The period of the First World War is widely regarded as a watershed in the history of American labour. Through the introduction of Bureaus of Labor Statistics, arbitration boards and other regulatory devices, organized labour had won a number of concessions from government at state and local levels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the federal level, however, while labour had its grievances heard through the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (1913–15) and, in between the Taft and Wilson Administrations, won de facto cabinet-level representation through the newly created Department of Labor (1913), the relationship between state and labour was characterized largely by judicial injunctions, the use of military force against strikers, and the tacit support given by lawmakers to all kinds of employers’ repression. During the First World War organized labour finally made its presence felt in the chambers of government at Washington, DC. Historians have even found in this period of wartime emergency the foundations of what would eventually become the union protections of the New Deal. During those two eventful years of war the Wilson administration instituted a whole raft of machinery to arbitrate disputes, brought entire industries under federal control, and repressed the more intransigent labour opponents of the conflict.

In the last several decades Joseph McCartin, Melvyn Dubofsky, Valerie Jean Conner and Jeffrey Haydu, among others, have reinvigorated the study of wartime federal labour policy.Footnote ¹ They have generally approached the period in a more favourable light than earlier scholars. This is particularly true in terms of the widest-reaching and best-known of the wartime executive branch's creations, the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Dubbed the “Supreme Court of Industry” by its friends, the NWLB stood at the apex of wartime arbitration efforts. Across its table five representatives from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the largest agglomeration of American organized labour, faced five from the National Industrial Conference Board (NICB), a recently formed but influential employers’ organization determined to rescue the image of business at a time when, as Howard Gitelman writes, employers were “highly vulnerable” to adverse public opinion.Footnote ² Each of these groups chose a cochairman to guide their deliberations as they waded through the thousands of industrial disputes that struck the United States from April 1918 until March 1919.

The NWLB also stands at the apex of recent scholarship on the war period. The scholars mentioned above have generally emphasized the labour-friendly aspects of the board, and the role it played in swelling the ranks of the AFL by more than a million new members during the war, especially in industries like steel and meatpacking where unions had historically failed to survive.Footnote ³ For the first time, they argue, labour representatives played an influential role in the formulation and implementation of federal policy. The board, in short, was the harbinger of a new industrial order, protecting unions from open-shop employers and placing labour relations upon a constitutional and more democratic foundation. Though not simply a tool of the unions, federal labour agencies nevertheless helped bring, as Joseph McCartin has most comprehensively argued, the rhetoric and goals of “industrial democracy” to the forefront of industrial relations – and American industry would never quite be the same again.

A more pessimistic view is presented here, based on the close examination of the board's first major case, between the Western Union Telegraph Company (WU) and the Commercial Telegraphers’ Union of America (CTUA). The CTUA, formed in 1902, was precisely the kind of numerically small but potentially very powerful union that the board is supposed to have supported in steel and elsewhere, and faced a similar level of antiunion activity from employers. Western Union, the dominant player in the telegraphic industry and boasting close ties to Wall Street and the House of Morgan, had long used a sophisticated system of private detectives and agents to infiltrate union locals and dismiss union members. Supplemented by quick recourse to strikebreakers, the company's managers had, since the Civil War, successfully dispatched to oblivion the CTUA's three predecessors, the National Telegraphers’ Union, the Telegraphers’ Protective League, and the Brotherhood of Telegraphers.Footnote ⁴ The board's principles, and its celebrated defence of “industrial democracy,” were intended by the AFL's leaders to put an end to tactics like these. But they did not.

While the Western Union case was only one amongst many that the NWLB handled, I argue that it was important on its own terms. This is true both in terms of the numbers of people affected – around 60,000 telegraphers by the board's own reckoning, two-thirds of them at Western Union – and in terms of the way that it highlighted the board's vague and often contradictory set of principles. It is also important for another reason. When the board proved unable to settle the dispute, President Wilson nationalized the telegraphs, bringing Western Union under the stewardship of the US Department of the Post Office. Instead of gaining concessions, as the railroad unions did under their federal administration, the CTUA was shouldered out of the way by a company union, the Association Western Union Employees (AWUE), aggressively supported both by the company and by federal management.

