One of the most powerful, inclusive, and effective groups to support the open-shop principle and spread its underlying message was the NAM. Formed in response to the 1893 depression, the NAM held its initial meeting in 1895 in Cincinnati, where delegates, including future president William McKinley, discussed the necessity of expanding economic development in part by increasing foreign trade. The organization, representing mostly locally controlled, midsized workplaces that employed somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the nation’s manufacturing wage earners, enjoyed a close relationship with the Republican Party. Chroniclers of the NAM’s early history have long pointed out that the membership under its first two presidents neither formally discussed, nor took positions on, matters related to the management of labor.94 Unlike others, it did not develop as a labor-fighting, or union-containing, “defense association.”
Yet under the leadership of Indianapolis’s David M. Parry, the organization, in response to widespread labor unrest and agitation from recruiters like Du Brul, had established itself as a leading participant in the movement. Parry had clear, class-based reasons to oppose organized labor. Immensely wealthy and well connected, he headed Indianapolis’s enormous Parry Manufacturing Company, which built several different types of wagons and employed roughly 2,000 employees, including at least some union sympathizers. According to a historian of Indiana, his towering, capital-intensive workplace was “bigger than the next five biggest carriage factories in the world.”95
The NAM’s anti-union activities officially began in 1902 and involved intensive political lobbying and letter writing directed at policy-makers in Washington, where it ultimately succeeded in blocking the American Federation of Labor-backed proposal for an eight-hour workday on government contracts. Parry and his colleagues, some of whom enjoyed profitable contracts with the U.S. navy, found the prospect of such “class legislation” wholly obnoxious. “The right to say how long men shall work,” Parry declared, “is a right which belongs to private agreement between employer and employe, and we deny the justice of government endeavoring to regulate those matters which come within the province of industrial adjustment.”96
The NAM’s aggressive anti-union efforts under Parry’s leadership, defended under the banner of protecting personal “rights,” should not surprise us in part because Parry himself had confronted several organizing drives orchestrated by Indianapolis’s Central Labor Union. In 1901, a union spokesperson, citing low pay, frequent firings, and a generally dispiriting atmosphere, claimed “that conditions there are worse than in any factory in the city.” And by August of that year, the union stated that it had the support of 75 percent of the labor force. Insisting that he compensated his men “better” than most employers, Parry dismissed the union’s number as simply absurd, doubting that its lead organizer, John Blue, could identify “1 per cent of the men ready to go into a union.”97
This seems more like wishful thinking on Parry’s part than a truly honest appraisal of his workforce’s views on the matter. While it may be correct that fewer than 75 percent signed union cards, it is difficult to believe Parry’s claim that only 1 percent supported the organizing effort. But Parry wanted observers to believe that he took the high road, insisting that, as a goodhearted American, he did not care if the individual worker joined a labor union, “the Odd Fellows,” or “The Presbyterian Church,” provided “he does not molest anybody else.” That “anybody else” did not merely mean him. Yet as the owner, he felt a responsibility to prevent the creation of a closed shop—a truly nightmarish industrial relations scenario that, in his view, would lead to falling levels of productivity and the growth of an increasingly incompetent labor force. As he explained, “I do not propose to have it run by any labor union or these fakers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.” For Parry, unscrupulous outside dissenters and charlatans, rather than grievance-holding workmen, were responsible for triggering the unnecessary controversy. Whatever its source, Parry succeeded, demonstrating his unwillingness to “tolerate [the union’s] dictatorial policy.”98
Less than two years later at the NAM annual conference in New Orleans, Parry forcefully professed that his organization was committed to solving the labor problem nationally by strenuously backing efforts to establish thousands of open-shop workplaces like his own. Here he helped to usher in a period that labor leaders disparagingly called “Parryism.”99 In front of over 200 delegates, including Pfahler and Du Brul, Parry delivered a speech as passionate and as pointed as anything given by Du Brul, insisting that organized labor posed a singular threat to “liberty-loving people” and thus challenged “the whole social, political, and governmental systems of the Nation.” He made his points almost selflessly, explaining that the reinvented organization’s principal goal was emancipatory, designed to help “thousands of men to shake off the shackles of unionism.”100
Figures from both sides of the open-shop question immediately understood the significance of the NAM’s evolution under Parry’s tenure. According to one labor activist, “Trade unionists who imagine that Mr. Parry and his colleagues have merely organized to give pink teas or chowder parties will find that they are sadly misinformed.”101 Employers at this momentous event, reflecting on what they considered onerous contracts, organized labor’s unreasonable demands, pushy business agents, and occasional outbreaks of labor turmoil, affectionately greeted this development. Indeed, the fervent responses to Parry’s speech in Tulane Hall, which found expression in repeated eruptions of loud applause, indicate that the delegates understood the extent of the problem and saw the possibilities of resolving it. Parry’s thunderous declarations gave inspiration to many rank-and-file employers who sincerely cherished his bold and steady leadership. As word spread of the organization’s transformation into a confident, union-fighting outfit, hundreds of employers flocked to it. The organization counted 1,900 dues-paying members in 1902; a year later, that number climbed to 2,700.102 Dayton’s Kirby, excited that the NAM had placed union breaking at the center of its program, called Parry “the Abraham Lincoln of the twentieth century.”103
At first glance, this comparison seems far-fetched. Yet Kirby was apparently dead serious in making it, noting that Parry was one of the most vocal, visible, and determined proponents of the emancipation of independent wage earners and employers from what they viewed as the burdensome reality of closed-shop unionism. Like antebellum slaves, business owners and nonunion workers were, according to his logic, unfairly, even brutally, constrained by the oppressive rules that prevented them from achieving their economic goals and full freedom, which laissez-faire capitalism was supposed to ensure. The movement activists who catapulted Parry to this elevated position clearly saw him as a transformative visionary capable of leading employers away from the morass of union-run corruption and closed-shop oppression.
By invoking Lincoln, Kirby demonstrated consistency with other reformers in this period. Lincoln’s strong leadership at a time of an unprecedented national crisis inspired several prominent early twentieth-century figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. As historical sociologist Barry Schwartz notes, “Progressives promoted Lincoln as a model for their era of reform.”104 In the eyes of Kirby, and presumably other employers, Parry, by helping to lead the movement, had reached the conclusion that provocative language and industrial warfare constituted the soundest, and perhaps only, choice in the face of an increasingly rebellious and radical labor movement intolerant of the rights of the “free worker.”
The movement took on a new urgency around the time of the NAM’s transformation. No longer did organized employers merely complain about what a member of the AFA called in 1897 “the inconveniences inseparable from labor troubles.”105 By 1903, employer activists, led partly by Lincolnesque visionaries like Parry, viewed the labor problem, expressed most sharply by demands for closed shops, as more than simply “inconvenient.” Rather, they warned about the creeping threats of dictation and domination,