a blow to unionized printers and to the labor movement in general. And unionists, unsurprisingly, responded bitterly. The Cigar Makers’ International Union’s J. M. Barnes called the president’s intervention a “slap in the face.”26
While Roosevelt disillusioned and disappointed labor activists, organized employers were, unsurprisingly, elated by his actions. In October 1903, Ernest F. Du Brul, the energetic National Metal Trades Association organizer, responded to Roosevelt’s involvement in the Miller controversy by campaigning for similar open-shop rules in Cincinnati, his hometown. Speaking about one of the chief goals of the recently formed Cincinnati Employers’ Association, whose open-shop agenda mirrored that of the NMTA, the National Founders’ Association, and the NAM, Du Brul announced, “The members [of the employers’ association] are determined to wipe out the discrimination on public work in Cincinnati the same as President Roosevelt has done in Washington.” Flying the flag of civic reform, Du Brul found organized labor’s impact on public services as obnoxious as its involvement in impeding the productivity of factories and foundries: “we expect to put boycotting completely out of business, and see to it that public utilities are not tied up by strikes.”27 Here Du Brul, like Roosevelt, presented himself as a concerned, antidiscriminatory citizen, championing the interests of nonunionists and the larger public’s rights over organized labor’s supposedly selfish interests.
Others were equally inspired by Roosevelt’s moral convictions in the face of labor union pressure. In nearby Dayton, the National Cash Register Company’s John H. Patterson, an influential welfare capitalist and NCF member, noted in 1905 that Roosevelt’s support “stamped him as a man and a courageous American citizen of the highest type.” According to Patterson, Roosevelt’s “sense of justice and his regard for the law have caused him to take a firm stand for the open-shop.”28 As Du Brul and Patterson presented matters, concerned employers’ association activists and upstanding citizens leading the federal government, not labor unionists, were the nation’s genuine reformers. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s policies and rhetoric, employers sought to illustrate that they were the foremost public-spirited men who selflessly attempted to implement the president’s policies into their own communities and workplaces. The enthusiasm expressed by Van Cleave, Du Brul, Patterson, and others underlines the importance of both the Square Deal and the Miller decision, which, according to a 1905 article in North American Review, gave “a strong impetus to the open-shop movement.”29
Indeed, the industrial relations involvement of Roosevelt and the Gray commission, combined with Baker’s journalistic contributions, helped align the open-shop system of management with traditions cherished by many Americans, including respect for individual rights, fairness, and policies designed to uphold law and order and peace. Moreover, the roles played by these and growing numbers of other high-profile academics, journalists, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians brought the controversy over open versus closed shops to larger audiences, giving renewed meaning to the labor question. Such figures effectively drew attention to, and helped build sympathy for, the plight of nonunionists, insisting that they, more than union members, constituted society’s true underdogs.
Securing support from Roosevelt, Baker, Gray, and numerous other influential figures is precisely what open-shop employers desired. Employer activists aggressively sought allies from both within and outside industrial relations settings. Outside observers, after all, had the ability to reinforce the employers’ position and thus provide this managerial system with a veneer of respectability. Improving public relations was critical, and employers embraced two basic strategies to win greater support for the open-shop philosophy in Roosevelt’s America. The first approach was organizational. In addition to building associations made up exclusively of employers, they formed hundreds of reformist-sounding, inclusive, and supposedly class-neutral citizens’ associations. Furthermore, employers helped promote the establishment of organizations of nonunion workers; such associations promoted the righteousness of the open-shop policy from below, demonstrating that the movement was not built or led exclusively by merchants, manufacturers, coal operators, or railroad owners.
Second, employers and their supporters ambitiously approached members from the general public, including distinguished figures, in an attempt to make this management system more palatable. Recognizing the importance of securing allies from politics, higher education, journalism, and the broad reform community, employers and their allies mailed millions of journals, pamphlets, and books about the moral superiority of the open-shop principle to journalists, academics, university presidents, teachers, clergymen, and fellow employers.30 In some cases, their direct mail campaigns included reprinted articles, including Baker’s “The Right to Work.”31 Additionally, employers invited community supporters to address meetings of open-shop activists. The results of the employers’ multipronged public relations efforts were impressive. By the mid-1910s, numerous figures from across the political spectrum had concluded that the open-shop principle was fairer to workers than closed-shop unionism, the most efficient way to run businesses, and in many cases an expression of American patriotism. Moreover, influential public figures, as Roosevelt’s Square Deal demonstrates, helped magnify the reformist, rather than the repressive, character of the open-shop principle. Together, employers and reformers used language and supported policies designed to promote workplace harmony in terms favorable to themselves and nonunion wage earners while proclaiming a desire to de-escalate class conflict. Some even denied the existence of class divisions. As a NAM member put it in 1914, “We have no classes in our country.”32
Organized employers had reasons to cheer Roosevelt’s involvement in both settling the anthracite coal strike and in reinstating Miller. Like Roosevelt, employers in the emerging open-shop movement spoke the language of reform. But they had much catching up to do in the early twentieth century, when organized labor, strengthened by the support of clusters of middle-class liberals, had long positioned itself as a leading carrier of the banner of progressivism.33 Indeed, organized employers remained continuously fearful of the prospect of growing forces on their left, which found expression at the point of production, in voting booths, and in the press. Politically, they saw the nation threatened by pro-union activists who sought to move the country leftward. In fact, several politicians had proposed various forms of what open-shop supporters derided as “class legislation.”34 Some such legislation, typically advanced at the state level, was comparatively mild, designed to protect women and children from long hours and unsafe working conditions. Such reforms generally enjoyed support from both within and outside labor union circles. Other proposals called for fewer hours and an end to court injunctions against strikers.35 Employers felt most uneasy by the threat of protests from below, fearing their economic and social impacts, especially the radical ideas that these movements helped generate. Could open-shop employers successfully compete with the cacophony of calls for working-class solidarity or the growing popularity of, say, socialism?36 Could they offer attractive alternatives to organized labor’s decades-old insistence, amplified persistently by the Industrial Workers of the World, that “an injury to one is an injury to all”? They tried, and in the process found others willing to champion the virtues of individual hard work and labor-management harmony while criticizing instances of labor solidarity and outbreaks of working-class militancy. Open-shop proponents were clearly determined to play a meaningful role in shaping the very character of the era itself, in part by methodically steering public opinion against what the NAM’s David M. Parry called in 1904 “the closed shop and other Socialistic schemes.”37
Open-shop employers realized that effective framing and information dissemination were important years before Baker, Roosevelt, or the Gray commission defended nonunionists’ “right to work” and therefore helped inspire the movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they went to great lengths to illustrate that their managerial activities were not at all based on their narrow class interests as employers. Publicly, they seldom insisted that they wanted open shops because this management system was, say, the most cost-effective and profitable way to run businesses. Nor did they draw attention to their own power and privilege relative to the working classes. Instead, they sought to demonstrate that the critical divisions