The Western Union case is something of an anomaly in terms of the cases handled by the NWLB – though these were themselves not entirely representative of American industry as a whole – or of the industries, like shipbuilding, construction or the railroads, which were nationalized or placed under heavy federal regulation during the war. The CTUA fared far worse than unions in these three industries, or than most unions whose cases were mediated by the NWLB. The union, as we will see, suffered even relative to the telephone workers organized by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, another AFL union but one with much wider and larger membership.Footnote ⁵ But though it might not be entirely representative in this way, the Western Union case does emphasize the limitations of federal labour policy, especially in areas and industries where powerful – or ideologically acceptable – unions were absent. The Western Union case, in other words, suggests further reconsideration not so much of federal labour policy as a whole, but of the emphasis placed by historians on the negative and positive effects of this policy upon organized labour.

David Montgomery has described the back end of the Progressive Era, from around 1909 to 1922, as the heyday of the New Unionism, a rank-and-file revolt against AFL craft union practice and a period of unprecedented militancy.Footnote ⁶ The New Unionism touched the offices of Western Union little, if at all. Though the CTUA survived comprehensive defeat in its 1907 strike, something none of its predecessors had managed to do, on the eve of war the union maintained only a small, precarious toehold at Western Union, claiming the allegiance of a mere several thousand of the company's 40,000 telegraphers. WU's successful antiunion policies were the main but not the only reason for this failure. Technological change, particularly the substitution of the teletype and keyboards for the older Morse senders, reduced the numbers of skilled male operators while increasing the numbers of less skilled female workers. While the union admitted women from the outset (though not blacks) the changes created a problem for organizing efforts. Western Union also implemented a number of the welfare measures that gained currency amongst many large corporations in the 1910s and which, along with reversing the long-term decline of telegraphers’ real wages, constituted yet another plank in the antiunion edifice that management confidently maintained.Footnote ⁷

All that remained was to build an active rival to what Western Union president Newcomb Carlton contemptuously referred to as “outside organization,” through an in-house employee representation plan. Like welfarist schemes this idea was in vogue during the 1910s, part of the wider clamour for “industrial democracy.” The best-known example, proposed by industrial relations expert W. MacKenzie King and termed the “Rockefeller Plan,” followed the Ludlow Massacre at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in April 1914. The Rockefeller plan was designed to give workers a nominal voice in business affairs and, in King's oft-quoted words, to provide “a maximum of publicity with a minimum of interference in all that pertains to the conditions of employment.”Footnote ⁸ Carlton had toyed with the idea since at least 1915, and would implement it during wartime with decisive effect.Footnote ⁹

War threatened to change all that. The militancy brewing throughout the 1910s reached fever pitch in the six months after President Wilson's declaration of war. In that first half-year of what Joseph McCartin has aptly termed the “Second Great Upheaval,” American workers engaged in more than three thousand strikes, more than the total for all of 1916, encouraged in this unprecedentedly high level of industrial action by an unemployment rate that halved from 15 percent in 1914 to 8 percent in 1917; by opposition from many quarters to the war itself; and by inflation, with a 30 percent hike in average prices in the previous three years.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time the coffers of employers were abnormally full. Many of them regarded the war as, in the words of the appropriately named Howard E. Coffin, “the greatest business proposition since time began.” For many of them it was.Footnote ¹¹

Federal officials struggled to lessen disruption to industry, and turned to the AFL and the NICB to fill the breach. AFL president Samuel Gompers, as he later reminisced, proved especially willing.Footnote ¹² In the winter of 1917 the President's Mediation Commission (PMC), composed of all these different constituencies, started to give war labour policy some badly needed coherency. Its findings emphasized that “some form of collective relationship between management and men” would be required to minimize wartime class conflict.Footnote ¹³ The Labor Department, headed by veteran trade unionist William B. Wilson, and with close ties to the AFL leadership, also pushed for recognition of elementary union rights. With these forces developing a “politics of industrial democracy,” as McCartin labels it, the result was the War Labor Conference Board (WLCB), with five members each from the AFL and NICB and presided over by the labour lawyer Frank P. Walsh, the labour appointee, and former President William H. Taft, appointed by business. After drafting a set of principles, the WLCB was reconstituted by order of President Wilson as the NWLB in March 1918.

