Capital's Terrorists by Chad E. Pearson

Author:Chad E. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

St. Louis posse members. The “Businessmen of Responsibility” taking a break from terrorizing streetcar protestors. (George Stark Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Identifier: NO 1213)

Organization leaders remained uncompromising, and nothing distressed them more than labor’s sustained demands for closed shops. Ittner made this clear in 1906. The closed shop, in his view, “is without exception the worst curse that ever befell this country.” It was worse, he declared, than “wars, pestilence, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, fires, and all the other ills that humanity is heir to.” Ittner’s hyperbolic comments suggests that he wanted readers to believe that the city’s citizens, irrespective of their class positions, had a common enemy: dangerous unionists who demanded exclusive bargaining rights, which threatened to inflict on society a catastrophic and almost unlivable future. Such demands, which Ittner characterized as “venomous and relentless,” had an adverse impact on not only employers, but also on job seekers uninterested in joining unions and on harmony-seeking community members. Ittner—who helped weaken the power of trade unions by overseeing the establishment of employer-controlled apprenticeship training programs—extended an olive branch to rank-and-filers, inviting them to reject unionism and “come together in this city for the good of the city and State, and declare for the ‘open shop’.”95

St. Louis’s Citizens’ Industrial Association members, like those in northeastern Pennsylvania and Colorado, had much to learn from old-timers like Ittner, Thompson, and Goodwin. Members frequently met in the city’s Odd Fellows building, a safe space for terrorists. Here they discussed ways to halt organized labor’s coercive and “unlawful” practices, and like others, they pledged themselves to secrecy. For example, to protect the organization’s privacy during a November 1903 meeting, two security guards were stationed outside the meeting room where they prevented those without invitations from entering. That evening’s highlight was a speech by Goodwin, whom a St. Louis paper exaggeratedly called “the father of the movement.” For many attendees, the event must have ignited feelings of déjà vu, since they had followed the same social codes here, including adopting hyper-secret practices, that they had embraced close to two decades earlier.96

Hoping to earn respect from liberal-minded observers—from those both in and outside of industrial relations conflicts—St. Louis’s union-battlers placed their movement in the broader context of American reform pursuits. An Exponent article made this point explicitly, noting that support for the open-shop principle included renowned figures from outside of industrial relations settings. The Citizens’ Industrial Association of St. Louis members proclaimed their support for the same labor relations system ardently championed by President Roosevelt and prominent reformers: “The many utterances of the President of the United States, of the Anthracite Coal Commission, of university presidents such as Chas. W. Eliot of Harvard, are so many forceful expressions of our principles.”97 Clearly, powerful enablers and authoritative narrative-creators provided these frontline union-fighters with greater confidence and a renewed sense of legitimacy.

For his part, Goodwin helped to bring St. Louis members together with others throughout the state. In 1906, he joined with luminaries from Kansas City, St. Louis, Joplin, and Springfield to form The Federated Associations of Missouri.

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