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

Chad Pearson's Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement makes significant contributions to the history of labor, management, and capitalism while provoking important questions about Progressive-era reform. Pearson analyzes employer associations and the "open-shop movement"—which sought to prevent employee engagement with labor unions—between 1890 and 1917 (p. 3). Pearson organizes his work spatially by looking at the national development of the open-shop idea before delving into four case studies in Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the South. Using newspapers accounts, trade journals, magazines, and speeches, he unearths a complicated, nuanced history of the anti-union movement that, as the title suggests, blurred the line between reform and repression.

Pearson contributes much to our understanding of employer motivations in the turbulent years between 1890 and 1917. Historians have largely written about this period from the perspective of workers who organized, struck, and rioted in their quest for recognition, workplace protections, and higher wages. When this scholarship has considered employers, it has been as one-dimensional reactionaries. Yet as Pearson demonstrates, employers' motivations were complex. Employers' vision of the open shop aligned with their view that unions were lawless, anti-individualistic, inefficient, and un-American. Employers believed that the open shop rewarded hardworking, skilled, and determined individuals. Employers did not see a conflict between their own collective action when they formed organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Citizens' Industrial Association of America and their ongoing denunciation of unions as "labor trusts" (p. 2). By placing employers at the center of his analysis, Pearson draws our attention to the people who "wielded a tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people"(p. 2).

One of the more surprising elements of Pearson's study is that a diverse array of people joined employers in supporting and promoting the open shop. Pearson populates his book with a number of these figures, from the better-known Theodore Roosevelt, Ray Stannard Baker, Louis D. Brandeis, and Booker T. Washington to the relatively obscure open-shop evangelist Ernest F. Du Brul and journalist George Creel. As this list illustrates, the open-shop movement appealed across political ideologies and cut across racial, religious, and geographic lines as well. The widespread support for the open shop demonstrates the effectiveness with which employers delivered their message. This support also helps explain how these ideas continue to influence how many perceive labor unions, collective action, and management to this day.

Given Pearson's regional approach, it is surprising that he did not include a case study of a western location. In many ways, the West looms large in Pearson's examination. Some of the open-shop movement's most prominent advocates hailed from places like Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Helena, Montana. The region also seems rife for exploration, as it was the setting for some of the most spectacular outbreaks of labor-management conflict during this period. As it stands, Pearson's study rarely crosses the Mississippi River, especially in his later chapters.

That minor criticism does not detract from what is an important book that challenges readers to grapple with a dark undercurrent running through the Progressive reform agenda. Pearson maintains, "Open-shop campaigners repeatedly proclaimed a desire to protect, rather than punish, ordinary people"(p. 217). In this sense, their movement fits comfortably with our understanding of Progressive reform. As Pearson points out, however, the open-shop movement served the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor and the working class. Ultimately, open-shop reform efforts helped sustain "an economic system designed to protect the most privileged classes of Americans at the expense of those who had demanded a more democratic say over their lives"(p. 20).