put, the open-shop movement was not, they argued, against unions. Indeed, in 1901, the two-year-old NMTA passed a resolution prohibiting “the word ‘non-union’ in all official documents.” Instead, the association’s leadership required that rank-and-filers use the words “free men” and “free shops” when describing nonunionists and open-shop workplaces.38 The underlying message was clear enough: open shops were nondiscriminatory, allowing both unionists and “free men” equal access to employment. According to this logic, open-shop workplaces protected workers’ individualism, allowing them to refuse pressures to join monopoly-imposing labor unions.
The Citizens’ Industrial Association of America
Acknowledging the need to tighten relationships between employers and nonemployers, as well as recognizing the importance of gaining greater respect for themselves and for “free workers,” open-shop proponents formed new, reformist-sounding organizations, including city-based citizens’ associations and the national Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA), during the early twentieth century. Proposed by Kansas City employers in early 1903 and led by Parry—the Lincolnesque figure who helped transform the NAM into an open-shop-crusading powerhouse—the CIAA opened its membership to a multi-class and multioccupational assortment of figures: doctors, professors, lawyers, judges, religious leaders, fellow employers, and even nonunion workers. “Let us not array class against class,” remarked the Reverend William J. H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and movement organizer from Shelbyville, Indiana, at the CIAA inaugural conference in Chicago.39
Yet the CIAA was not led by a cross-class partnership of employers and “free workers.” Seasoned employer activists, a somewhat insular fraternity with shared managerial interests, served in most leadership positions, and the fourteen figures Parry tapped to help direct it included a number of the nation’s most visible union fighters: Denver’s J. C. Craig, Detroit’s E. M. McCleary, Brooklyn’s J. T. Hoile, Cincinnati’s Du Brul, Dayton’s John Kirby, Jr., Chicago’s Frederick W. Job, Battle Creek, Michigan’s Charles Post, New York’s Berkley R. Merwin, Kansas City’s Philip R. Toll, Minneapolis’s J. L. Record, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania’s W. C. Shepherd, and Evansville, Indiana’s Albert C. Rosencranz, a Civil War veteran who had fought in the famous battle of Chickamauga and for ten months languished in a Confederate prison.40 The mostly northern and midwestern coalition also included two Confederate veterans, James Van Cleave of St. Louis and N. F. Thompson of Birmingham, who had battled under the command of Confederate general, former slave trader, and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.41 As a Louisville member noted in 1904, “the South contended with the North to divide the nation, now it will fight with you side by side against the common foe to our industrial liberty!”42 Decades after the Civil War, open-shop activists from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had mostly put their old partisan views aside, recognizing the importance of a new, though, in their collective view, equally momentous struggle. Under Parry’s leadership, the old Confederates, by joining their one time foes, had begun to prioritize class and national, over regional, unity, echoing the decades-old Republican call for “free labor.”
Parry’s association was neither the first nor the last to use the word “citizen” in its title. The emergence and authority of various urban-based citizens’ associations in places like Chicago, Denver, New York, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, as well as in the coal regions of Colorado and northeastern Pennsylvania, were quite notable by the time of the inaugural CIAA conference in 1903.43 Consisting of coal mine operators, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and an assortment of mostly white, Protestant elites, these groups typically began during the second part of the nineteenth century in an effort to fight what members considered entrenched, urban-based political problems, including expressions of corruption emanating largely from machine politicians and the working class, the often propertyless constituency that helped elect immigrant mayors. Traditionally, such organizations maintained rather strict membership requirements, participated in various types of locally based lobbying activities, and often, though certainly not always, expressed themselves in nativist ways against the immigrant working classes. The membership of such groups, viewing themselves as natural civic leaders, typically believed that municipal government must be run by professionals rather than by fortunate electoral victors. Some even called for suffrage restrictions, and many were deeply committed to fighting what members of New York City’s elite often referred to as “the dangerous classes.” Some formed militias for this purpose.44
Members of Parry’s association shared much with those active in earlier organizations, including anxiety related to the labor movement’s tendency to engage in economically damaging, even riotous, activities. And the CIAA membership included business owners from these former campaigns. Yet the CIAA advertised itself as a respectable, inclusive, multi-class populist organization, rather than a refined and elitist group of snobbish businessmen.45 Parry and his colleagues wanted Americans to see them as authentic partners with the nation’s workforce, not hostile rivals engaged in a class struggle for workplace or community control. The organization proclaimed its willingness to bridge class divisions, extending an open hand to the nation’s millions of mostly nonunionists. Consider the CIAA’s stationery letterhead: “For the protection of the common people.” Rather than an anti-democratic organization, its stated purpose, printed on every official letter, was to safeguard the rights of ordinary people, including small shop owners and nonunion “free workers.” Such language certainly represented a departure from the self-important and callous rhetoric articulated by cutthroat capitalists like Baer.46 Publicly, these men had chosen benevolence over belligerency.
The close to 300 manufacturers, commercial club members, self-identified reformers, and citizens’ alliance activists who arrived in Chicago in late October 1903 initially lacked a name. Wilbur F. Sanders, a Civil War veteran, Montana pioneer, former Republican senator, and leader of the recently formed Citizens’ Alliance of Helena, proposed “Citizens’ Industrial Association of America.” Sanders, who had earned his reputation as a crusading vigilante lawyer against western gold thieves and murderers in the 1860s—Lew L. Callaway, a chronicler of these Wild West days, referred to him as the “chief counsel for the people”—won the delegates’ unanimous approval: the name “was finally adopted without a dissenting vote.”47 Decades later, the sixty-nine-year-old veteran law-and-order campaigner and frontier savior sought to continue a struggle against opponents as equally menacing as the West’s most notorious criminals. And the delegates clearly respected one of Montana’s first two U.S. senators and likely appreciated his impressive background, which, in addition to helping tame parts of the Wild West, included extensive legal activities on behalf of the gigantic Northern Pacific Railroad between 1880 and 1890, and senatorial service alongside Democrat Gray (the two former railroad lawyers had served together on the seven-person Committee on Patents) in the early 1890s. Indeed, the famous Republican’s participation in patriotic Civil War battles in Tennessee, his take-no-prisoners approach to western lawbreakers, and his criticisms of alleged acts of Democratic Party corruption in Montana during the 1890s suggested that he was fully prepared to help protect “the common people” in Roosevelt’s America.48
Sanders was certainly no stranger to the labor question. Labor unrest repeatedly erupted in parts of Montana, and few of the region’s residents could ignore the dramatic mine and railroad struggles that broke out in the 1890s.49 Sanders, a staunch Republican intimately allied with the region’s copper mining and railroad industries, predictably took the capitalists’ side, and in 1897 he denounced union activists as “worthless characters.”50 In the face of repeated labor conflicts, he became a leading member of the open-shop Citizens’ Alliance of Helena, which, according to its 1903 founding document, organized “in defense of Labor, from which it would remove all shackles.” Helena’s citizens’ alliance, like similar associations, was “opposed to boycotts, to lockouts, to strikes, and to all conspiracies concocted with a view to invade the rights and privileges of American Citizens.”51 The organization, like the CIAA, presented itself as an undistorted patriotic outfit committed to assisting, not hurting, the rights
