Chad Pearson’s book is timely given that the attack on unions is as pervasive as it has ever been. Indeed, one could argue that we are in the midst of a third-wave open-shop movement. At the very end of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a dramatic increase in the numbers of organized workers and strikes, employers organized the first coordinated nationwide campaign to create what is now called a “union-free environment.” As Pearson demonstrates, it spread rapidly. Indeed, within fifteen years after the first open-shop drive in 1901, there were over 1,600 open-shop organizations throughout the nation, and it had numerous allies outside business. The campaign combined persuasion—through the educational and public relations efforts of organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Citizens Industrial Alliance—with brute force. With the assistance of local police, court-issued injunctions, violent strikebreakers, and spies, as well as employment bureaus that weeded out pro-union workers, employers reversed public sympathy toward unions and brought the growth of organized labor to an abrupt halt. Government support of labor during World War I, however, brought another dramatic surge in unionism, which was followed by a second virulent antiunion movement during the 1920s that resulted in heavy union membership losses that were not reversed until the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s and the launching of a newly powerful union movement. The long third wave began in the late 1970s when a new, sophisticated union-avoidance consulting industry helped drive the current percentage of private-sector union membership to well under 7 percent, the lowest levels since the 1920s.

While acknowledging the importance of the open-shop drives, historians have paid relatively little attention to the forces behind those campaigns: the organized employers. They have focused primarily on the role of large companies and the courts in fighting unions, breaking strikes, and on the post-World War II era on political efforts to slow labor’s growth or managerial tactics designed to inoculate workers from organized labor’s appeal. Important exceptions are two city-based studies of open-shop associations—Howell Harris’s wonderfully detailed history of the Philadelphia Metal Manufacturers’ Association and William Millikan’s history of the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance—as well as Sidney Fine’s study of the trade-based group, the National Erector’s Association. Both Harris’s and Fine’s books benefited from having access to the rich records of the organizations they studied. Still, we know little about the movements’ ideology and leadership or the nature and mechanisms for their diffusion.

Chad Pearson would argue that it is not surprising that so little attention has been given to the open-shop movement because historians have cast the movement as a reactionary force to increase business profits by breaking unions. In Reform or Repression, Pearson provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the first open-shop movement by focusing on the employer organizations that provided “practical resources, emotional reassurance, and strategic guidance” (53). He begins with two nationally oriented chapters that examine its origins, leadership, and growth, and the impact of its philosophy that all workers should have “access to jobs irrespective of union status” (7). The next four chapters seek to capture the complexity of the movement through local and regional case studies. Focusing on Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Worcester, Massachusetts, and on the career of N. F. Thompson, a southern open-shop activist, serves as a means to showcase how the movement’s ideas shaped workplace relations, urban politics, and local identities. With the exception of the chapter on the South, each of these chapters includes a short description of the city, the emergence of the employers’ organizations, and an analysis of one or more strikes to illustrate the power of the open-shop movement.

One of the strengths of Pearson’s work is that he takes the employers’ ideas and language seriously, particularly their contention that they were patriotic and class-neutral reformers who were “agents of managerial and technical progress” (36). They denounced the closed shop, in which all workers had to be members of the union, as discriminatory and undermining American values, particularly individual liberty. In fact, in a twist on free-labor ideology, they labeled non-unionists and strikebreakers as “free men” and union members as slaves. Employers sincerely viewed themselves as defending the common people and the broader community against lawless, violent, selfish, dictatorial, corrupt, and monopolistic unions. The irony, of course, as Pearson observes, was that while open-shop organizations, such as the National Founders Association, condemned unions’ “collectivism,” it recruited employer-members by arguing that only through organization could they regain the freedom to manage. The movement, he argues, also attracted the support and, thus, legitimacy from a wide range of prominent reformers, including Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, who shared the belief that the “open-shop principle constituted a progressive and just solution” to protect the individual rights of employers, workers, and Americans generally” (51).

Throughout, Pearson homes in on the background and activities of the movement’s leaders and activists. He uses biographical sketches to demonstrate other ways that some open shoppers expressed their reformism, such as welcoming Jews or Catholics into their ranks or supporting welfare capitalism or temperance. Several of the chapters are built around individuals who represent different aspects of the open shop. The chapter on Cleveland, for instance, highlights the role of essentially mid-level activists, focusing on Jay P. Dawley and John Penton, both of whom, oddly enough, recanted their original positions on unions. Dawley, a lawyer, and briefly president of the open-shop Cleveland Employers Association, defended violent strikebreakers. In 1911, he condemned the “low wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and the ‘blacklist system’” associated with many non-union shops, and pledged to “devote the rest of my days to the cause of laboring manhood and womanhood” (117). Conversely, John Penton had served as a union president, but by 1900 had become the secretary of the National Foundry Association, a national strikebreaking organization, and he devoted himself to recruiting strikebreakers and even armed non-union men.

By carefully analyzing the movement’s language and ideology and the role of employer organizations and their leaders, Pearson has made an important contribution to our understanding of the emergence and diffusion of the first open-shop movement. Its legacy can be seen today in contemporary right-to-work campaigns, which often use similar language and arguments. However the book has some shortcomings. The case studies are overly ambitious. While Pearson clearly demonstrates that employer organizations helped defeat strikes, we never really learn how the movement shaped the workplace, politics, or local identities. To understand how the open shop won over communities, it would be useful to dig more systematically into the connections between the employers, politicians, and other social actors. In making the case for employers’ genuine commitment to reform, Pearson relies heavily on published sources, open-shop publications, or advocates’ public statements. While he notes that one must be cautious about taking these kinds of sources at face value, at times he seems to ignore his own advice. In Reform or Repression, we certainly learn more about the open-shop movement, but it also demonstrates that the concept of reform can be stretched so broadly that it is almost meaningless.