz, a Civil War veteran who had fought in the famous battle of Chickamauga and for ten months languished in a Confederate prison.⁴⁰ The mostly northern and midwestern coalition also included two Confederate veterans, James Van Cleave of St. Louis and N. F. Thompson of Birmingham, who had battled under the command of Confederate general, former slave trader, and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.⁴¹ As a Louisville member noted in 1904, “the South contended with the North to divide the nation, now it will fight with you side by side against the common foe to our industrial liberty!”⁴² Decades after the Civil War, open-shop activists from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had mostly put their old partisan views aside, recognizing the importance of a new, though, in their collective view, equally momentous struggle. Under Parry’s leadership, the old Confederates, by joining their one time foes, had begun to prioritize class and national, over regional, unity, echoing the decades-old Republican call for “free labor.”

Parry’s association was neither the first nor the last to use the word “citizen” in its title. The emergence and authority of various urban-based citizens’ associations in places like Chicago, Denver, New York, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, as well as in the coal regions of Colorado and northeastern Pennsylvania, were quite notable by the time of the inaugural CIAA conference in 1903.⁴³ Consisting of coal mine operators, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and an assortment of mostly white, Protestant elites, these groups typically began during the second part of the nineteenth century in an effort to fight what members considered entrenched, urban-based political problems, including expressions of corruption emanating largely from machine politicians and the working class, the often propertyless constituency that helped elect immigrant mayors. Traditionally, such organizations maintained rather strict membership requirements, participated in various types of locally based lobbying activities, and often, though certainly not always, expressed themselves in nativist ways against the immigrant working classes. The membership of such groups, viewing themselves as natural civic leaders, typically believed that municipal government must be run by professionals rather than by fortunate electoral victors. Some even called for suffrage restrictions, and many were deeply committed to fighting what members of New York City’s elite often referred to as “the dangerous classes.” Some formed militias for this purpose.⁴⁴

Members of Parry’s association shared much with those active in earlier organizations, including anxiety related to the labor movement’s tendency to engage in economically damaging, even riotous, activities. And the CIAA membership included business owners from these former campaigns. Yet the CIAA advertised itself as a respectable, inclusive, multi-class populist organization, rather than a refined and elitist group of snobbish businessmen.⁴⁵ Parry and his colleagues wanted Americans to see them as authentic partners with the nation’s workforce, not hostile rivals engaged in a class struggle for workplace or community control. The organization proclaimed its willingness to bridge class divisions, extending an open hand to the nation’s millions of mostly nonunionists. Consider the CIAA’s stationery letterhead: “For the protection of the common people.” Rather than an anti-democratic organization, its stated purpose, printed on every official letter, was to safeguard the rights of ordinary people, including small shop owners and nonunion “free workers.” Such language certainly represented a departure from the self-important and callous rhetoric articulated by cutthroat capitalists like Baer.⁴⁶ Publicly, these men had chosen benevolence over belligerency.

The close to 300 manufacturers, commercial club members, self-identified reformers, and citizens’ alliance activists who arrived in Chicago in late October 1903 initially lacked a name. Wilbur F. Sanders, a Civil War veteran, Montana pioneer, former Republican senator, and leader of the recently formed Citizens’ Alliance of Helena, proposed “Citizens’ Industrial Association of America.” Sanders, who had earned his reputation as a crusading vigilante lawyer against western gold thieves and murderers in the 1860s—Lew L. Callaway, a chronicler of these Wild West days, referred to him as the “chief counsel for the people”—won the delegates’ unanimous approval: the name “was finally adopted without a dissenting vote.”⁴⁷ Decades later, the sixty-nine-year-old veteran law-and-order campaigner and frontier savior sought to continue a struggle against opponents as equally menacing as the West’s most notorious criminals. And the delegates clearly respected one of Montana’s first two U.S. senators and likely appreciated his impressive background, which, in addition to helping tame parts of the Wild West, included extensive legal activities on behalf of the gigantic Northern Pacific Railroad between 1880 and 1890, and senatorial service alongside Democrat Gray (the two former railroad lawyers had served together on the seven-person Committee on Patents) in the early 1890s. Indeed, the famous Republican’s participation in patriotic Civil War battles in Tennessee, his take-no-prisoners approach to western lawbreakers, and his criticisms of alleged acts of Democratic Party corruption in Montana during the 1890s suggested that he was fully prepared to help protect “the common people” in Roosevelt’s America.⁴⁸

