Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Reform or Repression
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
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http://www.collin.edu/history/Faculty.htm * https://www.lawcha.org/author/cepearson/
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LC control no.: no2015101539
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2015101539
HEADING: Pearson, Chad
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370 __ |e Plano (Tex.) |2 naf
372 __ |a United States–History–20th century |a Business–History–20th century |a Working class–United States–History |a Labor unions–United States–History |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Collin County Community College District |2 naf
373 __ |a State University of New York at Albany |2 naf |t 2008
374 __ |a College teachers |a Historians |2 lcsh
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377 __ |a eng
378 __ |q Chad E.
670 __ |a Reform or repression, 2016: |b ECIP title page (Chad Pearson)
670 __ |a Collin College, Dept. of History, Faculty, via WWW, July 30, 2015: |b faculty (Chad E. Pearson; Ph. D., State University of New York, Albany, 2008; research areas include business, labor and working class, Gilded Age, Progressive Era)
670 __ |a OCLC, Aug. 3, 2015 |b (access points: Pearson, Chad; Pearson, Chad, 1975-; usage: Chad Pearson)
PERSONAL
Born 1975.
EDUCATION:State University of New York, Albany, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Collin College, history professor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Chad E. Pearson is a writer and professor of history. He received his Ph.D. in history from State University of New York, Albany in 2008. He teaches history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. Pearson’s research interests include business, labor and the working class, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era.
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, Pearson’s first book, examines the labor movement in the United States of America between 1890 and 1917. While the perspectives of workers who organized, rioted, and demanded workplace protections and fair wages have been covered extensively by historians, examinations into the views of the employers who resisted unionization have often been depicted in a one-dimensional way, emphasizing the use of national repression and brute force. Pearson attempts to offer the voice of another participant in the movement; that of the small-scale, local employer. He describes the intricate relationship between national and local anti-union forces and examines the many complicated motives of local employers.
Pearson opens the book by describing the events and trends that led to the development of the open-shop idea. In the first two chapters, Pearson writes about how this concept provided a strong opposition to unionization, allowing employers to hire employees without ties to the union and thereby directly hurting the efforts of the labor movement.
Vilja Hulden in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society wrote that Pearson “provides rich detail on the protagonists, strategies, rhetoric, and efficacy of the anti-union campaigns instigated by the employer organizations.” Though the seeds of the open-shop idea were planted as far back as 1890, the first drive occurred in 1901. The movement gained such popularity that within fifteen years, 1,600 open-shop organizations had opened, with many allies outside of the direct businesses providing support. The open-shop campaign spread its message with public education methods through organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Citizens Industrial Alliance, as well as through the use of physical violence. With the help of police, spies, and court orders, open-shop employers were able to pinpoint and punish pro-union workers and dampen public opinion that favored labor unions.
The next four chapters of the book are regional case studies, focusing on Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the South. In these sections Pearson presents details about the businesses, individuals, and local/national relations that influenced anti-union sentiment.
Pearson highlights the connection between local and national efforts. National organizations provided nonunion labor to local employers, and local employers replicated successful union suppression tactics that they observed from national organizations.
Despite the relationship between national and local organizations, Pearson argues, the two groups were very different in motivation. He describes how some local anti-union employers claimed that their actions were motivated by resistance against monopoly and a love of liberty. They did not view themselves as repressive or antiprogress, but instead claimed that they were promoters of peace. In their eyes, Pearson explains, unionization was similar to a social ill, such as poverty or alcoholism, and by resisting its spread, they were fighting for the health of the individual and the nation. While Pearson openly presents these assertions by open-shop employers, he also questions the honesty behind them. Tom Mitchell in Labour/Le Travail wrote that Pearson “critically examines the claims of open-shop advocates,” while also “exploring the open-shop advocates’ own sense of what they were doing.”
Pearson draws on newspapers accounts, journals, magazines, and speeches throughout the book. He focuses on particular individuals, towns, and companies to support his assertions. Dennis P. Halpin in Journal of Southern History wrote that the book “makes significant contributions to the history of labor, management, and capitalism while provoking important questions about Progressive-era reform.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2016, R.J. Goldstein, review of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, p. 1664.
Enterprise & Society, March, 2017, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, review of Reform or Repression, pp. 226-229.
Journal of Southern History, Volume 83, number 3, 2017, Dennis P. Halpin, review of Reform or Repression, p. 716.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, September, 2017, Anthony R. DeStefanis, review of Reform or Repression, pp. 106-108.
Labour/Le Travail, Number 78, 2016, Tom Mitchell, review of Reform or Repression, p. 350.
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, winter, 2017, Vilja Hulden, review of Reform or Repression, pp. 109-111.
ONLINE
Counter Punch Online, https://www.counterpunch.org/ (March 3, 2017), Louis Proyect, “The Scab Economy,” review of Reform or Repression.
Economic History, https://eh.net/ (January 29, 2018), Gerald Friedman, review of Reform or Repression.
Labor and Working-Class History Association Website, https://www.lawcha.org/ (January 29, 2018), author profile.
Labor Notes, http://www.labornotes.org (July 6, 2017), review of Reform or Repression.
Chad Pearson
Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Organizing Against Labor: Controversies in the History of Employers (University of Illinois, forthcoming).
LABOR HISTORY LABORONLINE FEATURES
The Right to Work, the Right to Carry, and the Right to Shoot
by Chad Pearson on July 18th, 2016
Chad Pearson Chad Pearson
Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Organizing Against Labor: Controversies in the History of Employers (University of Illinois, forthcoming).
View all posts by Chad Pearson »
Ohio’s open carry law has generated a considerable amount of controversy given that Cleveland is hosting this year’s Republican Convention. In light of recent killings in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, critics, both liberals and staunch advocates of “law and order”, have raised serious questions about the law, and the city’s cop union, those responsible for defending the local ruling class, have called for a temporary suspension of it after learning that some black activists will be armed.
This is hardly the first time the issue of firearms has led to acrimonious debate and discussion in this Lake Erie City. In fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous strikebreakers and managers carried guns during industrial disputes, insisting that the weapons were necessary to protect the property rights of capitalists and the mobility of anti-union workers. The legal system in Cleveland, like most other places, largely protected the brutal actions of scabs and bosses. In many cases, protecting scabs’ right to work also meant defending their right to shoot.
