Since the late 1890s, the United States has been involved in eight major wars (Spanish-American, the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the War in Iraq, and the War in Afghanistan) and scores of more limited military engagements. From the Second World War on, the country has maintained a very large military establishment in both wartime and peacetime, and it is currently engaged in the longest war in its history. The prominent role of the military in United States life over the past century has been closely linked to increasing international economic, political, and cultural activity that can be usefully thought of as the American version of imperialism. Yet for all its centrality, the impact of militarism on the social history of the United States remains largely unexplored.Footnote ¹ This article makes a modest effort in that direction by looking at the connection between military values and labor relations, using as a viewing device the life of General Brice P. Disque.

Military metaphors have figured prominently in the language of American industrial relations. When workers restricted their output, management experts called it “soldiering.” Organizing efforts and strikes were described as “campaigns” and “battles,” union activists as “cadre,” and well-protected factories as “fortresses.” Striking workers “picket” their employers, unions “raid” one another, and company executives discuss “business generalship” and accuse prounion workers of “disloyalty.”Footnote ²

In practice as well as language, industrial relations often have resembled war. Strikers and company agents have engaged in full-scale armed battle, for example during the 1892 Homestead Strike. They also have conducted extended guerrilla warfare, as in the western mining strikes of the early twentieth century. On scores of occasions, state militia and National Guard units have been called out to intervene in labor disputes.Footnote ³

In spite of this verbal and physical militarism, surprisingly little has been written on the influence of the military and military thinking on US labor. Historians have explored government regulation of labor during the First and Second World Wars, when military necessity, filtered through complex political struggles, shaped industrial relations in civilian industry.Footnote ⁴ But the broader story of the impact of the military on labor relations remains largely untold, be it direct military involvement in labor relations or the diffusion of military methods, thinking, and culture into the civilian sector via former soldiers, sailors, and officers who went on to become workers, managers, and union officials.Footnote ⁵

The life of General Brice Pursell Disque provides one starting point for exploring the relationship between the militarization of society and “the labor question.”Footnote ⁶ Disque's interest lies not in his brief prominence, but in the range of activities in which he engaged. Disque led the Army effort during the First World War to increase production and end labor strife in the spruce industry, which Harold M. Hyman detailed in Soldiers and Spruce and Melvyn Dubofsky briefly recounted in his history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).Footnote ⁷ Otherwise, Disque flew too low for historians to pick up his track. Yet in a long military and civilian career, Disque took part in the dawning of American imperialism, the country's rise to world power, and the development of modern systems of labor relations. As an Army officer, prison warden, businessman, trade association leader, and labor negotiator, Disque's professional life centered on problems of discipline, logistics, and labor management. Through Disque we can begin to see the deep and multiple connections between labor relations in the so-called free market of the private sphere and in the decidedly unfree arenas of military and penal life. His career suggests that military and penal experience may have contributed to private-industry adoption of a style of labor relations that combined authoritarianism with upgraded conditions, a departure from the Progressive era embrace of industrial democracy as a way of achieving labor peace and social harmony.

Brice Disque's life reminds us how short the span of United States history has been. Disque's grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, while his father—a public school teacher and, later, principal—had been a drummer boy in the Civil War. Disque himself was born in California, Ohio, a small village eight miles from Cincinnati, just three years after the end of Reconstruction, and died in New York City not long before John F. Kennedy's election to the presidency.Footnote ⁸

As a young man, Disque found his calling with the creation of an overseas United States empire. Following the outbreak of fighting in the Philippines between the independence forces and American troops, Disque, working at the time as a clerk at a wholesale grain business, enlisted in the Army Volunteers. The high point of his duty in the Philippines came in 1901, when a small unit he led forced the surrender of a provincial insurgent leader, Emeterio Fumes, and nearly two hundred of his men. The Army rewarded Disque with a commission as a second lieutenant in a regular cavalry unit.Footnote ⁹ Disque's forte, though, lay not in battle—he never again experienced significant combat—but in the management of men and materials, central problems of war and imperialism. Just a few years after Disque's promotion, the chief engineer for the construction of the Panama Canal, a massive, military-led, imperial effort, reported that “The greatest problem . . . is the one of labor.”Footnote ¹⁰

