Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement by Chad Pearson (review)

Chad Pearson acknowledges that few historians have challenged the judgement offered 50 years ago by Robert Wiebe that organized employers were counter-reformist. No matter. In Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement, Pearson explores the progressive credentials of America’s turn of the century open shop advocates. He has a complicated story to tell. On the one hand open-shop proponents where opponents of working class activism; on the other, they might be considered reformers in the progressive tradition of the early 20th century. Pearson’s open shop advocates fought unions, but they were also proponents of welfare capitalism, honest government, municipal efficiency, industrial progress, urban beautification, and temperance. Pearson raises the possibility that the open-shop struggle was perhaps the finest hour of America’s employer-class progressives.

Pearson has set out to explore how open shop advocates viewed their struggle against labour and their role in it. He argues that open-shop proponents, including both employers and those outside workplace settings, did not see themselves as agents of repression standing in the way of working-class progress. Rather, they were anti-monopolists who acted within and were inspired by “a noble tradition stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, one fashioned by an assortment of abolitionists, anti-monopolists, and promoters of peace.” (217) In this story the “labour question” is transformed into a social problem akin to alcoholism, poverty, or municipal efficiency: organized labour – the “labour question” – appears as a social ill to be ameliorated; ipso facto, open shop advocates could and did embrace the role of social reformers or liberators.

In Reform or Repression men from America’s leading business strata and their associates in civil society emerge as the subjects of history, standing at the centre of a progressive narrative in which they exercise agency as benefactors to the nation. The men who engineered the creation of the National Founders’ Association (nfa) may have been businessmen concerned with managerial freedom and the bottom line, but says Pearson, ”they were not exclusively inspired by the supposed joys of materialistic individualism or the emotional pleasures of ego building.” (27) And, if the new nfa became a labour busting organization it was because organized labour became “belligerent.” (36)

The reformist progressive agenda of the open shop movement comes into clearer view with Pearson’s account of the evolution of the National Association of Manufacturers (nam), formed in 1895, and transformed into an anti-labour organization under the leadership of David M. Perry who had “clear, class-based reasons to oppose organized labor.” (49) In Perry’s world organized labour threatened “liberty-loving people.” Under Parry, the nam embraced an emancipatory mission to help “thousands of men shake off the shackles of unionism.” (51) In the open shop narrative the “free worker” was enslaved by organized labour, and Perry, the liberator, was a “Lincolnesque” visionary. (52) Pearson contends that open shop advocates like Parry did not attack labour simply to diminish its power and maximize profits; they “felt a moral obligation to defend ... the labor movement’s most vulnerable targets: innocent children, widows, small tradesmen, modest sized business owners and above all, ‘free’ workers.” (53)

Pearson does not accept such assertions at face value and at various points he critically examines the claims of open shop advocates. However, he is interested in exploring the open shop advocates own sense of what they were doing, their vision of a proper civil order, and their notion of labour’s place in it. He creates space to consider the possibility that open shop advocates held social and political commitments in a Rawlsian way – prior to or apart from the their class positions – not just as dressed-up versions of their material interests. In Reform or Repression the nostrums of the open shop movement just might become principles upon which society might be ordered.

Accounts of the civic spiritedness of open-shop advocates give way to accounts of mostly conventional regional employer-based...