CTUA president Sylvester J. Konenkamp keenly followed the development of war labour policy, recognizing that with federal aid his union might finally breach the antiunion wall that Western Union had so painstakingly erected. Further inducement came from an unexpected quarter. Telegraph messenger boys, the casual, worst-paid section of the telegraph industry's hierarchy of labour, were not known for their proclivity for industrial action. But in February 1918 they went on strike and, though ultimately defeated, turned the eyes of unionists, employers and government officials upon the telegraphs. On 20 March 1918, with the WLCB's principles seeming to protect the right of workers to independently organize, Konenkamp seized the opportunity and advised Labor Secretary Wilson that the CTUA planned a day of major organizing work on Sunday, 28 April.Footnote ¹⁴

Predictably, President Carlton attacked the 5 percent of his staff who, presumably on account of their union affiliation, were “Bolsheviki who would, if they could, do to the Western Union what has been done to Russia.”Footnote ¹⁵ Even more predictably, when CTUA members openly displayed their union ribbons on 28 April, Western Union summarily dismissed around eight hundred of them. “My joining the union,” one telegrapher noted of his manager's attitude, was held to have “constituted an act of disloyalty to the company.”Footnote ¹⁶ Nothing, it seemed at first, had changed. But when the CTUA responded with threats of strike action to secure the reinstatement of its discharged members, the newly constituted NWLB accepted the union's plea to assume jurisdiction over the dispute. Konenkamp's gamble had apparently worked.

Commenting on the new board, the Washington Post exulted that “the people of America do not have to be conscripted. They are ready and willing to volunteer.”Footnote ¹⁷ The operation of the new body was premised on both parties voluntarily accepting its authority, a concession to the historical “voluntarism” of both the AFL and business in regard to the intervention of state power in “private” disputes. The Western Union dispute was enormously important in giving this, and the NLWB's other principles, some kind of practical expression. What emerged was, as McCartin and Haydu have to varying extents suggested, a mash of contradictory ideas born out of the conflict between the board's labour and business representatives, on the one hand, and, on the other, an attempt to stabilize American industry through a less labour-hostile version of existing patterns of labour relations. It must be evaluated, moreover, not by any contemplation of the status quo ante bellum, but by the unprecedentedly strong bargaining position that American workers enjoyed throughout wartime, whether measured in terms of unemployment, labour scarcity or returns to capital. Indeed, as John Steuben observed, “the status quo was already impossible, since the cost of living had already leaped skywards, destroying established standards.”Footnote ¹⁸

“On paper,” an NWLB publication claimed, the board “can function only if both parties request it to … On paper, in short, it is purely a voluntary organization.”Footnote ¹⁹ While this was a legal fiction that the board ignored in later rulings, it still had force in May. And Western Union did not feel compelled to voluntarily enlist. Carlton continued to discharge suspected unionists even after the board requested on 1 May that he stop, and a meeting of wider business and labour leaders five days later on the same theme proved equally fruitless. Nevertheless the board appointed its two cochairmen, Taft and Walsh, to investigate the dispute and propose solutions. While Walsh insisted that the NWLB must demand the reinstatement of dismissed unionists and an end to discrimination against the CTUA, Taft emphasized that arbitration was impossible, as Western Union had refused to accept the board's jurisdiction. It seemed that their deliberations had reached a stalemate, to the obvious benefit of Carlton and his Board of Directors. Yet faced with the WU chief's unwillingness to agree to any sort of compromise, even those suggested by the board's employer representatives, Taft soon dropped his legalistic misgivings.Footnote ²⁰ Wider pressures also made themselves felt. The ongoing German spring offensive continued to worry military strategists, while large numbers of strikes continued to disrupt critical war production. If Western Union could expose the NWLB as toothless, the whole federal project of minimizing this disruption would be thrown into disarray.

