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Introduction. Reformers and Fighters: Employers and the Labor Problem

Those who have given any thought to the labor question must see that it is a very inadequate statement to make that it is merely a controversy between employers and employes.

—David M. Parry, 1904

The period between 1890 and 1917 in the United States was shaped by both far-reaching reforms and episodic cases of violence and repression. Reform-minded citizens fought corruption and vice in cities and in official politics, sought to make our food and water supplies safer, denounced the role of alcohol in society, and campaigned for protective labor laws. Some reformers were motivated to improve efficiency; others were troubled by what they considered expressions of immorality in communities and workplaces. In that same era, dramatic strikes pitted militant workers against obstinate employers. Middle-class campaigners helped win legislation designed to protect some workers—namely women and children—at roughly the same time that immigrant anarchists, western miners, and socialists of various stripes preached the need for a working-class-led revolution. Picket-line violence was commonplace, and the state responded to the most aggressive examples of working-class combativeness and acts of sabotage with arrests, and sometimes even executions. The era truly was, as the names of two influential books about the period suggest, both an Age of Reform and America’s First Age of Terror.¹

This project investigates the ways an often overlooked and under-explored group, employers and their allies, helped shape this period of contrasts. Why study the history of American employers and their organizations? The reason is straightforward: historically, they have wielded a tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people. They hired, fired, disciplined, rewarded, promoted, set pay rates, decided what, if any, benefits to offer, and fought trade unionists and working-class activists. Turn-of-the-century employers representing different types and sizes of workplaces also joined with one another in unprecedented ways to build powerful organizations designed to alleviate the “labor problem,” which Americans from all classes viewed as one of the era’s most pressing concerns. Defined largely by clergymen, lawyers, journalists, and employers in the years after the Civil War, the labor problem consisted of a set of working class-led activities, including union organizing campaigns, boycotts, and strikes, that threatened to destabilize American capitalism.² How, reform-seeking employers demanded to know, could they best respond to expressions of insubordination like strikes and workers’ demands for recognition, which in practice meant the establishment of closed shops—workplaces where all wage earners held union membership cards and bargained collectively with management?³ Hundreds of employers’ organizations, established at both the local and national levels, worked to solve these multilayered challenges at the point of production, in politics, and in society more generally. This study reveals that an employer-centered analysis offers an especially fruitful way of understanding the dynamics of class relations, the rhetorical power of progressivism, and the workings of the era’s political economy.

What was, from employers’ collective perspective, the long-term labor solution? Their answer was the widespread creation of workplaces filled with loyal, industrious, and law-abiding employees who sincerely respected America’s industrial and political institutions. Above all, employers and their allies generally believed that wage earners must embrace individualism over collectivism, and hence resist the temptations to join anarchist or socialist organizations or the more numerous “labor trusts”—the term employers and their allies used to describe what they considered the many powerful, intemperate, and subversive unions that demanded recognition and collective bargaining rights. Reinforcing a commonly held opinion among employers, George B. Hugo—owner of a modest-sized Bostonbased wholesale liquor and beer bottling company, head of the Employers’ Association of Massachusetts, and a former leader of the influential Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA)—drew an especially stark contrast between the two basic choices facing workers in 1909: “Properly defined, individualism means progressive civilization, order, and liberty. Collectivism means retrogression, chaos, compulsion, and, at its best, state servitude.”⁴ In an effort to find solutions to the many-sided labor problem, employers like Hugo had built alliances with one another and with members of their communities, lobbied politicians, organized public lectures, published and distributed pamphlets, and fired and blacklisted working-class activists who demanded collective bargaining rights.⁵ Paradoxically, early twentieth-century employers, including many self-identified reformers, established hundreds of “defense” organizations—both restrictive employers’ associations and the more inclusive “citizens’” alliances—largely to discourage workers from participating in their own confrontational, class-based associations.

No issue better highlights employers’ combination of reformist and combative tendencies, this study maintains, than their widespread involvement in establishing open-shop workplaces—workplaces run by employers who refused to recognize or negotiate with labor unions—and in creating a well-organized and mostly effective open-shop movement. Organized employers, many of whom were stalwart Republicans, invented and popularized the anti-labor union open-shop theory—which they presented as a nondiscriminatory managerial principle, welcoming both union and nonunion “free” men—in the aftermath of the late nineteenth-century labor actions that rocked much of the nation.⁶ Soon, thousands embraced the theory and took part in the open-shop movement, which was designed to liberate employers and nonunionists from what they considered the burdens of collective bargaining, labor unrest, and “class dictation.” In short, employers demanded greater freedom to hire and fire.⁷ By the early post-World War I period, 1,665 separate employers and business associations throughout the country officially supported the open-shop movement and enforced this managerial policy in their workplaces.⁸ This study examines the origins, character, growth, and limitations of the first-wave open-shop movement—which emerged at the turn of the century and concluded when the United States entered World War I—by exploring the colorful figures behind it and the ideas and events that influenced them.

