Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
commission held a series of meetings and interviewed hundreds of strikers, strikebreakers, and witnesses. Commissioners also read reports, including Baker’s sensational essay about the strikers’ confrontational picket-line conduct. Gray was especially agitated by this particular article. After reading it and listening to testimony from over 100 nonunionists, Gray berated Mitchell for refusing to expel any of the “mob” participants, for failing to denounce “these evident misdeeds,” and for Mitchell’s unwillingness to promote “law and order.”16 Gray, selectively criticizing striker violence while ignoring the brutality of mine guards, told the New York Times five years after the conflict that he had truly wanted to “find an alternative to violence and the strong hand.”17
Gray was not alone, and he and his colleagues participated in many contentious and polarizing gatherings throughout the winter months. The result of these meetings, according to most contemporary and historical accounts, was a genuinely fair resolution, which the commission issued on March 21, 1903. Both sides, not just Baer’s, claimed victory—a noteworthy departure from previous labor-management conflicts. While workers won a 10 percent wage increase and a nine-hour day, operators were under no obligation to formally recognize the UMWA as the workers’ exclusive bargaining agent—and they did not.18 The commission, insisting that “the rights and privileges of non-union men are as sacred to them as the rights and privileges of unionists,” framed its refusal to grant a closed shop in the language of America’s virtuous presidential past: “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.’ This is as true in trade unions as elsewhere.”19 Roosevelt shared this sentiment and called the agreement the “Square Deal,” proclaiming that it constituted a victory for everyone, including consumers, unionists, coal operators, nonunion workmen, and strikebreakers.20 Nonunionists, the commissioners proudly declared, had “the right to remain at work where others have ceased to work, or to engage anew in work which others have abandoned.”21 This statement, legitimizing the democratic right of nonunionists to refuse to succumb to union pressure, was perfectly consistent with the position demanded by the owners, embraced by the nation’s judiciary, and unreservedly championed by the planners of the budding open-shop drive. Importantly, Roosevelt had given his full blessings to the open-shop principle.
Employers in the vanguard of the emerging open-shop movement responded to Roosevelt’s endorsement with undisguised enthusiasm. In 1905, emboldened employers began publishing a monthly magazine named after it, and intellectuals and activists from various employers’ associations wrote articles for the Square Deal, “a magazine devoted to industrial peace,” which was edited by novelist and Union-side Civil War veteran Wilson Vance. James Van Cleave, manager of St. Louis’s Buck’s Stove and Range Company and one time National Association of Manufacturers president, announced in 1907 that the settlement offered a clear template of how to properly settle “all future labor difficulties.”22 More than almost any other figure, Roosevelt, by agreeing that the open-shop principle was, above all, morally sound and impartial, rather than underlining its economic advantages for management, gave organized employers and their allies decades of powerful ammunition in their public relations campaigns against an increasingly embittered, closed shop-demanding labor movement.23 Employers keenly embraced Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and they invoked it repeatedly to build a highly inclusive, flexible, often liberal-sounding, and lasting open-shop movement publicly committed to safeguarding the rights of nonunion workers and business owners. Increasingly, organized employers and their allies distanced themselves publicly from the class-dominant ideas embedded in Social Darwinism while embracing the class-neutralsounding Square Deal.
Roosevelt actually provided the public-relations-conscious employers’ inspiration on more than one occasion. In late 1903, the president, building on the model created by the Gray-led commission, brought his open-shop advocacy to the public sector Government Printing Office, where he reinstated William A. Miller, a nonunion bookbinder who had lost his job in the face of union pressure.24 Upholding a culture of solidarity, printers in this office practiced a “no union card, no work” rule. Roosevelt and his assistant in the Department of Labor and Commerce, George B. Cortelyou, an NCF member, apparently cared little about whether government printers held a union card, and decided to reinstate Miller over the union’s strong objections. This act of rehiring, Roosevelt insisted, was fundamentally moral and just. In his autobiography, Roosevelt reflected on the controversy, insisting that “the non-unionist like the unionist, must be protected in all his legal rights by the full weight and power of the law.”25 His open-shop advocacy, framed in the language of inclusion and fairness, represented a blow to unionized printers and to the labor movement in general. And unionists, unsurprisingly, responded bitterly. The Cigar Makers’ International Union’s J. M. Barnes called the president’s intervention a “slap in the face.”26
While Roosevelt disillusioned and disappointed labor activists, organized employers were, unsurprisingly, elated by his actions. In October 1903, Ernest F. Du Brul, the energetic National Metal Trades Association organizer, responded to Roosevelt’s involvement in the Miller controversy by campaigning for similar open-shop rules in Cincinnati, his hometown. Speaking about one of the chief goals of the recently formed Cincinnati Employers’ Association, whose open-shop agenda mirrored that of the NMTA, the National Founders’ Association, and the NAM, Du Brul announced, “The members [of the employers’ association] are determined to wipe out the discrimination on public work in Cincinnati the same as President Roosevelt has done in Washington.” Flying the flag of civic reform, Du Brul found organized labor’s impact on public services as obnoxious as its involvement in impeding the productivity of factories and foundries: “we expect to put boycotting completely out of business, and see to it that public utilities are not tied up by strikes.”27 Here Du Brul, like Roosevelt, presented himself as a concerned, antidiscriminatory citizen, championing the interests of nonunionists and the larger public’s rights over organized labor’s supposedly selfish interests.
Others were equally inspired by Roosevelt’s moral convictions in the face of labor union pressure. In nearby Dayton, the National Cash Register Company’s John H. Patterson, an influential welfare capitalist and NCF member, noted in 1905 that Roosevelt’s support “stamped him as a man and a courageous American citizen of the highest type.” According to Patterson, Roosevelt’s “sense of justice and his regard for the law have caused him to take a firm stand for the open-shop.”28 As Du Brul and Patterson presented matters, concerned employers’ association activists and upstanding citizens leading the federal government, not labor unionists, were the nation’s genuine reformers. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s policies and rhetoric, employers sought to illustrate that they were the foremost public-spirited men who selflessly attempted to implement the president’s policies into their own communities and workplaces. The enthusiasm expressed by Van Cleave, Du Brul, Patterson, and others underlines the importance of both the Square Deal and the Miller decision, which, according to a 1905 article in North American Review, gave “a strong impetus to the open-shop movement.”29
Indeed, the industrial relations involvement of Roosevelt and the Gray commission, combined with Baker’s journalistic contributions, helped align the open-shop system of management with traditions cherished by many Americans, including respect for individual rights, fairness, and policies designed to uphold law and order and peace. Moreover, the roles played by these and growing numbers of other high-profile academics, journalists, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians brought the controversy over open versus closed shops to larger audiences, giving renewed meaning to the labor question. Such figures effectively drew attention to, and helped build sympathy for, the plight of nonunionists, insisting that they, more than union members, constituted society’s true underdogs.
Securing support from Roosevelt, Baker, Gray, and numerous other influential figures is precisely what open-shop employers desired. Employer activists aggressively sought allies from both within and outside industrial relations settings. Outside observers, after all, had the ability to reinforce the employers’ position and thus provide this managerial system with a veneer of respectability. Improving public relations was critical, and employers embraced two basic strategies to win greater support for the open-shop philosophy in Roosevelt’s America.