A fragile consensus amongst the board's members thus pushed it towards confrontation with Western Union. Now its principles came into play. Above all, Konenkamp and his union took heart as the board “recognized and affirmed” the right to organize into unions free of employer discrimination and “to bargain collectively through chosen representatives.” This pledge, as McCartin and others point out, was an important cause or precondition for the great wartime upsurge in AFL membership. It offered to the CTUA the promise of protection from Western Union's traditional union-busting. Other clauses guaranteed women equal pay for equal work and, very ambiguously, called for a “living wage” that would secure the subsistence and comfort of all workers.Footnote ²¹

Yet these concessions came at great cost. The board called on workers and employers to “maintain an industrial truce,” permitting no strikes or lockouts once it assumed jurisdiction of a case. Whereas the federal Railroad and Fuel Administrations merely codified existing recognition by most (though not all) employers in the railroad and coal-mining industries, the NWLB was only able, and its employer representatives only willing, in Jeffrey Haydu's words, to “reform” open shops through provisions against antiunion discrimination rather than abolish them.Footnote ²² Open and closed shops that existed prior to the war were allowed to continue, which meant in practice the entrenchment of the prevailing open-shop order at the very time that American workers were threatening to tear it down. Statistics bear this out. Of the 18,654 establishments deemed capable of munitions production by the Naval Consulting Board, a federal preparedness agency, “16787, or 89 percent, were ‘open’ shops.” In sum, as David Montgomery writes, federal protection of the right to organize was predicated on the “demand that both industry and labor refrain from using the crisis to ‘change existing standards.’” Yet even here, the board's call for “maximum production of all war industries” gave employers the green light to introduce new technologies and work methods that undercut the skill differentials of telegraphers, among others.Footnote ²³

But principles are one thing, and their practical use another. Cochairmen Taft and Walsh were charged by the board with settling the dispute, and with establishing in the process an all-important precedent for the board's future operation. The fruit of their labours, sent to Carlton on 15 May, showed just how many qualifications the board's principles placed around protection of the right to organize. While their plan demanded as a precondition the reinstatement of discharged unionists, “Western Union,” the cochairmen emphasized, “should not be required in any way to deal with the union or to recognise it.” As if by way of compensation, Taft and Walsh proposed that the company “would receive a committee of its own men only, who desired individually, or in a group composed of the employees, to present requests for better conditions of labor as to hours, compensation, and otherwise.” The board would handle any future disagreements and uphold the dismissal of strikers. In general as well as in detail, then, Western Union's open shop was to be left intact, with the board, as Haydu argues, enforcing “the principles that proponents of the open shop espoused but rarely practiced: non-discrimination against unionists and a willingness to meet with one's own employees to discuss grievances.”Footnote ²⁴

Had the NWLB actually carried out this plan the CTUA would have been left in a strange limbo. Unionists were protected from discrimination, but unable to influence company policy through any kind of collective bargaining, or more adversarial means. Only indirectly, through pressure placed by Konenkamp on the board's five labour representatives, could unionists exert any leverage over their employer. In other industries and in other places – the munitions plants of Bridgeport, Connecticut are an excellent example – this state of affairs met with vocal opposition from rank-and-file militants. At Western Union it just left the point of CTUA membership moot. Why join a union that has no power to shape events, especially with management no doubt tallying up the names of union members for future use? The New Republic aptly captured the dilemma. The board's plan, it explained, “permits unions to exist and grow, but does not incorporate them into the organization of industry.”Footnote ²⁵

Yet even this conciliatory plan proved too much for Carlton and his Board of Directors. His reply to the board on 22 May, imperious as ever, offered instead a referendum of Western Union employees on the subject of CTUA membership. If a majority favoured the union the company would stop dismissing its members but would refuse to recognize it. If a majority failed to endorse the CTUA, Carlton offered an alternative with long-term consequences for labour relations at Western Union: an antistrike employees association, nominally independent of both the AFL and the company. As Valerie Jean Conner writes, Carlton “offered his employees either the right to organize or the right to bargain collectively but not both.”Footnote ²⁶ One telegrapher put it more bluntly, writing to President Wilson that “the Western Union Telegraph Co. by its President Mr. Newcomb Carlton, declines to grant to its employees the right to organize for mutual protection and collective bargaining, except upon a plan as outlined and suggested by its Board of Directors.”Footnote ²⁷

