let us consider additional evidence, including the role played by the NCF’s full-time secretary and strategist, Ralph M. Easley, who occasionally sought assistance from leaders in the emerging open-shop movement to help suppress strikes. For example, in summer 1902 he secured Du Brul’s aid in settling a New York City strike of skilled blacksmiths; Du Brul made the lengthy trip from Cincinnati shortly after becoming NMTA commissioner.112 The circumstances surrounding Easley’s hire are noteworthy: the NCF secretary decided to employ Du Brul a year after the NMTA ceased all formal negotiations with the IAM. Indeed, it is highly difficult to imagine that Easley, who was well-connected in the world of business and had studied labor questions carefully, was somehow unaware of Du Brul’s principled and vocal opposition to closed-shop unionism.113
Finally, we must ponder the words and actions of the NCF’s employers at meetings. Writing about the organization’s fall 1903 gathering in Chicago, the journal World’s Work, for example, described an absolutely polarized atmosphere, noting that “every employer [at the conference] favored the open shop, and every union man opposed it.”114 Furthermore, consider the case of Eidlitz, a leader of both the BTEA and the NCF. Eidlitz apparently felt only mildly reluctant about making a provocative speech in front of mixed company, including the AFL’s Samuel Gompers and the United Mine Workers of America’s John Mitchell, in late 1903. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I have been told to make it funny, but I can’t be humorous, for I have something that I am boiling to say.” Recognizing the controversial nature of his subject, Eidlitz claimed that “I am speaking my personal views.” Less confident and combative than Du Brul or Parry, Eidlitz nevertheless went on: “when organized labor interferes with the rights of a free white man over twenty-one who lives in this country something must be done, and I hope the Civic Federation is going to do it.” As an NCF member, perhaps Eidlitz appreciated organized labor’s campaigns against child labor, but he believed that the same forces were misguided to interfere with the rights of nonunion white adults. Echoing Du Brul, Parry, and Post, Eidlitz called on fellow employers to offer them protection. In essence, he wanted the businessmen in the room, many of whom had experienced their own rather unpleasant brushes with strikes and boycotts, to acknowledge what growing numbers had already concluded: that the open-shop principle constituted a progressive and just solution that promised to protect the individual rights of employers, workers, and Americans generally. How did the crowd respond? Rather favorably, according to a report in the Building Trades Employers’ Association Bulletin: “There was a sharp buzz of comment when Mr. Eidlitz sat down. He got considerable applause, and there were one or two cries of ‘You’re right’!”115
Chapter 2
“For the Protection of the Common People”: Citizens, Progressives, and “Free Workers”
American public opinion is more liable to be with the underdog. In other words, it is more apt to sympathize with the demands of organized labor than with the demands of organized capital, because of an indefinable feeling that capitalists are able to take care of themselves, while labor is less able to do so. For this reason the employers’ associations usually make studious and intelligent efforts to so regulate their conduct as to inspire the sympathy and assistance of public opinion as reflected by the Citizens’ Alliance.
—J. C. Craig, Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Citizens’ Industrial Association of America, 1904
Although the open-shop movement was led chiefly by employers with recognizable financial and managerial interests, numerous others from outside industrial relations settings played their own important roles in strengthening it. This chapter describes the multiple ways well-known reformers in the areas of higher education, journalism, law, politics, and religion, combined with nonunion workers, assisted management by embracing policies, joining organizations, and making statements that promoted what they considered the open-shop principle’s virtues. Together, broad coalitions of citizens, led by employers, sought to illustrate that this principle was fundamentally fair to Americans as a whole, rather than simply serving the interests of the elite. What follows below is a series of biographical sketches and case studies, beginning with the 1902 anthracite coal strike and its immediate aftermath, that highlight efforts to convince the general public of the open-shop principle’s evenhanded, class-neutral, and reformist character.
The Square Deal?
The 1902 anthracite coal mine strike, an enormous protest that dragged on for more than five months and involved as many as 147,000 demonstrators in northeastern Pennsylvania, was undoubtedly one of American history’s most significant labor-management confrontations. Protestors, represented by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), harbored numerous grievances—low pay, irregular work schedules, long workday hours, and the inability to bargain collectively. They demanded a 20 percent wage increase, an eight-hour workday, and closed shops. The region’s mightiest railroad and coal companies, embroiled in this conflict, flatly refused these demands. They were especially unwilling to recognize the UMWA as the miners’ exclusive bargaining unit. As attorney Clarence Darrow, who represented the UMWA during the conflict, explained, the owners were motivated by more than a desire to save money and maintain existing work hours; fundamentally, the showdown was based on “a question of mastery—nothing else; because they felt and they believed that upon this contest depended the question of whether they should be the masters or whether the men should be the masters.”1
The coal company employers were accustomed to winning strikes, but they typically had to battle for their victories. Consider the words of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company president, George Baer, whose workplaces were affected by this, and previous, strikes. In 1901, he claimed that labor conflicts always have “and, perhaps, always will result in the ‘survival of the fittest’.”2 During the 1902 strike, Baer, who served as a spokesperson for a number of the besieged mine managers and owners, including J. P. Morgan, remained confident that his side, by effectively employing strikebreakers and guards while ensuring class solidarity, would, yet again, demonstrate that it was indeed the country’s economically fittest. The coal miners, Baer arrogantly wrote in 1902, “will be protected and cared for—not by labor agitators, but by the Christian gentlemen to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.”3
As the disruptive, increasingly violent, and seemingly intractable conflict continued into the fall, reformers took notice. The (Kansas City) Independent, annoyed by both sides, contended that “the public interest in this and similar struggles is paramount to that of either employers or workmen.” Above all, the newspaper argued, the public needed “to protect itself against either or both parties to the controversy.”4 It maintained that ordinary people, particularly consumers, were hurt by both the strikers’ actions and “the stubborn Baer and his associates.”5
Not all commentators faulted both sides. And few captured the strike’s sense of drama better than muckraker Ray Stannard Baker, whose somewhat probing and lengthy article about the conflict was published in McClure’s, a widely circulated magazine popular with a middle-class readership. Baker was one of McClure’s most prolific writers, and he established a reputation for himself partially by writing “The Right to Work”—a decades-old slogan that some employers and their allies had used as an attempt to personalize the plight of non-strikers, individuals who faced organized labor’s unforgiving wrath on picket lines.6 Rather than draw attention to northeastern Pennsylvania’s widespread poverty, stark class divisions, the repressive coal mine police, or the undiluted arrogance articulated by Social Darwinists like Baer, Baker’s fourteen-page article—which appeared in print shortly after the strike’s conclusion—focused on the ways nonunion men, numbering approximately 17,000, faced what Baker called the multiple “tragedies of the great coal strike.”7 Baker depicted cases of unrelenting viciousness, describing how strikers verbally and physically abused strikebreakers. He
