Reform or Repression
AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY
Series editors
Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird, Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and public policy—understood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking but also the structuring presence of governmental institutions—has been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Reform or Repression
Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement
Chad Pearson
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4776-3
To Sandra and Lucia
Contents
Introduction. Reformers and Fighters: Employers and the Labor Problem
Chapter 1. Fighting “Union Dictation”: Birth of the Open-Shop Movement
Chapter 2. “For the Protection of the Common People”: Citizens, Progressives, and “Free Workers”
Chapter 3. A Tale of Two Men: Class Traitors and Strikebreaking in Cleveland
Chapter 4. Avenging McKinley: Organized Employers in Buffalo
Chapter 5. Making the “City of Prosperity”: The Poetry of Industrial Harmony in Worcester
Chapter 6. “A Solid South for the Open Shop”: N. F. Thompson and the Labor Solution
Introduction. Reformers and Fighters: Employers and the Labor Problem
Those who have given any thought to the labor question must see that it is a very inadequate statement to make that it is merely a controversy between employers and employes.
—David M. Parry, 1904
The period between 1890 and 1917 in the United States was shaped by both far-reaching reforms and episodic cases of violence and repression. Reform-minded citizens fought corruption and vice in cities and in official politics, sought to make our food and water supplies safer, denounced the role of alcohol in society, and campaigned for protective labor laws. Some reformers were motivated to improve efficiency; others were troubled by what they considered expressions of immorality in communities and workplaces. In that same era, dramatic strikes pitted militant workers against obstinate employers. Middle-class campaigners helped win legislation designed to protect some workers—namely women and children—at roughly the same time that immigrant anarchists, western miners, and socialists of various stripes preached the need for a working-class-led revolution. Picket-line violence was commonplace, and the state responded to the most aggressive examples of working-class combativeness and acts of sabotage with arrests, and sometimes even executions. The era truly was, as the names of two influential books about the period suggest, both an Age of Reform and America’s First Age of Terror.1
This project investigates the ways an often overlooked and under-explored group, employers and their allies, helped shape this period of contrasts. Why study the history of American employers and their organizations? The reason is straightforward: historically, they have wielded a tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people. They hired, fired, disciplined, rewarded, promoted, set pay rates, decided what, if any, benefits to offer, and fought trade unionists and working-class activists. Turn-of-the-century employers representing different types and sizes of workplaces also joined with one another in unprecedented ways to build powerful organizations designed to alleviate the “labor problem,” which Americans from all classes viewed as one of the era’s most pressing concerns. Defined largely by clergymen, lawyers, journalists, and employers in the years after the Civil War, the labor problem consisted of a set of working class-led activities, including union organizing campaigns, boycotts, and strikes, that threatened to destabilize American capitalism.2 How, reform-seeking employers demanded to know, could they best respond to expressions of insubordination like strikes and workers’ demands for recognition, which in practice meant the establishment of closed shops—workplaces where all wage earners held union membership cards and bargained collectively with management?3 Hundreds of employers’ organizations, established at both the local and national levels, worked to solve these multilayered