Who exactly were these figures? One cannot offer a perfectly exhaustive sociological portrait of the thousands of merchants, manufacturers, coal mine bosses, bankers, railroad executives, clergymen, lawyers, journalists, academics, and nonunion workers who gave the movement its character and direction. But this study does explore some of the most influential, outspoken, and visible open-shop proponents, examining their involvement in campaigns against the labor problem both nationally and in several important industrial centers: Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, Massachusetts, and southern areas of the United States. Indeed, this book, in part because of its spatial approach, illuminates both the national and regional dimensions of the open-shop movement’s foundational history.⁹

We can actually make some generalizations about many of the individuals who participated in the assorted groups that helped launch and lead this movement. A glance at the membership of the National Metal Trades Association (NMTA), the National Founders’ Association (NFA), and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—influential business organizations that emerged in the late nineteenth century—reveals that numerous members identified with the Republican Party, resided in northern and midwestern cities, and shared a profound appreciation for America’s economic vibrancy. Some had fought as Union soldiers during the Civil War, and most held the nation’s political history and institutions in high esteem. Many were engineers, managed various-sized specialized manufacturing establishments, celebrated periods of prosperity, and coped, as best as they could, with periodic economic downturns. These relatively privileged men, residing in cities like Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Worcester, also joined commercial clubs, engineering societies, higher education alumni groups, Republican leagues, and English-style gentlemen’s associations—organizations that offered intellectual and social stimulation and thus fostered class-based bonds of friendship and solidarity. By century’s end, these figures—the architects and beneficiaries of what historians have long called the second industrial revolution—had ultimately developed a common concern with the labor problem, the primary force that they believed threatened to undermine their collective goals of financial prosperity, industrial progress, and managerial stability.¹⁰ In 1903, Frank Vanderlip, a New York banker and open-shop proponent summed up these fears succinctly, warning that “the only serious obstacle” to these objectives “will be our labor organizations.”¹¹

This study brings to light the efforts of the numerous activists who helped convince employers to join with one another to confront this “serious obstacle.” One of the most influential individuals we will meet was an ambitious and talented Cincinnati-based organizer named Ernest F. Du Brul, a partner in the large Miller, Du Brul, and Peters Manufacturing Company, a highly productive and internationally recognized cigar mold manufacturing establishment. Beginning in 1902, the Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins educated Du Brul organized numerous recruitment trips and met with audiences of engineers and manufacturers in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. In early 1903, Du Brul expressed enormous satisfaction with the results of his enlistment campaigns in a newspaper interview: “in about 100 different places central bodies of employers are now flourishing.”¹² Du Brul helped motivate many fellow union critics, including David M. Parry, the Indianapolis-based carriage manufacturer who helped turn the NAM into the nation’s most recognized open-shop organization in spring 1903. Speaking to an excited crowd of 400 like-minded open-shop proponents, including Du Brul, in Indianapolis in early 1904, Parry explained that “the cry is going up in every part of the country: ‘we want to be organized’.”¹³

This book does not limit itself to members of manufacturers’ associations in the Northeast or Midwest. As Parry noted, not all open-shop activists lived in highly industrialized cities in these regions, and some preferred to join one of the hundreds of “citizens’ associations” rather than one or more of the less inclusive employers’ organizations. For example, an additional noteworthy labor movement foe, Wilbur F. Sanders—western pioneer, 1860s vigilante, and one of Montana’s first two U.S. senators—helped lead both the Citizens’ Alliance of Helena and the larger, more powerful CIAA in the early twentieth century. The CIAA—comprised of open-shop activists from throughout the nation, including many from small and moderate-sized western cities—campaigned for “the maintenance of industrial peace, the preservation of constitutional rights, and the creation of public sentiment against all forms of violence, coercion and intimidation,” wrote George Creel, a Kansas City newspaperman and one of its spokespersons, in 1903.¹⁴

Union opponents were especially successful in the South. And another prominent CIAA member we will meet is Birmingham’s N. F. Thompson, an enthusiastic regional booster, Confederate veteran, and one of the first Ku Klux Klan heads. Thompson had earned a reputation for his unapologetic condemnations of labor unrest at the turn of the century. In 1900, for example, the former Klansman called for the enactment of “justifiable homicide” laws in the context of labor-management disputes. Such laws would provide employers with the legal right to murder those who threatened, in Thompson’s words, the “right [of Americans] to earn an honest living.”¹⁵ By exploring the activities of individuals like Sanders and Thompson, this study draws fresh connections between nineteenth-century vigilantism and racial violence on the one hand and early twentieth-century anti-union activism on the other. Indeed, both Sanders and Thompson invoked the politics of law and order in the context of confrontations with labor in the 1900s, just as they had previously during their respective struggles against gold thieves and insubordinate former slaves in the 1860s. A proper analysis of the movement’s activists and leaders, as this study demonstrates, requires that we reckon with this deep history.

