from both sides of the open-shop question immediately understood the significance of the NAM’s evolution under Parry’s tenure. According to one labor activist, “Trade unionists who imagine that Mr. Parry and his colleagues have merely organized to give pink teas or chowder parties will find that they are sadly misinformed.”101 Employers at this momentous event, reflecting on what they considered onerous contracts, organized labor’s unreasonable demands, pushy business agents, and occasional outbreaks of labor turmoil, affectionately greeted this development. Indeed, the fervent responses to Parry’s speech in Tulane Hall, which found expression in repeated eruptions of loud applause, indicate that the delegates understood the extent of the problem and saw the possibilities of resolving it. Parry’s thunderous declarations gave inspiration to many rank-and-file employers who sincerely cherished his bold and steady leadership. As word spread of the organization’s transformation into a confident, union-fighting outfit, hundreds of employers flocked to it. The organization counted 1,900 dues-paying members in 1902; a year later, that number climbed to 2,700.102 Dayton’s Kirby, excited that the NAM had placed union breaking at the center of its program, called Parry “the Abraham Lincoln of the twentieth century.”103
At first glance, this comparison seems far-fetched. Yet Kirby was apparently dead serious in making it, noting that Parry was one of the most vocal, visible, and determined proponents of the emancipation of independent wage earners and employers from what they viewed as the burdensome reality of closed-shop unionism. Like antebellum slaves, business owners and nonunion workers were, according to his logic, unfairly, even brutally, constrained by the oppressive rules that prevented them from achieving their economic goals and full freedom, which laissez-faire capitalism was supposed to ensure. The movement activists who catapulted Parry to this elevated position clearly saw him as a transformative visionary capable of leading employers away from the morass of union-run corruption and closed-shop oppression.
By invoking Lincoln, Kirby demonstrated consistency with other reformers in this period. Lincoln’s strong leadership at a time of an unprecedented national crisis inspired several prominent early twentieth-century figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. As historical sociologist Barry Schwartz notes, “Progressives promoted Lincoln as a model for their era of reform.”104 In the eyes of Kirby, and presumably other employers, Parry, by helping to lead the movement, had reached the conclusion that provocative language and industrial warfare constituted the soundest, and perhaps only, choice in the face of an increasingly rebellious and radical labor movement intolerant of the rights of the “free worker.”
The movement took on a new urgency around the time of the NAM’s transformation. No longer did organized employers merely complain about what a member of the AFA called in 1897 “the inconveniences inseparable from labor troubles.”105 By 1903, employer activists, led partly by Lincolnesque visionaries like Parry, viewed the labor problem, expressed most sharply by demands for closed shops, as more than simply “inconvenient.” Rather, they warned about the creeping threats of dictation and domination, and argued that the nation’s rich diversity of employers—corporate heads, proprietary capitalists, practitioners of scientific management, self-made men, and products of nepotism—had a moral “duty” to fight back. C. W. Post, multimillionaire breakfast cereal mogul, explained the urgency at the NAM historic New Orleans conference. “That duty,” Post maintained, “lies toward the innocent children made fatherless by the tyranny of union laborers; toward the wives made widows from the same cause; towards the small tradesmen throughout the country, whose business has been ruined; towards manufacturers whose property has been destroyed.”106
Du Brul described his “duty” in patriotic terms, declaring that he joined the open-shop movement because it was “a call on my patriotism, just as much as if it were a call to shoulder arms in defense of our country’s institutions from any other sort of an attack.”107 The stakes involved were, as Du Brul, Post, Parry, and others made abundantly clear, significantly weightier than their own inconvenient financial struggles. In this spirit, organizers sought to recruit and motivate hundreds more, explaining to them that, together, they had the power to stop the irredeemable forces of immorality and economic destruction by building organizations that publicly prioritized the interests of ordinary people and the nation as a whole over the demands of any particular class. Their statements clearly indicate that they chose to fight unions not because they wanted to limit their employees’ rights while maximizing profits, but rather because they felt a moral obligation to defend what they defined as the labor movement’s most vulnerable targets: innocent children, widows, small tradesmen, modest-sized business owners, and, above all, “free” workers.
The movement leaders announced that they were especially active in defending nonunionists. Open-shop employers from coast to coast, Parry eagerly told his colleagues in 1904, had finally stepped up and come to the rescue of these “liberty loving people”:
Shop after shop has been opened to the non-union man, and protection has been given him against the sluggers in most of our industrial centers. I believe that fully one thousand manufacturing establishments have, in the last year, abandoned the closed shop and thrown their doors open to workmen without regard to their membership or non-membership in a union.108
These victories ignited renewed feelings of confidence and clarity of vision. And there was little public disagreement about the overall soundness of the open-shop system in management circles across the country’s diverse industrial landscape. As one unnamed observer explained in The Iron Trade Review the following year,
the “open-shop” idea is becoming very much more prominent in the minds of all manufacturers. They no longer debate the question; they have given up feeling timid over the issue, and when the alternative of the open-shop is placed before them they are ready to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to maintain the open-shop and will not listen to any other method of conducting their business.109
Importantly, the movement’s primary contribution was not that it was somehow responsible for educating thousands of diverse employers about the magnitude of the problem; in most cases, they were painfully aware of it. Instead, Davenport, Du Brul, Job, Parry, Pfahler, Post, and many others contributed most meaningfully by providing their likeminded colleagues with practical resources, emotional reassurance, and strategic guidance as they charted a new course. They had, essentially, armed their comrades with the confidence and the tools necessary to solve this many-sided problem. And in return, together, they enthusiastically welcomed the development of an advanced stage of employer empowerment. The optimism was immensely contagious.
But what about the NCF, a joint labor-management organization formed in 1900 committed—at least publicly—to trade agreements and peaceful collective bargaining in a spirit of mutual respect? Did its merchants, manufacturers, corporate moguls, and railroad operators—a very prosperous fraternity—abandon closed-shop agreements like so many others? Based on the conclusions reached by generations of scholars, it would appear that it was the least inclined of any association of employers to support the open-shop movement’s efforts.110
We must resist the temptation to view the NCF businessmen as genuine supporters of organized labor’s main, workplace-centered goals in light of both the documentary record and simple common sense. In essence, like other organized businessmen, the NCF employer members believed that union demands for exclusive bargaining rights were unfair to nonunionists and, like all employers, dreaded eruptions of labor militancy. Of course, this class-collaborationist organization hardly spoke with one voice on the issue of the open versus closed shop—its union representatives understandably wanted recognition and collective bargaining rights. But a number of its employer members were unrepentant Parryites, holding overlapping membership in hardcore open-shop associations, including the NFA, the NMTA, and the NAM.111 Pfahler, for example, was an especially influential open-shop proselytizer. He actually spoke positively about trade unions and defended the employer’s right to employ nonunionists. In fact, few of these people publicly said that unions should
