in the number of top managerial positions in the country—and this process seemed irreversible. No longer could every focused, diligent man climb his way to the top. “With that incentive taken away,” Pfahler argued, “it was important that conciliation should prevail.”20 Such structural changes, including the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few—a process accelerated by the turn of the century’s great merger movement—meant that employers needed to play their part in modifying, even lowering, the workforce’s expectations. The fifty-six-year-old Pfahler, whose devotion to the Republican Party had been put to the ultimate test on the battlefields in the 1860s, no longer unconditionally believed that the party’s early free labor ideology—a doctrine professing that hard work in a free, non-slaveholding society would eventually translate into financial success and independence, including business ownership—reflected the reality of late nineteenth-century America. Yet workers’ lower prospects, he reasoned, must not translate into frustration, misery, cynicism, or, worst of all, raw outbreaks of workplace conflict. Pfahler, who would soon serve as a leader of the National Civic Federation (NCF)—an organization comprising leaders from business, labor, and the general public that promoted union-management cooperation—did not break with free labor ideology completely; he continued to believe that ambition, efficiency, and skill mattered. But “reward” signified something markedly different at the end of the century from what it meant in the era of the Civil War. Simply put, Pfahler had come to accept the limits of upward class mobility.21 The Iron Trade Review recommended that workers take Pfalher’s assessment seriously: “Let us hear more of the desirability of being successful as an employe.”22
Pfahler, like Putnam, sympathized with the predicaments of shop floor employees and rejected the harshest features of Social Darwinism, the cutthroat theory shared by numerous corporate moguls and their elite friends on both sides of the Atlantic. This cold-hearted concept, which applied the eminent biologist Charles Darwin’s famous views to the free market, stressed that only the fittest economic actors, a tiny minority, could achieve extraordinary financial success—and such success came at the expense of ordinary people. The theory, in essence, helped legitimize an industrial society shaped by stark class divisions. Social Darwinists, including both business leaders and a handful of elite academics, sought to justify their own wealth and power, believing they essentially owed nothing to the laboring masses.23 Pfahler, unlike insensitive Social Darwinists, believed employers needed to show goodwill by reaching out to employees, patiently listening to them, and, when possible, helping resolve their grievances. In essence, he wanted fellow NFA members, some of whom stood near, but not at, the apex of industrial society, to ensure they were basically fair to their employees.24 Rather than view wage laborers as, in the words of historian Sven Beckert, “‘the dangerous classes’ who threatened the rights of property holders,” Pfahler’s public statements suggest he perceived employees, both unionists and nonunionists, as potential partners—albeit junior ones—in a future shaped by cross-class harmony and prosperity.25 One of his colleagues even claimed in 1903 that this Philadelphian was “one of the most earnest friends of organized labor.”26
But creating an atmosphere in which employees thrived and experienced feelings of fulfillment was not enough. Pfahler and his comrades realized the importance of building and maintaining trust with the IMU leadership, relatively privileged individuals who tended to conduct their tasks from comfortable offices, not grubby shop floors. These individuals, Pfahler realized, were critical, even necessary, to ensuring industrial peace. And meetings between the NFA and the IMU culminated in the 1899 New York Agreement, a labor-management settlement promising to usher in years of industrywide harmony similar to the arrangements reached by the SFNDA. In other words, Pfahler, in consultation with his colleagues, realized that routine, courteous conferences with labor representatives served a productive purpose. Pfahler, writing in 1903, understood that the NFA must use its connections with the union leadership wisely to prevent rebellious rank-and-filers from violating labor-management agreements and disrupting the production process:
It is true that at first the members of local unions, led by some wild agitator, would make a demand upon their employer, and, failing to enforce the demand, would quit work; but the national officers of the union would require them to return to work at once and await the usual and proper means of adjustment.27
Union leaders, Pfahler acknowledged, were often largely responsible, fair-minded figures who exercised a certain amount of control over the potentially “wild” rank and file. The labor leadership, by ensuring contract enforcement, were colleagues, rather than adversaries.
This leadership also saw the benefits of industrial peace. Writing about the NFA’s development, the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine explained in 1901, “This splendid situation is indeed a rift in the clouds that have lowered over the industrial world throughout a generation in most lines of business.”28 And an IMU spokesperson, writing in early 1898, affectionately welcomed the new employers’ association partially because of Pfahler’s involvement:
we have looked with favor upon the efforts of Mr. Wm. H. Pfahler and his colleagues of the American Foundrymen’s Association to organize a protective organization among the foundrymen, which, working in harmony with the Iron Molders’ Union, would endeavor to fix yearly, or otherwise, the wage rate and thus avoid the possibility of a strike and its attendant inconvenience to both parties.29
While the NFA leadership recognized the value of meeting and negotiating with union leaders, Pfahler and his colleagues also held firm to the belief that the employers must have the option of hiring and firing men irrespective of union status. In practice, foundry operators employed mostly unionists because local IMU chapters often represented the majority of the skilled employees in the industry. Yet NFA members were perfectly willing to hire nonunionists, including strikebreakers, during industrial disputes.30
At the same time, most had peace on their minds. And several AFA activists, understanding the need for workplace stability and the necessity of collaborating with politically moderate labor leaders, followed Pfahler’s lead by helping to build the new defense association. In a short period, the NFA had become a formidable team, consisting of, in the 1916 words of its early chronicler, Margaret Loomis Stecker, “some of the best-known manufacturers of heavy machinery and other casting iron specialties.”31 The organization included, for example, executives from General Electric and the American Locomotive Company, two large, highly prosperous, multilocation workplaces. Employers attached to more modest-sized, standalone establishments also paid their membership dues and volunteered their time to the cause. Numerous figures joined the association apparently because, as The Iron Trade Review explained in 1898, they took a liking to Pfahler’s “affable and charming manner” and because they shared his faith “that bringing together all the brains that have developed the manufacturing interests of this country, must be a force for good.”32
The recruitment process was fairly straightforward, involving face-toface contacts between men from roughly the same class. In meetings with foundry owners, many of whom were clubby, AFA-affiliated individuals, recruiters provided membership cards and requested assistance as they built this “force for good.” Some organizers were paid; others donated their time. In 1898, Pfahler hired John A. Penton, the AFA secretary and the former president of the Detroit-based International Brotherhood of Machinery Molders Union, a rival to the IMU before the two unions merged in 1893, to organize full time.33 By most accounts, the Paris, Ontario-born Penton was a sensible pick. The New York Times explained in 1902 that he was once “a practical molder and consequently understands every question of the foundry as one without a knowledge of the work could not.”34 His union-organizing experience gave him a degree of credibility possessed by few others, and he used his connections wisely, recruiting dozens from the AFA. One NFA member named Penton “the early propagandist” in 1903.35 Yet his former IMU adversaries, recalling previous conflicts, called him “something of a hustler” in 1897.36
Penton certainly hustled,