Disque first got involved in managing labor in 1902, when, as adjunct to a district commander in the Philippine province of Nueva Ecija, he found himself in charge of a military prison. It held, by his later account, “about 1500 natives, mostly paying the price for violations of what was then a civilized code of warfare,” and about fifty court-martialed ex-soldiers. To “keep them physically and mentally healthy,” Disque put the inmates to work, a strategy he would later employ on a larger scale, producing a variety of items from bamboo and rattan.Footnote ¹¹ Disque had a life-long aversion to allowing those in his charge to be idle, a predilection, deep-rooted in Protestantism, which he shared with the disciples of Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management. Additionally, he almost certainly was aware of the widespread belief back in the United States that convicts should be employed in some form of labor (which in the South often took the form of convict leasing, while in the North work inside penitentiaries was more common).Footnote ¹²

Disque next served at a variety of domestic posts in the peacetime Army, spending much of his time training National Guard units. In 1915, he returned to the Philippines, taking charge of an Army facility near Manila that manufactured and repaired harnesses, wagons, and other equipment used by the occupying forces. In short order, Disque, who had received some engineering training at the Army Staff College, introduced a series of measures associated with systematic management, including precise cost accounting and individual worker bonuses. To expand his work force, he recruited prisoners from both the city prison and neighboring military stockades. With a work force that shot up from 100 to 2,000, Disque found himself with greater productive capacity than the Army needed, so he contracted for civilian jobs, including heavy foundry work, making profits for the government.Footnote ¹³

In spite of this success, Disque's assignment to a four-year tour with the Quartermaster's Corps rather than a combat unit so discouraged him that he resigned his commission and returned to the states. With little experience in civilian life, he contacted a group of Michigan National Guard officers with whom he had worked, who secured him a position as general manager of the Michigan State Prison at Jackson, which housed 1,200 men. A bundle of energy, Disque quickly expanded a series of reforms begun by his predecessor. In doing so, he refined an approach to managing men and institutions he had developed in the Army.

At Jackson, Disque upgraded basic living conditions and treated his charges with respect, believing strongly in the possibilities for human redemption. To improve the health of the prisoners, he enhanced cellblock ventilation, ordered enforced daily outdoor exercise, and installed enough showers so that each man could wash daily.Footnote ¹⁴ As he had done in the Philippines, Disque also promoted inmate labor as both a health measure and a way to generate income. Disque nearly doubled the size of the prison farm, to some 5,000 acres, selling food and animals not needed for consumption at the institution to large commercial buyers. He likewise expanded prison manufacturing operations, most notably a large twine factory.

At the same time, Disque insisted on centralized control, managerial discretion, and obedience to authority. In the Progressive spirit, Disque wanted an efficient, self-supporting penal institution, free of patronage, which provided the opportunity for men to remake themselves. However, he did not flinch at the use of stern discipline or lifetime imprisonment, even for those convicted of relatively minor offenses. In a 1922 article in Atlantic Monthly, Disque called for allowing trials only to determine guilt or innocence. Convicted criminals, he believed, should be committed to prison for indefinite terms, with their release determined by prison managers, who were in the best position to judge if a prisoner continued to present a threat to society. A prisoner who committed an assault while incarcerated, Disque wrote, should be put on bread and water or “paddled until the impression left upon his memory will be sufficient to deter him when he is again tempted . . . to injure another.”Footnote ¹⁵

Disque's plans for prison reform brought him into contact with organized labor. Disque hoped to reproduce his Philippine success in starting a foundry that would serve his own institution's needs and do outside contracting. It also would train inmates for postprison work. Disque intended to use skilled union workers to supervise the operation, but he found his plan blocked by the International Molders' Union. The Molders, in addition to a general hostility toward prison labor, typical of most unions, had strict rules on the ratio of journeymen to apprentices (who in this case would be prisoners), which made the Disque plan impractical.

Not one to be easily discouraged, Disque won over the local Molders lodge to his plan. He next got John P. Frey, the editor of the union's national newspaper—who went on to become a powerful American Federation of Labor (AFL) insider—to spend a day with him at the prison. He also began corresponding with AFL president Samuel Gompers. Disque succeeded in getting both men to invite him to present his foundry plan at the upcoming conventions of their respective organizations, where he hoped to win over the delegates to the virtues of prison labor.Footnote ¹⁶

Disque never got a chance to test his persuasive powers. As soon as the United States entered the First World War, he began a frantic effort to get back on active Army service. He failed to win the opportunity to lead a combat unit abroad, but his letter seeking reinstatement did come to the attention of an old acquaintance, General John J. Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force, who saw in him an ideal candidate to solve a crisis that was threatening the allied military effort: chaos in the West Coast lumber industry. Disque soon found himself far from the Jackson prison, once again serving as an industrial logistics specialist for the Army, but on a scale far beyond his past experience.Footnote ¹⁷

The First World War saw the emergence of the airplane as a critical weapon of war. The Europeans were far ahead of the Americans in its development. In mid-1917, the United States did not have a single gun-carrying plane. Already, however, Britain and France were depending on the United States for supplies for aircraft production, particularly lumber.