1899 Cleveland Streetcar strike
1899 Cleveland Streetcar strike
Consider some early history. One of the most dramatic disputes in the city was the 1899 strike against the Cleveland Electric Railway Company’s Big Consolidated Line. Fought mostly over wages and union recognition, the roughly 850 strikers enjoyed much community support during this conflict. Daily demonstrations, sometimes involving over 8,000 protestors, had routinely succeeded in preventing scabs from crossing picket-lines. They were not entirely successful, but militancy and solidarity, in many instances, worked. In the face of the violence, including the dynamiting of railway cars, authorities brought in state troopers, and a number of non-unionists armed themselves for protection. Both sides were guilty of violence, though some of the worst bombings, according to historian Stephen Norwood, were likely caused by agent provocateurs. And as strike historian John Stark Bellamy has written, “not a single instance of dynamiting had ever been or ever would be traced by to the union or its card-carrying members.” In one of the dramatic moments of the strike, a non-union conductor named Ralph P. Hawley fatally shot an eighteen-year-old protestor named Michael Connzweit. Represented by anti-union lawyer Jay P. Dawley, the jury acquitted Hawley, concluding that he had acted out of self-defense.
Most middle class and elite observers, both outsiders and Clevelanders, criticized labor violence, but said little about the thuggery generated by police, state troops or strikebreakers. Several Catholic and Protestant leaders, business owners, and public officials, denounced instances of working class militancy, called for order, and insisted that workers respect the rights of non-unionists. Confederate veteran, former Klan leader, and Huntsville, Alabama-based commercial real estate investor, N. F. Thompson, visited Cleveland at the time and later expressed shock by the life-threatening mayhem. Speaking about the event to a room full of anti-union businessmen in New York City in 1904, Thompson recalled that his “southern blood was beginning to get up” due to the “inhuman” activities.
Almost exactly a year after witnessing Cleveland’s streetcar strike, Thompson gained national attention for speaking before the US Industrial Commission, where he warned that labor unions consisted “the greatest menace to this Government that exists inside or outside the pale of our National domain. Their influence for the disruption and disorganization of society is far more dangerous to the perpetuation of our Government in its purity and power than would be the hostile array on our borders of the armies of the entire world combined.” Thompson called for a number of responses, including a “justifiable homicide” law, which would protect the rights of individuals responsible for “any killing that occurred in defense of any lawful occupation.” In other words, the former Klansman put forward a proposal that resembles what we know today as the “stand your ground law.” The Cleveland streetcar strike was one of numerous disputes that Thompson had studied before he put forward this attention-grabbing proposal. For him and others in anti-union circles, managers and anti-unionists like Ralph P. Hawley must enjoy the right to work as well as the right to shoot.
Chad Pearson is a scholar of employer anti-unionism. His book, Reform or Repression covers strikebreaking in Cleveland as well as across the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
It is entirely possible that John A. Penton, owner of the Cleveland-based Penton Publishing Company, former organizer for the anti-union National Founders’ Association and Thompson’s colleague in the open-shop movement, had Thompson’s idea in mind in 1906 when he armed dozens of his non-union workers during a dispute at his shop. “We have issued an injunction that’s made of lead and can’t be modified,” he explained to a journalist. Penton, who also carried a revolver, bragged that “Our employees are instructed to shoot any man who even jostles them; to shoot at once and right. The Company will stand behind them.”
No deaths resulted from this action, but one of Penton’s colleagues, Israel Whitworth, nearly killed Eli Black, a striker, by driving a chisel into his back. This came at the end of the strike, which resulted in a victory for Penton and his gunmen. Yet authorities arrested Whitworth for attempted murder. This was just a minor inconvenience: at trial, Whitworth was successfully defended by the veteran union-busting attorney and president of the Cleveland Employers’ Association, Jay P. Dawley. Penton, his scabs, and Whitworth faced no meaningful consequences for their actions.
Labor unionists in Cleveland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like black lives matter activists today, had little faith in the legal system or in the most vocal defenders of gun rights. After all, their opponents in the open-shop movement, inspired by N. F. Thompson’s message promoting justifiable homicide, demonstrated that union lives didn’t matter in elite circles. The friends, relatives, and union brothers and sisters of Michael Connzweit and Eli Black knew this painfully well. Today, the friends and family members of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old killed by Cleveland’s police, and countless advocates of social justice, understand this painful reality as well.
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Print Marked Items
Reform or Repression: Organizing
America's Anti-Union Movement
Dennis P. Halpin
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p716+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement. By Chad Pearson. American
Business, Politics, and Society. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 303. $55.00,
ISBN 9780-8122-4776-3.)
Chad Pearson's Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement makes significant
contributions to the history of labor, management, and capitalism while provoking important questions
about Progressive-era reform. Pearson analyzes employer associations and the "open-shop movement"--
which sought to prevent employee engagement with labor unions--between 1890 and 1917 (p. 3). Pearson
organizes his work spatially by looking at the national development of the open-shop idea before delving
into four case studies in Cleveland. Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the South.
Using newspapers accounts, trade journals, magazines, and speeches, he unearths a complicated, nuanced
history of the anti-union movement that, as the title suggests, blurred the line between reform and
repression.
Pearson contributes much to our understanding of employer motivations in the turbulent years between
1890 and 1917. Historians have largely written about this period from the perspective of workers who
organized, struck, and rioted in their quest for recognition, workplace protections, and higher wages. When
this scholarship has considered employers, it has been as onedimensional reactionaries. Yet as Pearson
demonstrates, employers' motivations were complex. Employers' vision of the open shop aligned with their
view that unions were lawless, anti-individualistic, inefficient, and un-American. Employers believed that
the open shop rewarded hardworking, skilled, and determined individuals. Employers did not see a conflict
between their own collective action when they formed organizations like the National Association of
Manufacturers and the Citizens' Industrial Association of America and their ongoing denunciation of unions
as "labor trusts" (p. 2). By placing employers at the center of his analysis, Pearson draws our attention to the
people who "wielded a tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people" (p. 2).
One of the more surprising elements of Pearson's study is that a diverse array of people joined employers in
supporting and promoting the open shop. Pearson populates his book with a number of these figures, from
the better-known Theodore Roosevelt, Ray Stannard Baker, Louis D. Brandeis, and Booker T. Washington
to the relatively obscure open-shop evangelist Ernest F. Du Brul and journalist George Creel. As this list
illustrates, the open-shop movement appealed across political ideologies and cut across racial, religious, and
geographic lines as well. The widespread support for the open shop demonstrates the effectiveness with
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which employers delivered their message. This support also helps explain how these ideas continue to
influence how many perceive labor unions, collective action, and management to this day.