Sanders was certainly no stranger to the labor question. Labor unrest repeatedly erupted in parts of Montana, and few of the region’s residents could ignore the dramatic mine and railroad struggles that broke out in the 1890s.⁴⁹ Sanders, a staunch Republican intimately allied with the region’s copper mining and railroad industries, predictably took the capitalists’ side, and in 1897 he denounced union activists as “worthless characters.”⁵⁰ In the face of repeated labor conflicts, he became a leading member of the open-shop Citizens’ Alliance of Helena, which, according to its 1903 founding document, organized “in defense of Labor, from which it would remove all shackles.” Helena’s citizens’ alliance, like similar associations, was “opposed to boycotts, to lockouts, to strikes, and to all conspiracies concocted with a view to invade the rights and privileges of American Citizens.”⁵¹ The organization, like the CIAA, presented itself as an undistorted patriotic outfit committed to assisting, not hurting, the rights of wage earners.

Sanders demonstrated a willingness to help a number of different underdogs. He served as a defense lawyer for a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy convicted of murder in 1879 and, in the 1890s, represented members of the Chinese community, a group that had repeatedly faced organized labor’s wrath.⁵² Growing numbers of western-based white unionists, arguing that Chinese residents were responsible for driving down wages, repeatedly lashed out at both Chinese laborers and small business owners in several Montana communities. In 1896 and 1897, an extensive coalition of Butte’s unions, including locals representing brewers, carpenters, miners, and molders, organized a citywide boycott of Chinese and Japanese restaurants and laundries. Suffering financially as a result, dozens of these immigrants sought legal protections against the boycott and compensation for their financial losses—$500,000 in lost income in their estimation. In 1898, they secured Sanders’s help, who represented them in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. Here the complainants discussed the boycott’s crippling economic consequences, as well as the ways unionists mistreated both Asian business owners and their customers. Sanders reported that “three or four hundred” demonstrators, backed by walking delegates—the boycott enforcers—apparently stood in front of restaurants, harassing and discouraging potential customers from entering.⁵³ Speaking in court, Chinese-born Hum Fay, owner of the Palace Chop House, testified that union activists harassed his customers “day by day.” As a result, business, he complained, “got so bad.” Fay and members of his community desperately craved what he called “protection.”⁵⁴ Sanders helped them win the case by securing an injunction against the protestors who, in his words, “willfully and maliciously combined, conspired, and confederated together” to destroy numerous businesses.⁵⁵

Sanders was one of the numerous defenders of “free” workers, business owners, and, more generally, “the common people,” who helped shape the CIAA’s orientation. In order to respond properly and effectively to irksome and often destructive trade unionists, delegates at the CIAA’s first conference took on a number of tasks. The most dedicated members joined committees, which focused on matters important to practically all voluntary organizations, including credentials, rules and orders of business, resolutions, constitution, dues, nominations, and the press. Most CIAA leaders served on at least one committee.

One of the CIAA’s most noteworthy and influential subgroups was the three-member press committee, which included Chicago’s Job, Parry’s personal secretary John Maxwell, and a twenty-seven-year-old Kansas City newspaperman named George Creel. Creel first established a name for himself as a muckraker who had exposed a series of police scandals, first in Kansas City and later in Denver. Given his background, it made sense that he served on the CIAA’s press committee; Creel started his career as a newspaper reporter in 1894, and five years later purchased his own paper, the (Kansas City) Independent, which he owned and edited until 1908. Throughout the early twentieth century, Creel also served as Kansas City coal inspector, supported suffrage rights for women, advocated public ownership of utilities, and strongly opposed child labor, insisting that it, as he and his coauthors explained in 1914, is a “fundamental evil.”⁵⁶ As a reporter, Creel had also criticized coal mine employers like Baer for stubbornly refusing to consider the larger public’s interests during the 1902 coal strike. Given his moral sensitivity and muckraking zeal, Creel demonstrated that he certainly did not fit the image of the arrogant and pitiless labor-fighting capitalist. The tent the CIAA built was designed to be large enough to accommodate people like Creel, and by 1904, 247 employers’ associations, impressed with the efforts of Sanders, Creel, Parry, and many others, had affiliated with the organization.⁵⁷

Figure 2. Wilbur F. Sanders in Butte, Montana (ca. 1890). Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

