Flag-waving patriots, northern industrialists, war propagandists, prohibitionists, Ku Klux Klan members, opponents of child labor, newspapermen, former union members, and U.S. presidents were among the cast of characters that led America's open shop movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chad Pearson examines not only the direct words and organizing tactics of these leading open shop advocates, but also their biographies, to persuasively argue that they saw their actions as constituting an essential and benevolent reform movement designed to advance American civilization, morality, and economic freedom. Reform or Repression offers relevant analysis of the historical origins of a pressing theme that persists in the present day, as twenty-first-century unions suffer from declining membership amidst unfavorable state laws and organized opposition that is often couched in the reformist language of safeguarding the “right to work” or of promoting progress and prosperity.
Drawing on a diverse array of mostly published sources, Pearson contends that the organizers of the open shop movement did not see or project themselves as repressing the rights of workers to make an honest living. Rather, they claimed to be reformers who protected the interests of both workers and the nation against the tyranny of labor unions. They alleged that unions pressured honest laborers into joining radical causes that slowed production and prevented them from earning their worth as individuals in the open market. To defend nonunion workers, and supposedly to facilitate freedom and industrial progress, they formed organizations that contested the closed shop and union power through publications, political engagement, welfare capitalism, labor bureaus, and violence.
Along with their open shop advocacy, leaders of the movement participated in a host of other American reform movements, many of which they tied ideologically to their open shop beliefs. They were capable of pursuing benevolent and repressive causes concurrently, often under the seemingly dissonant banners of American freedom, paternalism, free market individualism, and employer control. Altogether, Pearson shows that the individuals behind the open shop movement did not engage so much in reform or repression, but in reform and repression. Then and now, these terms carry malleable, contested, and contradictory meanings.
Along these lines, Pearson calls into question the categorization of the open shop movement as antiprogressive. He underscores how leaders fit their open shop advocacy within the tradition of progressive reform, projected it as critical to progressive visions of the nation's future, and pursued other progressive causes along with their open shop organizing. Nevertheless, even if they saw themselves as reformers acting for the common good, open shop employers were “fundamentally self-interested,” Pearson notes, as their repressive actions “spoke much louder than their words” (p. 224).
Methodologically, Pearson's work builds on existing scholarship by offering a simultaneously detailed and broad analysis of the diverse participants in the open shop movement, “both from within and outside industrial relations settings” (p. 14). Rather than focusing singularly on employers, specific organizations, allies in “citizens’ committees,” prominent reformers, or political leaders in the open shop movement, he shows, through a combined analysis, how each opposed the closed shop in defense of the “common people,” even if through different regional or political contexts. Pearson accomplishes this through two chapters covering the national dynamics of the “birth, growth, and influence of open shop ideas” and organizing, and building on the example of Howell Harris's exploration of open shop activism at the local level, through four case studies (pp. 15–16). These particularly strong and engaging local examples include analyses of the movement in Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, and the primarily southern cities that intersected with the career of southern apologist N. F. Thompson. Pearson's interwoven national and multi-city approach differs from the single-city focuses of such scholars as Harris and Thomas Klug, allowing us to more clearly see common threads in open shop advocacy across many different spaces, without sacrificing too much of the impressive detail that is evident in these works.
Pearson has taken on a difficult project in exploring the intentions of open shop movement leaders. A range of open shop advocates claimed to be working for the common good, patriotism, progress, and the little guy—the nonunion worker purportedly crushed by the destructive collective force of organized labor. Determining whether their words were sincere is a challenging task. After all, a number of employers with questionable business practices, then and now, have projected an image of themselves as serving the greater good. As Pearson points out, many open shop organizers had a financial stake in the debate. Nevertheless, the reformist behavior in their biographies, from supporting prohibition to lobbying against child labor, suggests that a number of them did genuinely see their otherwise self-serving advocacy as a reform movement for the public benefit. While relatively few available historical sources can reliably measure their intentions (particularly when having to draw primarily on published materials that were created for group or public audiences), Pearson's ability to place them in biographical contexts convincingly shows, insofar as possible, the sincerity of open shop reformers’ ideologies and actions. He further notes that, despite employers’ high-minded language, nonunion workers certainly did not always share their same worldview, though the book could benefit from incorporating more of their direct, yet underarchived, voices.
This well-researched, engaging, and fresh look into the organizing of the open shop movement during the Second Industrial Revolution should garner strong interest among scholars of labor, economic, business, and political history, as well as anyone seeking to examine the central debates and themes that shaped the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It is accessible to general readers and offers far-reaching lessons on the interworkings of antiunion organizing. It shows that some of the most powerful and benevolent-sounding reform can center on expressions of economic, political, and physical repression in ways that continue to have repercussions a century later.