The Western Union president's intransigence energized the board's employer members. “Mr Carlton's position in being willing to abide by the wishes of the majority of his men is an unassailable position,” asserted Loyall Osborne, “and a Board which is supposed, if anything, to stand for the principles of democracy, would lose its position among fair minded men if it, on technical grounds, refused to endorse so eminently fair a compromise.” To Osborne the NWLB's deliberations disclosed another danger, that “the Board [will] become what I fear it may, the tool of a particular labor union – of labor unionism generally.”Footnote ²⁸ The NWLB's union representatives instead presented the right to organize as an individual freedom. “If the workers have the right to organize,” they stated, “then that right is an individual right to be exercised by one, one hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand.”Footnote ²⁹

Taft, meanwhile, tried to impress on Carlton the favourable aspects of his plan. The board's method of operation, he wrote to the WU executive on 27 May, “contemplates a waiver by employers” of the right to bar unions from the workplace, “just as it contemplates a waiver by employees of the legal right to strike as a method of securing industrial peace.” The board's plan, he continued, would “secure you against the danger of a strike as completely as practical machinery can provide against it.” “By it,” Taft insisted, “you do not recognize the union or deal with it. You deal only with committees of your employees.”Footnote ³⁰ The board, in other words, would take on the role of strikebreaker if necessary, and would actively prevent union recognition, all in exchange for defending the simple act of joining a union.

In the full knowledge that the board's decision would help determine all its future cases, both sides dug in. The employer representatives seized on Carlton's template, while the labour representatives supported Taft and Walsh's alternative. The NWLB's charter required a unanimous vote for all awards. Though this was amended for future cases, in this instance the board wallowed helplessly in deadlock, and its members found agreement only that “it does not seem useful to further prolong mediation. The construction of our principles, as set forth in Mr. Taft's telegram to Mr. Carlton, leads to the conclusion that the Western Union Telegraph Company should accept this compromise as therein stated. It declines, however, to do so.” The only tangible development to come out of the board's deliberations was publication of the cochairmen's report, with Taft crossing sides to join the AFL representatives in ensuring that this passed by majority vote. How quickly things changed, one commentator observed. After all, “this body is composed, with one exception, of the same persons who some weeks ago unanimously acknowledged the right of labor to organize.”Footnote ³¹ Here ended the NWLB's abortive attempt to adjudicate the conflict at Western Union.

The board's failure was only the first chapter in the CTUA's wartime entanglements with state power. It was not initially certain, however, that government would play any further role in the telegraphs. Western Union's public-relations team issued the company's version of events, and Carlton declared that “the principles of the War Labor Board furnish a cloak behind which a propaganda for the unionizing of labor in every industry may be carried on without let or hindrance,” adding in patriotic tones that “at this hour, when the destiny of nations depends upon quick communication, there should be no experiments.”Footnote ³² The fiery executive's bellicose rhetoric won him the approbation of many employers. But it did not endear him to the Wilson administration's labour policymakers, who worried over the CTUA's strike threats and the support Carlton might raise amongst employers against the federal government's peculiar rapprochement with organized labour.

President Wilson, encouraged by Gompers and the AFL, the NWLB's cochairmen, and the secretary of labor, placed the entire communications network under the administration of the US Post Office Department on 16 July. Historians have generally approached Wilson's decree in light of the salutary effect it had on the board's authority and power. It “underscored,” claims Haydu, along similar lines to McCartin, Conner and Dubofsky, “the government's determination to uphold employee rights as well as open shops.”Footnote ³³ Scholars have proved less concerned with the fate of the CTUA, whose experience of federal administration was not a happy one.

