Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
of reformist-sounding, inclusive, and supposedly class-neutral citizens’ associations. Furthermore, employers helped promote the establishment of organizations of nonunion workers; such associations promoted the righteousness of the open-shop policy from below, demonstrating that the movement was not built or led exclusively by merchants, manufacturers, coal operators, or railroad owners.
Second, employers and their supporters ambitiously approached members from the general public, including distinguished figures, in an attempt to make this management system more palatable. Recognizing the importance of securing allies from politics, higher education, journalism, and the broad reform community, employers and their allies mailed millions of journals, pamphlets, and books about the moral superiority of the open-shop principle to journalists, academics, university presidents, teachers, clergymen, and fellow employers.30 In some cases, their direct mail campaigns included reprinted articles, including Baker’s “The Right to Work.”31 Additionally, employers invited community supporters to address meetings of open-shop activists. The results of the employers’ multipronged public relations efforts were impressive. By the mid-1910s, numerous figures from across the political spectrum had concluded that the open-shop principle was fairer to workers than closed-shop unionism, the most efficient way to run businesses, and in many cases an expression of American patriotism. Moreover, influential public figures, as Roosevelt’s Square Deal demonstrates, helped magnify the reformist, rather than the repressive, character of the open-shop principle. Together, employers and reformers used language and supported policies designed to promote workplace harmony in terms favorable to themselves and nonunion wage earners while proclaiming a desire to de-escalate class conflict. Some even denied the existence of class divisions. As a NAM member put it in 1914, “We have no classes in our country.”32
Organized employers had reasons to cheer Roosevelt’s involvement in both settling the anthracite coal strike and in reinstating Miller. Like Roosevelt, employers in the emerging open-shop movement spoke the language of reform. But they had much catching up to do in the early twentieth century, when organized labor, strengthened by the support of clusters of middle-class liberals, had long positioned itself as a leading carrier of the banner of progressivism.33 Indeed, organized employers remained continuously fearful of the prospect of growing forces on their left, which found expression at the point of production, in voting booths, and in the press. Politically, they saw the nation threatened by pro-union activists who sought to move the country leftward. In fact, several politicians had proposed various forms of what open-shop supporters derided as “class legislation.”34 Some such legislation, typically advanced at the state level, was comparatively mild, designed to protect women and children from long hours and unsafe working conditions. Such reforms generally enjoyed support from both within and outside labor union circles. Other proposals called for fewer hours and an end to court injunctions against strikers.35 Employers felt most uneasy by the threat of protests from below, fearing their economic and social impacts, especially the radical ideas that these movements helped generate. Could open-shop employers successfully compete with the cacophony of calls for working-class solidarity or the growing popularity of, say, socialism?36 Could they offer attractive alternatives to organized labor’s decades-old insistence, amplified persistently by the Industrial Workers of the World, that “an injury to one is an injury to all”? They tried, and in the process found others willing to champion the virtues of individual hard work and labor-management harmony while criticizing instances of labor solidarity and outbreaks of working-class militancy. Open-shop proponents were clearly determined to play a meaningful role in shaping the very character of the era itself, in part by methodically steering public opinion against what the NAM’s David M. Parry called in 1904 “the closed shop and other Socialistic schemes.”37
Open-shop employers realized that effective framing and information dissemination were important years before Baker, Roosevelt, or the Gray commission defended nonunionists’ “right to work” and therefore helped inspire the movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they went to great lengths to illustrate that their managerial activities were not at all based on their narrow class interests as employers. Publicly, they seldom insisted that they wanted open shops because this management system was, say, the most cost-effective and profitable way to run businesses. Nor did they draw attention to their own power and privilege relative to the working classes. Instead, they sought to demonstrate that the critical divisions in society were not between hostile classes, but rather between individual employees and monopoly-imposing unionists and between law-abiding Americans and criminality. Simply put, the open-shop movement was not, they argued, against unions. Indeed, in 1901, the two-year-old NMTA passed a resolution prohibiting “the word ‘non-union’ in all official documents.” Instead, the association’s leadership required that rank-and-filers use the words “free men” and “free shops” when describing nonunionists and open-shop workplaces.38 The underlying message was clear enough: open shops were nondiscriminatory, allowing both unionists and “free men” equal access to employment. According to this logic, open-shop workplaces protected workers’ individualism, allowing them to refuse pressures to join monopoly-imposing labor unions.
The Citizens’ Industrial Association of America
Acknowledging the need to tighten relationships between employers and nonemployers, as well as recognizing the importance of gaining greater respect for themselves and for “free workers,” open-shop proponents formed new, reformist-sounding organizations, including city-based citizens’ associations and the national Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA), during the early twentieth century. Proposed by Kansas City employers in early 1903 and led by Parry—the Lincolnesque figure who helped transform the NAM into an open-shop-crusading powerhouse—the CIAA opened its membership to a multi-class and multioccupational assortment of figures: doctors, professors, lawyers, judges, religious leaders, fellow employers, and even nonunion workers. “Let us not array class against class,” remarked the Reverend William J. H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and movement organizer from Shelbyville, Indiana, at the CIAA inaugural conference in Chicago.39
Yet the CIAA was not led by a cross-class partnership of employers and “free workers.” Seasoned employer activists, a somewhat insular fraternity with shared managerial interests, served in most leadership positions, and the fourteen figures Parry tapped to help direct it included a number of the nation’s most visible union fighters: Denver’s J. C. Craig, Detroit’s E. M. McCleary, Brooklyn’s J. T. Hoile, Cincinnati’s Du Brul, Dayton’s John Kirby, Jr., Chicago’s Frederick W. Job, Battle Creek, Michigan’s Charles Post, New York’s Berkley R. Merwin, Kansas City’s Philip R. Toll, Minneapolis’s J. L. Record, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania’s W. C. Shepherd, and Evansville, Indiana’s Albert C. Rosencranz, a Civil War veteran who had fought in the famous battle of Chickamauga and for ten months languished in a Confederate prison.40 The mostly northern and midwestern coalition also included two Confederate veterans, James Van Cleave of St. Louis and N. F. Thompson of Birmingham, who had battled under the command of Confederate general, former slave trader, and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.41 As a Louisville member noted in 1904, “the South contended with the North to divide the nation, now it will fight with you side by side against the common foe to our industrial liberty!”42 Decades after the Civil War, open-shop activists from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had mostly put their old partisan views aside, recognizing the importance of a new, though, in their collective view, equally momentous struggle. Under Parry’s leadership, the old Confederates, by joining their one time foes, had begun to prioritize class and national, over regional, unity, echoing the decades-old Republican call for “free labor.”
Parry’s association was neither the first nor the last to use the word “citizen” in its title. The emergence and authority of various urban-based citizens’ associations in places like Chicago, Denver, New York, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, as well as in the coal regions of Colorado and northeastern Pennsylvania, were quite notable by the time of the inaugural CIAA conference in 1903.43 Consisting of coal mine operators, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and an assortment of mostly white, Protestant elites, these groups typically began during the second part of the nineteenth century in an effort to fight what members considered entrenched,