Many open-shop activists did not start their adult lives as businessmen or elite politicians. Some, like NFA chief organizer John A. Penton, were even once active in the labor movement before switching sides. Well before he worked for the NFA at the turn of the century, Penton headed the International Brotherhood of Machinery Molders of North America—a union that engaged in numerous jurisdictional disputes with the substantially larger Iron Molders Union (IMU) in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Penton abandoned the labor movement in the 1890s, and in 1900 played a critical role in helping Cleveland’s foundry operators recruit strikebreakers during a dramatic work stoppage staged by his old IMU adversaries. Shortly afterward, the Cleveland-based Penton—who rivaled Du Brul as the period’s most ambitious employer organizer—established the Penton Publishing Company, which produced and circulated a half-dozen trade publications nationally that frequently covered the open-shop movement’s challenges and successes.

Movement participants were somewhat diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, and religion. Most open-shop advocates were Protestant whites, but certainly not all. Elite African Americans like Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in southern Alabama, and William H. Councill, top administrator at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Huntsville, played their own roles in assisting their mostly white colleagues by encouraging southern black students and graduates to stay away from labor unions. And several leading employer activists were Catholic by religion, including Du Brul and Thompson. Jews were also present in the movement, especially in the garment industry. As we will discover, a shared dislike of closed shops combined with a pervasive fear of labor unrest helped unite dissimilar groups of economically privileged elites.

In an effort to protect themselves, business interests generally, and nonunion workers, Creel, Du Brul, Parry, Penton, Sanders, Thompson, and many others had concluded that they needed their own organizations to effectively challenge what CIAA activist C. W. Post called in 1906 “the greatest trust with which the people have had to contend.”¹⁶ Together, they became active in what one newspaper in 1902 called “missionary work.”¹⁷

The nation’s variety of open-shop advocates realized that effectively framing the movement’s agenda and goals remained a critical task from its birth to the 1910s and beyond. As Creel put it in 1903, “public opinion is the great arbitrator.”¹⁸ By this time, a diverse set of employers and their supporters had insisted that the open-shop principle, the idea that workers must be allowed access to jobs irrespective of union status, constituted a fundamentally fair, progressive, economically sound, and ultimately American alternative to closed shops. “The union label,” Thompson complained in 1907, “no longer stands for skill or merit in any particular way, but it has become a weapon with which to fight independent workmen and a club to destroy freedom in a free land.”¹⁹ Writing in 1910, one NAM leader, reinforcing Thompson, referred to the membership of his organization as “the progressive employers of the United States.”²⁰ By highlighting such rhetoric—including statements that connected open shops to American patriotism, workplace competence, and merit—this study aims to heighten our understanding of this forceful movement’s reformist tendencies. After all, those in the crusade’s front line presented themselves, first and foremost, as mainstream campaigners, defenders of ordinary people, and representatives of technological and managerial progress, “not,” Creel argued in 1903, “a body of ‘Labor Crushers,’ or ‘Strike Busters’.”²¹ In other words, those in the movement sought to show that they were far from the profit-driven reactionaries and union busters depicted by labor union and leftist activists.

Open-shop advocates claimed that they stood squarely in favor of what we have come to call a system of meritocracy, and they argued that open-shop workplaces rewarded employees for their loyalty, skill, and efficiency, not whether or not they belonged to unions. Writing in 1902, Chattanooga’s E. H. Putnam, a foundry operator and one of the original organizers of the NFA, insisted that well-trained independent workmen “are better molders than some of the fellows who are drifting about the country with union cards in their pockets.”²² These “better” employees, open-shop proponents claimed, deserved the right to employment without confronting pressures to join labor organizations as a precondition. As Putnam’s colleague Philadelphia’s William H. Pfahler explained in early 1903, the individual job hunter must “be free to seek employment wherever and under whatsoever conditions he may prefer, without regard to his politics, his religion, or his affiliation with organizations based on principles which he cannot endure.”²³ For industrial leaders like Pfahler, discrimination against nonunionists, a central feature of closed shops, was no less immoral than any other form of intolerance.

Employers and their allies often complained that closed shops suffered from inefficiencies and were plagued by unnecessary rules, as well as challenging, unreasonable union leaders—individuals who, open-shop proponents believed, stubbornly held on to outdated ideas. Such leaders routinely demanded across-the-board wage increases for all, irrespective of skill, behavior, or productivity levels, and periodically launched crippling work stoppages, which, union critics insisted, threatened manufacturing and technological progress. “Striking as a means of redressing wrongs,” Creel’s Independent newspaper declared in late 1901, “is a thing of the past.”²⁴ Indeed, employers maintained that demanding unionists, unlike themselves, behaved anachronistically. Writing about one union during a 1906 strike against the introduction of open-shop conditions, a commentator in a trade publication noted, “Sentiment has moved on, but the Iron Molders Union has refused to move with it. Its failure to catch step with the modern industrial movement has demonstrated its unfitness for the control of the instruments of production at which it aims.”²⁵ Closed shops were, as another open-shop magazine asserted in 1908, “tyrannical and reactionary.”²⁶