Public ownership of the telegraphs, as with other utilities, was a long-standing demand among Progressive reform groups, enjoying strong support from the old Populists, from the AFL, and even from within Wilson's Cabinet.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, Postmaster-General Albert Sidney Burleson had long favoured bringing the telegraphs under the control of his Post Office Department, as he made clear in his 1918 report to Congress.Footnote ³⁵ During the First World War, moreover, Wilson placed the railroads, another vital piece of nationwide infrastructure, under its own federal administration. Although the United States Railway Administration (USRA) faced criticism from rank-and-file militants due to the tardiness and perceived inadequacy of its rulings, membership of railroad unions grew substantially. The Order of Railroad Telegraphers, the most analogous of these organizations to the CTUA, grew from 25,000 to 48,700 members under federal administration.Footnote ³⁶ We cannot directly compare the railroads with the telegraphs, for unions in the former industry, especially the brotherhoods in the running trades, were powerful institutions, large in both absolute and proportional terms and with sizeable political clout.Footnote ³⁷ But the differences between the two federal administrations are certainly suggestive.

The US Telegraph and Telephone Administration, also known colloquially as the Wire Board, was a much different beast than the USRA. Where all the railway arbitration boards included a union component similar to the NWLB, the Wire Board, headed by Postmaster-General Albert S. Burleson, was composed of himself, Solicitor General William H. Lamar, First Assistant Postmaster General John C. Koons and David J. Lewis, a telegraph expert. AT&T president Theodore Vail served as its adviser. Burleson also called upon an “operating board” of four telegraph and telephone executives. No labour representative lay in sight. Nor, indeed, did the telegraphs play host to an arbitration board to regulate labour issues as occurred in shipbuilding, construction or the railroads themselves. In a similar vein, Western Union's entire management stayed where they were. This included Carlton, who, according to his later recollection, was told by Burleson, “I am going to put you in charge of Western Union. And I have only one instruction to give you with respect to labor. Don't let the union sons of bitches get the best of you.”Footnote ³⁸

Unionists were naturally frustrated. In November 1918, CTUA official Harry Tompkins appeared before the board in a vain attempt for redress, and explained the union's concerns. Burleson “allowed both companies to maintain their business along individual lines,” Tompkins argued. “While the government is ostensibly in control,” he emphasized, “they are not actually in control.”Footnote ³⁹ The secretary of the the St. Paul, Minnesota Trades and Labor Assembly went even further, describing the Wire Board as a “strikebreaking agency pure and simple.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Wire Board, more cover for Western Union than an actual administrative body, was in many ways worse for the Telegraphers’ Union than the status quo ante bellum, as Burleson's contemporary and fellow federal officer Alexander Bing recognized. “Company officials who had been fighting the demands of the workers before the war,” he pointed out, “were thereby changed into officers of the government whose decisions it was much harder to oppose.”Footnote ⁴¹

Scholars have laid most of the blame for this state of affairs on the Postmaster General's abrasive personality. “An autocrat with a fragile ego … [and] ill-equipped to keep a labor force content,” according to Valerie Jean Conner; a “walking, talking, political disaster,” argues Thomas Fleming, “hated by management for his provincial Texas hostility to big business and detested by workers because he discriminated against unions.”Footnote ⁴² Wealthier than the rest of Wilson's cabinet, the pugnacious Texan was hardly a model employer in his own backyard. Not only did his own cotton plantation profit from prison labour; if a 1909 investigation by the Texas State Penitentiary Investigating Committee can be believed, his managers also frequently used the whip to discipline recalcitrant inmates.Footnote ⁴³ Nor did his tenure as Postmaster General bode well for the CTUA. Burleson detested the very idea of public-sector unions, and repeatedly and publicly urged the repeal of legislation allowing government employees to organize provided they did not strike. These unions were, he fulminated, “a menace to public welfare and should no longer be tolerated or condoned.” On these grounds it is likely that Carlton was particularly amenable to placing the telegraphs under the Postmaster General's tutelage. Indeed, Burleson's frequent public thunderings against organized labour were liberally quoted in Carlton's own defence of Western Union's stand against the Telegraphers’ Union.Footnote ⁴⁴ In an administration already struggling to cope with the exigencies of war, and with Burleson necessary in political terms as a key representative of the southern wing of Wilson's Democratic Party, the Postmaster General was able to impose his own views on the Post Office Department with the minimum of interference from the Cabinet at large.

