Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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as class-neutral defenders of the American people’s long-term interests, not merely protectors of the business community.31 As Parry put it in April 1903, employers had opted to act decisively because union activists had simply become too powerful, “dominating to a dangerous degree the whole social, political and governmental systems of the Nation.”32
The commanding, straight-talking Parry, building on the efforts of union antagonists like Du Brul, Sanders, Thompson, Penton, Pfahler, Putnam, and others, had helped give voice and direction to growing numbers of employers who had long struggled with restive, closed-shop-demanding workers. By the time Parry had assisted in turning the NAM into a robust union-fighting outfit in 1903—a year when organized labor staged close to 3,500 strikes nationally—thousands had already flocked to the hundreds of national and local employers’ associations. By mid-decade, groups like the NAM, the NFA, the NMTA, the American Anti-Boycott Association (AABA), the many locally based employers’ associations, and the considerably more inclusive CIAA had transformed labor relations by providing union opponents with numerous perks: access to strikebreakers and spies, managerial training, legal assistance, greater confidence, comradeship, and a set of progressive-sounding talking points as they struggled against what appeared to be an overwhelming labor problem. In the face of this problem, they sought to, as the CIAA put it on its letterhead, protect “the common people”—no one narrow group or class.
Employers, many of whom identified themselves as enlightened visionaries partially responsible for the welfare of “the common people,” repeatedly showed a willingness to protect individual nonunion workers against challenges from a “monopoly-imposing,” often hostile, and sometimes lawless labor movement. They promised to offer a genuine alternative to closed shops, insisting, as veteran open-shop activist Walter Gordon Merritt put it in 1919, that “factory solidarity” was far superior to “class solidarity.”33 And indeed, many employers offered benefits beyond pay to their workers and engaged in philanthropic activities in their communities. As so-called welfare capitalists, employers, especially those who oversaw large multi-campus workplaces, sought to improve industrial life by investing in sports teams, theater clubs, seasonal outings, and measures intended to improve shop floor safety. Additionally, a number offered their employees health insurance and subsidized housing. Some employer activists insisted that all owners and managers must demonstrate kindness to their wage earners, and they criticized those who failed to treat their employees fairly. For example, a spokesperson for the employer-led Citizens’ Industrial Association of St. Louis, which claimed a membership of 8,500, declared in 1907 that “Our Association has no worse enemy than the unfair employer.”34 Members of this association, like others, held the view that benevolent expressions from above proved that workers had no need for their own oppositional organizations from below.35 Numerous manufacturers, merchants, mine owners, and retail heads—holding membership in national and local organizations—positioned themselves as principled opponents of both “the labor trust” and “unfair employers.”
In fact, the open-shop principle enjoyed enormous popularity across a range of locations and industries. An organization that would come to play a leadership role in the movement, the NAM, for instance, welcomed and assisted, as this group put it in 1895, “manufacturing industries of all classes throughout the country.”36 Furthermore, locally based employers’ associations in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, and Worcester and in cities throughout the nation included men who represented a diversity of workplaces in terms of both size and type. Even those who opted not to join employers’ or citizens’ associations typically preferred the open-shop system of management. As the New York Times explained in 1904, “the open-shop is the first issue ever presented to employers upon which they could combine in entire agreement.”37
Yet, although the era’s business owners and managers were attracted to the open-shop philosophy and often promoted it, many, under certain circumstances, negotiated with unions in closed shops. For example, those who required skilled workers, including managers of construction sites, foundries, printing presses, and specialized manufacturing establishments, employed union members in contexts in which there were shortages of comparably adept nonunionists. Others, under pressure during work stoppages, bargained with unions simply because they could not afford expensive and inconvenient strikes. They typically did so grudgingly. In fact, as we will see, more than a dozen NFA members and small shop owners continued to identify as open-shop proponents after reluctantly granting wage increases to striking IMU members in 1906. But these Buffalo-based employers, annoyed by idled factories and harassing picketers, would have certainly preferred managing unilaterally without the nuisances of collective bargaining agreements and repeated union demands.38 Combative and effective protests at the point of production reinforced, rather than altered, their underlying managerial philosophy.
Many non-employers shared this outlook. Indeed, members of open-shop organizations were far from the era’s only reform-minded group to express displeasure with outbreaks of working-class conflict, revulsion with the hard left’s ideology and militancy, fear of labor violence, and discomfort with the subject of class itself. Most prominent reform organizations, including the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Consumers’ League, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and an assortment of settlement house volunteers, remained consistently unwilling to challenge the roots of economic and social inequality in the nation’s communities or workplaces.39 And several high-profile individuals who participated in these types of reform-oriented groups found themselves siding with open-shop employers and nonunion workers during periods of industrial disputes. That a surprisingly large and varied range of Americans, including President Theodore Roosevelt, journalist Ray Stannard Baker, social gospeler Washington Gladden, Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, lawyer Louis D. Brandeis, and numerous other, lesser-known reformers, endorsed the open-shop principle is a testament to organized employers’ networking and public relations effectiveness.
A number of mainstream reformers, like open-shop employers, were unquestionably supportive of the rights of individuals to reject unionization in the context of labor-management conflicts and often expressed horror at the extent to which unyielding unionists carried out their organizing campaigns.40 Commenting on a series of belligerent miners’ strikes in 1904 in the pages of the NAM’s monthly magazine, American Industries, Gladden, a high-profile Protestant reformer, advised labor activists that they “must learn to be reasonable and decent” and cease the harassment of nonunionists by enforcing “a policy of live and let live.”41 Gladden was one of numerous reformers to share his views of the labor problem in the pages of employers’ association magazines. The same magazine applauded Roosevelt in 1905 for taking “the position that every man, whether union or nonunion, should have an equal chance in the United States.”42 Employers’ association publications were far from the only source to enthusiastically tout the open-shop principle’s virtues. The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform 1908 edition, edited by Christian socialist William Dwight Porter Bliss, honored open-shop workplaces for promoting “individual freedom,” which, it insisted, “is the cardinal principle of American life.”43
Why did prominent reformers, including muckrakers, social gospelers, good government proponents, and consumer advocates, embrace the open-shop movement’s goals? One somewhat obvious reason: they generally shared a similar class background with the movement’s employers. But reductionist explanations alone are insufficient; we must dig deeper by also considering how late nineteenth-century opinion makers depicted the multiple clashes between unions, on the one hand, and employers, police, and nonunion workers, on the other. Certainly many middle-class observers sympathized with the plight of nonunionists and found picket line violence directed against these “free men,” repeatedly conveyed—often exaggeratedly—in the press, intensely unnerving. Starting in the second part of the nineteenth century, newspaper reporters began providing their mostly middle-class readership with dreadful, attention-grabbing reports of ill-behaved unionists, rebels guilty of riotously destroying property, attacking police officers, harassing nonunionists, and threatening employers with bodily harm. Such sources were much less inclined to highlight the considerably more powerful and effective forms of state repression aimed at protestors. In its coverage of the 1877