The campaign to establish and maintain the Open Shop, in Philadelphia as in the rest of industrial America before the war, had been aided by recurrent periods of very high unemployment, and scarcely impeded by state intervention. Entrepreneurial liberty rested on sound foundations: Competition between firms for workers' services was rarely unmanageable; governmental involvement in the private relations of employers and employees was only occasional, and normally quite supportive – law-enforcement stiffened with the occasional injunction.

But as 1905–07 and 1910–11 illustrated, a tight labor market made the Open Shop somewhat more vulnerable. During cyclical upswings makers of producers' goods, in particular, experienced short-run but severe demand pressures that sharply increased the bargaining power of their skilled workers, the supply of whom was quite inelastic. And the political equilibrium of the Republican era was under strain in the prewar years. “Progressivism” infected the elected portions of city, state, and national governments, and threatened to increase the forces all three brought to bear limiting employers' freedom to manage.

So the foundations of the Open Shop were not, perhaps, quite as solid as they at first seemed. Workers were numerous, had votes, and had middleclass sympathizers; their unions had political options open to them providing a new forum within which to pursue the goals of industrial struggle even after meeting defeat on the picket line and shop floor. And prosperity, one day, must surely return, with its attendant organizing drives and strikes.

Because of these possibilities, insecurity pervaded the MMA's membership in the early ‘teens, providing ever-present and growing reasons for collective self-defense.

The argument of this book has been that Philadelphia in the 1900s through early 1920s was actually a good, rather than simply a convenient, place in which to study the dynamics of labor–capital relations in the metal trades. What happened in the metal manufacturing industries of other major cities usually happened in Philadelphia too, generally at much the same time, and for many of the same reasons. The business communities, labor unions, and skilled workers who are the protagonists in this story were all reacting to the same great national events – particularly changes in the business cycle and the balance of political power, and the war. Local developments took place in a context shaped by national institutions, and the information and experience they circulated within and among themselves. The MMA thus stands as a representative for its two dozen sister associations that gave the NFA and the NMTA a grass-roots presence and prosecuted the Open shop war on the ground. It was cheaper than any of them, more conservative than some, less combative than others, and more successful than most. But its ideology, strategy, and practice were quite commonplace.

In another sense, too, Philadelphia looked like a microcosm of metal-trades labor relations nationwide: Great corporations held up the umbrella under which mid-sized businesses could find shelter from the rain. The metaphor is not exact and the protection was incomplete, but the successes of the NFA, the NMTA, and the local employers' associations are best understood alongside the anti-union climate created and maintained by the likes of U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and others.

The first aim of this chapter is to describe the structure of the metal-manufacturing community of the great and grimy industrial city of Philadelphia at the dawn of the twentieth century. Examining some of the men and the companies that composed it, we will then explore the proprietary capitalist nature of business enterprise in Philadelphia metal working, and go on to investigate their owners' managerial philosophies. We will discover that most of them favored tradition, simplicity, and direct, personal control just as much as they believed in the absolute rights of ownership. This bundle of values would have significant implications for the type of labor relations strategy that they decided to pursue. When unionized skilled workers attempted to assert a claim to share in decision making about wages, hours, and working conditions in firms such as these, they would be seen as trespassers in other men's houses, in many cases houses that their proprietor-managers had built at their own risk and with their own sweat. This fact, and the threat that craft unions posed to enterprises' viability as well as enterprisers' freedom, would help sustain the Open Shop creed for a long generation.

THE WORLD'S GREATEST WORKSHOP

Philadelphia was America's first big city, its oldest manufacturing rather than commercial metropolis, and in 1900 only New York and Chicago – which had surpassed it in the 1880s – outranked it in population and output. These three cities were in a different league from other American industrial centers – the value of the goods that Philadelphia produced exceeded that of forty-five states and territories.

