Abstract
Historians and social scientists view the Open Shop Movement of the turn of the 20th century and the rise of its key backers, employer associations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Metal Trades Association, as the first sustained organized reaction against working-class insurgency in the United States. For labor scholars in particular, Open Shop advocates and their political allies were an especially repressive force, one that often violently subdued radicalism and all but ensured a more conservative and limited path for the labor movement. In Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, Historian Chad Pearson provides a new reading of the era by showing the extensive ties between business activists and progressive reformers of the day. Although richly detailed and interwoven accounts of Open Shop campaigns and the businessmen behind them, Pearson describes an employer movement that successfully tied itself to the political mainstream, built far-reaching alliances with intellectuals and social reformers, and that often couched its activities in progressive terms. One of the most interesting contributions of the book is the insight it provides into the worldview of prominent business activists and how they made sense of their anti-union activities. Many truly saw themselves as enlightened agents of reform and progress.
Two threads run throughout both the national overview of the movement (Part I) and the four case studies (Part II). First, the motivations and strategies of Open Shop activists were fairly diverse. All demanded managerial autonomy, but beyond that participants spanned the continuum from reform to repression. For example, Pearson introduces readers to N.F. Thompson, a former Klansman turned southern booster who told a Congressional Commission in 1900 that employers should be able to kill strikers, advocating for “justifiable homicide for any killing that occurred in defense of any lawful occupation” (p. 183). But also prominent in the movement were welfare capitalists like George Alden of the Norton Grinding Company in Worcester, Massachusetts. Norton ran its own hospital and offered a number of recreational and cultural amenities to its workers. For many like Norton, worker uplift and the union busting activities of the Open Shop movement were not antithetical.
The variation in outlook among Open Shop advocates and their organizations is on full display in the four case studies of Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, and the South generally. Each is carefully researched and told through the experiences of key business leaders. Many of them make appearances throughout the book. The Cleveland case is told through the experience of two “class traitors,” John Penton, a unionist turned strike-breaker, and Jay Dawley, an employment lawyer who came around to the labor side after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Worcester offers a different feel as many of the leading employers were engineers who came out of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They made strike-breaking and union avoidance strategies into a science, developing one of the National Metal Trade Association’s most active hiring bureaus. Their unwavering belief in progress and in technical solutions to the Labor Problem mirrored the enthusiasm and near-evangelical zeal of tech leaders today. In the southern case, Pearson provides fascinating anecdotes on the ties between the former Klansman Thompson and the black elite at the turn of the 20th century, including Booker T. Washington. Whatever regional and ideological differences Open Shop activists displayed, however, they all believed only they knew what was best for workers. Nor could they fathom that workers would ever willingly resort to collective action to address their grievances in the absence of threats or foreign radicalism.
The second thread is that progressive reformers of the day often shared organizational memberships with Open Shop leaders and embraced their cause to varying degrees. In Cleveland, for example, manufacturer and Open Shop advocate Howard Eells hosted a representative from the National Child Labor Committee to discuss the problem with well-to-do Clevelanders. Pearson does a nice job of showing how industrial elites and middle-class reformers often saw little conflict between their aims. One of the lasting contributions here is perhaps not so much that the Open Shop movement was more diverse than we give it credit for—though, as Pearson shows, it was—but rather that the progressive movement was more paternalistic and conservative when it came to workers’ self-determination than at least many social scientists care to remember.
Interestingly, many of the employers featured in the book developed a hardened opposition to unions not through conflict with radical agitators, but through their interaction with fairly moderate labor organizations. For example, the militant Industrial Workers of the World formed in 1905 do not make an appearance in any of the cases. While Buffalo employers were shocked into action by the assignation of President McKinley at the hands of an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition there, more often it was the hard bargaining of the Iron Molders Union or the Machinists that prompted employers to mobilize. By the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, most Open Shop leaders viewed radicals and mainstream unionists as one in the same and shared the belief that there “was no such thing as peaceful picketing.”
At the end, Pearson returns to the question of whether the Open Shop movement of the early 20th century was an agent of repression or reform. And here he seems resigned to the fact business leaders undermined the common good for their own good. This much is not new. But the significant ties between Open Shop and progressive movements, the substantial diversity within former, and the rich regional variation in outlook and strategy are all important contributions. Indeed, this book has much to offer for labor and social movement scholars, historians of the period, and anyone interested the activities of organized business.