Given Pearson's regional approach, it is surprising that he did not include a case study of a western location.
In many ways, the West looms large in Pearson's examination. Some of the open-shop movement's most
prominent advocates hailed from places like Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Helena,
Montana. The region also seems rife for exploration, as it was the setting for some of the most spectacular
outbreaks of labor-management conflict during this period. As it stands, Pearson's study rarely crosses the
Mississippi River, especially in his later chapters.
That minor criticism does not detract from what is an important book that challenges readers to grapple with
a dark undercurrent running through the Progressive reform agenda. Pearson maintains, "Open-shop
campaigners repeatedly proclaimed a desire to protect, rather than punish, ordinary people" (p. 217). In this
sense, their movement fits comfortably with our understanding of Progressive reform. As Pearson points
out, however, the open-shop movement served the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor and the
working class. Ultimately, open-shop reform efforts helped sustain "an economic system designed to protect
the most privileged classes of Americans at the expense of those who had demanded a more democratic say
over their lives" (p. 20).
Dennis P. Halpin
Virginia Tech
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Halpin, Dennis P. "Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement." Journal of
Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 716+. General OneFile,
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Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression:
Organizing America's Anti-Union
Movement
Tom Mitchell
Labour/Le Travail.
.78 (Fall 2016): p350+.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
Full Text:
Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press 2016)
Chad Pearson acknowledges that few historians have challenged the judgement offered 50 years ago by
Robert Wiebe that organized employers were counter-reformist. No matter. In Reform or Repression:
Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement, Pearson explores the progressive credentials of America's
turn of the century open shop advocates. He has a complicated story to tell. On the one hand open-shop
proponents where opponents of working class activism; on the other, they might be considered reformers in
the progressive tradition of the early 20th century. Pearson's open shop advocates fought unions, but they
were also proponents of welfare capitalism, honest government, municipal efficiency, industrial progress,
urban beautification, and temperance. Pearson raises the possibility that the open-shop struggle was perhaps
the finest hour of America's employer-class progressives.
Pearson has set out to explore how open shop advocates viewed their struggle against labour and their role
in it. He argues that open-shop proponents, including both employers and those outside workplace settings,
did not see themselves as agents of repression standing in the way of working-class progress. Rather, they
were anti-monopolists who acted within and were inspired by "a noble tradition stretching back to the midnineteenth
century, one fashioned by an assortment of abolitionists, anti-monopolists, and promoters of
peace." (217) In this story the "labour question" is transformed into a social problem akin to alcoholism,
poverty, or municipal efficiency: organized labour--the "labour question" --appears as a social ill to be
ameliorated; ipso facto, open shop advocates could and did embrace the role of social reformers or
liberators.
In Reform or Repression men from America's leading business strata and their associates in civil society
emerge as the subjects of history, standing at the centre of a progressive narrative in which they exercise
agency as benefactors to the nation. The men who engineered the creation of the National Founders'
Association (NFA) may have been businessmen concerned with managerial freedom and the bottom line,
but says Pearson, "they were not exclusively inspired by the supposed joys of materialistic individualism or
the emotional pleasures of ego building." (27) And, if the new NFA became a labour busting organization it
was because organized labour became "belligerent." (36)
The reformist progressive agenda of the open shop movement comes into clearer view with Pearson's
account of the evolution of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), formed in 1895, and
transformed into an anti-labour organization under the leadership of David M. Perry who had "clear, classbased
reasons to oppose organized labor." (49) In Perry's world organized labour threatened "liberty-loving
people." Under Parry, the NAM embraced an emancipatory mission to help "thousands of men shake off the
shackles of unionism." (51) In the open shop narrative the "free worker" was enslaved by organized labour,
and Perry, the liberator, was a "Lincolnesque" visionary. (52) Pearson contends that open shop advocates
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like Parry did not attack labour simply to diminish its power and maximize profits; they "felt a moral
obligation to defend ... the labor movement's most vulnerable targets: innocent children, widows, small
tradesmen, modest sized business owners and above all, 'free' workers." (53)
Pearson does not accept such assertions at face value and at various points he critically examines the claims
of open shop advocates. However, he is interested in exploring the open shop advocates own sense of what
they were doing, their vision of a proper civil order, and their notion of labour's place in it. He creates space
to consider the possibility that open shop advocates held social and political commitments in a Rawlsian
way--prior to or apart from the their class positions--not just as dressed-up versions of their material
interests. In Reform or Repression the nostrums of the open shop movement just might become principles
upon which society might be ordered.
Accounts of the civic spiritedness of open-shop advocates give way to accounts of mostly conventional
regional employer-based anti-labour organizations that sought to convince workers of the benefits of the
open shop, carried on an extensive public relations campaigns against organized labour, lobbied politicians
for open shop legislation, fired and blacklisted labour activists. Pearson describes the struggle of open shop
advocates against a strike of the Iron Molders' Union in Cleveland in 1900. Here the open shop cause was
led by Jay P. Dawley, a Cleveland-based management-side labour lawyer and National Founders'
Association Detroit-based functionary John A. Penton. In Buffalo, in 1906, members of the Buffalo
Foundrymen's Association took on the Iron Moulders' Union in a months-long struggle to demonstrate that
"neither radicalism nor closed-shop unionism were welcome." (128) In Worcester, Massachusetts, Pearson
describes a 1902 strike of the International Association of Machinists that involved manufacturer unity,
coordination with national employers' associations, and "unequivocal sympathy for the plight of non-union
strikebreakers." (153) Here industrial leaders and open shop advocates like Joseph H. Walker were also
advocates of welfare capitalism. Pearson takes readers into the South and recounts the career of N.F.
Thompson, Chamber of Commerce activist and former Klansman, and "the South's most ambitious and
visible opponent of closed-shop unionism." (184) With Thompson, anti-labour agitation included calls for
legislation "that would make it justifiable homicide for any killing that occurred in defense of any lawful
occupation." (183)
Pearson's focus extends beyond employers' associations. Allied citizens' associations, largely the creation of
employers, were an important feature of the open-shop movement in communities across America. While
Pearson's regional accounts offer a grass roots perspective on employer anti-labour activity, he says little
about virulent anti-labour activity undertaken by citizens' associations in, for example, turn of the century
Colorado and elsewhere. In 1903, these anti-labour citizens' committees gained a national organization
when David M. Parry and the National Association of Manufacturers launched the Citizens Industrial
Association of America. Pearson tells us that Perry's told the founding convention that labour challenged
"the whole social, political, and governmental systems of the nation." (10) Here Pearson has selected one of
Parry's less apocalyptic denunciations of organized labour.
