estimation, this population was “numerous enough, however, to reflect discredit and to inflict injury on the entire guild of employers.”64 Though he refrained from identifying names, Van Cleave may have had in mind figures like Baer, individuals who, through their callous words, authoritarian actions, and managerial shortsightedness, created a poor image of businessmen as a whole. Whatever the case, Van Cleave sought to distance the CIAA from these “oppressive employers,” believing that a small number of bad apples ultimately hurt the reputation of reasonable and magnanimous merchants and manufacturers. The CIAA, building on the open-shop movement’s work generally, sought to chart a new course, one designed to establish trust with the general public and the working class by promoting what Van Cleave called “peaceable relations between employers and employed.”65 This was, quite clearly, the language of reform. After all, what forward-thinking social reformer or industrial modernizer was uninterested in establishing lasting “peaceable relations”?
The same year that Van Cleave called for establishing “peaceable relations” between employers and wage earners, the CIAA went on the record supporting laws and practices that reduced child labor “abuses.” Its support appeared sincere and was hardly tepid; the membership announced approval for “every lawful and proper means for correcting these abuses either in the way of the education and enlightenment of public opinion, the enforcement of existing laws, or the passage and wise and humane enforcement of such additional laws as may be necessary and adequate to bring about a change in existing conditions.” Finally, the organization called for punishing “the real offender, whoever he may be, employer or parent, or both.”66
And on the question of organized labor, the CIAA, on paper, did not appear especially antiunion. It, like the NCF, as well as the NMTA and the NFA in their early years, defended responsible and lawful unionism, recognizing “the free right of workmen to combine.” The CIAA’s stated purpose was not to eliminate unions altogether. Workers nevertheless needed to understand, the organization held, that labor and management shared the same interests. Strikes, after all, had injurious impacts on employees, managers, and most of all, the general population. Unions had no reason to challenge employers because, as the CIAA put it in 1903, “our welfare is inseparable from theirs and theirs from ours; we are essentially interdependent, each is indispensably necessary to the other; and those who stir up strife between us are enemies of mankind.”67
The CIAA’s respect for, and willingness to unconditionally defend, mankind was on full display beginning in 1905 when the organization, showing its high regard for Roosevelt’s famous involvement in settling the 1902 anthracite coal strike, began publishing the Square Deal, a monthly magazine that featured accounts of organized labor’s excesses, fables and poems stressing the open-shop principle’s moral soundness, and articles showcasing various court cases legitimizing the plight of “free” workers.68 Contributors came from a wide-section of society. University-based economists offered hardheaded reasons why the open-shop system was the most rational, efficient and fair form of management while Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish spokespersons penned essays on the alleged impiety of closed shops.69 Such impiety was rooted in the supposed corruption and brutal tendencies of union leaders, figures who went to great lengths, including using violence, to establish their supposedly selfish demands over the rights of nonunionists. The open-shop movement, the Square Deal habitually claimed, was concerned with tackling this problem from multiple angles. As J. Laurence Laughlin, the prominent University of Chicago economist, Roosevelt’s former Harvard University professor, and one of the Federal Reserve Act’s authors, explained in 1914, arguments against closed-shop unionism are “legally, economically, and morally overwhelming.”70
In this spirit, the CIAA argued that closed shops resembled a new, and equally brutal form of slavery. The Square Deal’s pages contained numerous articles calculated to alarm readers about the supposedly deceitful, lawless, and thuggish labor leaders who frequently forced “free” men to join unions, pay dues, and follow their presumably loathsome and economically destructive dictates. And those who resisted were unfairly punished by these merciless and barbaric leaders. The cover page of the first issue of the Square Deal in 1905 set the tone; it featured a dramatic cartoon depicting a chained nonunion man receiving a whipping by an overbearing union business agent. The caption read, “Will the white slave have a Lincoln?”71
A Movement from Below?
There was hope. In fact, open-shop campaigners, unlike those active in earlier citizens’ associations, sought to partner with ordinary, law-abiding Americans, including the “white slaves.” These supposedly brutalized slaves had become active, paradoxically, in their own emancipatory, anti-union associations. In other words, independent workers, like late antebellum black slaves, had agency and were unafraid to actively champion the virtues of free labor in the face of hostile oppressors. Organized groups of “free workers” emerged in urban areas at roughly the same time that employers’ associations began systematically cleansing their workplaces of union activists. In 1902, Albany’s Rev. E. M. Fairchild, for example, proclaimed his commitment to helping closed-shop victims establish a “National League of Independent Workmen of America.” The workers involved in the league would, in Fairchild’s words, “demand that employers run their shops as ‘open shops’.”72 Meanwhile, coercive labor activists in Dayton, home of open-shop leader Kirby, prompted nonunionists to form the Modern Order of Bees, a workingmen’s group that challenged, according to a 1903 article in the NMTA’s Bulletin, “the influence of the law-breakers and the intimidators.”73 And in early 1903, Elmira, New York, began hosting the first chapter of the Independent Labor League of America (ILLA), “organized by workingmen for the maintenance of their rights to personal liberty.” These organizations, apparently built from below with management’s enthusiastic approval, were chiefly concerned with promoting “good character” and showing, as Dayton’s Modern Order of Bees put it in 1902, that “both employer and employee will recognize the fact that their interests are identical.”74 The underlying message was clear enough: the common people, both the employed and employers overseeing various-sized businesses, had shared interests and goals in promoting a more respectful and peaceful industrial relations system.
These organizations emerged with the assistance of open-shop employers and their middle-class allies. Consider the case of Fairchild, an Albany clergyman and published sociologist who first developed sympathy for nonunion workers during the course of an Albany streetcar strike in 1901.75 He was appalled by the widespread violence that the strike generated, and afterward decided to deepen his knowledge of the causes, characteristics, and consequences of labor-management struggles. The next year, he, like Baker and Brandeis, visited northeastern Pennsylvania, where he spent ten days observing coercive tactics staged by UMWA members. He took his study seriously, reading books and articles about the labor question, conducting interviews with those embroiled in industrial unrest, and photographing strike scenes. He believed that his profession gave him a certain amount of credibility that employers simply lacked. “The very fact that I am a clergyman, and not an employer,” he remarked in 1903, “has made it possible for me to get an understanding of this labor problem from the workman’s point of view.”76
While conducting fieldwork, the Oberlin College-educated Fairchild, like Baker, encountered numerous workers who rejected their union leaders’ values and policies. Over the course of the century’s first years, the clergyman talked with dozens of Pennsylvania coal miners, Albany streetcar workers, and southwestern New York machinists, who apparently valued hard work, appreciated their managers, respected the law, and sought a degree of upward mobility—values and goals often rejected by labor activists. Such individuals, he discovered, were often profoundly uncomfortable with some of the decisions of their union leaders. This was especially clear among ambitious and talented mechanics at Elmira’s Payne Engineering and Foundry Company, a modest-sized manufacturer of iron and brass castings owned by N. B. Payne, an NMTA leader. Numerous mechanics here supported the company’s premium system of payment—a system that rewarded individual workers with financial bonuses for