This study illustrates that open-shop advocates hungered for an industrial relations system that allowed them greater freedom to manage, insisting that they must enjoy the unalloyed authority to employ nonunionists and reward ambitious individuals with financial bonuses and attractive working conditions while also enjoying the flexibility to dismiss those they deemed lazy, inefficient, or insubordinate. Wage rates, workload, hours, benefits, and employment itself, open-shop defenders maintained, needed to be tied to the output and reliability of employees, to the overall state of the economy, and ultimately to the judgment of managers, not to onerous collective bargaining agreements or to pressure from trade unions. Why, employers and their allies asked, would employees want to labor in closed shops, workplaces that apparently suppressed their individual talents and restricted their ability to choose whether they wanted to belong to a labor organization?

But, as we know, hundreds of thousands of workers in various industries did join unions, demanding the establishment of closed shops, the ability to negotiate contracts, and the right to secure regular across-theboard pay increases. Facing a determined employer class, workers frequently disrupted production and joined picket lines in their efforts to achieve these aims. In the face of such pressure, employers often responded collectively, fired protestors, recruited strikebreakers, attempted to influence public opinion, and collaborated with lawyers—many of whom held membership in employers’ associations—to secure injunctions and thus resume production. For the most part, organized employers had enormous faith in the nation’s public institutions, expecting that the courts and police had a responsibility to protect businesses, property, and nonunionists in confrontations with protestors. But they also believed that the private sector had a crucial role to play in these efforts, and many employers from the metal-working, foundry, garment, coal mining, railroad, retail, timber, and numerous other industries used their connections with one another and with law enforcement to fill struck workplaces with nonunionists. They often referred to nonunionists as “free men,” individuals unburdened by union rules, unwilling to participate in coercive picket-line activities, and uninterested in fostering the development of what Thompson referred to in 1903 as “class dictation, class interference, and class rule.”²⁷ Employers, seeking to both contain the labor problem and remove the concept of class from the consciousness of as many workers as possible, routinely defended their often heavy-handed managerial policies.²⁸ A spokesperson from the NMTA summed up the fight apocalyptically in 1903: “The devil must be fought with fire.”²⁹ Thus employers and their allies became flamethrowers, they maintained, out of necessity. In the face of labor unrest, they used a common phrase to justify their actions: “Do Right—Then Fight.”³⁰

As they sought to “do right,” union fighters repeatedly claimed to place the interests of the nation above their own particular economic and class concerns. They denounced strike leaders and unionists generally who used coercion to build unions, presenting themselves, most importantly, as class-neutral defenders of the American people’s long-term interests, not merely protectors of the business community.³¹ As Parry put it in April 1903, employers had opted to act decisively because union activists had simply become too powerful, “dominating to a dangerous degree the whole social, political and governmental systems of the Nation.”³²

The commanding, straight-talking Parry, building on the efforts of union antagonists like Du Brul, Sanders, Thompson, Penton, Pfahler, Putnam, and others, had helped give voice and direction to growing numbers of employers who had long struggled with restive, closed-shop-demanding workers. By the time Parry had assisted in turning the NAM into a robust union-fighting outfit in 1903—a year when organized labor staged close to 3,500 strikes nationally—thousands had already flocked to the hundreds of national and local employers’ associations. By mid-decade, groups like the NAM, the NFA, the NMTA, the American Anti-Boycott Association (AABA), the many locally based employers’ associations, and the considerably more inclusive CIAA had transformed labor relations by providing union opponents with numerous perks: access to strikebreakers and spies, managerial training, legal assistance, greater confidence, comradeship, and a set of progressive-sounding talking points as they struggled against what appeared to be an overwhelming labor problem. In the face of this problem, they sought to, as the CIAA put it on its letterhead, protect “the common people”—no one narrow group or class.

Employers, many of whom identified themselves as enlightened visionaries partially responsible for the welfare of “the common people,” repeatedly showed a willingness to protect individual nonunion workers against challenges from a “monopoly-imposing,” often hostile, and sometimes lawless labor movement. They promised to offer a genuine alternative to closed shops, insisting, as veteran open-shop activist Walter Gordon Merritt put it in 1919, that “factory solidarity” was far superior to “class solidarity.”³³ And indeed, many employers offered benefits beyond pay to their workers and engaged in philanthropic activities in their communities. As so-called welfare capitalists, employers, especially those who oversaw large multi-campus workplaces, sought to improve industrial life by investing in sports teams, theater clubs, seasonal outings, and measures intended to improve shop floor safety. Additionally, a number offered their employees health insurance and subsidized housing. Some employer activists insisted that all owners and managers must demonstrate kindness to their wage earners, and they criticized those who failed to treat their employees fairly. For example, a spokesperson for the employer-led Citizens’ Industrial Association of St. Louis, which claimed a membership of 8,500, declared in 1907 that “Our Association has no worse enemy than the unfair employer.”³⁴ Members of this association, like others, held the view that benevolent expressions from above proved that workers had no need for their own oppositional organizations from below.³⁵ Numerous manufacturers, merchants, mine owners, and retail heads—holding membership in national and local organizations—positioned themselves as principled opponents of both “the labor trust” and “unfair employers.”

