A Tale of Two Men: Class Traitors and Strikebreaking on Lake Erie, 1886–1911

Which Side Are You On?

—Florence Reese, 1931

Militant strikes, economic boycotts, and union-building campaigns were commonplace in cities throughout the nation at the turn of the century. In the Progressive Era, thousands of wage earners left workplaces and protested while demanding pay increases, shorter hours, and union recognition. In response, hundreds of manufacturers joined local and national employers' associations designed to combat this increasingly militant labor movement. Members of these organizations, consisting of proprietary capitalists and corporate managers, became increasingly more anxious as they observed, and in many cases participated in workplace and community conflicts.

Many of the nation's factory owners had their eyes on Cleveland during the second half of 1900. Tensions had been mounting inside dozens of the city's foundries, climaxing in a workplace action that pitted molders against their bosses. In July workers at seventeen foundries struck because the employers refused to grant them a 10 percent wage increase. Six months later, members of the Iron Molders Union's (IMU) Local 218 were still on strike, demanding "living wages." The strike was a major test for both the IMU and the National Founders' Association (NFA), the two-and-a-half-year-old organization that represented most of the city's foundry operators. The NFA sent representatives, including John A. Penton, the Detroit-based secretary, to help the besieged industrialists. Penton spent months in Cleveland counseling employers about strategy as unionists demonstrated and attempted to prevent nonunionists from crossing picket lines.¹

More than a dozen employers and hundreds of workers were affected by this job action. Workers received help from the IMU leadership, and employers looked to each other for assistance. John A. Penton and Jay P. Dawley, a Cleveland-based management-side labor lawyer, also assisted employers. Penton found workers who were willing to take the jobs of strikers; Dawley secured court injunctions against protesters. Penton, the publisher of the Foundry, a national trade journal, mentioned his involvement in the quarrel in its pages: "In the matter of procuring men, very satisfactory progress is being made, much more so, in fact, than was reasonably anticipated." Penton and Dawley each worked with the NFA nationally and the Cleveland Employers' Association, a multi-industry organization formed in the spring of 1900. Both made their living helping factory owners defeat working-class rebellions. They held the view, popular among conservatives and most manufacturers of the era, that employers had the right to employ whomever they wanted irrespective of union status. They considered workers who sought to impose union restrictions on workplaces to be selfish, dangerous, lawless, and even un-American. Neither the employers affected by the strike nor the NFA's outside leadership questioned the loyalties of Penton and Dawley. The two men were loyal to the affected employers and to the open shop drive.

According to supporters of this campaign, open shops were nondiscriminatory workplaces that employed both union and "free" men. In reality, unionists did not benefit from working in open shops. In open shops, employers refused to sign collective bargaining agreements with the entire workforce, which offered management greater flexibility; rather than negotiate with trade unions, managers determined pay rates, benefits, and other workplace policies unilaterally.²

In showing Penton and Dawley's relationships to the anti–labor union open shop drive, this article has two main purposes. First, it shows the key roles played by nonemployers in the employer-led open shop drive. Secretaries of national and local employers' associations, including Penton, were critical in building and sustaining the movement. They recruited employers, kept scrupulous membership lists, and secured strikebreakers during emergencies. As a publisher, Penton wrote glowingly about employers' associations and their campaigns against trade unionism. Lawyers, including Dawley, were also vital; they fought numerous courtroom battles, invoking nineteenth-century laws to show the illegality of "combinations of labor." A small number of historians have outlined the important roles played by lawyers in the open shop drive, and this study complements these works, demonstrating that Dawley served an essential role locally. In courtrooms and in print, he...