He served as a defense lawyer for a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy convicted of murder in 1879 and, in the 1890s, represented members of the Chinese community, a group that had repeatedly faced organized labor’s wrath.52 Growing numbers of western-based white unionists, arguing that Chinese residents were responsible for driving down wages, repeatedly lashed out at both Chinese laborers and small business owners in several Montana communities. In 1896 and 1897, an extensive coalition of Butte’s unions, including locals representing brewers, carpenters, miners, and molders, organized a citywide boycott of Chinese and Japanese restaurants and laundries. Suffering financially as a result, dozens of these immigrants sought legal protections against the boycott and compensation for their financial losses—$500,000 in lost income in their estimation. In 1898, they secured Sanders’s help, who represented them in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. Here the complainants discussed the boycott’s crippling economic consequences, as well as the ways unionists mistreated both Asian business owners and their customers. Sanders reported that “three or four hundred” demonstrators, backed by walking delegates—the boycott enforcers—apparently stood in front of restaurants, harassing and discouraging potential customers from entering.53 Speaking in court, Chinese-born Hum Fay, owner of the Palace Chop House, testified that union activists harassed his customers “day by day.” As a result, business, he complained, “got so bad.” Fay and members of his community desperately craved what he called “protection.”54 Sanders helped them win the case by securing an injunction against the protestors who, in his words, “willfully and maliciously combined, conspired, and confederated together” to destroy numerous businesses.55
Sanders was one of the numerous defenders of “free” workers, business owners, and, more generally, “the common people,” who helped shape the CIAA’s orientation. In order to respond properly and effectively to irksome and often destructive trade unionists, delegates at the CIAA’s first conference took on a number of tasks. The most dedicated members joined committees, which focused on matters important to practically all voluntary organizations, including credentials, rules and orders of business, resolutions, constitution, dues, nominations, and the press. Most CIAA leaders served on at least one committee.
One of the CIAA’s most noteworthy and influential subgroups was the three-member press committee, which included Chicago’s Job, Parry’s personal secretary John Maxwell, and a twenty-seven-year-old Kansas City newspaperman named George Creel. Creel first established a name for himself as a muckraker who had exposed a series of police scandals, first in Kansas City and later in Denver. Given his background, it made sense that he served on the CIAA’s press committee; Creel started his career as a newspaper reporter in 1894, and five years later purchased his own paper, the (Kansas City) Independent, which he owned and edited until 1908. Throughout the early twentieth century, Creel also served as Kansas City coal inspector, supported suffrage rights for women, advocated public ownership of utilities, and strongly opposed child labor, insisting that it, as he and his coauthors explained in 1914, is a “fundamental evil.”56 As a reporter, Creel had also criticized coal mine employers like Baer for stubbornly refusing to consider the larger public’s interests during the 1902 coal strike. Given his moral sensitivity and muckraking zeal, Creel demonstrated that he certainly did not fit the image of the arrogant and pitiless labor-fighting capitalist. The tent the CIAA built was designed to be large enough to accommodate people like Creel, and by 1904, 247 employers’ associations, impressed with the efforts of Sanders, Creel, Parry, and many others, had affiliated with the organization.57
Figure 2. Wilbur F. Sanders in Butte, Montana (ca. 1890). Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.
In fact, one of the CIAA’s central goals was to bring as many people as possible under this large, and expanding, tent—and to shape public opinion. As owner and editor of the Independent, Creel, like the handful of other newspaper-owning open-shop proponents, enjoyed certain advantages.58 His newspaper routinely carried articles sympathetic to the struggles of employers, and from April 1903 to March 1904, it served as the official mouthpiece of the Kansas City Employers’ Association, “Devoted to the Interest of Employer and Independent Employee.” Using the Independent to disseminate its views, this CIAA-affiliated association promised to challenge those who sought to advance “the interests of any class against the other.”59
National employers’ association magazines occasionally reprinted and disseminated essays from Creel’s paper. For example, in 1905, the Open Shop reprinted an essay by Hugh O’Neal about a successful union-cleansing campaign led by an Australian ship owner. O’Neal’s story highlights the ways the owner, Malcolm Donald McEacharn, patiently waited out a strike of difficult unionists “led by,” according to O’Neal, “asses.” McEacharn had previously surrendered to union demands, but eventually decided the costs of negotiating exceeded the benefits of managing unilaterally. After ten weeks of picket line protests, “starvation,” O’Neal reported, “won easily,” and “the once great trades union [sic] of Australia were counted out.” Many of the men eventually returned to work as individuals, leaving McEacharn unshackled by the bane of closed-shop unionism.60 By printing this story, Creel and the open-shop leadership sought to demonstrate that American employers were not the only victims of nagging labor problems. Yet O’Neal’s account was principally meant to inspire, illustrating an example of a distant “common” man’s unmistakable triumph over union adversity.
Roughly a decade after he helped shape the CIAA’s orientation, Creel became famous internationally as the primary architect of the Committee on Public Information, the name of President Woodrow Wilson’s comprehensive propaganda campaign, which was designed to win public support for America’s unprecedented military intervention in World War I. The wartime strategies that Creel employed were hardly new, and it is fair to say that his involvement in open-shop associations like the CIAA and the Kansas City Employers’ Association helped him master propaganda disseminating techniques that Wilson later found useful as they both attempted to “make the world safe for democracy.”61
Creel and his colleagues gathered in Chicago more than a decade before World War I partially because they wanted to build a sturdy organization that, according to the first of the CIAA’s eight objectives, assisted, “by all lawful and practical means, the properly constituted authorities of the State and Nation in maintaining and defending the supremacy of the law and rights of the citizen.” The men demanded “industrial peace” and sought to “create and direct a public sentiment in opposition to all forms of violence, coercion and intimidation.” Unsurprisingly, the delegates proclaimed their support for “individual enterprise and freedom in management of industry, under which the people of the United States have made this the most successful and powerful nation of the world.” In order to build and sustain such sentiment explicitly connecting the open-shop principle to American patriotism, the CIAA established a “Bureau of Education for the publication and distribution tending to foster the objects of the organization.”62 Reaching a broad public with messages that linked the open-shop system to justice, industrial efficiency, American patriotism, and protection of the underdog was critical in a context in which union activists challenged thousands of employers. Denver’s Craig explained in 1904 that “It might almost be said that public sentiment is the most important factor in the settlement of all such [workplace] controversies.”63
These activists, like NCF-affiliated businessmen, sought to demonstrate their progressive credentials by distinguishing themselves from the numerous cold-hearted employers who, over the years, had demonstrated little or no interest in the welfare of their wage earners. Such seemingly heartless figures ostensibly overworked their employees, cared about nothing but profit maximization, and frequently went into combat mode when confronted with shop floor grievances. Take, for instance, the words of Van Cleave, whose speech at the CIAA 1906 convention appeared Rooseveltian in its pledge to fairness: “As we all know, there are autocratic and oppressive employers. Judging by many of their acts they seem to
