the BTEA’s decision to follow in the NMTA’s footsteps. Like the NMTA, it spent the twentieth century’s first few years bargaining with union leaders. But its members increasingly found the process unnecessarily laborious, frustrating, and ultimately fruitless. In 1903, speaking in front of a crowd of over 700 men, Charles L. Eidlitz, a well-known building architect and NCF leader, pointed to what he considered the repetitiveness of preposterous union demands:
At first you were asked simply to take down the bar from the door. Later the chain was to be taken off. Still later the key must be left on the outside. All these demands and many others were granted. And now, what is asked of you? That the door shall be taken off the hinges and thrown into the street. What will be your answer to this request?89
Inspired by his colorful and dramatic analogy, the men in attendance, who, according to its Bulletin, had links to “various building trades representing eighty percent of all the building interests of New York,” had finally recognized the slippery slope nature of negotiations and thus reached the same conclusions drawn by the NMTA two years earlier: “By a unanimous vote it was determined to solidly unite and stand for the rights of employers to manage their own business.”90
This same impulse inspired thousands of others to form locally based employers’ associations. Defense associations of the sort that Pfahler, Penton, Davenport, Du Brul, and Eidlitz helped build had sprung up in large and small cities throughout the country. By late 1903, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Louisville, Minneapolis, Omaha, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Worcester had become movement hubs.91 And some of these urban-based employers’ associations were led by individuals outside the heavy manufacturing and the building trades. The Chicago Employers’ Association, for instance, was launched largely by John G. Shedd of department store Marshall Field’s in 1902. “Labor is organized,” Shedd announced. “We, too, must organize.”92
There was, from the perspective of Chicago’s merchants and manufacturers, a profound sense of urgency. Chicago’s participating employers obtained the help of attorney Frederick W. Job, a former member of the Illinois State Board of Arbitration. As ambitious as Penton and Du Brul, Job sent notices to Chicago’s employers, explaining the importance of unity in the face of a relentless uptick in strikes, boycotts, and organizing campaigns. His persistent activities bore fruit, resulting in the creation of forty “sub-associations,” including the Building Owners’ Association, the Laundry Owners’ Association, and the Manufacturing Confectioners’ Association. All functioned under the umbrella of the larger Chicago Employers’ Association. With a growing and increasingly confident membership behind them, Job and Shedd promised to supply struck workplaces with “independent” replacement workers, and they appealed to local politicians, such as Mayor Carter Henry Harrison Jr., to provide police protection. Harrison, once organized labor’s ally, honored their request, and in April 1904, more than 1,000 members of Chicago’s police force helped strikebreakers travel to struck workplaces. In the period of just a few months, this employers’ association, numbering about 1,000 firms by early 1904, had helped give renewed confidence to the city’s diverse business community. According to the magazine World’s Work, “The employer has been educated to appreciate the value of organization.”93
One of the most powerful, inclusive, and effective groups to support the open-shop principle and spread its underlying message was the NAM. Formed in response to the 1893 depression, the NAM held its initial meeting in 1895 in Cincinnati, where delegates, including future president William McKinley, discussed the necessity of expanding economic development in part by increasing foreign trade. The organization, representing mostly locally controlled, midsized workplaces that employed somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners, enjoyed a close relationship with the Republican Party. Chroniclers of the NAM’s early history have long pointed out that the membership under its first two presidents neither formally discussed, nor took positions on, matters related to the management of labor.94 Unlike others, it did not develop as a labor-fighting, or union-containing, “defense association.”
Yet under the leadership of Indianapolis’s David M. Parry, the organization, in response to widespread labor unrest and agitation from recruiters like Du Brul, had established itself as a leading participant in the movement. Parry had clear, class-based reasons to oppose organized labor. Immensely wealthy and well connected, he headed Indianapolis’s enormous Parry Manufacturing Company, which built several different types of wagons and employed roughly 2,000 employees, including at least some union sympathizers. According to a historian of Indiana, his towering, capital-intensive workplace was “bigger than the next five biggest carriage factories in the world.”95
The NAM’s anti-union activities officially began in 1902 and involved intensive political lobbying and letter writing directed at policy-makers in Washington, where it ultimately succeeded in blocking the American Federation of Labor-backed proposal for an eight-hour workday on government contracts. Parry and his colleagues, some of whom enjoyed profitable contracts with the U.S. navy, found the prospect of such “class legislation” wholly obnoxious. “The right to say how long men shall work,” Parry declared, “is a right which belongs to private agreement between employer and employe, and we deny the justice of government endeavoring to regulate those matters which come within the province of industrial adjustment.”96
The NAM’s aggressive anti-union efforts under Parry’s leadership, defended under the banner of protecting personal “rights,” should not surprise us in part because Parry himself had confronted several organizing drives orchestrated by Indianapolis’s Central Labor Union. In 1901, a union spokesperson, citing low pay, frequent firings, and a generally dispiriting atmosphere, claimed “that conditions there are worse than in any factory in the city.” And by August of that year, the union stated that it had the support of 75 percent of the labor force. Insisting that he compensated his men “better” than most employers, Parry dismissed the union’s number as simply absurd, doubting that its lead organizer, John Blue, could identify “1 per cent of the men ready to go into a union.”97
This seems more like wishful thinking on Parry’s part than a truly honest appraisal of his workforce’s views on the matter. While it may be correct that fewer than 75 percent signed union cards, it is difficult to believe Parry’s claim that only 1 percent supported the organizing effort. But Parry wanted observers to believe that he took the high road, insisting that, as a goodhearted American, he did not care if the individual worker joined a labor union, “the Odd Fellows,” or “The Presbyterian Church,” provided “he does not molest anybody else.” That “anybody else” did not merely mean him. Yet as the owner, he felt a responsibility to prevent the creation of a closed shop—a truly nightmarish industrial relations scenario that, in his view, would lead to falling levels of productivity and the growth of an increasingly incompetent labor force. As he explained, “I do not propose to have it run by any labor union or these fakers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.” For Parry, unscrupulous outside dissenters and charlatans, rather than grievance-holding workmen, were responsible for triggering the unnecessary controversy. Whatever its source, Parry succeeded, demonstrating his unwillingness to “tolerate [the union’s] dictatorial policy.”98
Less than two years later at the NAM annual conference in New Orleans, Parry forcefully professed that his organization was committed to solving the labor problem nationally by strenuously backing efforts to establish thousands of open-shop workplaces like his own. Here he helped to usher in a period that labor leaders disparagingly called “Parryism.”99 In front of over 200 delegates, including Pfahler and Du Brul, Parry delivered a speech as passionate and as pointed as anything given by Du Brul, insisting that organized labor posed a singular threat to “liberty-loving people” and thus challenged “the whole social, political, and governmental systems of the Nation.” He made his points almost selflessly, explaining that the reinvented organization’s principal goal was emancipatory, designed to help
