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