In fact, one of the CIAA’s central goals was to bring as many people as possible under this large, and expanding, tent—and to shape public opinion. As owner and editor of the Independent, Creel, like the handful of other newspaper-owning open-shop proponents, enjoyed certain advantages.⁵⁸ His newspaper routinely carried articles sympathetic to the struggles of employers, and from April 1903 to March 1904, it served as the official mouthpiece of the Kansas City Employers’ Association, “Devoted to the Interest of Employer and Independent Employee.” Using the Independent to disseminate its views, this CIAA-affiliated association promised to challenge those who sought to advance “the interests of any class against the other.”⁵⁹

National employers’ association magazines occasionally reprinted and disseminated essays from Creel’s paper. For example, in 1905, the Open Shop reprinted an essay by Hugh O’Neal about a successful union-cleansing campaign led by an Australian ship owner. O’Neal’s story highlights the ways the owner, Malcolm Donald McEacharn, patiently waited out a strike of difficult unionists “led by,” according to O’Neal, “asses.” McEacharn had previously surrendered to union demands, but eventually decided the costs of negotiating exceeded the benefits of managing unilaterally. After ten weeks of picket line protests, “starvation,” O’Neal reported, “won easily,” and “the once great trades union [sic] of Australia were counted out.” Many of the men eventually returned to work as individuals, leaving McEacharn unshackled by the bane of closed-shop unionism.⁶⁰ By printing this story, Creel and the open-shop leadership sought to demonstrate that American employers were not the only victims of nagging labor problems. Yet O’Neal’s account was principally meant to inspire, illustrating an example of a distant “common” man’s unmistakable triumph over union adversity.

Roughly a decade after he helped shape the CIAA’s orientation, Creel became famous internationally as the primary architect of the Committee on Public Information, the name of President Woodrow Wilson’s comprehensive propaganda campaign, which was designed to win public support for America’s unprecedented military intervention in World War I. The wartime strategies that Creel employed were hardly new, and it is fair to say that his involvement in open-shop associations like the CIAA and the Kansas City Employers’ Association helped him master propaganda disseminating techniques that Wilson later found useful as they both attempted to “make the world safe for democracy.”⁶¹

Creel and his colleagues gathered in Chicago more than a decade before World War I partially because they wanted to build a sturdy organization that, according to the first of the CIAA’s eight objectives, assisted, “by all lawful and practical means, the properly constituted authorities of the State and Nation in maintaining and defending the supremacy of the law and rights of the citizen.” The men demanded “industrial peace” and sought to “create and direct a public sentiment in opposition to all forms of violence, coercion and intimidation.” Unsurprisingly, the delegates proclaimed their support for “individual enterprise and freedom in management of industry, under which the people of the United States have made this the most successful and powerful nation of the world.” In order to build and sustain such sentiment explicitly connecting the open-shop principle to American patriotism, the CIAA established a “Bureau of Education for the publication and distribution tending to foster the objects of the organization.”⁶² Reaching a broad public with messages that linked the open-shop system to justice, industrial efficiency, American patriotism, and protection of the underdog was critical in a context in which union activists challenged thousands of employers. Denver’s Craig explained in 1904 that “It might almost be said that public sentiment is the most important factor in the settlement of all such [workplace] controversies.”⁶³

These activists, like NCF-affiliated businessmen, sought to demonstrate their progressive credentials by distinguishing themselves from the numerous cold-hearted employers who, over the years, had demonstrated little or no interest in the welfare of their wage earners. Such seemingly heartless figures ostensibly overworked their employees, cared about nothing but profit maximization, and frequently went into combat mode when confronted with shop floor grievances. Take, for instance, the words of Van Cleave, whose speech at the CIAA 1906 convention appeared Rooseveltian in its pledge to fairness: “As we all know, there are autocratic and oppressive employers. Judging by many of their acts they seem to believe that the relations between capital and labor are like those between belligerents in war.” Though relatively small in number, in Van Cleave’s estimation, this population was “numerous enough, however, to reflect discredit and to inflict injury on the entire guild of employers.”⁶⁴ Though he refrained from identifying names, Van Cleave may have had in mind figures like Baer, individuals who, through their callous words, authoritarian actions, and managerial shortsightedness, created a poor image of businessmen as a whole. Whatever the case, Van Cleave sought to distance the CIAA from these “oppressive employers,” believing that a small number of bad apples ultimately hurt the reputation of reasonable and magnanimous merchants and manufacturers. The CIAA, building on the open-shop movement’s work generally, sought to chart a new course, one designed to establish trust with the general public and the working class by promoting what Van Cleave called “peaceable relations between employers and employed.”⁶⁵ This was, quite clearly, the language of reform. After all, what forward-thinking social reformer or industrial modernizer was uninterested in establishing lasting “peaceable relations”?