Experience early in the war proved spruce ideal for war-plane construction. As Disque put it in a later report, it had “a combination of the necessary qualities of lightness, strength, resiliency, long and tough fibre and would not splinter when struck by a rifle bullet.” Spruce trees grew in unrivaled numbers in the Pacific Northwest, but European plane makers had difficulty getting all the wood they needed. Once the United States entered the war, it embarked on a crash aircraft construction program, further straining the supply of suitable wood.Footnote ¹⁸

At the time of the war, the Northwest lumber industry was still relatively new, having only begun serving the national market in the 1890s. Corporate consolidation had yet to occur, with “extreme individualists” owning and operating most firms in the region.Footnote ¹⁹ Before the war, what spruce they produced came as a by-product of logging other evergreens. Spruce trees generally grew in small stands in mixed forests. With little commercial demand, they were not worth seeking out for targeted cutting. Even when demand rose, harvesting new spruce stands required major investments in rail lines to extract the giant trees.Footnote ²⁰

Labor presented an additional impediment. The Northwest logging industry depended on itinerant workers, who flowed into and out of logging camps and mill towns from a handful of cities, which served as centers of labor recruitment, rest and recreation, and political agitation. Once in company camps, often isolated deep in forests, loggers lived and worked in miserable conditions. Most camps lacked basic amenities, with vermin-infested bunkhouses, no privacy or places to bathe, and few facilities for washing or drying clothing. Wage rates for lumber workers compared favorably to rates in other industries, but earnings lagged because of the irregularity of work. Workers bitterly resented the long hours (generally a ten-hour day) they had to spend at highly dangerous tasks.Footnote ²¹

High turnover and fierce employer resistance made union organizing extremely difficult, but in the decade prior to the First World War labor organizations began making their presence felt. Two unions affiliated with the AFL made modest progress. But the more radical IWW set the tenor of regional labor relations. Committed to a fundamental transformation of society, the IWW perfected organizing strategies and a political rhetoric well-suited to highly mobile, highly exploited workers, like those in the Northwest. Employers and political conservatives saw the IWW, with its anticapitalist agitation and opposition to the war, as a profound threat to managerial control, profitable operations, and the very basis of the existing social and political order.

In the spring of 1917, spurred on by their competition in the Northwest forests, both the IWW and the AFL made the eight-hour day, along with higher wages, their foremost objective. In July, after the employers refused to budge, the two groups called overlapping strikes that idled some 40,000 workers and cut production by over four-fifths. Though the strike ended in September, the IWW kept up the pressure through a “strike on the job,” a slowdown in which many AFL members participated as well. The war mobilization itself further contributed to the labor shortage, as skilled lumbermen joined the armed services or were drafted.Footnote ²²

Even before the July strike, General Pershing, about to leave for Europe, worried that labor unrest in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry, and throughout the country, would undermine the war effort. Pershing blamed the problem on the IWW and, more generally, on labor radicalism, which he believed had grown as a result of the influence of Mexican revolutionaries and German agents. (Pershing had led the US Army in combat against the revolutionary forces in northern Mexico.) Seeking a personal representative to monitor the situation in the Northwest, Pershing came upon Disque's request for reactivation and recruited him for the task.Footnote ²³

While Disque, operating secretly, still as a civilian, began educating himself about Northwest labor, the July strike led other government agents to pay intense attention to the lumber crisis. In the Northwest, two “dollar-a-year” businessmen, in charge of procuring lumber for the Army, took a hard, antiunion stand, urging lumber companies to resist the strikers' demands. Working with the Pinkertons and various antiradical groups, they built a network of antiunion spies to facilitate a series of raids against the IWW. In Washington, DC, Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker tried a different approach. Influenced by Gompers, who served on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense, and progressive academics in the Northwest, they saw the dismal conditions in the lumber industry as the root cause of worker discontent and low productivity. They tried, without success, to pressure the lumber companies to accept the eight-hour day and bargain with AFL unions as a way to undercut IWW influence.Footnote ²⁴

