Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
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financial success—and such success came at the expense of ordinary people. The theory, in essence, helped legitimize an industrial society shaped by stark class divisions. Social Darwinists, including both business leaders and a handful of elite academics, sought to justify their own wealth and power, believing they essentially owed nothing to the laboring masses.23 Pfahler, unlike insensitive Social Darwinists, believed employers needed to show goodwill by reaching out to employees, patiently listening to them, and, when possible, helping resolve their grievances. In essence, he wanted fellow NFA members, some of whom stood near, but not at, the apex of industrial society, to ensure they were basically fair to their employees.24 Rather than view wage laborers as, in the words of historian Sven Beckert, “‘the dangerous classes’ who threatened the rights of property holders,” Pfahler’s public statements suggest he perceived employees, both unionists and nonunionists, as potential partners—albeit junior ones—in a future shaped by cross-class harmony and prosperity.25 One of his colleagues even claimed in 1903 that this Philadelphian was “one of the most earnest friends of organized labor.”26
But creating an atmosphere in which employees thrived and experienced feelings of fulfillment was not enough. Pfahler and his comrades realized the importance of building and maintaining trust with the IMU leadership, relatively privileged individuals who tended to conduct their tasks from comfortable offices, not grubby shop floors. These individuals, Pfahler realized, were critical, even necessary, to ensuring industrial peace. And meetings between the NFA and the IMU culminated in the 1899 New York Agreement, a labor-management settlement promising to usher in years of industrywide harmony similar to the arrangements reached by the SFNDA. In other words, Pfahler, in consultation with his colleagues, realized that routine, courteous conferences with labor representatives served a productive purpose. Pfahler, writing in 1903, understood that the NFA must use its connections with the union leadership wisely to prevent rebellious rank-and-filers from violating labor-management agreements and disrupting the production process:
It is true that at first the members of local unions, led by some wild agitator, would make a demand upon their employer, and, failing to enforce the demand, would quit work; but the national officers of the union would require them to return to work at once and await the usual and proper means of adjustment.27
Union leaders, Pfahler acknowledged, were often largely responsible, fair-minded figures who exercised a certain amount of control over the potentially “wild” rank and file. The labor leadership, by ensuring contract enforcement, were colleagues, rather than adversaries.
This leadership also saw the benefits of industrial peace. Writing about the NFA’s development, the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine explained in 1901, “This splendid situation is indeed a rift in the clouds that have lowered over the industrial world throughout a generation in most lines of business.”28 And an IMU spokesperson, writing in early 1898, affectionately welcomed the new employers’ association partially because of Pfahler’s involvement:
we have looked with favor upon the efforts of Mr. Wm. H. Pfahler and his colleagues of the American Foundrymen’s Association to organize a protective organization among the foundrymen, which, working in harmony with the Iron Molders’ Union, would endeavor to fix yearly, or otherwise, the wage rate and thus avoid the possibility of a strike and its attendant inconvenience to both parties.29
While the NFA leadership recognized the value of meeting and negotiating with union leaders, Pfahler and his colleagues also held firm to the belief that the employers must have the option of hiring and firing men irrespective of union status. In practice, foundry operators employed mostly unionists because local IMU chapters often represented the majority of the skilled employees in the industry. Yet NFA members were perfectly willing to hire nonunionists, including strikebreakers, during industrial disputes.30
At the same time, most had peace on their minds. And several AFA activists, understanding the need for workplace stability and the necessity of collaborating with politically moderate labor leaders, followed Pfahler’s lead by helping to build the new defense association. In a short period, the NFA had become a formidable team, consisting of, in the 1916 words of its early chronicler, Margaret Loomis Stecker, “some of the best-known manufacturers of heavy machinery and other casting iron specialties.”31 The organization included, for example, executives from General Electric and the American Locomotive Company, two large, highly prosperous, multilocation workplaces. Employers attached to more modest-sized, standalone establishments also paid their membership dues and volunteered their time to the cause. Numerous figures joined the association apparently because, as The Iron Trade Review explained in 1898, they took a liking to Pfahler’s “affable and charming manner” and because they shared his faith “that bringing together all the brains that have developed the manufacturing interests of this country, must be a force for good.”32
The recruitment process was fairly straightforward, involving face-toface contacts between men from roughly the same class. In meetings with foundry owners, many of whom were clubby, AFA-affiliated individuals, recruiters provided membership cards and requested assistance as they built this “force for good.” Some organizers were paid; others donated their time. In 1898, Pfahler hired John A. Penton, the AFA secretary and the former president of the Detroit-based International Brotherhood of Machinery Molders Union, a rival to the IMU before the two unions merged in 1893, to organize full time.33 By most accounts, the Paris, Ontario-born Penton was a sensible pick. The New York Times explained in 1902 that he was once “a practical molder and consequently understands every question of the foundry as one without a knowledge of the work could not.”34 His union-organizing experience gave him a degree of credibility possessed by few others, and he used his connections wisely, recruiting dozens from the AFA. One NFA member named Penton “the early propagandist” in 1903.35 Yet his former IMU adversaries, recalling previous conflicts, called him “something of a hustler” in 1897.36
Penton certainly hustled, enlisted many, and received help in the process. He explained in 1899 that “if your secretary has achieved any measure of success in the work of obtaining new members, it has been in the main owing to the very substantial assistance he has received from time to time from our other members and officers.”37 Volunteers from Buffalo, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Pittsburgh, and Pfahler’s home town of Philadelphia also played a key part in this process, conducting what some referred to as “missionary work.”38 Audiences in these and other locations heard Penton, Pfahler and their colleagues deliver impassioned speeches about the necessity of joining together in order to protect themselves and their workmen from demanding unionists and the notorious walking delegates, the labor leaders responsible for calling strikes and therefore creating unnecessary turbulence and economic hardships.39 P. W. Gates, NFA president after Pfahler’s brief term and head of the Chicago-based Gates Iron Works, a successful manufacturer of mining machinery, performed “yeoman service in strengthening the association and making it a force in the foundry world.”40 Pittsburgh’s Isaac W. Frank, owner of the large United Engineering and Foundry Company, which employed about 2,000 men, helped by meeting with his contacts in foundries and social clubs throughout Western Pennsylvania. In addition to his business activities, Frank, a prominent individual in the city’s Jewish community, earned a reputation as a generous philanthropist.41 Ogden P. Letchworth, director of the giant Pratt and Letchworth Company, a malleable iron and steel castings manufacturing establishment in Buffalo, convinced dozens to join in his community. In Buffalo, Letchworth enjoyed a reputation as a socialite and as a benevolent welfare capitalist.42 As a result of the organizing carried out by Pfahler, Yagle, Putnam, Penton, Gates, Frank, Letchworth, and others, the NFA “added to its membership many of the most extensive foundries in the country.”43 Their traveling, networking, agitation, promises of greener pastures, and occasional good humor paid off handsomely: the NFA tripled in size from 1899 to 1900. The NFA gave voice and support to the nation’s leading manufacturers and community leaders. These “men of affairs” were fully “determined,” as The Iron Trade Review insisted in 1900, “to oppose injustice by employers and employes.”44 Together, NFA members promoted themselves as honest brokers, promising