Pearson's explorations of the varied commitments of open shop advocates to reform causes--including the
open shop--provides a salutary illustration of the dangers of reductionist historical accounts. Nevertheless,
he appears to accept Robert Wiebe's assessment of open shop advocates as counter-reformists. As he
explains, notwithstanding "their often high-minded, patriotic, and class-blind rhetoric about fairness and
freedom, they were fundamentally self-interested, concerned above all about profits and power." (224) To
paraphrase Adam Smith, the open shop movement was, it seems, simply the tacit union of employers
against labour made explicit and ferocious.
Tom Mitchell
Brandon University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mitchell, Tom. "Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement."
Labour/Le Travail, no. 78, 2016, p. 350+. General OneFile,
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Pearson, Chad. Reform or repression:
organizing America's antiunion movement
R.J. Goldstein
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.11 (July 2016): p1664.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Pearson, Chad. Reform or repression: organizing America's antiunion movement. Pennsylvania, 2015. 303p
index afp ISBN 9780812247763 cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9780812292206 ebook, $55.00
53-4940
HD6488
MARC
Historian Pearson (Collin College) has produced a truly outstanding study on the pre-WW I origins of the
"open-shop" movement, which sought to ban "closed shop" labor organizing and was widely termed by
employers the "American Plan" after WW I, thus not so subtly suggesting that unions were "un-American."
Using a dazzling array of sources, including archival material, vast swaths of contemporary newspapers and
magazines (especially trade journals), and a wide range of secondary sources, Pearson demonstrates in a
clearly organized and written account that while employers alleged that unions sought to impose collective
"dictation" and limit the ability of "free workers" to work when and as they wished, they themselves sought
to retain the ability to unilaterally control workers by organizing, on both city-wide and national industrial
bases, powerful business organizations that successfully used techniques such as blacklisting, national
recruitment of strikebreakers, and appeals to judges and police to severely limit or entirely ban strikes and
related activities such as picketing. As coal baron George Baer notoriously declared in 1902, labor was
viewed as seeking to interfere with the "Christian gendemen to whom God has given control of the property
rights of the country." Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-
-R. J. Goldstein, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Goldstein, R.J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Goldstein, R.J. "Pearson, Chad. Reform or repression: organizing America's antiunion movement."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1664. General OneFile,
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Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement by Chad Pearson (review)
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
From: Enterprise & Society
Volume 18, Number 1, March 2017
pp. 226-229
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
Chad Pearson. Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. viii + 303 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4776-3, $55.00 (cloth).
Chad Pearson’s book is timely given that the attack on unions is as pervasive as it has ever been. Indeed, one could argue that we are in the midst of a third-wave open-shop movement. At the very end of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a dramatic increase in the numbers of organized workers and strikes, employers organized the first coordinated nationwide campaign to create what is now called a “union-free environment.” As Pearson demonstrates, it spread rapidly. Indeed, within fifteen years after the first open-shop drive in 1901, there were over 1,600 open-shop organizations throughout the nation, and it had numerous allies outside business. The campaign combined persuasion—through the educational and public relations efforts of organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Citizens Industrial Alliance—with brute force. With the assistance of local police, court-issued injunctions, violent strikebreakers, and spies, as well as employment bureaus that weeded out pro-union workers, employers reversed public sympathy toward unions and brought the growth of organized labor to an abrupt halt. Government support of labor during World War I, however, brought another dramatic surge in unionism, which was followed by a second virulent antiunion movement during the 1920s that resulted in heavy union membership losses that were not reversed until the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s and the launching of a newly powerful union movement. The long third wave began in the late 1970s [End Page 226] when a new, sophisticated union-avoidance consulting industry helped drive the current percentage of private-sector union membership to well under 7 percent, the lowest levels since the 1920s.
While acknowledging the importance of the open-shop drives, historians have paid relatively little attention to the forces behind those campaigns: the organized employers. They have focused primarily on the role of large companies and the courts in fighting unions, breaking strikes, and on the post-World War II era on political efforts to slow labor’s growth or managerial tactics designed to inoculate workers from organized labor’s appeal. Important exceptions are two city-based studies of open-shop associations—Howell Harris’s wonderfully detailed history of the Philadelphia Metal Manufacturers’ Association and William Millikan’s history of the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance—as well as Sidney Fine’s study of the trade-based group, the National Erector’s Association. Both Harris’s and Fine’s books benefited from having access to the rich records of the organizations they studied. Still, we know little about the movements’ ideology and leadership or the nature and mechanisms for their diffusion.
Chad Pearson would argue that it is not surprising that so little attention has been given to the open-shop movement because historians have cast the movement as a reactionary force to increase business profits by breaking unions. In Reform or Repression, Pearson provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the first open-shop movement by focusing on the employer organizations that provided “practical resources, emotional reassurance, and strategic guidance” (53). He begins with two nationally oriented chapters that examine its origins, leadership, and growth, and the impact of its philosophy that all workers should have “access to jobs irrespective of union status” (7). The next four chapters seek to capture the complexity of the movement through local and regional case studies. Focusing on Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Worcester, Massachusetts, and on the career of N. F. Thompson, a southern open-shop activist, serves as a means to showcase how the movement’s ideas shaped workplace relations, urban politics, and local identities. With the exception of the chapter on the South, each of these chapters includes a short description of the city, the emergence of the employers’ organizations, and an analysis of one or more strikes to illustrate the power of the open-shop movement.
One of the strengths of Pearson’s work is that he takes the employers’ ideas and language seriously, particularly their contention that...
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-union Movement by Chad Pearson (review)
Anthony R. DeStefanis
From: Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
Volume 14, Number 3, September 2017
pp. 106-108
Duke University Press colophon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Anthony R. DeStefanis
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-union Movement Chad Pearson Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 303 pp., $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book)
This book is about the first open-shop movement in the United States, which, according to the author, Chad Pearson, emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and ended when the United States entered World War I. The book mostly focuses on the foundry industry. Pearson seeks to show how the industry’s open-shop advocates organized themselves as a class and attempted to attach their cause to the larger Progressive movement. The answer to the labor question for open-shop backers was “the widespread creation of work places full with loyal, industrious, and law abiding employees who sincerely respected America’s industrial and political institutions” (2). Workers had to “embrace individualism over collectivism … resist the temptation to join anarchist or socialist organizations or the more numerous ‘labor trusts’—the term employers and their allies used to describe what they considered the many powerful, intemperate, and subversive unions that demanded recognition and collective bargaining rights” (2).
