Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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give manufacturers greater peace of mind. Collective action made good sense, they realized, because strikes often caused “a host of indirect disasters” that created “false conditions, utterly unwarranted by the general state of trade or by any principle of abstract justice.” In other words, labor unionists engaged in activities that threatened the fundamental laws of economics and thus challenged the expertise of diligent managers. To avoid these unfavorable consequences, the committee proposed finding ways to build trust with union leaders, full-time figures who negotiated with employers, helped enforce contracts, and in the process often established friendships with management. This solution was commonsensical: one could reduce workplace conflict by taking “a few hours or a few days for calm deliberation.”9 The general body agreed, and the National Founders’ Association (NFA), as a writer for The Iron Trade Review explained in 1898, had become “a fruit of the American Foundrymen’s Association’s efforts.”10
It is worth looking more closely at the men behind the NFA’s creation. As established business owners and community leaders, they had earned admiration from the AFA general membership. Pfahler served as an officer and treasurer of the Abram Cox Stove Company, a vast, five-story manufacturing establishment in Philadelphia’s densely populated and heavily industrialized north end. The company’s 400 employees built stoves and furnaces that were sold, according to an 1890 issue of Manufacturer and Builder, throughout “the entire country from Maine to California.”11 Yagle stood on the other side of Pennsylvania, where he led the Yagle Foundry and Machine Company, near the Allegheny River that received industry-wide admiration for its “original Black crusher.”12 In the somewhat sparsely industrialized South, Putnam held a high-level management position at the Chattanooga Plow Company, one of East Tennessee’s most productive, profitable, and sizable manufacturing establishments. A structurally imposing worksite spread over six acres, the Chattanooga Plow Company supplied cane mills, chilled plows, evaporators, and hay presses to markets throughout the globe. According to a 1913 book on Tennessee industries, this company, which began operations in 1878, was “the largest industry of its kind in the south, and may be considered one of the corner-stones of Chattanooga’s industrial prosperity.” The same source bragged that “the sun never sets upon Chattanooga plows.”13
It appears that Pfahler, Yagle, and Putnam had their eyes on more than their own immediate economic successes. They each displayed a sincere desire to assist the industry, their colleagues, and their communities. Accounts of their lives suggest that they were not exclusively inspired by the supposed joys of materialistic individualism or the emotional pleasures of ego building. Yet they certainly were ambitious. In addition to holding an AFA leadership position, Yagle had served on the Pittsburgh Board of Education and was highly active in the Pittsburgh Foundrymen’s Association.14 Seeking to share his deep knowledge of the industry, Putnam wrote for the Tradesman, a Chattanooga-based trade publication that promoted economic development throughout the South. Founded by future New York Times owner Adolph Ochs in 1879, the Tradesman contained statistics and detailed information about innovations and industrial output as well as details regarding the establishment of new factories and the accomplishments of older industrial plants within the borders of the numerous jewels of the “new South”: Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Louisville, New Orleans, and, above all, Chattanooga. According to an 1897 article in the Chattanooga Daily Times, also owned by Ochs, the Tradesman offered “the most complete, exhaustive, and valuable review of the South.”15 And finally, Pfahler was a visible social reformer in his community. This public-spirited individual played a leadership role in Philadelphia’s Committee of Seventy, a municipal reform organization that, in its own words, sought to “keep watch and ward over the public interest.”16
The NFA did not emerge to “fight” labor. Instead, its members initially promised to negotiate honorably and dispassionately with union heads while offering fair working conditions to employees irrespective of union status. They sought to establish an atmosphere of shared trust and cooperation at their worksites, and they occasionally distanced themselves from the nation’s most excessively exploitative employers. Putnam, for instance, strongly criticized those who presumably felt no shame in employing young females in heavy industry. Writing in 1899, he lashed out at “The man who can be satisfied with industrial conditions that drive girls into the foundry in the struggle for existence.” In the Tradesman’s pages, Putnam complained that such a manager “certainly ought not to be satisfied with his own moral condition; and if he is satisfied therewith, society ought to be so dissatisfied with him as to make it known in no uncertain terms.” Putnam, echoing the moral outrage expressed by growing numbers of gender-conscious reformers, realized that a minority of these immoral employers “would work their own grandmothers in the foundry if they could make a little profit by it. This is the most mischievous class of people in industrial society. They are much harder to manage and far more injurious in their influence upon trade than the trades-union can be when under unwise direction.”17
Fellow employers, Putnam held, had an obligation to use sound judgment, which in part meant barring women, children, and the elderly from laboring in grimy and often hazardous foundries. By mentioning the malevolent deeds of these “unjust” employers—the unnamed members of the “mischievous class”—Putnam illustrated that he was not merely interested in leading an organization designed to minimize labor unrest; he also sent a clear message that he was wholly unafraid to sharply criticize examples of what he called “scavenger business” practices.18 The new employers’ association, led by righteous critics of both labor radicalism and employer abuses, professed that it had no tolerance for the “mischievous class.”
The most pressing dilemma facing these agents of industrial change was effectively making and sustaining lasting peace with a mostly grown-up workforce of men. NFA leaders believed that offering benefits and creating a respectful rapport with wage earners made for sound policy in a context in which fewer employees enjoyed upward mobility of the sort that was apparently commonplace for hardworking men in the nineteenth century’s first half. Consider the words of Pfahler, a Civil War veteran who served as first NFA president—his 1908 obituary credited him for “first propagating the theory of defense associations of manufacturers.”19 By 1898, when the NFA officially started, Pfahler had come to realize the sharp decline in the number of top managerial positions in the country—and this process seemed irreversible. No longer could every focused, diligent man climb his way to the top. “With that incentive taken away,” Pfahler argued, “it was important that conciliation should prevail.”20 Such structural changes, including the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few—a process accelerated by the turn of the century’s great merger movement—meant that employers needed to play their part in modifying, even lowering, the workforce’s expectations. The fifty-six-year-old Pfahler, whose devotion to the Republican Party had been put to the ultimate test on the battlefields in the 1860s, no longer unconditionally believed that the party’s early free labor ideology—a doctrine professing that hard work in a free, non-slaveholding society would eventually translate into financial success and independence, including business ownership—reflected the reality of late nineteenth-century America. Yet workers’ lower prospects, he reasoned, must not translate into frustration, misery, cynicism, or, worst of all, raw outbreaks of workplace conflict. Pfahler, who would soon serve as a leader of the National Civic Federation (NCF)—an organization comprising leaders from business, labor, and the general public that promoted union-management cooperation—did not break with free labor ideology completely; he continued to believe that ambition, efficiency, and skill mattered. But “reward” signified something markedly different at the end of the century from what it meant in the era of the Civil War. Simply put, Pfahler had come to accept the limits of upward class mobility.21 The Iron Trade Review recommended that workers take Pfalher’s assessment seriously: “Let us hear more of the desirability of being successful as an employe.”22
Pfahler, like Putnam, sympathized with the predicaments of shop floor employees and rejected the harshest features of Social Darwinism, the cutthroat theory shared by numerous corporate moguls and their elite friends on both sides of the Atlantic. This cold-hearted concept, which applied the eminent biologist Charles Darwin’s famous views to