In October, with neither the hard line nor the ameliorative approaches achieving much success in increasing spruce output, Secretary Baker handed the problem over to Disque, now back in uniform as a colonel in the signal corps. Carleton Parker, a progressive reformer deeply involved with Northwest labor problems, briefed Disque extensively, convincing him that without winning over rank-and-file IWW members there simply would not be enough skilled labor to produce the needed quantities of spruce. Disque became more sympathetic to the workers' plight after touring the lumber camps. “We treated captured Moros better in the Philippines,” he later wrote to a fellow Army officer.Footnote ²⁵

Disque quickly developed a multifaceted approach to increasing spruce output that, following the model he used running prisons, combined upgrading conditions with strict discipline and, when needed, strong force. Central to Disque's plan was the formation of a large Army unit—what came to be called the Spruce Production Division (SPD)—dedicated to increasing lumber output. Soldiers, recruited from men with lumbering or sawmill experience who already had joined the Army, would be used to supplement civilian labor in producing spruce. The same troops also would be available, when necessary, to suppress labor radicals. Meanwhile, Disque would press employers for improvements in working conditions. Finally, Disque envisioned the creation, under Army sponsorship, of an organization of employers and employees that would serve as an alternative to the IWW.

Before approving the SPD, Secretary Baker asked Disque to clear the idea with Gompers. Gompers already had been seeking government involvement in the Northwest, hoping that Washington would force the employers to accept the eight-hour day and thereby diminish the appeal of the IWW. Having established something of a relationship with Disque over prison issues, and with Disque at that point under influence of progressives like Parker and Assistant Secretary of War Felix Frankfurter, Gompers apparently saw the SPD as a potential vehicle to advance AFL interests. In addition, according to one biographer, Gompers “may have been influenced by Disque's promise to him that he would secure the immediate appointment of Private First Class Samuel Gompers, grandson of the labor chief, to the rank of Second Lieutenant.” Thus, over the opposition of the AFL organizer assigned to Northwest lumber, Gompers agreed to Disque's plan, with the understanding that soldiers assigned to work for civilian companies would be paid civilian wages minus their Army pay, and that soldiers would only be used where no non-military labor could be found.Footnote ²⁶

Disque moved with remarkable dispatch to establish the new Army division. By the end of January 1918, he had over 1,200 men in logging camps, and another 4,000 at his cantonment at Vancouver, Washington (across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon). Five months later, he had over 13,000 officers and men, including some 8,000 in the field.Footnote ²⁷

In addition to supplying men to the civilian logging companies, the SPD got deeply involved in technical aspects of spruce production. At its Vancouver facility, it constructed a large, specialized saw mill to cut spruce logs into smaller pieces with grain suitable for producing aircraft parts, a task that commercial sawmills had proved unable to efficiently accomplish. Disque's men also promoted the “riving” of spruce logs—splitting them where felled—to make it easier to transport them out of isolated stands without building rail lines, the slow, expensive past practice. Complementing riving, his unit pioneered the use of trucks to carry out logs on rudimentary plank roads.Footnote ²⁸

The SPD also worked with lumber companies to rid the region of IWW activists. In January 1918, for example, the Bloedel Donovan Lumber Mills, which had SPD troops at two camps, asked Disque to be prepared to supply it with additional military loggers because it was planning to “let the [civilian] track men and graders go, as these are the classes where the I.W.W. are the worst.” Even with the Army men, the company had difficulty retaining an adequate work force because of rising wartime wages elsewhere and “I.W.W. agitation among the common labor.”Footnote ²⁹

As another weapon in the battle against the IWW, in late December 1917 Newton Baker formally approved Disque's complement to the SPD, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumberman, or 4L as it was commonly called. Initially conceived as an Army-sponsored patriotic organization, any timber worker or employer could join the 4L by swearing an oath of loyalty to the government and promising to do what he could to assist the war effort. With officers from the SPD acting as recruiters and branch secretaries, the 4L quickly claimed more than 20,000 members. The Army used the 4L as an intelligence network as well as a vehicle for propaganda. Two “complete moving picture outfits,” supplied by the Army, were used for presentations in logging camps and mills where 4L locals had been established. The 4L also distributed a phonograph record President Woodrow Wilson made, appealing to lumber workers' patriotism.Footnote ³⁰

Disque also moved to upgrade working conditions. His greatest triumph came over the eight-hour day. Various progressives, including Parker and Frankfurter, had tried to convince the President to impose an eight-hour day on the West Coast lumber industry, but without success. Disque, taking advantage of lingering fears of government compulsion, in February 1918 got the lumber operators (dependent on him for labor) to voluntarily agree to switch to an eight-hour day. He also convinced them to give him the personal authority to set industry wage rates. Disque further used his role as a labor supplier to force the companies to improve conditions in the camps by allowing soldiers to be assigned only to those camps that met minimum Army sanitary standards, which required better food and hygiene than the companies had seen fit to provide for their regular workers.Footnote ³¹