Pearson divides this study into two sections. The two chapters in part 1 examine the open-shop movement nationally. Part 2 is four case studies that consider the open-shop and antiunion movement in Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the South as a whole.
In part 1, Pearson explores how employers began to organize themselves as a class by forming trade associations, citizens’ alliances, and organizations like the Citizens Industrial Association of America (CIAA). He locates the origins of the movement in the American Founders’ Association, which became the National Founders’ Association (NFA) in 1897 as the concerns of foundry owners became focused on how to deal with an increasingly restless working class. Pearson points out that foundry owners spoke explicitly about organizing themselves to protect their interests, but they were not necessarily antiunion. Instead, the NFA condemned social Darwinism, criticized industrialists who paid wages that forced families to send their children to work, and recruited union leaders as well as Catholic and Jewish foundry owners. NFA members were also willing to negotiate with “responsible” union leaders as long as they did not insist on the closed shop. Because they acted in these ways, Pearson contends, NFA members saw themselves as part of the larger Progressive reform movement.
That foundry work was largely skilled labor helped create a moderate NFA, but its moderation did not last for long. Both the NFA and the National Metal Trades Association, a new organization of foundry owners established in 1902, became sources for strategy on how to break strikes. As the open-shop movement spread to other trade-specific employer associations and to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), it increasingly “provided their likeminded colleagues with practical resources, emotional reassurance, and strategic guidance as they charted a new course” (53). As they did so, [End Page 106] employers insisted “that they chose to fight unions not because they wanted to limit their employees’ rights while increasing profits, but rather because they felt a moral obligation to defend what they defined as the labor movement’s most vulnerable targets: innocent children, widows, small tradesmen, modest-sized business owners, and above all, ‘free’ workers” (52–53).
Pearson is skeptical about this claim, but he also shows how employer organizations successfully recruited nonemployers to the open-shop movement. Along the way, we meet a host of familiar figures from the Progressive Era who expressed support for the open shop. Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Booker T. Washington, Ray Stan-nard Baker, George Creel, and Woodrow Wilson all approved of the open shop at one time or another, and Pearson makes the case that such support helped legitimize it as a necessary reform.
The subsequent chapters on Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, and the South focus on different aspects of the open-shop and antiunion movement in the foundry industry during the first years of the twentieth century. In chapter 3, Pearson organized his discussion of the open-shop movement around John A. Penton and Jay P. Dawley. Penton had been president of the International Brotherhood of Machinery Molders, a...
Browse > History > U.S. History > Local and Regional > South
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement by Chad Pearson (review)
Vilja Hulden
From: Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Volume 115, Number 1, Winter 2017
pp. 109-111 | 10.1353/khs.2017.0017
Kentucky Historical Society colophon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Vilja Hulden (bio)
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement. By Chad Pearson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 303. $55.00 cloth; $55.00 ebook)
Compared to the scholarship on the labor movement, work analyzing the employer side of the struggle is scarce, especially for [End Page 109] the pre-New Deal era. Chad Pearson’s valuable monograph on the formative period of organized employer resistance provides rich detail on the protagonists, strategies, rhetoric, and efficacy of the anti-union campaigns instigated by the employer organizations that emerged in the late Gilded Age and the Progressive era.
The heart of the book consists of four case studies exploring cities and individuals in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. The local-level focus underlines the diversity and potency of employer responses; as Pearson points out, the most searing impacts of the era’s confrontations were felt locally. At the same time, Pearson demonstrates how these local confrontations fit into a broader pattern linked to the growth of anti-union employer organizing. Local employers benefited from the strikebreaking expertise and non-union labor supply provided by national organizations; they drew inspiration from examples of other employers’ resistance to unions; and they added their own inflections to the anti-union movement. Connecting the local and national levels is one of the main strengths of Pearson’s study: it lays bare the replication of employer strategies in multiple localities and highlights how the local-national linkages wove a powerful network against previously successful unions.
Beyond how and why employers won specific local battles, Pearson also aims to understand how employers shaped and participated in the Progressive era’s broader reform ethos. The battle cry of these employers was the “open shop”—a workplace that purportedly employed union members and nonmembers on equal terms rather than acquiescing to the unions’ demands for a “closed,” union-members-only workplace. In the two chapters that preface the case studies, Pearson argues that this emphasis on individual liberty and fairness linked the employers’ efforts to the reform spirit of the Progressive era and reverberated in how some of the era’s most prominent intellectuals assessed labor union praxis.
Throughout, Pearson pays careful attention to the materiality and specificity of the stories he tells, drawing on research conducted in multiple archives as well as local histories and biographical compendia [End Page 110] to provide us with a wealth of detail about the individuals, companies, and towns forming the setting and subjects of the book. Pearson uncovers many mouthwatering tidbits, but the book sometimes leaves one wishing that more analysis would have gone into these morsels, perhaps transforming them into satisfying meals. For example, we learn that before he joined the employer-led crusade “for the protection of the common people” from unions, the “crusading vigilante lawyer” Wilbur F. Sanders defended Montana’s Chinese residents against the anti-Chinese agitation of the labor movement (pp. 67–68). And in perhaps the most original chapter of the book, we are told that as a boy, the future anti-union leader N. F. Thompson had witnessed the Civil War and had induced the breakdown of labor discipline among the slaves on his father’s plantation, “forcing [him] to come to terms with the labor problem a decade before” most of his northern counterparts (p. 187). Such stories throw a fascinating sidelight on the sometimes unexpected contexts of the employer antiunion crusade—but what exactly should we make of them?
Overall, this work is a welcome analysis of actors who have received too little scrutiny in proportion to the “tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people” they wielded—and continue to wield (p. 2). Particularly helpful is Pearson’s insistence that the impact of the employer movement reached beyond the manufacturing belt into the South and West and beyond the factory into the discourse of the Progressive era, with repercussions echoing down to our own day. [End Page 111]
Vilja Hulden
VILJA HULDEN teaches history at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is currently finishing a manuscript on employer organizations, the idea of the closed shop, and democratic governance.
Copyright © 2017 Kentucky Historical...
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement
Author(s): Pearson, Chad
Reviewer(s): Friedman, Gerald
Published by EH.Net (June 2016)
Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. viii + 303 pp. $55 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8122-4776-3.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts.
