Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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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