the conflict. The demoralized unionized workforce, confronted by formidable strikebreaking actions, had lost its bargaining power. For several years, the IAM maintained a strong presence in the shop. In 1901, before Bates joined the NMTA, IAM activists forced him to accept a closed union shop, which granted workers the nine-hour day.77 Now an NMTA member, Bates was emboldened, no longer willing to make costly and inconvenient concessions. Backed by a network of professional union-fighters, he now managed unilaterally, voiding previous agreements that had covered pay rates and hours, a practice that presumably became contagious in this community. Spokespersons were confident of a future free of union-provoked mayhem, proclaiming that “Joliet is today in a position to practically guarantee industrial peace not only to her own manufacturers, but also to future site-seekers.” Those who harbored a desire to invest in Joliet had Bates and the NMTA to thank for creating inviting and peaceful business conditions. Like Reeves, Bates and movement spokespersons interpreted successful union breaking as a community accomplishment rather than as a narrow workplace victory.78
Not all recruits became members because they heard speeches by organizers or because they contacted activists after reading the movement’s voluminous output of antiunion propaganda. Nevertheless, the NMTA played a part in helping such employers caught up in labor troubles. Sometimes “free men,” wage earners who rejected unionism, encouraged employers to discover the virtues of the open-shop philosophy. In the South, J. W. Glover, head of the Marietta, Georgia-based Glover Machine Works, the region’s foremost maker of locomotives and hoisting engines, joined the NMTA shortly after suffering through what appears to have been an especially debilitating strike. Yet no NMTA organizers engaged in any recruitment campaigns in this part of the nation prior to Glover’s conflict. Nevertheless, in a matter of a few short years, Glover became a regional leader.
An ostensibly timid industrialist who had never before given a public speech, Glover addressed the NMTA annual conference in Cleveland in 1906 about the profound impact the group had on his career and morale after his IAM encounter. Alarmed by the viciousness of the strikers, Glover complained his factory nearly closed down. “I have tried to build up my little business down in a small town in Georgia,” he remarked in an exaggeratedly humble fashion, “and the Machinists’ Union tackled me last July.” Unionists were ruthless, he reported: “they laughed at me like a little chicken.” Glover needed assistance—and a renewed sense of confidence—but knew nothing about the NMTA until an unnamed antiunion employee told him about the group in the midst of the conflict. After learning about its vision and services, Glover traveled to the association’s Cincinnati headquarters, where he spent hours talking to William Eagan and Robert Wuest, the NMTA’s commissioner and secretary respectively, pleading for aid.79
Eagan and Wuest agreed to help, ordering nonunionists from two of the association’s hardest-working secretaries, Philadelphia’s D. H. McPherson, a former NMTA organizer, and New York’s Henry C. Hunter, an activist who had mastered the craft of strikebreaking in New York and New Jersey shipyards.80 The leadership’s generosity, combined with the organization’s efficient and reliable union-busting services, warmed Glover’s heart and transformed him into an open-shop ideologue: “I feel that you gentlemen ought to know what a good work you have done for a poor little devil like me.” In reply, the audience, consisting principally of mechanical engineers, proprietary capitalists, and veteran union fighters, broke into laughter.81
Glover learned that his largely northern-based comrades were a supportive and amusing bunch. That Glover lived hundreds of miles from the majority of the NMTA’s membership did not matter; the NMTA was organized on class and industry rather than geographic lines. The IAM established locals and staged nationwide protests; the NMTA leadership learned that, in order to perform its union fighting effectively, it too needed to maintain chapters in southern cities. It appears that Glover had less self-assurance and fewer acquaintances than his more educated, seemingly more experienced and cosmopolitan Yankee brothers, though he shared their concern over the labor movement’s growth and combativeness. More importantly, he shared a willingness to fight and reform his community. One certainly did not need a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering to hold membership in the NMTA and win battles against trade unions.
Glover had become a dedicated NMTA member, served on committees, and recruited fellow employers in his home state of Georgia. In 1906, he began serving as secretary of the newly formed southern district, based in Atlanta, where he helped build an open-shop presence in the heart of the “New South.” No longer intimidated by abusive labor activists, he was now part of a proud alliance enjoying the discretionary power of managing unilaterally. By testifying about the association’s help, Glover reinforced the organizing by Du Brul and his successor, Eagan.82
The movement’s successes continued to multiply in the second part of the decade. According to NMTA secretary Wuest, the association responded to 126 strikes in 1907, winning all but four.83 Not coincidentally, 1907 was a year of significant growth. Of course, such effective strikebreaking and membership increases occurred in the context of a deep recession. High levels of unemployment meant a larger pool of potential strikebreakers, which certainly assisted the organization’s union-breaking operations. In July of that year, Wuest, who had helped place many nonunionists in struck workplaces, reported that “practically all of the strikes called in the shops of our members have failed in their purpose.”84 Victory rates of over 90 percent compelled employers, both organized and independent, to take notice. After triumphant campaigns, numerous employers became eager open-shop advocates, acknowledging that their labor problems could be solved with help from professional antiunionists. Employers like Reeves, Bates, and especially Glover, toughened and educated by their experiences, became collaborators in this national movement because they profited personally from it. They were in awe of the NMTA’s strikebreaking operations, thankful to the panoply of participants, and grateful to have managerial hegemony restored, and as members, they too were prepared to engage in further campaigns designed to reform their communities against “union dictation.” And Bates, Reeves, Glover, and hundreds of others saved money in the process. According to Cleveland’s Sayle, a leader of both the NFA and the NMTA, members paid their union-free workforces “a low average rate of $2.50 per day.”85 The NMTA, effectively using strikebreakers, guards, and management consultants in the interests of its members, had proved itself a central player in the open-shop movement. Writing about the NMTA in 1922, Bonnett observed that “the Association has reduced the combating of strikes to a science.” Other historians have more recently referred to its activities as an “art.”86
“We too must organize”: The Movement Spreads
Employers from other sectors of the economy demonstrated equal annoyance with organized labor’s activities. And by mid-decade, large numbers from coast to coast had elected to follow the lead of the NMTA and the NFA. Organizers formed both city- and trade-based associations. Some of the more influential groups included the National Association of Manufacturers, the Laundrymen’s National Association, the National Association of Employing Lithographers, the National Erectors’ Association, the Building Trades Employers’ Association (BTEA), and the American Anti-Boycott Association (AABA), led by lawyers determined to use the courts against organized labor’s boycott drives and demands for closed shops.87
The AABA chief organizer, Bridgeport, Connecticut-based attorney Daniel Davenport, was especially active, pointing out, as he asserted to a room full of employers in 1904 “the duty, the importance, and the necessity of standing firmly for the right of the individual to run his own business.” Davenport, known in part for his endorsement of women’s suffrage rights, insisted that employers must feel no obligation to succumb to union pressure because the courts had routinely upheld the legality of the open-shop system of management. By providing legal support and by pointing out the significance of decades of judicial backing, Davenport had reminded employers they were far from alone.88
But the presence of anti-union laws did little to discourage labor leaders from making what open-shop proponents believed were