The same year that Van Cleave called for establishing “peaceable relations” between employers and wage earners, the CIAA went on the record supporting laws and practices that reduced child labor “abuses.” Its support appeared sincere and was hardly tepid; the membership announced approval for “every lawful and proper means for correcting these abuses either in the way of the education and enlightenment of public opinion, the enforcement of existing laws, or the passage and wise and humane enforcement of such additional laws as may be necessary and adequate to bring about a change in existing conditions.” Finally, the organization called for punishing “the real offender, whoever he may be, employer or parent, or both.”⁶⁶

And on the question of organized labor, the CIAA, on paper, did not appear especially antiunion. It, like the NCF, as well as the NMTA and the NFA in their early years, defended responsible and lawful unionism, recognizing “the free right of workmen to combine.” The CIAA’s stated purpose was not to eliminate unions altogether. Workers nevertheless needed to understand, the organization held, that labor and management shared the same interests. Strikes, after all, had injurious impacts on employees, managers, and most of all, the general population. Unions had no reason to challenge employers because, as the CIAA put it in 1903, “our welfare is inseparable from theirs and theirs from ours; we are essentially interdependent, each is indispensably necessary to the other; and those who stir up strife between us are enemies of mankind.”⁶⁷

The CIAA’s respect for, and willingness to unconditionally defend, mankind was on full display beginning in 1905 when the organization, showing its high regard for Roosevelt’s famous involvement in settling the 1902 anthracite coal strike, began publishing the Square Deal, a monthly magazine that featured accounts of organized labor’s excesses, fables and poems stressing the open-shop principle’s moral soundness, and articles showcasing various court cases legitimizing the plight of “free” workers.⁶⁸ Contributors came from a wide-section of society. University-based economists offered hardheaded reasons why the open-shop system was the most rational, efficient and fair form of management while Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish spokespersons penned essays on the alleged impiety of closed shops.⁶⁹ Such impiety was rooted in the supposed corruption and brutal tendencies of union leaders, figures who went to great lengths, including using violence, to establish their supposedly selfish demands over the rights of nonunionists. The open-shop movement, the Square Deal habitually claimed, was concerned with tackling this problem from multiple angles. As J. Laurence Laughlin, the prominent University of Chicago economist, Roosevelt’s former Harvard University professor, and one of the Federal Reserve Act’s authors, explained in 1914, arguments against closed-shop unionism are “legally, economically, and morally overwhelming.”⁷⁰

In this spirit, the CIAA argued that closed shops resembled a new, and equally brutal form of slavery. The Square Deal’s pages contained numerous articles calculated to alarm readers about the supposedly deceitful, lawless, and thuggish labor leaders who frequently forced “free” men to join unions, pay dues, and follow their presumably loathsome and economically destructive dictates. And those who resisted were unfairly punished by these merciless and barbaric leaders. The cover page of the first issue of the Square Deal in 1905 set the tone; it featured a dramatic cartoon depicting a chained nonunion man receiving a whipping by an overbearing union business agent. The caption read, “Will the white slave have a Lincoln?”⁷¹

A Movement from Below?

There was hope. In fact, open-shop campaigners, unlike those active in earlier citizens’ associations, sought to partner with ordinary, law-abiding Americans, including the “white slaves.” These supposedly brutalized slaves had become active, paradoxically, in their own emancipatory, anti-union associations. In other words, independent workers, like late antebellum black slaves, had agency and were unafraid to actively champion the virtues of free labor in the face of hostile oppressors. Organized groups of “free workers” emerged in urban areas at roughly the same time that employers’ associations began systematically cleansing their workplaces of union activists. In 1902, Albany’s Rev. E. M. Fairchild, for example, proclaimed his commitment to helping closed-shop victims establish a “National League of Independent Workmen of America.” The workers involved in the league would, in Fairchild’s words, “demand that employers run their shops as ‘open shops’.”⁷² Meanwhile, coercive labor activists in Dayton, home of open-shop leader Kirby, prompted nonunionists to form the Modern Order of Bees, a workingmen’s group that challenged, according to a 1903 article in the NMTA’s Bulletin, “the influence of the law-breakers and the intimidators.”⁷³ And in early 1903, Elmira, New York, began hosting the first chapter of the Independent Labor League of America (ILLA), “organized by workingmen for the maintenance of their rights to personal liberty.” These organizations, apparently built from below with management’s enthusiastic approval, were chiefly concerned with promoting “good character” and showing, as Dayton’s Modern Order of Bees put it in 1902, that “both employer and employee will recognize the fact that their interests are identical.”⁷⁴ The underlying message was clear enough: the common people, both the employed and employers overseeing various-sized businesses, had shared interests and goals in promoting a more respectful and peaceful industrial relations system.