In the spring and summer of 1918, Disque—now the object of widespread praise, including in liberal journals like The New Republic—greatly enlarged his operation. In addition to supplying men for logging operations, the SPD undertook a massive program of railroad construction (contracting out much of the work) and let out huge cost-plus contracts for timbering. According to Disque's account, spruce production under SPD control increased from under three million board feet in November 1917 to twenty-two million in October 1918. At its peak, the unit had 30,000 men.Footnote ³²

While expanding production, Disque converted the 4L into something much like a company union. First Disque instructed 4L units to elect committees to deal with local problems and grievances. When they could not reach agreement with an employer, they could appeal to district-wide management-worker committees, and if necessary to Disque himself for final adjudication. Since Disque had the power to set wage rates, supply workers, and purchase logs, he could effectively impose his decisions even in the absence of legal authority to do so. Disque allowed IWW members to join the 4L, but once having done so they were not allowed to continue advocating IWW ideas. Those who did were driven out of the area. The 4L also kept up a barrage of pro-war propaganda, aided by $100,000 that President Wilson personally allocated for this purpose.Footnote ³³

By the spring of 1918, in the face of improvements in pay and working conditions and SPD repression, the IWW had receded as a major factor in the Northwest lumber industry. Gompers and progressives like Parker believed that this would pave the way for AFL organization, but Disque, under the growing influence of lumber company executives, increasingly came to see the 4L as a long-term solution to labor unrest, obviating the need for moderate independent unionism. His relations with Gompers deteriorated over the AFL's claim of some credit for the eight-hour day and Disque's effort to convince the AFL not to try to organize lumber workers in his dominion until after the war. With Disque arranging for SPD commissions for many lumber company officials, the unit took on an increasingly antiunion cast. In some places, SPD officers arranged to have AFL members fired from their jobs and threatened with the draft, while uniformed soldiers broke up meetings of the AFL Timber Workers. What had begun as an effort to rid the woods of radical unionism turned into a campaign against any type of unionism at all.Footnote ³⁴

The Armistice brought Disque's operation to a rapid conclusion. However, the 4L lived on. Employers took over the financing of the operation from the Army, with Disque briefly continuing to head the organization before withdrawing. Members pledged to work during the postwar period toward closer employer-employee relations and foreswore striking until they had made full use of the organization's mediation process.

With the war over, though, the 4L became less active and influential. Many companies, once freed from government pressure, stopped backing it. The group also lost a great deal of worker support during the 1920 depression, when it approved repeated drops in the industry's minimum wage. Employers' need for the group diminished thereafter, since neither the IWW nor the AFL succeeded in reviving themselves in the Northwest lumber industry. Disque and the Army had taught the operators how to use a combination of improved conditions, controlled repression, and what Dubofsky characterized as “the shadow of industrial democracy without substance” to establish their hegemony. At low cost to employers, the 4L continued to provide “the shadow” until the Great Depression and the New Deal radically changed the political economy of Northwest logging.Footnote ³⁵

In February 1919, Disque resigned his Army commission. His lack of wartime combat experience no doubt would have limited his military future. Also, according to one account, Disque believed that the AFL would have blocked Senate confirmation of any Regular Army promotion. (The Senate did confirm his appointment as brigadier general in the Army Reserve.) Disque also faced an unpleasant congressional investigation into allegations of waste and impropriety by the SPD.Footnote ³⁶

Disque's wartime service left him a far more worldly man, with a new network of contacts, than he had been when he had left the Army for the first time, just two years earlier. He reached out to Felix Frankfurter, John D. Ryan, an industrialist who ran the wartime federal Aviation Board, and no doubt others in search of private employment. Ryan came through, helping him secure a position as chairman of the board of G. Amsinck & Co., Inc., a New York-based import-export firm, and president of two of its Latin American affiliates. In his new post Disque made $30,000 a year, nearly twice what he had been offered to return to his post at Jackson prison.Footnote ³⁷

Thus began Disque's years as a corporate officer and aspiring entrepreneur. C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite, one of the few studies to seriously consider the role of the military in the governance of the United States, dated the lasting ascendancy of military leaders into “higher economic and political circles” to the Second World War, with the practice of retired officers joining corporate boards becoming common thereafter. Disque's career suggests that such intermingling of business and military leadership began earlier.Footnote ³⁸

