freedom,” which, it insisted, “is the cardinal principle of American life.”43
Why did prominent reformers, including muckrakers, social gospelers, good government proponents, and consumer advocates, embrace the open-shop movement’s goals? One somewhat obvious reason: they generally shared a similar class background with the movement’s employers. But reductionist explanations alone are insufficient; we must dig deeper by also considering how late nineteenth-century opinion makers depicted the multiple clashes between unions, on the one hand, and employers, police, and nonunion workers, on the other. Certainly many middle-class observers sympathized with the plight of nonunionists and found picket line violence directed against these “free men,” repeatedly conveyed—often exaggeratedly—in the press, intensely unnerving. Starting in the second part of the nineteenth century, newspaper reporters began providing their mostly middle-class readership with dreadful, attention-grabbing reports of ill-behaved unionists, rebels guilty of riotously destroying property, attacking police officers, harassing nonunionists, and threatening employers with bodily harm. Such sources were much less inclined to highlight the considerably more powerful and effective forms of state repression aimed at protestors. In its coverage of the 1877 railroad strike, for example, the New York Times condemned the “lawlessness” and “the incendiary and inflammatory speeches” delivered by working-class demonstrators.44 In the following decade, the Chicago Times referred to the anarchists present during the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886 as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism, and murder.”45 And the Richmond Dispatch mocked Eugene Debs, American Railway Union head and leader of the 1894 Pullman strike, for failing to preserve peace despite promising to do so: “This ‘peaceful’ strike has attained the proportions of a war upon the entire people, and the interest on which their very lives are dependent.”46 Picket-line activities were, to be sure, not always violent, but judges, employers, and much of the press tended to portray most as pernicious expressions of intimidation and brutality—and as a result helped to generate a pervasive atmosphere of terror.47 By the early twentieth century, many bourgeois Americans had concluded that, in the words of Eliot, “there is no such thing as peaceful picketing.”48
Organized employers, many of whom shared Eliot’s analysis, sincerely cherished the support that they received from well-known reformers and the mainstream press, but they were especially thankful for state assistance, including direct help from judges and police forces during labor conflicts. As they campaigned to reform workplaces and communities by pitting what they considered uncontrollable and demanding unionists against hardworking “free” employees, open-shop advocates saw themselves as firmly embedded in the political mainstream and securely allied with the nation’s lawmakers and enforcers.49 Judges were particularly helpful. Altogether, state and municipal courts issued 2,095 injunctions against trade unions between 1890 and 1920.50 The legal establishment, including the Supreme Court, even legitimized employers’ use of blacklists against union supporters, and numerous judges invoked the Sherman Antitrust Act, which punished strikers for restraining interstate trade.51 By policing labor and issuing rulings against working-class activists and the unions that represented them, the legal establishment gave employers greater peace of mind, inspiration, and intellectual ammunition for their campaigns.52
The court system and influential reformers certainly helped to legitimize the open-shop movement by providing its practitioners with legal assistance and moral support. This study emphasizes that a wide spectrum of figures—both from within and outside industrial relations settings—offered a set of multidimensional antiunion critiques, which involved a mix of tough-minded economic logic, flag waving, and a moral concern with the welfare of “free workers,” business owners, and citizens generally. In essence, a broad range of mostly privileged Americans, intolerant of labor solidarity and fearful of working-class militancy, provided a hearty defense of “the common people.”
Large numbers of influential people supported the open-shop principle in the name of fairness and progress, but there were definitely exceptions. Certainly not all open-shop managers saw themselves as progressive actors fighting to improve the livelihoods of the “common people.” Furthermore, this book does not claim that all reformers were advocates of open-shop workplaces and supporters of the men who refused to bargain collectively with organized labor. We can undoubtedly identify several influential progressive campaigners, including settlement house pioneer Jane Addams and lawyer Clarence Darrow, for example, who had, at various points in their lives, stood in solidarity with unions at marches and on picket lines.
Additionally, this book largely, though not entirely, avoids labels like “conservative” and “liberal” in the context of labor-management conflicts mainly because such terms are historically contingent. After all, we can surely point to plenty of historical scenarios that defy such political categorizations. Consider some questions. Were the employers who demanded that nonunionists—including African Americans, Mexicans, and Chinese—enjoy the right to work during periods of strikes staged by white laborers liberal or conservative? How should we label the union members who defiantly refused to toil next to those without union cards? Were they closed-minded conservatives, principled liberals, or perhaps something else? Of course, different observers, prioritizing dissimilar values, will offer various responses to questions like these. We must acknowledge, in other words, the lack of a political consensus with respect to these questions.53
Yet, as we look back on them, we should not perceive employers’ fundamental supervisory interests as controversial or mysterious. Although they frequently presented themselves as committed to “doing right” by protecting the “common people” in the name of community harmony, patriotism, and industrial peace, employers were primarily interested in earning profits and maintaining unfettered managerial control. Of course, they seldom expressed their objectives in such a crass way. This does not mean that they were uninterested in their workers’ welfare; many certainly acknowledged the diversity of grievances harbored by wage earners, but consistently claimed that they could respond meaningfully to them without recognizing unions. For many employers, providing benefits beyond paychecks, drawing attention to what they considered the virtues of America’s economic and political institutions, and joining “defense” organizations constituted a considerably more cost-effective, empowering, and emotionally satisfying set of responses than relinquishing any managerial control by formally bargaining with trade unions.
The open-shop principle itself was enormously comforting to the nation’s diversity of employers both during periods of labor peace and in the context of industrial disputes. Its advocates were unwilling, with very few exceptions, to question the logic or limitations of this managerial principle, even in the face of intense labor unrest, protests from the radical left, and critical journalistic exposés. For most, this managerial system was absolutely nonnegotiable, even though, in the short term, open-shop campaigns often intensified, rather than alleviated, working-class discontent and community strife. Given the profound impact it had on their collective consciousness, employers were naturally disinclined to address one of the root causes of labor’s restlessness: demands for closed shops and collective bargaining rights. Employers’ ideological blind spots and stubbornness are entirely understandable—even rational—given their primary interests as managers and profit maximizers in a capitalist economy. As novelist Upton Sinclair famously put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”54
This study explores employers and their embrace of the open-shop system both nationally and locally. The first two chapters demonstrate the birth, growth, and influence of open-shop ideas and employer-led activism throughout much of the nation. The final four are regional case studies that investigate at the ground level the ways in which the open-shop philosophy influenced workplace relations, urban politics, and local identities. The most intense confrontations, including strikes and anti-strike campaigns, occurred in, and left lasting impacts on, individual communities. Indeed, a multiregional focus allows us to better appreciate the ways in which employers responded to different-sized labor movements, to various types of political challenges,
