The Open-Shop Movement and the Long Shadow of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction

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• The Open-Shop Movement and the Long Shadow of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
• Chad E. Pearson (bio)

Readers of the Open Shop, a nationally circulated publication popular with mostly urban-based businessmen, were reminded in 1907 that "Abraham Lincoln freed the shackles from the limbs of 4,000,000 slaves." The nation's diverse set of employers used the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction to contend with rebellious workers committed to building closed-shop worksites, or places that employed union members exclusively. In the face of these challenges, the socalled Great Emancipator served as a model of moral clarity and principled action, someone worthy of high praise and emulation. Like Lincoln, spokespersons for the powerful, multilocational open-shop movement were determined to battle pushy union leaders and working-class militants who threatened to introduce what union fighters labeled a new type of "slavery"—this time against owners and nonunion workers who refused to subordinate their individual rights to the labor movement's dictates. In their collective minds, Lincoln, had he lived in the early twentieth century, would have stood squarely with employers and nonunionists during these intense confrontations. After all, according to the Open Shop, he "gave up his life in the cause of perpetuating the institutions which organized labor, as represented by the American Federation of Labor, seeks to overthrow and destroy."¹ Indeed, movement leaders, representing thousands, regularly cited the [End Page 87] former president's iconic statements, insisting that, as the National Association of Manufacturers' (NAM) James A. Emery put it in 1905, the nation "cannot endure half slave and half free."² According to Emery, a leader of the country's most powerful antiunion organizations, unions—their preponderance and influence—had revived and reanimated the practice of human bondage in the United States.

Emery was one of countless Americans who raised the memory of Lincoln and the Civil War in the Progressive years. By this time, figures from multiple sides of labor controversies, as well a diverse set of individuals outside of industrial relations settings, found continuous value in the late president's words and actions.³ This was, according to sociologist Barry Schwartz, a new development. As Schwartz maintained, Lincoln "did not became a national idol until the first two decades of the twentieth century." By this time, an assortment of historians, journalists, poets, and architects had produced books, articles, and attention-grabbing statues of the former president, reminding Americans of his unparalleled place in history.⁴ Employers and their allies, enjoying large platforms to communicate their ideas, added their own voices, which were designed to shape the era's economic and political climate in ways that maintained sharp class divisions. In their speeches and publications, they stressed Lincoln's calls for national unity and free labor. NAM members like Emery tied their struggles for open-shop workplaces to the age of Lincoln.

Lincoln loomed large in the minds of mostly Northern movement participants, though he was only one of several sources of inspiration. Numerous other labor union opponents, especially Confederate veterans and their descendants, were predictably unwilling to cite Lincoln's words or honor his actions as they sought to build and maintain supremacy in their workplaces and communities. Southern businessmen, seeking to establish and defend a region that would become uniquely inhospitable to organized labor and expressions of working-class unrest, drew from different sets of ideological and practical lessons. They capitalized on their wartime traumas, geographical advantages, and racist traditions. [End Page 88] As they fought to promote and defend open-shop conditions, spokespersons raised the significance of the region's racially based political economy and their post–Civil War setbacks and triumphs. In their minds, slave owners were not the oppressive, cruel, or exploitative figures labeled by their onetime Northern foes; instead, they were warmhearted paternalists who fearlessly protected the enslaved population from several cruelties: "wage slavery" and invasive and arrogant unionists and "carpetbaggers." As they saw matters, the Republican Party, especially its radical wing, was a deeply intrusive force responsible for harming the section following slavery's collapse. As an article in the pro-open-shop publication, Manufacturers' Record explained in 1903, "The horrors of reconstruction...