Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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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,