During the 1920s, Disque held a variety of corporate positions, including as president of a textile firm, Johnson, Cowdin & Co., Inc.; chairman of the board of Farrand Manufacturing Company; director of Murray Hill Trust Co.; and president of United Industrial Bancstocks Corp. One abortive scheme Disque got involved in echoed his spruce operation, a plan to make wooden parts for automobile chassis at lumbering sites, rather than at distant vehicle plants. Like Charlie Anderson, the former Army aviator in John Dos Passos's trilogy U.S.A., some of Disque's business ventures entailed actual production, but others seemed to have a significant element of financial speculation, using inside connections and knowledge to make “The Big Money.” (Dos Passos knew of Disque, putting him in his 1961 novel Midcentury, thinly disguised as “Colonel Round.”)Footnote ³⁹

Disque prospered financially in his corporate career, even though he never ascended to the top ranks of business. Though he proudly proclaimed himself “an eighth generation citizen of the United States,” Disque had grown up in modest circumstances. By capitalizing on his wartime service, he now brought his family into the ranks of the upper class. When his son Brice, Jr. attended Dartmouth in the early 1920s, he wrote home about fraternity life, money troubles, and the greediness of Jews—the stock concerns of the social elite he aspired to join. Disque himself obtained a four-hundred-acre farm in upstate New York, in addition to a comfortable New York home. His wife became a leading member of the New York State Federated Garden Clubs.Footnote ⁴⁰

By the beginning of the 1930s, however, perhaps because of the stock market collapse, Disque seemed eager for a change. In August 1930 he approached President Herbert Hoover about joining his administration out of a “desire to do something more worth while” than he had been doing as a New York-based businessman. When this came to naught, he sold his services as a management consultant to the Pittston Coal Company, the beginning of a long involvement with the coal industry. Disque went on to simultaneously hold a number of executive positions with Pittston subsidiaries, head a transportation holding company, and lead the Anthracite Institute, the trade association for Pennsylvania hard coal producers.Footnote ⁴¹ His involvement with the coal industry came at just the moment when the United Mine Workers and its leader, John L. Lewis, rebuilt its strength in the mine fields, helped craft the New Deal approach to labor, and fostered the spread of industrial unionism in basic industry.Footnote ⁴²

Disque occasionally had written or spoken about public issues after leaving the Army, but the beginning of the New Deal sparked a more intense engagement with politics. Having already grown more conservative in his political inclinations—by some accounts, in reaction to AFL and congressional criticism of the SPD—Disque vehemently objected to the New Deal expansion of state function, an ironic position for one who had achieved renown and social position by marshalling government authority and resources to increase industrial output.

Disque mirrored common business sentiment in objecting to New Deal efforts to manage the economy and give workers greater rights. In a 1934 speech to the New York State Coal Merchants Association, Disque attacked government involvement with the National Recovery Administration (NRA) industry codes, declaring that he had “absolutely no confidence in the business capacity of our government.” Disque also took exception to section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which guaranteed workers the right to organize without interference from employers. “For all practical purposes,” he contended, it gave the AFL “a monopoly of labor control.”Footnote ⁴³

In a letter to the New York Herald-Tribune, Disque elaborated his view of industrial relations. “Nowhere in the history of mankind has it ever been demonstrated that several people can work on a common project without a single leader with authority. No business can tolerate the ruthless interference of outside forces operating from motives that are diametrically opposed to the objectives of business.” Conceding that there were some “industrial managers who will not give labor a decent deal,” he thought that they were “becoming more of a minority every year, simply because it is good business to have happy, well-paid and cooperative labor.” Rather than a federally guaranteed right to organize, Disque felt labor would be better served by job sharing and shorter hours to spread out work, and, if necessary, support for the unemployed financed from “excessive profits.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Over the next few years, Disque's bitterness toward the New Deal intensified. In a widely publicized 1938 speech, Disque attacked “the political racket of using billions of national treasure in a process of building up useless bureaucracies for those who will not work for a living.” Doing so undermined the economy by driving up taxes and undermined the political process by creating a class of dependents who would inevitably give electoral support to the distributors of their bounty. To get out of this “mess,” Disque called for strong medicine. He wanted to “restrict the right to suffrage to those who financially support the government and withdraw that right from any citizen who is on any government payroll,” get the federal government entirely out of regulating labor relations, and terminate agricultural subsidies. Internationally, Disque rejected economic liberalism or extensive diplomatic or military commitments. To protect high-wage domestic industries, he called for tariffs. Beyond that, he said, “Let us re-state the Monroe Doctrine in modern and emphatic terms and be ready to enforce it. That's all the foreign policy we need now or ever will need.” Ever more vehement, at least in private, in his criticism of Franklin Roosevelt, Disque became increasingly enamored with Herbert Hoover, the anti-Roosevelt with whom he developed a passing relationship and occasional correspondence.Footnote ⁴⁵