AFL leaders, for their part, also recognized Burleson's views when, as nationalization of the telegraphs seemed imminent, they unsuccessfully lobbied President Wilson to replace Burleson with “a progressive man more in line with modern government policies.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Certainly, comparison with Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, the head of the USRA who sought to make a case through his administration for the public ownership of the railroads, does not paint Burleson in a kind light.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet not all the tribulations of the CTUA can be laid at his doorstep. The prewar context, not any differences of outlook between Burleson and McAdoo, was the decisive factor: the imperatives of running an uninterrupted service meant that the Treasury secretary needed to placate the powerful railroad unions; the Postmaster General, on the other hand, had more to gain from working closely with Western Union management than from attending to the needs of the CTUA. Strength followed strength, and weakness led to more weakness. Indeed, even Burleson could in some cases accede to union representation: in the telephone industry, where the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had a strong presence, the Brotherhood's representative sat on the Wire Board's Wage Commission.Footnote ⁴⁷

Burleson's role, in any case, consisted mainly of providing the same old WU managers with new political cover. His order for the restoration to service of discharged telegraphers of 15 August came even as Western Union vice president G. W. E. Atkins announced the eligibility of locked-out unionists for re-employment. This was an important distinction as the latter offer meant wiping their seniority, which determined the access of Western Union employees to the company's welfare schemes. Naturally Atkins's programme prevailed. But this was the least of it, as numerous examples furnished by the CTUA indicated. Managers provided an often imaginative array of pretexts on which to decline the rehiring of discharged unionists, most commonly citing a lack of vacancies – at a time when the telegraph service was in extremely high demand from both private and public sources – or by levelling accusations of drunkenness on the job. Burleson, meanwhile, peppered even his orders against antiunion discrimination with suggestive passages. Half of the preamble to his 15 August order countered the insinuations of unionists that the government desired workers to organize in AFL unions. “These representations,” he declared, “have no foundation in fact whatever.”Footnote ⁴⁸

While the Postmaster General kept the actual administration of the telegraphs at arm's length, Konenkamp kept up a steady correspondence with the NWLB, attempting to convince it to prod the Wire Board into action. “The Western Union telegraph officials continue to discharge men and women who are prominent in our organization without just cause,” he wrote to the NWLB on 25 October, and “protests to the wire board bring no result.” But Burleson kept the NWLB's inquiries at arm's length as well. “While the officials of the telegraph systems are cooperating with us in every way,” he replied tersely, “I regret to say that Mr. Konenkamp is attempting to create discord among the employees and embarrass the Government in every way in the operation of the telegraph lines.” Despite the best efforts of the NWLB's secretary, W. Jett Lauck, and other of its administrative staff, the board on 24 September “decided that this case should be considered as settled.” An internal memorandum in March 1919 buttressed this view, agreeing that Konenkamp's missives were no more than an attempt to have the board lean on Burleson to deliver better wages, hours, conditions and union rights.Footnote ⁴⁹ The irony was exquisite. Unionists had pushed federal administration as the best protection against Carlton's union-busting; now they appealed to other federal bodies against the union-busting of the federal administration.

“Industrial democracy,” as Joseph McCartin and other scholars have so ably demonstrated, was the great watchword of wartime labour relations. This term, they argue, was best encapsulated through the board's creation of shop committees, independent of unions and employers, and designed to permit workers to voice concerns directly to management.Footnote ⁵⁰ Under federal administration, Western Union provided an alternative application of industrial democracy, one that deserves further exploration elsewhere in wartime American industry: the company-initiated employee representation scheme or, less euphemistically, the company union. In the 1920s, after the defeat of the postwar strikes, company unions were a defining feature of the industrial-relations landscape.Footnote ⁵¹ As nationalization became increasingly likely in June, Carlton went ahead with his May proposal, anticipating postwar developments with his own brainchild: the Association Western Union Employees (AWUE).

