Table 1: NFA and NMTA, 1899–1914: Growth and Consolidation
Source: Howell J. Harris, “Research Note”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dipyO77UdrOk27VhqCSFYHITw7NcpAUoIvsIK4Y1jEg/edit?pli=1.
Reynolds, Sweet, and numerous other engineers most likely hungered for the prestige and financial compensation that resulted from their hard work and technological innovations, and their involvement in employerled defense organizations indicates their profound desire to help prevent the many types of union troubles—boycotts, organizing campaigns, nettlesome shop floor demands, and strikes—from interfering with their goals. After all, like the NFA’s original organizers, they had businesses to run, patents to develop, clubs to visit, and money to make. Yet their active involvement in research and development, combined with their participation in employers’ associations, demonstrates their broader commitment to what they most certainly believed benefited the general public.
Some in this growing movement apparently went above and beyond the call of duty, including Henry N. Covell, a well-connected engineer who had attended the original meeting that launched the NMTA. Born in Troy, New York, in 1862, Covell was reportedly a prominent NFA member and, since 1889, superintendent of the large and enormously lucrative Brooklyn-based Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company, a producer of steam engine castings and logging machinery that formed in 1873. A Yale University graduate and former National Guard member, Covell hobnobbed with several economically privileged, intellectually curious, and socially active individuals as a young man; he held memberships in various organizations, including the Brooklyn Engineers Club. He was also involved in the more socially oriented Brooklyn, Hamilton, and Midwood Clubs, where he participated on various entertainment committees. His business and social pursuits naturally brought him into contact with other prominent Brooklynites and occasional outside visitors. Some fellow clubmen joined him as he helped build and lead the NMTA’s New York City branch.58
Yet Covell did not limit his activities to Brooklyn or Manhattan, and union opponents from outside New York treasured his sociability, community services, foresight, and involvement in the NMTA’s formative period. Speaking at the association’s 1903 conference in Buffalo, British-born William Lodge, an illustrious engineer himself and president of the Cincinnatibased Lodge and Shipley Company, praised the sacrifices and “brains [Covell put] into the inceptionary work of this Association.” Lodge, who was partially responsible for forming the Machine Tool Builders Association in 1902, explained that Covell could have made “thousands of dollars if he had spent the same time in his business” that he spent organizing the NMTA.59 Here Lodge emphasized Covell’s apparent selflessness, noting that he had broader goals than his own financial achievements. Lodge clearly saw Covell as fundamentally duty-bound, compelled to act in order to protect the interests of a virtuous, forward-thinking brotherhood, one that was interrelated by layers of educational, economic, military, and social networks. Indeed, Lodge himself was a core member of this honorable partnership, which was led by, as the NMTA’s Bulletin declared in 1903, “the wisest heads and the most skillful hands.”60
One of the movement’s “wisest heads” was Ernest F. Du Brul, the NMTA’s principal organizer. He often gave stirring speeches, including one at the 1903 ASME convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. Here he spoke shortly after Frederick W. Taylor presented one of his influential talks on “Shop Management” to the group. An observer noted that Du Brul “made a strong plea for the organization of employers.”61 While Taylor spoke methodically, Du Brul talked passionately, insisting that those without an NMTA membership card needed to fill one out immediately and contribute to the employer-led open-shop movement, a campaign designed to transform America’s workplaces by helping employers reestablish full control, profitability, and ultimately harmony. Too many workmen, Du Brul and his colleagues realized, had not become, as The Iron Trade Review had put it, “successful as employees.” Their acts of insubordination, expressed most sharply by demands for exclusive bargaining rights often accompanied by outright rebellion, meant employers needed to take a tough stance. Instead of employing and negotiating with unionized labor, open-shop supporters like Du Brul insisted on the need to secure “free men,” individuals who, as Pfahler had explained earlier that year, “prefer to control the sale of their own labor according to its value, rather than at a price fixed by a body of men whose purpose is to create a standard of wages based upon the ability of the incompetent workman.”62 By the time Du Brul gave his talk, NMTA activists had uniformly come to oppose closed shops, which they found costly and burdensome to themselves, and fundamentally unfair to their “free men.” How, Du Brul implied, could one talk about “shop management” without first responding to a more profound crisis—the aggressive and utterly unwelcome penetration of trade unions into America’s workplaces?
In 1903, the year Du Brul delivered his ASME address, organized labor staged roughly 3,500 work stoppages nationally. The immediate question facing employers from across industries was how best to respond, regain workplace control, and set a moral example for others to follow. In Du Brul’s plainspoken words, “To-day we must take into account a very important factor, and one which did not enter very largely into shop questions until recent years: the factor of unionism.” He continued, “Individually the manufacturer cannot oppose the Unions excepting at a tremendous cost, and even if he wins his fight alone he establishes no precedents and he has peace only for a time.” Organized manufacturers, Du Brul believed, needed to begin the process of looking to one another for support and thus realize their potential to stop strikes and hence minimize their economic consequences. Du Brul offered three reasons why, in his opinion, holding NMTA membership was necessary: “First, for the purpose of defense. Second, for purposes of educating themselves, their workmen and their foremen.” And finally, “From motives of patriotism. In the matter of defense it is self-evident that with the whole power of organized labor concentrated on one individual firm there is much danger to that firm in individual resistance; collective resistance to injustice, however, has never yet failed.” A careful observer of economic developments and industrial relations throughout the western world, Du Brul often invoked history and used fear tactics, arguing that if American manufacturers failed to unite against trade unionism, then labor relations would soon resemble the poor state of conditions in England, where “industrial prosperity” was “disappearing” in the face of merciless strikes.63 Though it is unclear how many engineers Du Brul converted, his influence at this meeting eclipsed that of Taylor’s.64
It is possible that Du Brul garnered more interest at this gathering than Taylor, whose influence on workplace management has interested multiple generations of scholars, because the open-shop advocate spoke to a problem that concerned practically all manufacturers, not just those interested in adopting scientific management techniques. Indeed, some employers organized their workplaces on Taylor’s methods, but plenty of others did not. In the midst of the 1903 strike wave, the open-shop system promised to address the more immediate needs of managers overseeing workforces of various sizes and types. One could not make the same point about Taylor’s ideas, even though, as historian Hugh G. J. Aitken claimed, Taylor’s methods constituted “an allegedly complete system of management.”65 The multifaceted labor problem, experienced intimately and often agonizingly by the nation’s manufacturers, united both disciples of Taylor’s methods and those with no, or only a passing, interest in his ideas.
Observers of the nascent open-shop movement recognized that Du Brul was a gifted leader and organizer, called “an enthusiast in the employers’ association movement” by The Iron Trade Review in 1903.66 Born in 1873, he, like Pfahler,