Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890-1940 (review)

Howell John Harris is a Reader in History at the University of Durham, England, who has been a prominent participant in American historical debates ever since he published The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982). His basic objective in writing this account of Philadelphia’s Metal Manufacturers Association (MMA) is to reveal how metal working firms around the United States defeated repeated efforts to unionize their workers and managed their personnel in the absence of union contracts. For most of American history, he argues, the vast majority of enterprises have operated in what would today be called a “union-free environment.” The New Deal order, when terms negotiated with unions set norms that prevailed even where no unions existed lasted only from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s.

Historians have previously examined the “open shop drive,” which was initiated by employers in Cincinnati in 1901 and subsequently spread throughout the country, primarily by studying the role of the judiciary and of large corporations in combating trade unions. Consequently, Harris’ scrutiny of the unusually accessible and rich records of the association formed by Philadelphia foundry and machine shop owners in 1903 and which has survived in various guises until the present day, permits him to offer some extremely valuable insights into styles of industrial relations which prevailed in manufacturing cities around the country until the late 1930s.

Despite the fame of Clarence E. Bonnett, History of Employers’ Associations in the United States (New York, 1956) and the fine account of the early decades of the American Iron and Steel Institute found in John N. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills of Pittsburgh, 1820–1920 (Columbus, 1991), detailed studies of the coordinated labor policies of firms that did not rank among the nation’s giants have been limited to the construction, garment, and bituminous coal industries, in all of which trade unions played conspicuous roles.

The MMA was formed by proprietary capitalists, who were closely bound to each other through kinship, social circles, and academic institutions. The city’s largest metal-working enterprises rarely needed its services, and the smallest ones could seldom afford membership. The keys to its triumph over aggressive union campaigns of 1898–1903, 1910–16, and 1918–1922 were timely recessions, which provided skilled workers desperate for jobs, and the MMA’s Labor Bureau, which screened and dispatched job applicants to its members, while providing acceptable workers ready access to employment.

Under the leadership of Morris Leeds and other (distinctively Philadelphian) Quaker manufacturers and working in close collaboration with Joseph H. Willits and other scholars from the Wharton School of Business, whose research was funded by the Rockefeller and other new foundations, the MMA cultivated welfare capitalism and employment stabilization among its members. It also actively encouraged public schools to produce the types of employees its members needed. It enthusiastically implemented codes of competition initiated by the National Recovery Administration, before vigorous unionizing efforts by its members’ workers drove the MMA back to more belligerent activities and sent Quakers like Leeds and academics like Willits off to government service.

In Philadelphia proprietary firms with batch- and even custom-made production remained indispensable components in an economy that historians have more often discussed in terms of its corporate giants and mass production. Their persistence also leads Harris to conclude that the “deskilling” of labor in this century has been misleadingly overstated. All the firms who joined forces in the MMA relied heavily on all-around machinists and molders throughout the period under discussion and represented “‘traditional’ rather than ‘modern’ ways of organizing a business.” (164) Harris is, however, overly contemptuous of the celebrated influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whom he treats as little more than a windbag, obsessed with fashioning the myth of his own importance (unlike, I would protest...