Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson

inflammatory speeches” delivered by working-class demonstrators.⁴⁴ In the following decade, the Chicago Times referred to the anarchists present during the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886 as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism, and murder.”⁴⁵ And the Richmond Dispatch mocked Eugene Debs, American Railway Union head and leader of the 1894 Pullman strike, for failing to preserve peace despite promising to do so: “This ‘peaceful’ strike has attained the proportions of a war upon the entire people, and the interest on which their very lives are dependent.”⁴⁶ Picket-line activities were, to be sure, not always violent, but judges, employers, and much of the press tended to portray most as pernicious expressions of intimidation and brutality—and as a result helped to generate a pervasive atmosphere of terror.⁴⁷ By the early twentieth century, many bourgeois Americans had concluded that, in the words of Eliot, “there is no such thing as peaceful picketing.”⁴⁸

      Organized employers, many of whom shared Eliot’s analysis, sincerely cherished the support that they received from well-known reformers and the mainstream press, but they were especially thankful for state assistance, including direct help from judges and police forces during labor conflicts. As they campaigned to reform workplaces and communities by pitting what they considered uncontrollable and demanding unionists against hardworking “free” employees, open-shop advocates saw themselves as firmly embedded in the political mainstream and securely allied with the nation’s lawmakers and enforcers.⁴⁹ Judges were particularly helpful. Altogether, state and municipal courts issued 2,095 injunctions against trade unions between 1890 and 1920.⁵⁰ The legal establishment, including the Supreme Court, even legitimized employers’ use of blacklists against union supporters, and numerous judges invoked the Sherman Antitrust Act, which punished strikers for restraining interstate trade.⁵¹ By policing labor and issuing rulings against working-class activists and the unions that represented them, the legal establishment gave employers greater peace of mind, inspiration, and intellectual ammunition for their campaigns.⁵²

      The court system and influential reformers certainly helped to legitimize the open-shop movement by providing its practitioners with legal assistance and moral support. This study emphasizes that a wide spectrum of figures—both from within and outside industrial relations settings—offered a set of multidimensional antiunion critiques, which involved a mix of tough-minded economic logic, flag waving, and a moral concern with the welfare of “free workers,” business owners, and citizens generally. In essence, a broad range of mostly privileged Americans, intolerant of labor solidarity and fearful of working-class militancy, provided a hearty defense of “the common people.”

      Large numbers of influential people supported the open-shop principle in the name of fairness and progress, but there were definitely exceptions. Certainly not all open-shop managers saw themselves as progressive actors fighting to improve the livelihoods of the “common people.” Furthermore, this book does not claim that all reformers were advocates of open-shop workplaces and supporters of the men who refused to bargain collectively with organized labor. We can undoubtedly identify several influential progressive campaigners, including settlement house pioneer Jane Addams and lawyer Clarence Darrow, for example, who had, at various points in their lives, stood in solidarity with unions at marches and on picket lines.

      Additionally, this book largely, though not entirely, avoids labels like “conservative” and “liberal” in the context of labor-management conflicts mainly because such terms are historically contingent. After all, we can surely point to plenty of historical scenarios that defy such political categorizations. Consider some questions. Were the employers who demanded that nonunionists—including African Americans, Mexicans, and Chinese—enjoy the right to work during periods of strikes staged by white laborers liberal or conservative? How should we label the union members who defiantly refused to toil next to those without union cards? Were they closed-minded conservatives, principled liberals, or perhaps something else? Of course, different observers, prioritizing dissimilar values, will offer various responses to questions like these. We must acknowledge, in other words, the lack of a political consensus with respect to these questions.⁵³

      Yet, as we look back on them, we should not perceive employers’ fundamental supervisory interests as controversial or mysterious. Although they frequently presented themselves as committed to “doing right” by protecting the “common people” in the name of community harmony, patriotism, and industrial peace, employers were primarily interested in earning profits and maintaining unfettered managerial control. Of course, they seldom expressed their objectives in such a crass way. This does not mean that they were uninterested in their workers’ welfare; many certainly acknowledged the diversity of grievances harbored by wage earners, but consistently claimed that they could respond meaningfully to them without recognizing unions. For many employers, providing benefits beyond paychecks, drawing attention to what they considered the virtues of America’s economic and political institutions, and joining “defense” organizations constituted a considerably more cost-effective, empowering, and emotionally satisfying set of responses than relinquishing any managerial control by formally bargaining with trade unions.

      The open-shop principle itself was enormously comforting to the nation’s diversity of employers both during periods of labor peace and in the context of industrial disputes. Its advocates were unwilling, with very few exceptions, to question the logic or limitations of this managerial principle, even in the face of intense labor unrest, protests from the radical left, and critical journalistic exposés. For most, this managerial system was absolutely nonnegotiable, even though, in the short term, open-shop campaigns often intensified, rather than alleviated, working-class discontent and community strife. Given the profound impact it had on their collective consciousness, employers were naturally disinclined to address one of the root causes of labor’s restlessness: demands for closed shops and collective bargaining rights. Employers’ ideological blind spots and stubbornness are entirely understandable—even rational—given their primary interests as managers and profit maximizers in a capitalist economy. As novelist Upton Sinclair famously put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”⁵⁴

      This study explores employers and their embrace of the open-shop system both nationally and locally. The first two chapters demonstrate the birth, growth, and influence of open-shop ideas and employer-led activism throughout much of the nation. The final four are regional case studies that investigate at the ground level the ways in which the open-shop philosophy influenced workplace relations, urban politics, and local identities. The most intense confrontations, including strikes and anti-strike campaigns, occurred in, and left lasting impacts on, individual communities. Indeed, a multiregional focus allows us to better appreciate the ways in which employers responded to different-sized labor movements, to various types of political challenges, and to each other. Context certainly mattered, and to obtain a suitable understanding of the drama of open-shop campaigns, one must explore the particular ways in which local level employers established relationships with municipal authorities, including judges and police forces, and attempted to mobilize public opinion. After all, “the Open-Shop war,” as historian Howell Harris has observed, “was prosecuted at the grass roots.”⁵⁵

      The regional portion of this study moves from the Midwest to the East, and concludes in the South. Open-shop proponents were usually very active in their communities, and they identified closely with their regions. The most ardent “labor trust” critics and champions of the rights of independent workers were also civic boosters, proudly wearing the open-shop badge on their sleeves as they advertised what they considered the almost limitless virtues of their communities. Spokespersons in Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, and the southern areas of the United States insisted that their communities were progressive, prosperous, vibrant, and inviting in part because of the broad, multi-industry, and cross-class support for the open-shop principle. Public relations activities were an essential part of the movement.

      These urban-based open-shop boosters were actually indebted to a long history of public relations efforts. Beginning in the early antebellum period, developers, promoters, and newspaper editors, especially in cities and towns throughout the South, the Great Lakes Region, and the West, enthusiastically advertised—even embellished—the financial