questions until recent years: the factor of unionism.” He continued, “Individually the manufacturer cannot oppose the Unions excepting at a tremendous cost, and even if he wins his fight alone he establishes no precedents and he has peace only for a time.” Organized manufacturers, Du Brul believed, needed to begin the process of looking to one another for support and thus realize their potential to stop strikes and hence minimize their economic consequences. Du Brul offered three reasons why, in his opinion, holding NMTA membership was necessary: “First, for the purpose of defense. Second, for purposes of educating themselves, their workmen and their foremen.” And finally, “From motives of patriotism. In the matter of defense it is self-evident that with the whole power of organized labor concentrated on one individual firm there is much danger to that firm in individual resistance; collective resistance to injustice, however, has never yet failed.” A careful observer of economic developments and industrial relations throughout the western world, Du Brul often invoked history and used fear tactics, arguing that if American manufacturers failed to unite against trade unionism, then labor relations would soon resemble the poor state of conditions in England, where “industrial prosperity” was “disappearing” in the face of merciless strikes.63 Though it is unclear how many engineers Du Brul converted, his influence at this meeting eclipsed that of Taylor’s.64
It is possible that Du Brul garnered more interest at this gathering than Taylor, whose influence on workplace management has interested multiple generations of scholars, because the open-shop advocate spoke to a problem that concerned practically all manufacturers, not just those interested in adopting scientific management techniques. Indeed, some employers organized their workplaces on Taylor’s methods, but plenty of others did not. In the midst of the 1903 strike wave, the open-shop system promised to address the more immediate needs of managers overseeing workforces of various sizes and types. One could not make the same point about Taylor’s ideas, even though, as historian Hugh G. J. Aitken claimed, Taylor’s methods constituted “an allegedly complete system of management.”65 The multifaceted labor problem, experienced intimately and often agonizingly by the nation’s manufacturers, united both disciples of Taylor’s methods and those with no, or only a passing, interest in his ideas.
Observers of the nascent open-shop movement recognized that Du Brul was a gifted leader and organizer, called “an enthusiast in the employers’ association movement” by The Iron Trade Review in 1903.66 Born in 1873, he, like Pfahler, Penton, and Covell, traveled considerable distances and devoted enormous amounts of time to establishing the movement principally by offering talks like the one he delivered in Saratoga Springs. With an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, where he obtained a classical liberal arts education and played football, and graduate course work under his belt from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied politics and economics under some of the country’s most distinguished scholars—including future president Woodrow Wilson—Du Brul became the NMTA’s first vice president and commissioner in 1902, impressing his colleagues with his values, educational background, good character, and strong opinions.67 He was a partner of the Cincinnati-based firm Miller, Du Brul, and Peters Manufacturing Company, a very large plant that specialized in the construction of cigar and cigarette machines, established partially by his father, Napoleon.68 Napoleon Du Brul’s oldest son quickly became an influential leader in what was, at the time, one of the nation’s most productive centers of machine tool manufacturing.69 Ernest F. Du Brul’s interest in collective endeavors was likely influenced, at least in part, by his peers, men who created a number of elite organizations during the nineteenth century.70
It is noteworthy that Du Brul was a devoted follower of the Catholic faith leading a largely, though hardly exclusively, Protestant membership. In a previous generation, Du Brul’s Catholicism would have likely barred him from participating in elite organizations; many Protestants in the 1850s, for example, believed the growing Catholic community in the United States placed their devotion to the Pope above their respect for the nation’s republican values. This was certainly not the case half a century later with respect to the open-shop movement. The ambitious Cincinnatian’s central involvement in open-shop campaigns, like the participation of Frank, a Jew, demonstrates the movement’s cultural and religious pluralism. In short, White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) hardly commanded total control over the nation’s prominent businessmen-led organizations at this time. One’s religious beliefs and practices clearly mattered less than one’s commitment to a managerial philosophy that called for the full protection of business owners and independent workmen against “union dictation.”71
Du Brul shared the lessons he learned in northern Indiana, Baltimore, and Cincinnati with manufacturers throughout much of the country, vigorously proselytizing about the open-shop principle’s defensive, educational, and patriotic virtues. He traveled long distances, lectured on matters related to the political economy, and pressured manufacturers to join the NMTA. He visited factories, gentlemen’s clubs, and meetings of professional groups, sharing his deep knowledge of economics, history, and business etiquette. “Probably more than the average manufacturer,” The Iron Trade Review observed in 1902, “Mr. Du Brul has acquainted himself with the history of industrial and social movements.”72 He was confident, and occasionally even arrogant. Following several trips, Du Brul boasted about the NMTA’s righteousness and influence. “We have been tried by the fire,” he declared in early 1903, “and found true steel.”73 “When they [trade unionists] tangle up in a fight with this association,” he remarked less than a year after addressing the ASME meeting, “they are in for a fight to the finish, and the finish has only been one way, and that is our way.”74
Figure 1. Ernest F. Du Brul as a student at Notre Dame University. Courtesy of Notre Dame University archives.
Certainly nothing helped the movement grow more than effective battles, which involved both the direct breaking of labor protests at the point of production and the use of propaganda to legitimize such actions. Open-shop proponents tended to portray trade union campaigners as incurable troublemakers while almost always insisting that employers and independent workers were innocent victims. But the movement succeeded in minimizing casualties, and spokespersons further illustrated that salaried members of employers’ associations, enjoying access to large supplies of nonunion strikebreakers, constituted a consistent source of enormous help. And the grateful and often community-spirited beneficiaries of their mobilizations, excited by the prospects of long-term labor peace, then joined the movement. The lessons embedded in these tedious narratives are unambiguous and rather simple: led by noble warriors, the open-shop movement was fundamentally a force of good against evil.
A few cases illustrate this point. For instance, managers at Columbus, Indiana’s Reeves Pulley Company, a wood split pulley manufacturing establishment that occupied over 300,000 square feet, expressed a great amount of indebtedness for the NMTA’s services after it helped transform their city from a place plagued by trade union radicalism to a center of labor peace and affluence. How? Faced with labor troubles in 1903, a Reeves manager “went personally to Cincinnati,” where he requested Du Brul’s assistance. After Du Brul promised help, the manager “immediately made application for membership.” The thrilled man, a beneficiary of trainloads of strikebreakers, shared his experiences with fellow manufacturers. “Our labor troubles,” he proclaimed to a room full of supporters, “began to subside, and the unions have decided to carry the labor agitation in Columbus no further.” Like civic boosters speaking in the aftermath of natural disasters, Reeves, no longer hampered by labor troubles, promised long-term calm and prosperity for manufacturers and community members.75
Other victims joined the movement for similar reasons. W. O. Bates of the Joliet, Illinois-based Bates Machine Company, constructors of power-transmitting machinery and the Bates-Corliss Engine, became a dedicated NMTA member, “thanks to the association’s successful efforts in the handling” of a strike.76 In 1904, strikebreakers and guards, dispatched from