In fact, the open-shop principle enjoyed enormous popularity across a range of locations and industries. An organization that would come to play a leadership role in the movement, the NAM, for instance, welcomed and assisted, as this group put it in 1895, “manufacturing industries of all classes throughout the country.”³⁶ Furthermore, locally based employers’ associations in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, and Worcester and in cities throughout the nation included men who represented a diversity of workplaces in terms of both size and type. Even those who opted not to join employers’ or citizens’ associations typically preferred the open-shop system of management. As the New York Times explained in 1904, “the open-shop is the first issue ever presented to employers upon which they could combine in entire agreement.”³⁷

Yet, although the era’s business owners and managers were attracted to the open-shop philosophy and often promoted it, many, under certain circumstances, negotiated with unions in closed shops. For example, those who required skilled workers, including managers of construction sites, foundries, printing presses, and specialized manufacturing establishments, employed union members in contexts in which there were shortages of comparably adept nonunionists. Others, under pressure during work stoppages, bargained with unions simply because they could not afford expensive and inconvenient strikes. They typically did so grudgingly. In fact, as we will see, more than a dozen NFA members and small shop owners continued to identify as open-shop proponents after reluctantly granting wage increases to striking IMU members in 1906. But these Buffalo-based employers, annoyed by idled factories and harassing picketers, would have certainly preferred managing unilaterally without the nuisances of collective bargaining agreements and repeated union demands.³⁸ Combative and effective protests at the point of production reinforced, rather than altered, their underlying managerial philosophy.

Many non-employers shared this outlook. Indeed, members of open-shop organizations were far from the era’s only reform-minded group to express displeasure with outbreaks of working-class conflict, revulsion with the hard left’s ideology and militancy, fear of labor violence, and discomfort with the subject of class itself. Most prominent reform organizations, including the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Consumers’ League, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and an assortment of settlement house volunteers, remained consistently unwilling to challenge the roots of economic and social inequality in the nation’s communities or workplaces.³⁹ And several high-profile individuals who participated in these types of reform-oriented groups found themselves siding with open-shop employers and nonunion workers during periods of industrial disputes. That a surprisingly large and varied range of Americans, including President Theodore Roosevelt, journalist Ray Stannard Baker, social gospeler Washington Gladden, Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, lawyer Louis D. Brandeis, and numerous other, lesser-known reformers, endorsed the open-shop principle is a testament to organized employers’ networking and public relations effectiveness.

A number of mainstream reformers, like open-shop employers, were unquestionably supportive of the rights of individuals to reject unionization in the context of labor-management conflicts and often expressed horror at the extent to which unyielding unionists carried out their organizing campaigns.⁴⁰ Commenting on a series of belligerent miners’ strikes in 1904 in the pages of the NAM’s monthly magazine, American Industries, Gladden, a high-profile Protestant reformer, advised labor activists that they “must learn to be reasonable and decent” and cease the harassment of nonunionists by enforcing “a policy of live and let live.”⁴¹ Gladden was one of numerous reformers to share his views of the labor problem in the pages of employers’ association magazines. The same magazine applauded Roosevelt in 1905 for taking “the position that every man, whether union or nonunion, should have an equal chance in the United States.”⁴² Employers’ association publications were far from the only source to enthusiastically tout the open-shop principle’s virtues. The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform 1908 edition, edited by Christian socialist William Dwight Porter Bliss, honored open-shop workplaces for promoting “individual freedom,” which, it insisted, “is the cardinal principle of American life.”⁴³

Why did prominent reformers, including muckrakers, social gospelers, good government proponents, and consumer advocates, embrace the open-shop movement’s goals? One somewhat obvious reason: they generally shared a similar class background with the movement’s employers. But reductionist explanations alone are insufficient; we must dig deeper by also considering how late nineteenth-century opinion makers depicted the multiple clashes between unions, on the one hand, and employers, police, and nonunion workers, on the other. Certainly many middle-class observers sympathized with the plight of nonunionists and found picket line violence directed against these “free men,” repeatedly conveyed—often exaggeratedly—in the press, intensely unnerving. Starting in the second part of the nineteenth century, newspaper reporters began providing their mostly middle-class readership with dreadful, attention-grabbing reports of ill-behaved unionists, rebels guilty of riotously destroying property, attacking police officers, harassing nonunionists, and threatening employers with bodily harm. Such sources were much less inclined to highlight the considerably more powerful and effective forms of state repression aimed at protestors. In its coverage of the 1877 railroad strike, for example, the New York Times condemned the “lawlessness” and “the incendiary and inflammatory speeches” delivered by working-class demonstrators.⁴⁴ In the following decade, the Chicago Times referred to the anarchists present during the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886 as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism, and murder.”⁴⁵ And the Richmond Dispatch mocked Eugene Debs, American Railway Union head and leader of the 1894 Pullman strike, for failing to preserve peace despite promising to do so: “This ‘peaceful’ strike has attained the proportions of a war upon the entire people, and the interest on which their very lives are dependent.”⁴⁶ Picket-line activities were, to be sure, not always violent, but judges, employers, and much of the press tended to portray most as pernicious expressions of intimidation and brutality—and as a result helped to generate a pervasive atmosphere of terror.⁴⁷ By the early twentieth century, many bourgeois Americans had concluded that, in the words of Eliot, “there is no such thing as peaceful picketing.”⁴⁸

