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in numerous jurisdictional disputes with the substantially larger Iron Molders Union (IMU) in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Penton abandoned the labor movement in the 1890s, and in 1900 played a critical role in helping Cleveland’s foundry operators recruit strikebreakers during a dramatic work stoppage staged by his old IMU adversaries. Shortly afterward, the Cleveland-based Penton—who rivaled Du Brul as the period’s most ambitious employer organizer—established the Penton Publishing Company, which produced and circulated a half-dozen trade publications nationally that frequently covered the open-shop movement’s challenges and successes.

      Movement participants were somewhat diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, and religion. Most open-shop advocates were Protestant whites, but certainly not all. Elite African Americans like Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in southern Alabama, and William H. Councill, top administrator at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Huntsville, played their own roles in assisting their mostly white colleagues by encouraging southern black students and graduates to stay away from labor unions. And several leading employer activists were Catholic by religion, including Du Brul and Thompson. Jews were also present in the movement, especially in the garment industry. As we will discover, a shared dislike of closed shops combined with a pervasive fear of labor unrest helped unite dissimilar groups of economically privileged elites.

      In an effort to protect themselves, business interests generally, and nonunion workers, Creel, Du Brul, Parry, Penton, Sanders, Thompson, and many others had concluded that they needed their own organizations to effectively challenge what CIAA activist C. W. Post called in 1906 “the greatest trust with which the people have had to contend.”¹⁶ Together, they became active in what one newspaper in 1902 called “missionary work.”¹⁷

      The nation’s variety of open-shop advocates realized that effectively framing the movement’s agenda and goals remained a critical task from its birth to the 1910s and beyond. As Creel put it in 1903, “public opinion is the great arbitrator.”¹⁸ By this time, a diverse set of employers and their supporters had insisted that the open-shop principle, the idea that workers must be allowed access to jobs irrespective of union status, constituted a fundamentally fair, progressive, economically sound, and ultimately American alternative to closed shops. “The union label,” Thompson complained in 1907, “no longer stands for skill or merit in any particular way, but it has become a weapon with which to fight independent workmen and a club to destroy freedom in a free land.”¹⁹ Writing in 1910, one NAM leader, reinforcing Thompson, referred to the membership of his organization as “the progressive employers of the United States.”²⁰ By highlighting such rhetoric—including statements that connected open shops to American patriotism, workplace competence, and merit—this study aims to heighten our understanding of this forceful movement’s reformist tendencies. After all, those in the crusade’s front line presented themselves, first and foremost, as mainstream campaigners, defenders of ordinary people, and representatives of technological and managerial progress, “not,” Creel argued in 1903, “a body of ‘Labor Crushers,’ or ‘Strike Busters’.”²¹ In other words, those in the movement sought to show that they were far from the profit-driven reactionaries and union busters depicted by labor union and leftist activists.

      Open-shop advocates claimed that they stood squarely in favor of what we have come to call a system of meritocracy, and they argued that open-shop workplaces rewarded employees for their loyalty, skill, and efficiency, not whether or not they belonged to unions. Writing in 1902, Chattanooga’s E. H. Putnam, a foundry operator and one of the original organizers of the NFA, insisted that well-trained independent workmen “are better molders than some of the fellows who are drifting about the country with union cards in their pockets.”²² These “better” employees, open-shop proponents claimed, deserved the right to employment without confronting pressures to join labor organizations as a precondition. As Putnam’s colleague Philadelphia’s William H. Pfahler explained in early 1903, the individual job hunter must “be free to seek employment wherever and under whatsoever conditions he may prefer, without regard to his politics, his religion, or his affiliation with organizations based on principles which he cannot endure.”²³ For industrial leaders like Pfahler, discrimination against nonunionists, a central feature of closed shops, was no less immoral than any other form of intolerance.

      Employers and their allies often complained that closed shops suffered from inefficiencies and were plagued by unnecessary rules, as well as challenging, unreasonable union leaders—individuals who, open-shop proponents believed, stubbornly held on to outdated ideas. Such leaders routinely demanded across-the-board wage increases for all, irrespective of skill, behavior, or productivity levels, and periodically launched crippling work stoppages, which, union critics insisted, threatened manufacturing and technological progress. “Striking as a means of redressing wrongs,” Creel’s Independent newspaper declared in late 1901, “is a thing of the past.”²⁴ Indeed, employers maintained that demanding unionists, unlike themselves, behaved anachronistically. Writing about one union during a 1906 strike against the introduction of open-shop conditions, a commentator in a trade publication noted, “Sentiment has moved on, but the Iron Molders Union has refused to move with it. Its failure to catch step with the modern industrial movement has demonstrated its unfitness for the control of the instruments of production at which it aims.”²⁵ Closed shops were, as another open-shop magazine asserted in 1908, “tyrannical and reactionary.”²⁶

      This study illustrates that open-shop advocates hungered for an industrial relations system that allowed them greater freedom to manage, insisting that they must enjoy the unalloyed authority to employ nonunionists and reward ambitious individuals with financial bonuses and attractive working conditions while also enjoying the flexibility to dismiss those they deemed lazy, inefficient, or insubordinate. Wage rates, workload, hours, benefits, and employment itself, open-shop defenders maintained, needed to be tied to the output and reliability of employees, to the overall state of the economy, and ultimately to the judgment of managers, not to onerous collective bargaining agreements or to pressure from trade unions. Why, employers and their allies asked, would employees want to labor in closed shops, workplaces that apparently suppressed their individual talents and restricted their ability to choose whether they wanted to belong to a labor organization?

      But, as we know, hundreds of thousands of workers in various industries did join unions, demanding the establishment of closed shops, the ability to negotiate contracts, and the right to secure regular across-theboard pay increases. Facing a determined employer class, workers frequently disrupted production and joined picket lines in their efforts to achieve these aims. In the face of such pressure, employers often responded collectively, fired protestors, recruited strikebreakers, attempted to influence public opinion, and collaborated with lawyers—many of whom held membership in employers’ associations—to secure injunctions and thus resume production. For the most part, organized employers had enormous faith in the nation’s public institutions, expecting that the courts and police had a responsibility to protect businesses, property, and nonunionists in confrontations with protestors. But they also believed that the private sector had a crucial role to play in these efforts, and many employers from the metal-working, foundry, garment, coal mining, railroad, retail, timber, and numerous other industries used their connections with one another and with law enforcement to fill struck workplaces with nonunionists. They often referred to nonunionists as “free men,” individuals unburdened by union rules, unwilling to participate in coercive picket-line activities, and uninterested in fostering the development of what Thompson referred to in 1903 as “class dictation, class interference, and class rule.”²⁷ Employers, seeking to both contain the labor problem and remove the concept of class from the consciousness of as many workers as possible, routinely defended their often heavy-handed managerial policies.²⁸ A spokesperson from the NMTA summed up the fight apocalyptically in 1903: “The devil must be fought with fire.”²⁹ Thus employers and their allies became flamethrowers, they maintained, out of necessity. In the face of labor unrest, they used a common phrase to justify their actions: “Do Right—Then Fight.”³⁰

      As they sought to “do right,” union fighters repeatedly claimed to place the interests of the nation above their own particular economic and class concerns.

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