The late 1930s saw Disque adrift. Having left Pittston in 1936, he looked around for other business ventures. He tried to interest Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Company—like Disque, a former Army officer who had served in the Philippines and in various military logistics posts—in a plan to build prefabricated mass housing, but apparently with little success. When war broke out in Europe, Disque began a series of broadcasts on a Cincinnati radio station, commenting on the military situation. He also served as temporary business manager for the University of Vermont, which had fallen into severe financial difficulties.Footnote ⁴⁶

The spreading World War brought Disque back into public prominence. In September 1941, the Army called him back to active service, assigning him to run the Army Exchange System. But Disque soon left active Army service again, when, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes asked him to serve as an associate director of the Office of Solid Fuels Coordination, in charge of assuring adequate supplies of anthracite coal for civilian and military needs. As in the First World War, Disque assumed a central role in making sure the nation had sufficient quantities of a vital raw material, a task complicated by simmering labor conflicts. Disque, however, increasingly out of touch with the political tenor of the country, proved less adept at dealing with the bureaucratic politics of the wartime New Deal than he had with the military-civilian establishment of the First World War. Used to running his own shop, Disque ran into the huge ego and ferocious organizational in-fighting for which Ickes was renowned. After fifteen months, the secretary asked Disque to resign.Footnote ⁴⁷

Returning to civilian life, Disque took a job he retained until his retirement in 1957, as head of the Coal Consumers Protective Association, the trade association for New York-area coal dealers. Two years later he also took charge of the group representing area oil distributors. In these posts, he acted as spokesperson for the industries, coordinator of policy, and chief negotiator with the unionized delivery truck drivers and other fuel workers. With coal and oil shortages and labor disputes common during the latter part of the war and the first decade after its end, Disque's name often appeared in the New York press in connection with one crisis or another.Footnote ⁴⁸

A series of confrontations with the Teamsters Union, which represented coal and fuel oil drivers, centered Disque's attention once again on industrial relations. Under his leadership, the coal and oil distributors fought hard against the union, taking several strikes rather than give in to its demands, but the disputes were over pay rates and other contractual provision, not the legitimacy of unionism itself. Disque continued to put forth provocative views on labor relations. Reflecting his now hardened antistatism, he again called for the government to withdraw from industrial relations, leaving it to industry and labor to work out their own accords. But he now seemed more reconciled to dealing with organized labor, even praising some leaders of the AFL, whom he contrasted favorably with those unionists who were “always stirring up strife and opposition to employers to maintain membership.”Footnote ⁴⁹

During the postwar years, Disque allied himself with the antistatist right at a time when many conservatives questioned the expansive internationalism of the early Cold War and the ballooning of federal power associated with it. Disque believed that the Soviet threat was being exaggerated for domestic political purposes and to jack up military spending. He strongly supported the Bricker Amendment, which would have forbid treaties that imposed rules or regulations Congress itself lacked the power to institute. He continued to criticize federal farm subsidies and grew ever more extravagant in his praise for Herbert Hoover, to whom he began sending an annual gift of apples from his farm. In his last years, Disque came to see national labor unions and corporate monopolies as a threat to the very survival of the nation, which he believed had become “half pregnant with socialism.” In his final letter to Hoover, he characterized conservative Senator Robert Taft as “our last hope to recapture our heritage.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Yet for all his nostalgia for a republic of individualism, in the end, of all his activities after the First World War, collective bargaining seems to have given Disque the most satisfaction. His labor relations activities, he believed, “resulted in sound progress for all concerned.” On the very last page of eight large scrapbooks in which Disque kept a lifetime of newspaper clippings about himself, he pasted in an article about the settlement of a five-day strike by 3,000 New York fuel oil and coal truck drivers, in which he served as the chief industry negotiator, his final documentation of a long career dealing with labor in the military, prisons, and the business world.Footnote ⁵¹

It is always dangerous to generalize from a single case. But Brice Disque's career at the least suggests issues worthy of further investigation. Most obviously, his experience raises the question of the influence of military ways and assumptions on civilian labor relations. Disque's military thinking led him to value centralized, unilateral control over labor. He did not object to improved conditions for workers. To the contrary, he believed that better conditions led to more efficient labor. Furthermore, military leaders, unlike businessmen, did not necessarily see cost reduction as a paramount value. But he did object to any meaningful sharing of control with organized labor. Thus, when he could, he shut out unions altogether. However, as a practically oriented manager, after the Second World War he recognized the changed landscape of industrial relations and worked to minimize the power of labor rather than eradicate it.