Organized employers, many of whom shared Eliot’s analysis, sincerely cherished the support that they received from well-known reformers and the mainstream press, but they were especially thankful for state assistance, including direct help from judges and police forces during labor conflicts. As they campaigned to reform workplaces and communities by pitting what they considered uncontrollable and demanding unionists against hardworking “free” employees, open-shop advocates saw themselves as firmly embedded in the political mainstream and securely allied with the nation’s lawmakers and enforcers.⁴⁹ Judges were particularly helpful. Altogether, state and municipal courts issued 2,095 injunctions against trade unions between 1890 and 1920.⁵⁰ The legal establishment, including the Supreme Court, even legitimized employers’ use of blacklists against union supporters, and numerous judges invoked the Sherman Antitrust Act, which punished strikers for restraining interstate trade.⁵¹ By policing labor and issuing rulings against working-class activists and the unions that represented them, the legal establishment gave employers greater peace of mind, inspiration, and intellectual ammunition for their campaigns.⁵²

The court system and influential reformers certainly helped to legitimize the open-shop movement by providing its practitioners with legal assistance and moral support. This study emphasizes that a wide spectrum of figures—both from within and outside industrial relations settings—offered a set of multidimensional antiunion critiques, which involved a mix of tough-minded economic logic, flag waving, and a moral concern with the welfare of “free workers,” business owners, and citizens generally. In essence, a broad range of mostly privileged Americans, intolerant of labor solidarity and fearful of working-class militancy, provided a hearty defense of “the common people.”

Large numbers of influential people supported the open-shop principle in the name of fairness and progress, but there were definitely exceptions. Certainly not all open-shop managers saw themselves as progressive actors fighting to improve the livelihoods of the “common people.” Furthermore, this book does not claim that all reformers were advocates of open-shop workplaces and supporters of the men who refused to bargain collectively with organized labor. We can undoubtedly identify several influential progressive campaigners, including settlement house pioneer Jane Addams and lawyer Clarence Darrow, for example, who had, at various points in their lives, stood in solidarity with unions at marches and on picket lines.

Additionally, this book largely, though not entirely, avoids labels like “conservative” and “liberal” in the context of labor-management conflicts mainly because such terms are historically contingent. After all, we can surely point to plenty of historical scenarios that defy such political categorizations. Consider some questions. Were the employers who demanded that nonunionists—including African Americans, Mexicans, and Chinese—enjoy the right to work during periods of strikes staged by white laborers liberal or conservative? How should we label the union members who defiantly refused to toil next to those without union cards? Were they closed-minded conservatives, principled liberals, or perhaps something else? Of course, different observers, prioritizing dissimilar values, will offer various responses to questions like these. We must acknowledge, in other words, the lack of a political consensus with respect to these questions.⁵³

Yet, as we look back on them, we should not perceive employers’ fundamental supervisory interests as controversial or mysterious. Although they frequently presented themselves as committed to “doing right” by protecting the “common people” in the name of community harmony, patriotism, and industrial peace, employers were primarily interested in earning profits and maintaining unfettered managerial control. Of course, they seldom expressed their objectives in such a crass way. This does not mean that they were uninterested in their workers’ welfare; many certainly acknowledged the diversity of grievances harbored by wage earners, but consistently claimed that they could respond meaningfully to them without recognizing unions. For many employers, providing benefits beyond paychecks, drawing attention to what they considered the virtues of America’s economic and political institutions, and joining “defense” organizations constituted a considerably more cost-effective, empowering, and emotionally satisfying set of responses than relinquishing any managerial control by formally bargaining with trade unions.

