Citizen Employers: Business Communities and Labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco, 1870–1916

5. From Politics to Work

145 5 FROM POLITICS TO WORK Good Citizens and Model Employers in Cincinnati In praising Julius Dexter as an “ideal citizen” of Cincinnati, his fellow Commercial Club members found in his devotion to the public good “the very life of the Republic and the hope of its perpetuity.” They added that Dexter was “a man who did not have one conscience for private matters and another for public . . . affairs.”1 Such consistency in the application of moral codes counted as a virtue among Cincinnati’s leading citizens. And in their thinking about “private ” matters of work, employers applied the same all-purpose cultural script they cultivated in public affairs. I support this claim in three ways in this chapter. First, I identify parallels between business citizenship and employers’ workplace ideology—parallels in language, in underlying assumptions, and in categories of analysis. Because this comparative analysis of rhetoric is hardly an exact science , the overall case becomes more persuasive if multiple correspondences can be established. The strategy here is to trace parallels between business citizenship and one work arena after another, moving from industrial fairs to employee training, personnel policies, and union representation. Second, I present evidence that employers actually framed and responded to workplace dilemmas in accordance with principles of business citizenship. Such evidence comes closer to revealing transposition in action, as employers interpret problems and choose solutions from a wider menu along lines laid down by their class script. Third, I show that the approach employers took to various workplace matters changed over time in tandem with class formation. They redefined the goals of industrial training and the appropriate solutions for labor unrest, for example, as they shed older identities in favor of business citizenship. 146 PART III. TRANSPOSITION THE PUBLIC FACE OF WORK: CINCINNATI’S INDUSTRIAL EXPOSITIONS Cincinnati’s industrial expositions date back to 1838, when the city’s Ohio Mechanics’ Institute (OMI) organized a display of local arts, crafts, and manufactures . Held annually until the Civil War, those expositions advertised locally made products, educated“mechanics,”and entertained the public.Yearly expositions resumed between 1870 and 1888, with the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Commerce joining the OMI as sponsors.2 Parades and festivals celebrating local industry continued thereafter, but less frequently and with shifting institutional backing.As the premier effort by local manufacturers to publicize the work they did, these industrial expositions offer clues about how manufacturers constructed their own social identities. They also indicate what it was about manufacturing that proprietors deemed worth celebrating. And shifts in the expos over time show businessmen’s civic discourse and their views of work moving in parallel. Manufacturing Identities The changing character of manufacturer identities can be seen both in the producers being celebrated at the expositions and in the way their products were presented . The original expositions acted out republican ideals of work. Run solely by the OMI—whose own membership mixed manufacturers and craftsmen— these fairs celebrated the mechanic, the producer-citizen applying art and science to his trade. In anticipation of the 1847 exhibition, the Daily Times reminded readers that the people are the “foundation of all honor and power,” but to meet this responsibility they must also be “virtuous and intelligent.” The OMI and its annual expositions sought to foster those virtues. One way in which they did so was to display the“choicest specimens of the craftsman’s skill.”Those specimens, exposition organizers hoped, would do more than provide good advertising for local wares. They would also instruct others in craft techniques and, through competition for awards, stimulate mechanics to perfect their arts. Winners received a certificate depicting an artisan in his toga, holding a scroll in one hand and a hammer in the other, with books, scientific instruments, and manufacturing tools arrayed at his feet.3 In none of these rituals did organizers make clear distinctions between proprietors and skilled labor. There were still echoes of this republican ideal in the expositions of the early post–Civil War years. But the central actors were increasingly manufacturers, not mechanics, with skilled labor appearing (if at all) only as employees of FROM POLITICS TO WORK: CINCINNATI 147 participating firms.4 By the 1870s, the OMI itself had come to be run largely by manufacturers, and it now shared sponsorship with the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Commerce. By 1895 and 1900, in discussions about reviving the expositions, the initiative...