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Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016)
Chad Pearson acknowledges that few historians have challenged the judgement offered 50 years ago by Robert Wiebe that organized employers were counter-reformist. No matter. In Reform or Repression: Organizing America's AntiUnion Movement, Pearson explores the progressive credentials of America's turn of the century open shop advocates. He has a complicated story to tell. On the one hand open-shop proponents where opponents of working class activism; on the other, they might be considered reformers in the progressive tradition of the early 20th century. Pearson's open shop advocates fought unions, but they were also proponents of welfare capitalism, honest government, municipal efficiency, industrial progress, urban beautification, and temperance. Pearson raises the possibility that the open-shop struggle was perhaps the finest hour of America's employer-class progressives.
Pearson has set out to explore how open shop advocates viewed their struggle against labour and their role in it. He argues that open-shop proponents, including both employers and those outside workplace settings, did not see themselves as agents of repression standing in the way of working-class progress. Rather, they were anti-monopolists who acted within and were inspired by "a noble tradition stretching back to the midnineteenth century, one fashioned by an assortment of abolitionists, anti-monopolists, and promoters of peace." (217) In this story the "labour question" is transformed into a social problem akin to alcoholism, poverty, or municipal efficiency: organized labour - the "labour question" - appears as a social ill to be ameliorated; ipso facto, open shop advocates could and did embrace the role of social reformers or liberators.
In Reform or Repression men...