Reform or Repression - Chad Pearson American Business, Politics, and Society

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by offering talks like the one he delivered in Saratoga Springs. With an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, where he obtained a classical liberal arts education and played football, and graduate course work under his belt from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied politics and economics under some of the country’s most distinguished scholars—including future president Woodrow Wilson—Du Brul became the NMTA’s first vice president and commissioner in 1902, impressing his colleagues with his values, educational background, good character, and strong opinions.67 He was a partner of the Cincinnati-based firm Miller, Du Brul, and Peters Manufacturing Company, a very large plant that specialized in the construction of cigar and cigarette machines, established partially by his father, Napoleon.68 Napoleon Du Brul’s oldest son quickly became an influential leader in what was, at the time, one of the nation’s most productive centers of machine tool manufacturing.69 Ernest F. Du Brul’s interest in collective endeavors was likely influenced, at least in part, by his peers, men who created a number of elite organizations during the nineteenth century.70

      It is noteworthy that Du Brul was a devoted follower of the Catholic faith leading a largely, though hardly exclusively, Protestant membership. In a previous generation, Du Brul’s Catholicism would have likely barred him from participating in elite organizations; many Protestants in the 1850s, for example, believed the growing Catholic community in the United States placed their devotion to the Pope above their respect for the nation’s republican values. This was certainly not the case half a century later with respect to the open-shop movement. The ambitious Cincinnatian’s central involvement in open-shop campaigns, like the participation of Frank, a Jew, demonstrates the movement’s cultural and religious pluralism. In short, White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) hardly commanded total control over the nation’s prominent businessmen-led organizations at this time. One’s religious beliefs and practices clearly mattered less than one’s commitment to a managerial philosophy that called for the full protection of business owners and independent workmen against “union dictation.”71

      Du Brul shared the lessons he learned in northern Indiana, Baltimore, and Cincinnati with manufacturers throughout much of the country, vigorously proselytizing about the open-shop principle’s defensive, educational, and patriotic virtues. He traveled long distances, lectured on matters related to the political economy, and pressured manufacturers to join the NMTA. He visited factories, gentlemen’s clubs, and meetings of professional groups, sharing his deep knowledge of economics, history, and business etiquette. “Probably more than the average manufacturer,” The Iron Trade Review observed in 1902, “Mr. Du Brul has acquainted himself with the history of industrial and social movements.”72 He was confident, and occasionally even arrogant. Following several trips, Du Brul boasted about the NMTA’s righteousness and influence. “We have been tried by the fire,” he declared in early 1903, “and found true steel.”73 “When they [trade unionists] tangle up in a fight with this association,” he remarked less than a year after addressing the ASME meeting, “they are in for a fight to the finish, and the finish has only been one way, and that is our way.”74

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      Figure 1. Ernest F. Du Brul as a student at Notre Dame University. Courtesy of Notre Dame University archives.

      Certainly nothing helped the movement grow more than effective battles, which involved both the direct breaking of labor protests at the point of production and the use of propaganda to legitimize such actions. Open-shop proponents tended to portray trade union campaigners as incurable troublemakers while almost always insisting that employers and independent workers were innocent victims. But the movement succeeded in minimizing casualties, and spokespersons further illustrated that salaried members of employers’ associations, enjoying access to large supplies of nonunion strikebreakers, constituted a consistent source of enormous help. And the grateful and often community-spirited beneficiaries of their mobilizations, excited by the prospects of long-term labor peace, then joined the movement. The lessons embedded in these tedious narratives are unambiguous and rather simple: led by noble warriors, the open-shop movement was fundamentally a force of good against evil.

      A few cases illustrate this point. For instance, managers at Columbus, Indiana’s Reeves Pulley Company, a wood split pulley manufacturing establishment that occupied over 300,000 square feet, expressed a great amount of indebtedness for the NMTA’s services after it helped transform their city from a place plagued by trade union radicalism to a center of labor peace and affluence. How? Faced with labor troubles in 1903, a Reeves manager “went personally to Cincinnati,” where he requested Du Brul’s assistance. After Du Brul promised help, the manager “immediately made application for membership.” The thrilled man, a beneficiary of trainloads of strikebreakers, shared his experiences with fellow manufacturers. “Our labor troubles,” he proclaimed to a room full of supporters, “began to subside, and the unions have decided to carry the labor agitation in Columbus no further.” Like civic boosters speaking in the aftermath of natural disasters, Reeves, no longer hampered by labor troubles, promised long-term calm and prosperity for manufacturers and community members.75

      Other victims joined the movement for similar reasons. W. O. Bates of the Joliet, Illinois-based Bates Machine Company, constructors of power-transmitting machinery and the Bates-Corliss Engine, became a dedicated NMTA member, “thanks to the association’s successful efforts in the handling” of a strike.76 In 1904, strikebreakers and guards, dispatched from the NMTA’s Cincinnati headquarters, kept Bates’s factory, one of Joliet’s largest, running consistently during the conflict. The demoralized unionized workforce, confronted by formidable strikebreaking actions, had lost its bargaining power. For several years, the IAM maintained a strong presence in the shop. In 1901, before Bates joined the NMTA, IAM activists forced him to accept a closed union shop, which granted workers the nine-hour day.77 Now an NMTA member, Bates was emboldened, no longer willing to make costly and inconvenient concessions. Backed by a network of professional union-fighters, he now managed unilaterally, voiding previous agreements that had covered pay rates and hours, a practice that presumably became contagious in this community. Spokespersons were confident of a future free of union-provoked mayhem, proclaiming that “Joliet is today in a position to practically guarantee industrial peace not only to her own manufacturers, but also to future site-seekers.” Those who harbored a desire to invest in Joliet had Bates and the NMTA to thank for creating inviting and peaceful business conditions. Like Reeves, Bates and movement spokespersons interpreted successful union breaking as a community accomplishment rather than as a narrow workplace victory.78

      Not all recruits became members because they heard speeches by organizers or because they contacted activists after reading the movement’s voluminous output of antiunion propaganda. Nevertheless, the NMTA played a part in helping such employers caught up in labor troubles. Sometimes “free men,” wage earners who rejected unionism, encouraged employers to discover the virtues of the open-shop philosophy. In the South, J. W. Glover, head of the Marietta, Georgia-based Glover Machine Works, the region’s foremost maker of locomotives and hoisting engines, joined the NMTA shortly after suffering through what appears to have been an especially debilitating strike. Yet no NMTA organizers engaged in any recruitment campaigns in this part of the nation prior to Glover’s conflict. Nevertheless, in a matter of a few short years, Glover became a regional leader.

      An ostensibly timid industrialist who had never before given a public speech, Glover addressed the NMTA annual conference in Cleveland in 1906 about the profound impact the group had on his career and morale after his IAM encounter. Alarmed by the viciousness of the strikers, Glover complained his factory nearly closed down. “I have tried to build up my little business down in a small town in Georgia,” he remarked in an exaggeratedly humble fashion, “and the Machinists’ Union tackled me last July.” Unionists were ruthless, he reported: “they laughed at me like a little chicken.” Glover needed assistance—and a renewed sense of confidence—but knew nothing about the NMTA until an unnamed antiunion employee told him about the group in the midst of the conflict. After learning about its vision and services, Glover traveled to the association’s Cincinnati headquarters, where he spent hours talking to William Eagan and Robert

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