These organizations emerged with the assistance of open-shop employers and their middle-class allies. Consider the case of Fairchild, an Albany clergyman and published sociologist who first developed sympathy for nonunion workers during the course of an Albany streetcar strike in 1901.⁷⁵ He was appalled by the widespread violence that the strike generated, and afterward decided to deepen his knowledge of the causes, characteristics, and consequences of labor-management struggles. The next year, he, like Baker and Brandeis, visited northeastern Pennsylvania, where he spent ten days observing coercive tactics staged by UMWA members. He took his study seriously, reading books and articles about the labor question, conducting interviews with those embroiled in industrial unrest, and photographing strike scenes. He believed that his profession gave him a certain amount of credibility that employers simply lacked. “The very fact that I am a clergyman, and not an employer,” he remarked in 1903, “has made it possible for me to get an understanding of this labor problem from the workman’s point of view.”⁷⁶

While conducting fieldwork, the Oberlin College-educated Fairchild, like Baker, encountered numerous workers who rejected their union leaders’ values and policies. Over the course of the century’s first years, the clergyman talked with dozens of Pennsylvania coal miners, Albany streetcar workers, and southwestern New York machinists, who apparently valued hard work, appreciated their managers, respected the law, and sought a degree of upward mobility—values and goals often rejected by labor activists. Such individuals, he discovered, were often profoundly uncomfortable with some of the decisions of their union leaders. This was especially clear among ambitious and talented mechanics at Elmira’s Payne Engineering and Foundry Company, a modest-sized manufacturer of iron and brass castings owned by N. B. Payne, an NMTA leader. Numerous mechanics here supported the company’s premium system of payment—a system that rewarded individual workers with financial bonuses for increased productivity.⁷⁷ The International Association of Machinists, which had maintained a presence in the Payne Company, opposed this incentive plan, and called a strike shortly after management implemented it. But not all left their workstations: “Some twenty of Mr. Payne’s best machinists refused to strike, and were immediately insulted as ‘scabs’,” Fairchild reported.⁷⁸ In the face of this struggle, which also involved union-initiated violence, these non-striking men demanded, and ultimately created, a new organization.

Fairchild and Elmira’s “free men” celebrated the establishment of the ILLA on March 19, 1903. The organization’s principal aim was perfectly consistent with the open-shop movement’s goals: “To protect workmen in their independence.”⁷⁹ The extent of Fairchild’s involvement in the formation of this organization is difficult to measure, though we do know that the clergyman had established relationships with some of the antiunion workers before the strike. Whatever the case, union activists lampooned this organization and others like it. Writing in late 1903, a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers declared that “one can almost see the wage earners of this country falling over each other in an attempt to become members of this wonderful organization in order to obtain a reduction in wages or increased hours of labor.”⁸⁰

Despite sardonic comments from union activists, this supposedly bottom-up movement quickly gained momentum. Shortly after its formation in Elmira, “free workers” created other branches, and besieged employers approached these organizations during strikes for employment purposes. ILLA branches became highly useful to employers’ associations embroiled in numerous workplace showdowns. For instance, during a Brooklyn shipyard strike in June 1903, Henry C. Hunter, secretary of New York City’s Metal Trades Association, was happy to employ league members as strikebreakers. Hunter, a talented strikebreaking architect, was enormously pleased that it “has a branch in New York and undertakes to supply competent men.”⁸¹ Some manufacturers contacted league chapters to obtain “free men” before launching new workplaces. Consider the words of an unnamed Ohio employer writing in 1903: “Our reason for writing to you is that we desire to employ members of the Independent Labor League of America in a large new foundry which we are ready to start.”⁸² The league essentially served as a reserve army of potential strikebreakers, delighting open-shop enthusiasts and labor-hungry supervisors alike. And this movement continued to grow after Roosevelt announced his Square Deal. By the end of 1903, six cities—Albany, Boston, Detroit, Elmira, New York City, and Sherman, Texas—hosted chapters. League branches reinforced the efforts of the CIAA, emboldened “free workers,” and sent a powerful message demonstrating that the open-shop movement was more than a top-down campaign led exclusively by the moneyed elite.⁸³

“Gratifying results of the employers’ movement”