Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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and investors, often pointed to the availability of convenient railway lines, productive manufacturing establishments, nearby natural resources, visionary political leaders, and the enduring promise of shared prosperity.56 Years later, promoters added the presence of both lawful wage earners and magnanimous employers, joined together amicably in productive open shops, to the list of municipal virtues. Countless regional pamphlets and journals advertised this cooperative spirit of progress, but the reality, of course, was always more complicated. The periodic eruption of strikes and union organizing campaigns certainly represented a fundamental challenge to these boosterish narratives, demonstrating an alternative way of interpreting the collective views of the “common people.”
The particular regions I have chosen to explore enable us to better understand the open-shop movement’s propagandistic, boosterish, reformist, and confrontational dimensions while helping us to appreciate a series of regionally specific challenges and opportunities faced by a colorful cast of characters. Many of these characters appear throughout the book; others appear only in individual chapters. Importantly, I tell different, though equally significant, stories without losing sight of the larger picture. In the process, I have sought to illustrate the open-shop movement kaleidoscopically.
I selected Cleveland for two reasons. First, I wanted to know how strong open-shop campaigns found expression in a city that enjoyed a national reputation as a bastion of progressivism under the leadership of Mayor Tom L. Johnson. In 1905, muckraker Lincoln Steffens, for instance, famously called Johnson “the best Mayor of the best-governed city in the United States.”57 How did this municipal luminary and his administration respond to the labor struggles and growing open-shop movement in his backyard? His public record is actually silent on the movement itself, but a look at his own public sector managerial policies at the end of his career demonstrate that he actually shared much with the city’s financially privileged open-shop proponents. And the movement grew under his watch. Johnson himself infamously helped break a strike of unionized streetcar workers in 1908. During the course of it, he dispatched hundreds of police officers to picket lines and demanded that protestors refrain from harassing nonunionists, promising that “disorder will be met with force adequate to suppress it.”58
Second, Cleveland was home to several nationally prominent open-shop activists, including former trade unionist Penton and one-time president of the Cleveland Employers’ Association turned union supporter Jay P. Dawley. These two immensely influential men helped the city’s employers break a series of strikes while presenting themselves as forward-thinking reformers concerned with protecting the well-being of nonunionists, the interests of business owners, and the overall welfare of the city itself. In 1911, during an exceptionally bitter garment workers’ strike, Dawley, a successful defense lawyer who had spent much of the previous decade representing numerous employers in court, no longer believed that the open-shop principle was fair or progressive, severed his relationships with members of Cleveland’s business community, and began working for union-seeking garment laborers. This chapter explores their remarkable changes in a context of broad reform activities, strikes, and strikebreaking campaigns.
A second case study focuses on activities in Buffalo, another useful setting that teaches us much about employers’ reformist, repressive, and public relations activities. How, I wanted to know, did sections of Buffalo’s business community respond to threats from left-wing activists and demanding unionists in the years after anarchist Leon Czolgosz, inspired in part by Emma Goldman’s radical doctrines, killed President William McKinley—a longtime ally of employers, both in Buffalo and nationally—on the grounds of the city’s Pan-American Exposition? Coincidentally, the head juror in Czolgosz’s trial was Henry W. Wendt, an influential NFA leader. I discovered that Buffalo’s foundry operators, like their counterparts nationally, became increasingly attracted to the politics of law and order and to the open-shop principle in the aftermath of the president’s murder. And in 1906, with indispensable assistance from judges and the police, NFA members, including Wendt, fought—and in most cases defeated—a citywide IMU-initiated strike. The city’s outstandingly loyal police force also prevented anarchist Goldman from speaking to Buffalo’s protestors. In the victory’s aftermath, members of Buffalo’s business community, including leaders of the union-breaking campaign, trumpeted their city in the same way that they publicly celebrated it during the Pan-American Exposition. And spokespersons from national employers’ associations praised Buffalo’s foundry operators for their accomplishments. By exploring the struggles of Buffalo’s employers, we can better comprehend how they helped overcome the closed-shop challenge, assisted in halting the spread of anarchism, and ultimately regained confidence in the years after McKinley’s death.
Worcester’s open-shop campaigns deserve close attention for several reasons. Above all, Worcester, the smallest city in this study, was home to one of the NMTA’s most active and successful branches. It grew considerably after a half dozen of the city’s metal-working manufacturers defeated a machinists’ strike in 1902. In the strike’s aftermath, the city’s metalworking employers developed what became one of the NMTA’s busiest labor bureaus, the central headquarters that coordinated hiring, firing, and blacklisting. The labor bureau, run by diligent clerks, earned considerable praise nationally and attracted the attention of employers and reformers from as far away as Australia. Additionally, Worcester’s employers were widely recognized for their welfare capitalist programs, which, according to city spokespersons, reduced the appeal of unions. For these reasons, Worcester’s open-shop activists saw themselves as national leaders in the struggle against the labor problem, and the NMTA’s chapter secretary, Donald Tulloch, even projected in 1914 that the city would enjoy a “strikeless future.” Wage earners certainly did not share this vision: in 1915, 3,000 workers left their workstations and mobilized on city streets while demanding that managers cut their hours, raise their wages, and recognize their unions. This chapter investigates the ways in which the city’s open-shop proponents and industrial reformers engaged in excessive myth-making, noting the tensions between what they said about labor relations in Worcester and the reality of how workers thought and acted.
Of course, not all open-shop advocates resided in the North, and this study devotes much attention to Thompson and the South. Thompson—the Middle Tennessee-born former Klansman, diehard temperance activist, editor of the boosterish and widely circulated Tradesman, and CIAA leader—was the region’s most effective and recognizable open-shop developer and spokesperson. He played a critical role in luring steel mills, textile factories, and railroads to several southern cities, including Birmingham, Huntsville, and Chattanooga, insisting that these communities—headed by forward-looking paternalistic managers who oversaw racially divided workforces—were largely free of labor troubles, which contrasted with much of the North. Thompson, who had earned a considerable amount of attention nationally for delivering an electrifying anti-union speech before the U.S. Industrial Commission in 1900, offered a simple solution to northern industrialists: flight rather than fight. As the president of the Thompson Land and Investment Company, an industrial real estate concern, Thompson and his regional allies were actually, this chapter demonstrates, beneficiaries of the mostly northern-based labor problem. Exploring Thompson’s life helps us to better recognize the connections between southern economic development and the northern labor problem.
The process of confronting the labor problem was often difficult and complex. And indeed, this work underlines the ways in which a diverse set of employers and their partners in the areas of law, journalism, higher education, and politics approached a challenging set of questions, including how best to respond to labor unrest, how to effectively build organizations, how to secure state support, and how to establish public legitimacy. Of course, employers and their allies did not always meet their goals, but they won far more battles than they lost. It is my hope this study provides a deeper understanding of their ideas and struggles, as well as a better appreciation for the enduring power, elasticity, and significance of the open-shop principle.
Finally, this study does not limit itself to the views and behavior of employers and their allies; it also takes very seriously the struggles of their primary victims: defeated strikers, blacklisted unionists, and at-will employees. By considering the collective plight of the movement’s many casualties, we cannot help but recognize that the boosterish and flowery rhetoric persistently used by open-shop activists was quite obviously