Vilja Hulden’s The Bosses’ Union is a fascinating investigation into bosses’ responses to workers’ demands for a closed shop in the decades before the New Deal. Hulden roots workers’ demand for the closed shop—a business in which all workers are required to be union members—within the artisan republic, or the earlier world of small, independent producers. For workers who assumed that only trained and experienced men would enter their profession, the closed shop seemed a rational and attainable goal. But, through a careful study of labor contracts, Hulden shows how workers’ organizations struggled against more powerful forces which viewed unions—and the closed shop—as “conspiracies in restraint of trade.”
Hulden captures the varieties of possible responses. Some bosses, like those in the powerful National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), sought to destroy the unions entirely to defend the open shop. They had no interest in making concessions to workers. Others, however, prizing stability over absolute domination, worked with unions, cautiously, to arrive at mediated solutions to labor disputes, institutionalizing mediation through organizations such as the National Civic Federation (NCF). Hulden argues that the labor market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries buoyed workers’ unionization efforts. Labor costs and labor availability were variable across the rapidly industrializing American economy, and, in certain industries, employers competed against one another. Desperate for workers, employers in such tight markets formed the NCF and welcomed the closed shop in a bid to attract workers. Full-blown “trade agreements” with cooperative business unions could stabilize workforces, business leaders argued (65-66). Elsewhere in the economy, however, Hulden shows, through sophisticated statistical analysis, employers took a more militant stance against any unionization at all and rebuffed increasingly strident demands by skilled workers through business alliances such as NAM. All the while, battles over the closed shop bled into politics and bosses and workers competed for public opinion.
Hulden’s research is impressive. She draws on a wide range of archives and meticulously reads sources to provide always solid, and even occasionally groundbreaking, analysis. Couched in the middle of discussions surrounding the closed shop in chapter five, for instance, Hulden addresses a key question: what, generally, drove employers to band together? Hulden offers a detailed case study of employers and their families in St. Louis, Missouri, and finds many ways in which various business owners connected with one another, including golf clubs, residential proximity, and even volunteer militia companies. A national study here becomes a fascinating local one focused on the world of social clubs and other nodes of connections for St. Louis’s business class. Hulden’s treatment of public opinion is likewise a fascinating and ground-breaking investigation. To understand how employers sought to shape public opinion, Hulden looks closely at the world of publishing. She shows how daily newspapers functioned as both news sources shedding insights into distant events and as generators of local conventional wisdom through local stories, gossip columns, and advertisements. Hulden shows how innovations in publishing technology, such as readyprint and boilerplate (pre-set printed material which did not require type-setting and could be reproduced easily over time and space) allowed organizations such as NAM to inundate local papers with friendly stories and advertisements. And yet, Holden shows, drawing in part on word-frequency charts and other statistical analyses, such efforts were blunted by the public’s overall lack of interest in the types of stories peddled by NAM and other business groups.
Whatever missed opportunities The Bosses’ Union might have could better be seen as openings for future studies. Hulden’s close look at the social world of St. Louis businessmen, for instance, points to the importance of familial connections across the city’s business class, and yet Hulden provides very little material from the women in these families. Similarly, Hulden’s all-too-brief conclusion and its discussion of the New Deal only gestures towards the connections between pre-New Deal battles and employers’ responses to the labor revolutions wrought by the New Deal. But such possibilities for further investigation in no way take away from the accomplishment of The Bosses’ Union.
Hulden’s investigations into the varied paths and strategies employers pursued in response to the campaign for a closed shop cohere into an important and powerful study that draws needed attention to a critical component of the larger labor question in Progressive Era America. The Bosses’ Union should occupy an important role in the larger field of American labor history. Moreover, Hulden writes clearly and cleanly and in a style that is both extremely readable and occasionally literary. Easily accessible for undergraduates and graduate students alike, Hulden’s book would be a useful addition to undergraduate syllabi and graduate reading lists.
