against themselves, their homes, and their families. He discovered that the nonunion workmen were loyal to their employers, proudly independent, lawful, and patriotic. Baker sincerely believed that these humble sufferers, who “did not believe in the strike,” needed protection from union activists.8
Baker, whose article added a layer of legitimacy to the burgeoning open-shop movement, was not the only well-known figure concerned with protecting the rights of nonunionists in and around the tumultuous coalfields. President Theodore Roosevelt, distressed by picketers’ interference with nonunionists and fearing the devastating consequences of a prolonged strike involving the winter fuel supply, was determined to end the strife. After all, major cities relied on anthracite coal as a heating source. There was, from Roosevelt’s perspective, a profound sense of urgency, and like others before him, he could have opted to mobilize federal troops to break the protest. Instead of following the examples of earlier presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes or Grover Cleveland, executives who had dispatched armed forces against railroad strikers in 1877 and 1894 respectively and thus played a critical part in ensuring that the affected capitalists were, in the context of these disputes, “the fittest,” Roosevelt plotted a significantly more diplomatic path, one that considered the workers’ grievances, the owners’ interests, and the public’s overall well-being.9 Roosevelt and his administration reached out to J. P. Morgan—who owned most of the coal mines affected by the strike—and oversaw the establishment of a commission, which was designed to put pressure on both the union and management, including the cantankerous Baer, to resolve the conflict amicably.10 Roosevelt’s intervention, historian Perry Blatz notes, marked “the first time in American history” the federal government responded evenhandedly to a private sector labor-management conflict.11 Impressed by Roosevelt’s willingness to get the warring sides to find common ground, the UMWA’s John Mitchell, a leading member of the class-collaborationist National Civic Federation (NCF), called off the strike in mid-October. He had come to believe that the seven-person body, consisting of Judge George Gray, General John M. Wilson, E. W. Parker, Thomas H. Watkins, Bishop John L. Spalding, Carroll D. Wright, and E. E. Clark of the Order of Railway Conductors—a union with a long history of opposing strikes—would resolve the issues fairly.12
Several high-profile reformers, including Boston-based attorney Louis D. Brandeis, sought to help the commission—led by Gray, a former U.S. senator, corporate lawyer, and millionaire from Delaware—reach a mutually acceptable settlement. Brandeis was certainly no stranger to the labor question. More than twenty-five years earlier, while in Louisville in the summer of 1877, the recent Harvard University law school graduate joined a businessmen-led volunteer militia, carried a rifle, and helped guard the city’s railroad property from hordes of ill-tempered striking Louisville and Nashville Railroad employees and their pugnacious supporters.13 But Brandeis felt no need to arm himself during his trip to northeastern Pennsylvania. In fact, he expressed sympathy with the region’s working classes, and believed the protestors deserved improved conditions, increases in pay, and greater overall respect from the operators. Visiting the region in December, Brandeis pointed out that coal miners’ work schedules were often irregular, complaining to Darrow that “one of the great evils from which the employees suffer is the lack of continuous occupation.”14 Brandeis insisted that the employers had the financial resources to employ workers for additional weeks at higher rates, but he stopped short of calling for them to officially recognize the UMWA as the exclusive bargaining unit. Yet Gray’s commission refused to listen to Brandeis’s suggestions, prompting him to leave northeastern Pennsylvania disappointed.15
The commission held a series of meetings and interviewed hundreds of strikers, strikebreakers, and witnesses. Commissioners also read reports, including Baker’s sensational essay about the strikers’ confrontational picket-line conduct. Gray was especially agitated by this particular article. After reading it and listening to testimony from over 100 nonunionists, Gray berated Mitchell for refusing to expel any of the “mob” participants, for failing to denounce “these evident misdeeds,” and for Mitchell’s unwillingness to promote “law and order.”16 Gray, selectively criticizing striker violence while ignoring the brutality of mine guards, told the New York Times five years after the conflict that he had truly wanted to “find an alternative to violence and the strong hand.”17
Gray was not alone, and he and his colleagues participated in many contentious and polarizing gatherings throughout the winter months. The result of these meetings, according to most contemporary and historical accounts, was a genuinely fair resolution, which the commission issued on March 21, 1903. Both sides, not just Baer’s, claimed victory—a noteworthy departure from previous labor-management conflicts. While workers won a 10 percent wage increase and a nine-hour day, operators were under no obligation to formally recognize the UMWA as the workers’ exclusive bargaining agent—and they did not.18 The commission, insisting that “the rights and privileges of non-union men are as sacred to them as the rights and privileges of unionists,” framed its refusal to grant a closed shop in the language of America’s virtuous presidential past: “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.’ This is as true in trade unions as elsewhere.”19 Roosevelt shared this sentiment and called the agreement the “Square Deal,” proclaiming that it constituted a victory for everyone, including consumers, unionists, coal operators, nonunion workmen, and strikebreakers.20 Nonunionists, the commissioners proudly declared, had “the right to remain at work where others have ceased to work, or to engage anew in work which others have abandoned.”21 This statement, legitimizing the democratic right of nonunionists to refuse to succumb to union pressure, was perfectly consistent with the position demanded by the owners, embraced by the nation’s judiciary, and unreservedly championed by the planners of the budding open-shop drive. Importantly, Roosevelt had given his full blessings to the open-shop principle.
Employers in the vanguard of the emerging open-shop movement responded to Roosevelt’s endorsement with undisguised enthusiasm. In 1905, emboldened employers began publishing a monthly magazine named after it, and intellectuals and activists from various employers’ associations wrote articles for the Square Deal, “a magazine devoted to industrial peace,” which was edited by novelist and Union-side Civil War veteran Wilson Vance. James Van Cleave, manager of St. Louis’s Buck’s Stove and Range Company and one time National Association of Manufacturers president, announced in 1907 that the settlement offered a clear template of how to properly settle “all future labor difficulties.”22 More than almost any other figure, Roosevelt, by agreeing that the open-shop principle was, above all, morally sound and impartial, rather than underlining its economic advantages for management, gave organized employers and their allies decades of powerful ammunition in their public relations campaigns against an increasingly embittered, closed shop-demanding labor movement.23 Employers keenly embraced Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and they invoked it repeatedly to build a highly inclusive, flexible, often liberal-sounding, and lasting open-shop movement publicly committed to safeguarding the rights of nonunion workers and business owners. Increasingly, organized employers and their allies distanced themselves publicly from the class-dominant ideas embedded in Social Darwinism while embracing the class-neutralsounding Square Deal.
Roosevelt actually provided the public-relations-conscious employers’ inspiration on more than one occasion. In late 1903, the president, building on the model created by the Gray-led commission, brought his open-shop advocacy to the public sector Government Printing Office, where he reinstated William A. Miller, a nonunion bookbinder who had lost his job in the face of union pressure.24 Upholding a culture of solidarity, printers in this office practiced a “no union card, no work” rule. Roosevelt and his assistant in the Department of Labor and Commerce, George B. Cortelyou, an NCF member, apparently cared little about whether government printers held a union card, and decided to reinstate Miller over the union’s strong objections. This act of rehiring, Roosevelt insisted, was fundamentally moral and just. In his autobiography, Roosevelt reflected on the controversy, insisting that “the non-unionist like the unionist, must be protected in all his legal rights by the full weight and power