Even while the Labor Movement is dying, its history thrives. For a long time, Labor History was a narrow often sterile discipline focused on the glorious rise of unions and socialist political formations, the formal Labor Movement. Labor History was populated by advocates whose works often read like sermons, histories of good and honest workers struggling against evil capitalists and their political toadies. Strikes and unions were good, except where the earnest rank-and-file were betrayed by self-serving union leaders. Sometimes, these betrayals cost the workers. But the experience of collective action and struggle always contained good lessons, and task of the labor historian was seen as interpreting these lessons and passing them along to build the labor movement.
While labor historians imagined placing workers and their struggles at the center of historical analysis, by reducing capital, the state, and labor to simplistic Marxist elements, their work was consigned to a leftist ghetto. Labor History as medieval morality play can contribute little to the broader study of history because it treats all actors as parodies. Ironically, by shrinking all social actors to a simplistic category, this work brought nothing to the understanding of the labor movement or the proper strategy for labor struggles. In the face of the decline, even the collapse, of the Labor Movement, the old Labor History has had nothing to say except the old mantra of “evil capitalists” and “self-serving union leaders.”
Perhaps it is the crisis of the Labor Movement that has invigorated the field of Labor History. A new generation of historians has emerged conscious that the old categories are inadequate to understand the current crisis. They are ready for a much more nuanced approach, one that recognizes the varieties of capital. The experience of the Labor Movement’s rise and decline has forced them to recognize the often-contentious relationship between capital and democratic states, and the role of ideology in shaping not only the Labor Movement, but the response to labor militancy by states and by capitalists. In short: the new generation recognizes that the making of the capitalist class and any capitalist state is just as challenging as the making of the working class. By conceiving labor history as a history of contending collective movements, labor historians have enriched our understanding of American employers and their organizations (Ernst 1995; Harris 2006), their bargaining strategies and campaigns against unions (Richards 2008; Sidorick 2009; Cowie 1999), their often-tangled relationship with state officials (Howell 1992; Howell 2005; Friedman 1998; Friedman 2007), and the ideology they developed to sustain their collective action (Phillips-Fein 2009; Harris 1982; Leon 2015). At its best, this new labor history is contributing, as labor historians have long wanted, to a broader emerging field of the history of capitalism (Beckert 2014).
Chad Pearson’s new book should be seen in the context of this transformation of Labor History into a piece of the larger history of American capitalism. His book uses brief biographies and case studies of local associations to examine the development of the Open Shop movement in American industry before the First World War. (“Open Shops” are establishments that hire workers without regard for their union membership; in practice, they do not hire union members because they do not sign union contracts.) In particular, Pearson addresses a question that has often appeared as a paradox to liberal historians eager to portray the American story as a march of progress: the coincidence, both in time and often in personnel, between the Progressive Era “Age of Reform” and the rise of militant anti-unionism and the repression of labor organization. How to reconcile the seemingly antagonistic positions of progressive reformers like George Creel, who advocated of women’s suffrage, public ownership of utilities, and opposed child labor, while also campaigning for the Open Shop and serving on Citizen’s Industrial Association of America (CIAA) press committee (Pearson 2016, 70)? What to say of Theodore Roosevelt, bitter critic of both the repressive labor policies of the Anthracite Coal companies and of the closed (union) shop? Or the liberal hero, Louis Brandeis, who argued that the open shop protected the liberties of both employers and the rights of meritorious unionists and nonunionists alike (Pearson 2016, 83)?
It is the great strength of Pearson’s study that regardless of any personal sympathy with unions and labor militancy, he avoids any cant but evaluates seriously the positions of open-shop employers. He shows that they, too, were often reformers and their employers’ movement was as much a part of the Progressive Era as was the Labor Movement. In rejecting labor militancy and the closed shop as incompatible with his vision of America’s political traditions, Brandeis, for example, expressed a view of labor relations and the economy that was championed by Progressive Era employers’ organizations, has remained popular in America, and has come to motivate much of our political right. In this view, free Labor has no social dimension. It means simply the right of individuals to conduct their businesses and to buy and sell commodities, including their own labor power, untrammeled by the interference of others, either state regulators or other workers or businesses. An attribute of individuals, freedom is negated by collective action. Not only does free competition among individuals best promote efficiency, it is fair because it rewards work and merit; and it is just because it represents liberty. Labor unions are a threat to efficiency because they place the lazy and incompetent on equal standing with the hard-working and meritorious. Worse, through their political action, by promoting regulation and monopoly, they are a fundamental threat to freedom, “the greatest menace” (Pearson 2016, 182). Far from a selfish battle to increase profits, the campaign for the open shop and the employer in the management of his property, was a noble and generous struggle to protect fundamental principles of justice and fairness.
If the open-shop activists had a general political orientation, Pearson shows that, paradoxically for many historians, it was liberal and progressive rather than reactionary. Open shop proponents did not see themselves as part of a counter reformist movement; instead, they were part of a tradition of social reform that stretched back to the abolitionists and early Republicans, to Abraham Lincoln rather than Jefferson Davis. They saw themselves as heirs to the abolitionists, reformers, patriotic and class-neutral proponents of industrial fairness and guardians of ambitious, hard-working individuals. It was natural then for them to oppose monopoly, to favor honest government, municipal efficiency, industrial progress and professionalization. Far from fighting against labor or higher wages, they often condemned abusive managers (like the Anthracite Coal companies), and favored welfare capitalist initiatives and what labor economists today call efficiency wages.
It would be a cheap shot at the open-shop activists to observe that their campaign in defense of individual liberty against collective regulation required collective action, “employer solidarity” and individual sacrifices to benefit the group. Indeed, their campaigns were often undermined by the actions of self-interested individuals, employers who displayed an inclination not to “give their time to anything that will further the interests of the group. (Pearson 2016, 160, 162). Like their union opponents, employers’ organizations face a collective action problem, the need to mobilize individual resources to produce public goods. Pearson’s greatest contribution is to show how these organizations addressed this problem, and how they used ideas — the ideology of individual liberty — to mobilize their constituents. What socialism was for the working-class movement, progressivism became for America’s employers.
Pearson’s work should be read and read carefully by all interested in the history of the Progressive Era, the history of employer organizations, and American political thought. His work is Labor History in the broadest and finest sense, the history of the development of American capitalist society.
References:
Beckert, Sven. 2014. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf.
