Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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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