Amid this uptick in working-class combativeness, employers, unambiguously and passionately asserting their preference for undiminished control, sought to provide their members with helpful services: shipments of strikebreakers during periods of labor unrest, management consultants, attorneys, and spies. They also circulated joint publications, including the aptly named Open Shop, which began in 1903. Speaking in 1910, Dayton’s John Kirby, Jr., who had helped develop one of the nation’s first citywide open-shop organizations ten years earlier, explained that “these two great National organizations of employers stand as a unit for the open-shop, and against union dictation in their shops.”52
Hundreds of metal-working and foundry employers found the era’s upsurge of working-class protests worrisome, joined these self-proclaimed defense associations, paid their dues, lent a hand in union avoidance campaigns, and spoke favorably to their colleagues about the open-shop principle’s emancipatory potential. Started in 1899, the NMTA, the slightly larger of the two groups, leaped from 423 firms in March 1905 to 523 in March 1906. By March 1907, under the leadership of Cleveland’s Walter D. Sayle, the membership grew to 755. The NFA remained a more modest-sized group, growing to a peak of 536 in 1903. Its numbers fell in subsequent years, but the organization remained a formidable outfit committed to solving the labor question in the nation’s foundries.53
Yet despite Bonnett’s claim, few members saw themselves as “belligerents” after declaring their refusal to negotiate with organized labor’s representatives. Instead, they viewed themselves as agents of managerial and technological progress, publicly spirited men eager to help the nation reap the benefits of industrial improvements and an expanding economy. Biographical sketches reveal that many were respected civic leaders and well-regarded members of the engineering elite. For instance, one of the NMTA’s first presidents, Edwin Reynolds, also served as head of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the preeminent society of professional engineers.54 Reynolds, the general manager of Milwaukee’s sizable and profitable Allis-Chalmers Company, developed the company’s popular immobile pumping engines. “All of the large builders,” a fellow ASME member explained in 1899, “have adopted Reynolds’s pumping engines.”55 He became NMTA president in 1901, and served as one of three chief negotiators responsible for the short-lived Murray Hill Agreement.56 Equally notable was John E. Sweet, an ASME founder, former Cornell University mechanical engineering professor, and inventor of the Sweet Measuring Machine. In 1879, following his teaching career, Sweet began running the Straight Line Engine Company, a machine shop in Syracuse specializing in gray iron castings. Under Sweet’s management, the Straight Line Engine Company received numerous prizes for its impressive castings, including a gold medal at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. In Syracuse, Sweet headed the NMTA branch and held membership in the NFA.57
Table 1: NFA and NMTA, 1899–1914: Growth and Consolidation
Source: Howell J. Harris, “Research Note”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dipyO77UdrOk27VhqCSFYHITw7NcpAUoIvsIK4Y1jEg/edit?pli=1.
Reynolds, Sweet, and numerous other engineers most likely hungered for the prestige and financial compensation that resulted from their hard work and technological innovations, and their involvement in employerled defense organizations indicates their profound desire to help prevent the many types of union troubles—boycotts, organizing campaigns, nettlesome shop floor demands, and strikes—from interfering with their goals. After all, like the NFA’s original organizers, they had businesses to run, patents to develop, clubs to visit, and money to make. Yet their active involvement in research and development, combined with their participation in employers’ associations, demonstrates their broader commitment to what they most certainly believed benefited the general public.
Some in this growing movement apparently went above and beyond the call of duty, including Henry N. Covell, a well-connected engineer who had attended the original meeting that launched the NMTA. Born in Troy, New York, in 1862, Covell was reportedly a prominent NFA member and, since 1889, superintendent of the large and enormously lucrative Brooklyn-based Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company, a producer of steam engine castings and logging machinery that formed in 1873. A Yale University graduate and former National Guard member, Covell hobnobbed with several economically privileged, intellectually curious, and socially active individuals as a young man; he held memberships in various organizations, including the Brooklyn Engineers Club. He was also involved in the more socially oriented Brooklyn, Hamilton, and Midwood Clubs, where he participated on various entertainment committees. His business and social pursuits naturally brought him into contact with other prominent Brooklynites and occasional outside visitors. Some fellow clubmen joined him as he helped build and lead the NMTA’s New York City branch.58
Yet Covell did not limit his activities to Brooklyn or Manhattan, and union opponents from outside New York treasured his sociability, community services, foresight, and involvement in the NMTA’s formative period. Speaking at the association’s 1903 conference in Buffalo, British-born William Lodge, an illustrious engineer himself and president of the Cincinnatibased Lodge and Shipley Company, praised the sacrifices and “brains [Covell put] into the inceptionary work of this Association.” Lodge, who was partially responsible for forming the Machine Tool Builders Association in 1902, explained that Covell could have made “thousands of dollars if he had spent the same time in his business” that he spent organizing the NMTA.59 Here Lodge emphasized Covell’s apparent selflessness, noting that he had broader goals than his own financial achievements. Lodge clearly saw Covell as fundamentally duty-bound, compelled to act in order to protect the interests of a virtuous, forward-thinking brotherhood, one that was interrelated by layers of educational, economic, military, and social networks. Indeed, Lodge himself was a core member of this honorable partnership, which was led by, as the NMTA’s Bulletin declared in 1903, “the wisest heads and the most skillful hands.”60
One of the movement’s “wisest heads” was Ernest F. Du Brul, the NMTA’s principal organizer. He often gave stirring speeches, including one at the 1903 ASME convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. Here he spoke shortly after Frederick W. Taylor presented one of his influential talks on “Shop Management” to the group. An observer noted that Du Brul “made a strong plea for the organization of employers.”61 While Taylor spoke methodically, Du Brul talked passionately, insisting that those without an NMTA membership card needed to fill one out immediately and contribute to the employer-led open-shop movement, a campaign designed to transform America’s workplaces by helping employers reestablish full control, profitability, and ultimately harmony. Too many workmen, Du Brul and his colleagues realized, had not become, as The Iron Trade Review had put it, “successful as employees.” Their acts of insubordination, expressed most sharply by demands for exclusive bargaining rights often accompanied by outright rebellion, meant employers needed to take a tough stance. Instead of employing and negotiating with unionized labor, open-shop supporters like Du Brul insisted on the need to secure “free men,” individuals who, as Pfahler had explained earlier that year, “prefer to control the sale of their own labor according to its value, rather than at a price fixed by a body of men whose purpose is to create a standard of wages based upon the ability of the incompetent workman.”62 By the time Du Brul gave his talk, NMTA activists had uniformly come to oppose closed shops, which they found costly and burdensome to themselves, and fundamentally unfair to their “free men.” How, Du Brul implied, could one talk about “shop management” without first responding to a more profound crisis—the aggressive and utterly unwelcome penetration of trade unions into America’s workplaces?
In 1903, the year Du Brul delivered his ASME address, organized labor staged roughly 3,500 work stoppages nationally. The immediate question facing employers from across industries was how best to respond, regain workplace control, and set a moral example for others to follow. In Du