Cowie, Jefferson. 1999. Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ernst, Daniel R. 1995. Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism. The Working Class in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Friedman, Gerald. 1998. State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Friedman, Gerald. 2007. Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring Means to Ends in a Democratic Labor Movement. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Harris, Howell John. 1982. The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s. Madison University of Wisconsin Press.
Harris, Howell John. 2006. Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Howell, Chris. 1992. Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Howell, Chris. 2005. Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890-2000. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leon, Cedric de. 2015. The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago. Ithaca: ILR Press/Cornell University Press.
Pearson, Chad. 2016. Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement. American Business, Politics, and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W. W. Norton.
Richards, Lawrence. 2008. Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture. The Working Class in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Sidorick, Daniel. 2009. Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: ILR Press/Cornell University Press.
Jerry Friedman has served as the U.S. editor of Labor History since 2003.
Copyright (c) 2016 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2016). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/book-reviews/
Subject(s): Business History
Labor and Employment History
Geographic Area(s): North America
Time Period(s): 20th Century: Pre WWII
Book Review: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement
July 06, 2017 / Patrick M. Quinn enlarge or shrink text login or register to comment
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Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement, by Chad Pearson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 312 pp.
The final two decades of the 19th century, beginning with the great strike wave of 1877, and the first two decades of the 20th century were a period of intense class combat in the United States. The industrial working class struggled with the financial and industrial employing class in a bitterly fought battle that established an initial relationship of forces between the two emerging classes.
Chad Pearson’s new book recounts a critical component of that momentous struggle—the efforts of the employing class to establish an “open-shop” (i.e. non-union) movement, in order to defeat union attempts at organizing workers at the point of production and establishing what were characterized as workplace “closed shops” (i.e. unionized shops).
Pearson’s book is without a doubt among the best labor histories to be published in recent years. In keeping with the modern trend in labor history, this is not a labor history in the “traditional” sense of the term. Rather than being based on union minutes and other records and on union publications, Reform or Repression is almost exclusively based on sources produced by the employing class.
These include employer association magazines and other publications, speeches and writings by leaders of the employers’ associations and the “open-shop” movement, newspaper accounts about the movement, etc. Pearson uses the rhetoric of the “bosses” to document their efforts to prevent unions from organizing their workplaces.
Pearson concentrates on the metalworking industry, with the factory owners’ attempts to defeat the Iron Molders Union and the International Association of Machinists organizing efforts.
In his first of six chapters, Pearson comprehensively reviews the origins of the “open shop” movement in the United States. Chapter Two, perhaps the most informative and interesting, examines how the “open shop” movement embraced the rhetoric and values of the “progressive” movement in an effort to shape public opinion and steer it towards support for the concept of “open shops.”
Pearson reveals how “progressives” such as President Theodore Roosevelt, Kansas City’s George Creel (who later became head of U.S. war propaganda during World War I), the famous “muckraker” Ray Stannard Baker and others enthusiastically supported the “open-shop” movement. The the movement employed the concepts of “freedom,” “liberty” and “democracy” to further anti-union campaigns.
CYNICAL MANIPULATION
Some leaders of the “open-shop” movement actually believed in and supported the actions and values of the progressive movement, especially its efforts to eliminate child labor, establish safer working conditions, and break up trusts and monopolies. But the great majority of the leaders cynically articulated “progressive” values and incorporated them into their rationale for opposing union organizing efforts.
Does all this sound familiar? The origin of the “the right to work” concept, which prevails in 2017, had its inception well over a century ago as did the concept of “free labor.” The employers argued that the concepts of the “right to work” and “free labor” were the very essence of democracy. These became their mantra to keep unions out of their workplaces.
By the beginning of the 20th century the language of “free labor,” which had originally described white workers, primarily in the North as opposed to African-American slave labor in the South, had evolved to describe workers to be “free” to reject membership in unions.
Pearson’s following four chapters are case studies of the employers’ “open shop” campaigns to win hegemony in the industrial cities of Cleveland, Buffalo, and Worcester, Massachusetts as well as in the southern United States (which is today a paradise for “open shop” proponents).
In these chapters Pearson discusses the rhetoric and “values” of the “open shop” movement, and documents how the employing class in these three industrial cities and in the South defeated unions and union strikes by violent means. These were particularly carried out by the police, through importing thousands of strike-breaking workers from other cities, and by availing themselves of anti-union court injunctions.
In his chapter about Cleveland, Pearson recounts the role reversals of a one-time union official/organizer who became one of the main leaders of the “open-shop” movement and of a lawyer who originally was the leading legal representative of the “open shop” movement, but switched sides and became an ardent pro-union attorney.
The chapter on Buffalo depicts how the “open-shop” movement used the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, a follower of Emma Goldman, as a pretext for smashing the union movement in that city, thereby “avenging” McKinley’s death. Pearson’s case study of the “open-shop” movement in Worcester illustrates how successful the “open-shop” movement was in defeating union organizing efforts in that city.
Pearson’s final chapter discusses the “open-shop” movement in the South. He focuses on the career of a former Confederate soldier and early member of the Ku Klux Klan who became one of the most passionate advocates of the “open shop” movement in the various cities where he was a prominent businessman.
Reform or Repression is a truly great read, especially today when union membership has fallen to a historical low. Concepts such as “the right to work” prevail not just in the southern United States but more recently in the Midwest. The employing class today deploys the same rhetoric, concepts and values that it did more than a century ago, including the myth that we live in a classless society in which everybody is “middle class,” enjoying ubiquitous “freedom” and “liberty” in the world’s greatest “democracy.”
Originally published in the July/August 2017 issue of Against the Current.
MARCH 3, 2017
The Scab Economy: the Origins of America’s Anti-Union Movement
by LOUIS PROYECT
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Ever since Donald Trump became a front-runner in the 2016 primaries, leftwing pundits have offered varied historical analogies to help identify the threat we face. Was he more like Hitler or more like Berlusconi? In my view the best prism through which to view Trump is American history itself. Ever since the Reagan presidency there has been a concerted effort to turn the clock back to the 1880s—the gilded age. Or maybe even further back to Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump hung in the oval office. After all, it was Jackson who conned both voters and latter-day historians into believing that he was for the common man. Or fast forward to 1919 when the progressive Woodrow Wilson authorized the Palmer Raids that led to the deportation of 500 foreigners during a Red Scare.
The counter-clockwise rotation speeds up under Republican presidents and slows down a bit under Democrats but it never stops. Only a revolution will reset the clock once and for all.