The open-shop principle itself was enormously comforting to the nation’s diversity of employers both during periods of labor peace and in the context of industrial disputes. Its advocates were unwilling, with very few exceptions, to question the logic or limitations of this managerial principle, even in the face of intense labor unrest, protests from the radical left, and critical journalistic exposés. For most, this managerial system was absolutely nonnegotiable, even though, in the short term, open-shop campaigns often intensified, rather than alleviated, working-class discontent and community strife. Given the profound impact it had on their collective consciousness, employers were naturally disinclined to address one of the root causes of labor’s restlessness: demands for closed shops and collective bargaining rights. Employers’ ideological blind spots and stubbornness are entirely understandable—even rational—given their primary interests as managers and profit maximizers in a capitalist economy. As novelist Upton Sinclair famously put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”⁵⁴

This study explores employers and their embrace of the open-shop system both nationally and locally. The first two chapters demonstrate the birth, growth, and influence of open-shop ideas and employer-led activism throughout much of the nation. The final four are regional case studies that investigate at the ground level the ways in which the open-shop philosophy influenced workplace relations, urban politics, and local identities. The most intense confrontations, including strikes and anti-strike campaigns, occurred in, and left lasting impacts on, individual communities. Indeed, a multiregional focus allows us to better appreciate the ways in which employers responded to different-sized labor movements, to various types of political challenges, and to each other. Context certainly mattered, and to obtain a suitable understanding of the drama of open-shop campaigns, one must explore the particular ways in which local level employers established relationships with municipal authorities, including judges and police forces, and attempted to mobilize public opinion. After all, “the Open-Shop war,” as historian Howell Harris has observed, “was prosecuted at the grass roots.”⁵⁵

The regional portion of this study moves from the Midwest to the East, and concludes in the South. Open-shop proponents were usually very active in their communities, and they identified closely with their regions. The most ardent “labor trust” critics and champions of the rights of independent workers were also civic boosters, proudly wearing the open-shop badge on their sleeves as they advertised what they considered the almost limitless virtues of their communities. Spokespersons in Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, and the southern areas of the United States insisted that their communities were progressive, prosperous, vibrant, and inviting in part because of the broad, multi-industry, and cross-class support for the open-shop principle. Public relations activities were an essential part of the movement.

These urban-based open-shop boosters were actually indebted to a long history of public relations efforts. Beginning in the early antebellum period, developers, promoters, and newspaper editors, especially in cities and towns throughout the South, the Great Lakes Region, and the West, enthusiastically advertised—even embellished—the financial and political promises of their nascent communities. Such spokespersons, hoping to lure additional settlers and investors, often pointed to the availability of convenient railway lines, productive manufacturing establishments, nearby natural resources, visionary political leaders, and the enduring promise of shared prosperity.⁵⁶ Years later, promoters added the presence of both lawful wage earners and magnanimous employers, joined together amicably in productive open shops, to the list of municipal virtues. Countless regional pamphlets and journals advertised this cooperative spirit of progress, but the reality, of course, was always more complicated. The periodic eruption of strikes and union organizing campaigns certainly represented a fundamental challenge to these boosterish narratives, demonstrating an alternative way of interpreting the collective views of the “common people.”

The particular regions I have chosen to explore enable us to better understand the open-shop movement’s propagandistic, boosterish, reformist, and confrontational dimensions while helping us to appreciate a series of regionally specific challenges and opportunities faced by a colorful cast of characters. Many of these characters appear throughout the book; others appear only in individual chapters. Importantly, I tell different, though equally significant, stories without losing sight of the larger picture. In the process, I have sought to illustrate the open-shop movement kaleidoscopically.

I selected Cleveland for two reasons. First, I wanted to know how strong open-shop campaigns found expression in a city that enjoyed a national reputation as a bastion of progressivism under the leadership of Mayor Tom L. Johnson. In 1905, muckraker Lincoln Steffens, for instance, famously called Johnson “the best Mayor of the best-governed city in the United States.”⁵⁷ How did this municipal luminary and his administration respond to the labor struggles and growing open-shop movement in his backyard? His public record is actually silent on the movement itself, but a look at his own public sector managerial policies at the end of his career demonstrate that he actually shared much with the city’s financially privileged open-shop proponents. And the movement grew under his watch. Johnson himself infamously helped break a strike of unionized streetcar workers in 1908. During the course of it, he dispatched hundreds of police officers to picket lines and demanded that protestors refrain from harassing nonunionists, promising that “disorder will be met with force adequate to suppress it.”⁵⁸

Second, Cleveland was home to several nationally prominent open-shop activists, including former trade unionist Penton and one-time president of the Cleveland Employers’ Association turned union supporter Jay P. Dawley. These two immensely influential men helped the city’s employers break a series of strikes while presenting themselves as forward-thinking reformers concerned with protecting the well-being of nonunionists, the interests of business owners, and the overall welfare of the city itself. In 1911, during an exceptionally bitter garment workers’ strike, Dawley, a successful defense lawyer who had spent much of the previous decade representing numerous employers in court, no longer believed that the open-shop principle was fair or progressive, severed his relationships with members of Cleveland’s business community, and began working for union-seeking garment laborers. This chapter explores their remarkable changes in a context of broad reform activities, strikes, and strikebreaking campaigns.