Did others bring military values to civilian labor relations? No systematic study has been done, but it may well be that Disque represents a common phenomenon. At least two of his fellow veterans of the Philippines war seem to have shared his outlook. In his study of San Francisco labor, historian Michael Kazin recounts how following that city's 1906 earthquake its mayor “asked U.S. Army General Frederick Funston, commander of the Presidio, to order his troops to guard streets and set fire lines.” In a later report to the War Department, Funston “revealed his distaste for unionism,” as he “falsely accused the building trades of fomenting 'senseless' strikes and lockouts and attacked all of labor for bidding up the cost of reconstruction with its reckless wage demands.” Funston went on to recommend that “all construction work at the port on San Francisco Bay be done by prison labor.” Funston, remarks Kazin, “clearly regarded strikers as so much undisciplined rabble.” At Sears Roebuck, General Wood combined intensive efforts to improve worker morale with unsavory methods to keep out unions. Among other measures, he helped set up and then hired an antiunion consulting firm headed by his West Point classmate General William J. Westervelt. Like Disque, Wood promoted an air of worker participation without conceding any real authority. An opponent of overly complex bureaucratic structures in either government or business, Wood saw himself as a defender of small-town values, as he embraced a variety of right-wing causes and supported an isolationist foreign policy.Footnote ⁵²

Disque, Funston, and Wood, of course, came of age in a military far smaller and less bureaucratic than the armed services of the second half of the twentieth century. Whether later generations of Army officers brought different values to civilian labor relations remains to be explored. With thousands of ex-officers holding positions in corporate management in the post-World War II years—many corporations actively recruited young officers—their influence may have been very significant.Footnote ⁵³

We also know very little about how the extraordinarily common working-class experience of military service affected organized labor. For significant stretches of time, the military was the largest single employer in the United States, engaged in a vast range of activities, including engineering, transportation, construction, destruction, policing, and, of course, combat. Soldiering is a form of work. Yet little has been written about how it affected those who engaged in it during their subsequent work lives. One of the few labor historians who has written about this issue, Roger Horowitz, suggested that World War Two military service led working-class veterans to adopt a nationalist rhetoric and notion of rights at variance with New Deal laborite discourse. We know very little about the outlook of former career servicemen, who retired at a young age, received life-long benefits, and began new work lives. Nor do we know much about those with shorter service. Vietnam veterans repeatedly show up in accounts of the wave of labor militancy and rank-and-file union rebellion in the early 1970s, yet no one has looked at their role and influence.Footnote ⁵⁴

Brice Disque's career illustrates the way the twentieth-century officer corps became intertwined with business and political leaders in dealing with the problems of modern war and empire: logistics, labor control, production, discipline, and punishment. In these matters, the military often pioneered social and technical innovations, unconstrained, in contrast to business, by profit considerations.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the military never emerged as the dominant force in the ruling circles of modern America, nor, even at the height of the Cold War, did the country develop a garrison state. In spite of sustained, very high levels of military spending and repeated postwar military conflicts, individual rights and freedoms, after a period of repression in the late 1940s and early 1950s, expanded, at least until 9/11. The military generally stayed out of electoral politics, and the armed forces had less of a presence in daily life in the United States than in many of its allies and adversaries.Footnote ⁵⁶

Disque's political evolution suggests one reason why, widespread antistatism among large elements of the emerging imperial state itself. Even as they worked to develop a modern, corporate-dominated, bureaucratic, imperialist state, many military and political leaders became increasingly attached to the rhetorical and cultural trappings of its opposite, the individualistic republic of small-town America. Having made at least modest contributions to the creation of the most powerful corporate-military-imperial complex in human history, Disque—in a way not all that dissimilar to Dwight Eisenhower—came to see that creation as a threat to the very values that he professed to have spent his lifetime defending.Footnote ⁵⁷

Research for this article was funded in part by a PSC-CUNY Research Award. I want to thank the members of the “Imperialism” seminar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where I presented an earlier version of this article, as well as Jacob Kramer, Matt Weiland, and Jennifer Klein for their comments and suggestions.