I was reminded of this while reading Chad Pearson’s Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement that was published in 2015. If you knew nothing about the contents, you might assume from the title that it referred to the Truman presidency when the Taft-Hartley bill was passed. But instead it harkens back to the turn of the century when Theodore Roosevelt was president and whose Square Deal meant conservation, trust-busting, respect for workers and other progressive measures.
If you read the Wikipedia entry on Theodore Roosevelt, you are told that he believed unions “needed a square deal, and a stronger voice and collective bargaining with corporations.” It was up to Chad Pearson to read the fine print of history and reveal the role that Roosevelt played in one of the most bitter strikes during his presidency, the coal miners’ strike of 1902 that pitted the UMWA against big mine owners like J.P. Morgan and George Baer who wrote that the miners “will be protected and cared for—not by labor agitators, but by the Christian gentlemen to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.”
Ray Stannard Baker, a leading muckraker journalist, covered the strike in the pages of McClure magazine, which was the Mother Jones of its time. Despite his animosity toward J.P. Morgan and other fat cats, his main beef was with the UMWA’s fight for the closed shop. In Baker’s view, that would victimize the 17,000 non-union miners who reformorrepressionwere “one of the great tragedies of the strike”. Baker’s article was titled “The Right to Work” and can be read online at the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, an outfit that is part of the rightwing coalition pushing for right-to-work laws under the favorable conditions afforded by Donald Trump. Despite his rhetoric about defending the working class, scabs got permanent positions at the Momentive plant in upstate NY that is owned by Stephen Schwarzman, Trump’s “jobs creation czar”.
Using a “soft cop” strategy, Roosevelt tried to position himself as an impartial arbitrator in the same way his distant cousin Franklin would do during the New Deal. Instead of sending in the federal troops to crush the strike like Rutherford Hayes during the 1877 railroad workers strike, he put pressure on both mine owners as well as the UMWA to come to terms. Hampered by their distinctly class-collaborationist leader John Mitchell, the miners caved in.
A blue-ribbon panel had been convened to settle the strike. It relied on the good counsel of famous attorney Louis D. Brandeis who was a symbol of the era’s progressivism alongside Theodore Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey and other notables. As it happened, Brandeis had some experience with the 1877 railway strike. This legendary reformer whose name adorns the prestigious college where Angela Davis studied under Herbert Marcuse was part of a strike-breaking volunteer militia who carried a rifle to protect railroad property from the rebellious hordes.
This go-round Brandeis was much more sympathetic to the workers but stopped short of supporting a closed shop. Concurring with Baker, Brandeis insisted that the non-union workers had the right to work even if that hobbled the union. Like most reformers of the period, there was no notion of class versus class. The individual was primary. The Civil War had enshrined the idea of free labor and many “reformers” invoked Lincoln as an implicit supporter of the open shop. The blue-ribbon panel issued a report that stated: “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.’ This is as true in trade unions as elsewhere.”
While workers came out of the strike with substantial gains, including a 10 percent wage hike, they were not able to secure a closed shop. For Roosevelt, this settlement was in line with his Square Deal, proclaiming it a victory for bosses, workers and consumers. He agreed with the panel’s finding: non-unionists had “the right to remain at work where others have ceased to work, or to engage anew in work others have abandoned.”
In summing up the 1902 UMWA strike, Pearson makes points that are repeated throughout the book on a case-by-case basis. Foundry workers in Cleveland or printers in Worcester, they all got the sanctimonious call for an open shop by “reformers”—the iron fist in the velvet glove:
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 non-union 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.”
Chad Pearson is part of a cadre of historians associated with the The Labor and Working Class History Association whose website is an indispensable source of material such as the kind found in his new book. It was Pearson who suggested I have a look at Ahmed White’s “The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America” that I reviewed for CounterPunch in December. If Theodore Roosevelt sought to tame workers through the open shop, FDR was forced by a rising mass movement to back labor laws supporting the closed shop and other pro-union measures. In some cases, the workers could prevail such as in the Flint sit-down strike of 1938 but lost in other cases such as the Little Steel Strike that White chronicles. In that instance, the unions lost despite FDR’s 1935 Wagner Act that turned out to be not worth much more than the paper it was written on. When the bosses use militias and the cops to break heads with the tacit agreement of liberal Democratic Party governors, who can the workers turn to except members of their own class? The Little Steel strikers could not impose their will on the bosses and had to wait until WWII for the closed shop to kick in. As I pointed out in my CounterPunch article, the war industries needed a disciplined workforce to keep production going nonstop. For that a steelworkers union led by CP’ers who signed a no-strike pledge was made to order.
Right-to-work laws are the result of the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947 that was the outcome of an anti-labor coalition made up of Republicans and Dixiecrats. For the past 70 years, the AFL-CIO has called for the abolition of Taft-Hartley but it is questionable whether that will do much to revive the labor movement. The last big test of trade union solidarity took place in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 when Governor Scott Walker sponsored legislation that would eliminate the dues checkoff—the lynchpin of business unionism. In a test of strength, the top bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO failed to mobilize support for the public unions and Walker prevailed.
A graph on Quartz shows how the strike has become virtually extinct. A combination of globalization and a ruling class determined to push through neoliberal austerity has kept labor on a leash even though workers can start a union without facing the naked violence that marked Little Steel. What tends to work against them nowadays is economic pressure as families are simply incapable of being without income for long periods.
The Momentive workers were out for 105 days, forced to cry uncle because of economic pressure and the failure of the trade union movement to come to their aid (or perhaps the lack of a trade union movement.) Whether there is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, they got screwed. Under Obama, Momentive cut wages by 25%-50% and froze pensions for workers younger than 50. This time under Trump, Schwarzman targeted healthcare, especially for retirees.
Like the airline controllers and the P9 meatpacking workers, the Momentive strikers were driven to struggle because the bosses would not allow them to live like they had in the status quo ante. Unlike any period since the 1930s, trade unionists do not have the backing of the Democratic Party. When a Momentive worker voted for Trump, he or she took the conman at his word. Such a betrayal causes workers to reflect on their class identity. One worker told the Guardian: “Both parties are so busy hitting each other, they haven’t been interested in us. The choice, he said, was: ‘Do you want to die by drowning or die by fire?’”
As the insult and the injuries continue to mount in American capitalism’s senescence, many of these workers will begin to understand that there are alternatives to drowning or death by fire. Perhaps it is the rich who should perish—as a social class. You saw eruptions on Wall Street and in the streets of the Middle East and North Africa over the same violations of human rights and dignity. As James Baldwin put it, it will be the fire next time and the workers will ignite it.
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Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.