A second case study focuses on activities in Buffalo, another useful setting that teaches us much about employers’ reformist, repressive, and public relations activities. How, I wanted to know, did sections of Buffalo’s business community respond to threats from left-wing activists and demanding unionists in the years after anarchist Leon Czolgosz, inspired in part by Emma Goldman’s radical doctrines, killed President William McKinley—a longtime ally of employers, both in Buffalo and nationally—on the grounds of the city’s Pan-American Exposition? Coincidentally, the head juror in Czolgosz’s trial was Henry W. Wendt, an influential NFA leader. I discovered that Buffalo’s foundry operators, like their counterparts nationally, became increasingly attracted to the politics of law and order and to the open-shop principle in the aftermath of the president’s murder. And in 1906, with indispensable assistance from judges and the police, NFA members, including Wendt, fought—and in most cases defeated—a citywide IMU-initiated strike. The city’s outstandingly loyal police force also prevented anarchist Goldman from speaking to Buffalo’s protestors. In the victory’s aftermath, members of Buffalo’s business community, including leaders of the union-breaking campaign, trumpeted their city in the same way that they publicly celebrated it during the Pan-American Exposition. And spokespersons from national employers’ associations praised Buffalo’s foundry operators for their accomplishments. By exploring the struggles of Buffalo’s employers, we can better comprehend how they helped overcome the closed-shop challenge, assisted in halting the spread of anarchism, and ultimately regained confidence in the years after McKinley’s death.

Worcester’s open-shop campaigns deserve close attention for several reasons. Above all, Worcester, the smallest city in this study, was home to one of the NMTA’s most active and successful branches. It grew considerably after a half dozen of the city’s metal-working manufacturers defeated a machinists’ strike in 1902. In the strike’s aftermath, the city’s metalworking employers developed what became one of the NMTA’s busiest labor bureaus, the central headquarters that coordinated hiring, firing, and blacklisting. The labor bureau, run by diligent clerks, earned considerable praise nationally and attracted the attention of employers and reformers from as far away as Australia. Additionally, Worcester’s employers were widely recognized for their welfare capitalist programs, which, according to city spokespersons, reduced the appeal of unions. For these reasons, Worcester’s open-shop activists saw themselves as national leaders in the struggle against the labor problem, and the NMTA’s chapter secretary, Donald Tulloch, even projected in 1914 that the city would enjoy a “strikeless future.” Wage earners certainly did not share this vision: in 1915, 3,000 workers left their workstations and mobilized on city streets while demanding that managers cut their hours, raise their wages, and recognize their unions. This chapter investigates the ways in which the city’s open-shop proponents and industrial reformers engaged in excessive myth-making, noting the tensions between what they said about labor relations in Worcester and the reality of how workers thought and acted.

Of course, not all open-shop advocates resided in the North, and this study devotes much attention to Thompson and the South. Thompson—the Middle Tennessee-born former Klansman, diehard temperance activist, editor of the boosterish and widely circulated Tradesman, and CIAA leader—was the region’s most effective and recognizable open-shop developer and spokesperson. He played a critical role in luring steel mills, textile factories, and railroads to several southern cities, including Birmingham, Huntsville, and Chattanooga, insisting that these communities—headed by forward-looking paternalistic managers who oversaw racially divided workforces—were largely free of labor troubles, which contrasted with much of the North. Thompson, who had earned a considerable amount of attention nationally for delivering an electrifying anti-union speech before the U.S. Industrial Commission in 1900, offered a simple solution to northern industrialists: flight rather than fight. As the president of the Thompson Land and Investment Company, an industrial real estate concern, Thompson and his regional allies were actually, this chapter demonstrates, beneficiaries of the mostly northern-based labor problem. Exploring Thompson’s life helps us to better recognize the connections between southern economic development and the northern labor problem.

The process of confronting the labor problem was often difficult and complex. And indeed, this work underlines the ways in which a diverse set of employers and their partners in the areas of law, journalism, higher education, and politics approached a challenging set of questions, including how best to respond to labor unrest, how to effectively build organizations, how to secure state support, and how to establish public legitimacy. Of course, employers and their allies did not always meet their goals, but they won far more battles than they lost. It is my hope this study provides a deeper understanding of their ideas and struggles, as well as a better appreciation for the enduring power, elasticity, and significance of the open-shop principle.

Finally, this study does not limit itself to the views and behavior of employers and their allies; it also takes very seriously the struggles of their primary victims: defeated strikers, blacklisted unionists, and at-will employees. By considering the collective plight of the movement’s many casualties, we cannot help but recognize that the boosterish and flowery rhetoric persistently used by open-shop activists was quite obviously self-serving, intended to fundamentally legitimize an often repressive, largely successful movement that created an enormous amount of frustration and insecurity for millions of ordinary people. Therefore, we must remember those in the movement’s vanguard not primarily as defenders of “free workers,” “the common people,” or “progressive individualism,” but instead as the nation’s foremost champions of an economic system designed to protect the most privileged classes of Americans at the expense of those who had demanded a more democratic say over their lives.