In the 1920s innovative employment policies, and the institutional changes within the MMA that accompanied and facilitated them, resulted from local, private initiatives by the association and those of its member companies that gave its managerial progressivism their support. The only important outside forces that impinged on it were the cosmopolitan communities of businessmen and social scientists who devised and implemented the progressive agenda and the national corporations, G.E. and Westinghouse, whose local managers lent it their assistance. What businessmen and their allies did was all that mattered; public policy rarely affected their decision making. They could take their political environment more or less for granted – a distant, inactive federal government, whose rare interventions supported the progressives' programs; a state government of similar character; and a city government on whose help they could utterly rely, whether for vocational education or, if necessary, policing strikes. The labor movement almost vanished from view; workers figured only as a mass of disconnected individuals with sometimes awkward behavior, particularly the tendency to move from job to job.

But, in the 1930s, this cozy world turned upside down. What mattered about the thirties was what other people and institutions did, and how businessmen responded. They were battered, as never before or since, by forces that were national or even international in scope – the Depression, the development of interventionist governments and a pluralistic polity, and the rise of working-class militancy and of new forms of working-class action and organization.

This chapter describes how and why the MMA responded to some of the liberal currents that had swept through the awakened consciences of some of its members. The progressive impulse was necessarily diluted as it spread from proprietor-managers, who were convinced of the rightness of their program, through the Business Problems Group, few of whose members were able to accompany them very far down the welfare capitalist road, and into the MMA, where the Orthodox were never more than a small but influential minority. The MMA remained a voluntary association with an increasingly diverse membership whose needs it existed to serve. In this context, the impact of managerial liberalism could not but be limited. However, Leeds and his associates had allies who might not share their religious perspective but could agree to their specific policy recommendations. These allies were professional managers (particularly personnel specialists) of the MMA's new recruits, including some of Philadelphia's largest metal products companies and branch plants of both of the giant electrical manufacturers, General Electric and Westinghouse. The electrical manufacturers in particular were at the forefront of the employee representation and other movements for the reform of capitalist employment relations by enlightened capitalists themselves. In addition, the reformers found support outside of the local business community, in the new world of foundation-backed, university-based applied social science, represented in Philadelphia by Joseph Willits and the Wharton School's Department of Industrial Research (DIR), which he created and ran.

One of the regular features of the American Heritage of Invention and Technology is editor Frederick Allen's article, “They're Still There,” in which some heroic lump of nineteenth- or early-twentieth century machinery is shown still clunking away and churning out profits, operated by people who still embody traditional manual, engineering, and entrepreneurial skills. The attraction of Allen's reports to the industrial antiquarian is obvious, but there is a serious point too: “Progress” does not entirely eliminate or obliterate the past; institutions can survive and adapt; the present is a composite in which things and behaviors we have been taught to disregard, as unimportant or passé, continue alongside what we like to consider normal, or significant, or the wave of the future.

The title quote, taken from the membership development director of a midwestern employers' association's report on a conversation with a hesitant recruit, echoes Allen's charming evocation of the survival of traces of the past in the present. But it meant something different to the woman who uttered it. The message that she intended to pass to her prospective member was that the employers' association movement, as it stood on the brink of its second century, had become a permanently useful and necessary feature of the environment in which managers and entrepreneurs operate. If the prospect did not want to join this year, fair enough; there would be plenty of time to reconsider.

Employers' associations today are not mere charming survivals.

This chapter examines the internal sources of the association's strength and success – patterns of membership and recruitment, leadership and cohesion, revenue and expenditure – particularly during its first two decades, when it was a classic local employers' organization (see Table 5.1). Following the money trail will lead to a consideration of what the MMA did, year in and year out, to serve its members' interests and retain their loyalty – in particular, of its Labor Bureau's role in assisting them with the management of their everyday employment relations during times of industrial peace.

“COMPACT LOYAL BODY OF MANUFACTURERS” WITH “NO STRANGERS AMONG US”

The MMA grew rapidly during its first two years and thereafter its membership stabilized at about fifty-five firms (plus or minus a handful) until the war, their numbers fluctuating in response to the ebb and flow of prosperity, although more slowly and less dramatically than their total employment (see Figure 5.1). Nor was there much change in their character. Qualitative and quantitative evidence demonstrates that, throughout its first two decades, the MMA continued to recruit best among the middling sort of locally owned and controlled metal-working firms, drawn from the same few industries. They were generally the bigger enterprises within those industries, but none of them employed more than some hundreds of workers, and most of them far fewer. Chronic concerns about the threat posed by the same few craft unions welded this group together.