Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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There was hope. In fact, open-shop campaigners, unlike those active in earlier citizens’ associations, sought to partner with ordinary, law-abiding Americans, including the “white slaves.” These supposedly brutalized slaves had become active, paradoxically, in their own emancipatory, anti-union associations. In other words, independent workers, like late antebellum black slaves, had agency and were unafraid to actively champion the virtues of free labor in the face of hostile oppressors. Organized groups of “free workers” emerged in urban areas at roughly the same time that employers’ associations began systematically cleansing their workplaces of union activists. In 1902, Albany’s Rev. E. M. Fairchild, for example, proclaimed his commitment to helping closed-shop victims establish a “National League of Independent Workmen of America.” The workers involved in the league would, in Fairchild’s words, “demand that employers run their shops as ‘open shops’.”72 Meanwhile, coercive labor activists in Dayton, home of open-shop leader Kirby, prompted nonunionists to form the Modern Order of Bees, a workingmen’s group that challenged, according to a 1903 article in the NMTA’s Bulletin, “the influence of the law-breakers and the intimidators.”73 And in early 1903, Elmira, New York, began hosting the first chapter of the Independent Labor League of America (ILLA), “organized by workingmen for the maintenance of their rights to personal liberty.” These organizations, apparently built from below with management’s enthusiastic approval, were chiefly concerned with promoting “good character” and showing, as Dayton’s Modern Order of Bees put it in 1902, that “both employer and employee will recognize the fact that their interests are identical.”74 The underlying message was clear enough: the common people, both the employed and employers overseeing various-sized businesses, had shared interests and goals in promoting a more respectful and peaceful industrial relations system.
These organizations emerged with the assistance of open-shop employers and their middle-class allies. Consider the case of Fairchild, an Albany clergyman and published sociologist who first developed sympathy for nonunion workers during the course of an Albany streetcar strike in 1901.75 He was appalled by the widespread violence that the strike generated, and afterward decided to deepen his knowledge of the causes, characteristics, and consequences of labor-management struggles. The next year, he, like Baker and Brandeis, visited northeastern Pennsylvania, where he spent ten days observing coercive tactics staged by UMWA members. He took his study seriously, reading books and articles about the labor question, conducting interviews with those embroiled in industrial unrest, and photographing strike scenes. He believed that his profession gave him a certain amount of credibility that employers simply lacked. “The very fact that I am a clergyman, and not an employer,” he remarked in 1903, “has made it possible for me to get an understanding of this labor problem from the workman’s point of view.”76
While conducting fieldwork, the Oberlin College-educated Fairchild, like Baker, encountered numerous workers who rejected their union leaders’ values and policies. Over the course of the century’s first years, the clergyman talked with dozens of Pennsylvania coal miners, Albany streetcar workers, and southwestern New York machinists, who apparently valued hard work, appreciated their managers, respected the law, and sought a degree of upward mobility—values and goals often rejected by labor activists. Such individuals, he discovered, were often profoundly uncomfortable with some of the decisions of their union leaders. This was especially clear among ambitious and talented mechanics at Elmira’s Payne Engineering and Foundry Company, a modest-sized manufacturer of iron and brass castings owned by N. B. Payne, an NMTA leader. Numerous mechanics here supported the company’s premium system of payment—a system that rewarded individual workers with financial bonuses for increased productivity.77 The International Association of Machinists, which had maintained a presence in the Payne Company, opposed this incentive plan, and called a strike shortly after management implemented it. But not all left their workstations: “Some twenty of Mr. Payne’s best machinists refused to strike, and were immediately insulted as ‘scabs’,” Fairchild reported.78 In the face of this struggle, which also involved union-initiated violence, these non-striking men demanded, and ultimately created, a new organization.
Fairchild and Elmira’s “free men” celebrated the establishment of the ILLA on March 19, 1903. The organization’s principal aim was perfectly consistent with the open-shop movement’s goals: “To protect workmen in their independence.”79 The extent of Fairchild’s involvement in the formation of this organization is difficult to measure, though we do know that the clergyman had established relationships with some of the antiunion workers before the strike. Whatever the case, union activists lampooned this organization and others like it. Writing in late 1903, a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers declared that “one can almost see the wage earners of this country falling over each other in an attempt to become members of this wonderful organization in order to obtain a reduction in wages or increased hours of labor.”80
Despite sardonic comments from union activists, this supposedly bottom-up movement quickly gained momentum. Shortly after its formation in Elmira, “free workers” created other branches, and besieged employers approached these organizations during strikes for employment purposes. ILLA branches became highly useful to employers’ associations embroiled in numerous workplace showdowns. For instance, during a Brooklyn shipyard strike in June 1903, Henry C. Hunter, secretary of New York City’s Metal Trades Association, was happy to employ league members as strikebreakers. Hunter, a talented strikebreaking architect, was enormously pleased that it “has a branch in New York and undertakes to supply competent men.”81 Some manufacturers contacted league chapters to obtain “free men” before launching new workplaces. Consider the words of an unnamed Ohio employer writing in 1903: “Our reason for writing to you is that we desire to employ members of the Independent Labor League of America in a large new foundry which we are ready to start.”82 The league essentially served as a reserve army of potential strikebreakers, delighting open-shop enthusiasts and labor-hungry supervisors alike. And this movement continued to grow after Roosevelt announced his Square Deal. By the end of 1903, six cities—Albany, Boston, Detroit, Elmira, New York City, and Sherman, Texas—hosted chapters. League branches reinforced the efforts of the CIAA, emboldened “free workers,” and sent a powerful message demonstrating that the open-shop movement was more than a top-down campaign led exclusively by the moneyed elite.83
“Gratifying results of the employers’ movement”
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