The AWUE described itself as “neither a trade union, nor a workers union,” but a “voluntary association of individuals in the employ of the Western Union Telegraph Company,” and forbade strikes and membership in the AFL. This thinly veiled rival – or, more precisely, replacement – for the CTUA signed nearly half of Western Union's 40,000 employees during its first year.Footnote ⁵² Western Union and the Wire Board openly promoted and advanced this growth. Howell John Harris writes that under the NWLB, “firms could not compel membership of a company union, nor satisfy the requirement that they negotiate by ‘bargaining’ with one while refusing to deal with a representative workers’ committee.”Footnote ⁵³ While in practice this rule often proved blurry, Post Office officials ignored it, and completely undermined the appeal of the CTUA as a prospective bargaining agent by giving the AWUE a place at the negotiating table.

This was carried out with rather unseemly haste. As early as 7 August, less than a week after the federal government assumed control of the wires, AWUE general secretary–treasurer Hayes boasted that his association “had been recognized by Postmaster General Burleson and the War Board.” Hayes quoted the Wire Board exactly one week later as saying, “we will not stand for any outside organization gentlemen; we are heartily in accord with your movement. We will wire Mr. Carlton at once to confer with you in regards to increase. ‘Go back and get it.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ Several days later, WU vice president Atkins announced that only members of the AWUE would have their 10 percent war bonus translated into a direct increase in salary, thus providing long-term pecuniary incentives to joining the new organization.Footnote ⁵⁵

Western Union managers also resorted to even cruder measures. Konenkamp sent a list of 565 locked-out unionists to the Wire Board in August; by November, only those who surrendered their union cards were reinstated.Footnote ⁵⁶ Reports flowed in from all over the country detailing how promotion of the AWUE went hand in hand with continued repression of the CTUA. At the Des Moines, Iowa Western Union office, the chief operator advised CTUA members “to remove their union buttons or they would be reduced in rank and members of the AWE put in their places.” At the New York office, “officers and members of the AWE are being favored with promotions and salary increases, while every means possible are being used to force CTUA members to give up their union cards.” One telegrapher received a particularly frank letter from his local office in Atlanta. “As to re-instatement,” his superior wrote,

One of Konenkamp's accusations serves as a particularly excellent metaphor for the entire tenor of Burleson's stewardship. AWUE propaganda, the CTUA president claimed, was prepared by Western Union management, printed on company stationary, and charged to the federal government as operating expenses.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Wire Board did invite CTUA representatives to a conference to discuss wage adjustments, though union delegates found to their dismay that the conference had taken place a day earlier than their invitation stated. While this subterfuge took place the AWUE and the Wire Board engaged in a similarly comic charade of collective bargaining. The Postmaster General had resisted wage increases for postal workers, declaring them “justly compensated, receiving more than three times as much as those fighting in the trenches.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Evidently the AWUE negotiating team agreed. In October 1918 telegraphers were granted wage increases of between zero and 10 percent, the loss of time-and-a-half pay on Sundays, and the absence of standardized wages or rules governing working conditions. In a time of high inflation this meant a large drop in real wages and offered telegraphers less than previous offers from Western Union.Footnote ⁵⁹ If patriotism provided unionists with an “ideological shield” for their organizing work, as McCartin claims, it also gave employers, including, and even especially, federal ones like the Telegraph Administration, their own ideological sanction for holding down wages through comparison with those “over there.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The Wire Board's award did provide one last ironic twist. Telegraphers found it so inadequate that even the AWUE appealed to the War Labor Board for redress, claiming that the Telegraph Administration had unilaterally worsened the provisions of the award after negotiations ended. The NWLB refused to consider the request, citing procedural problems, while its union members and many staffers suspected a ploy by Carlton to discredit the Wire Board, and thereby return the telegraphs more quickly to private control.Footnote ⁶¹ At the same time, amidst all these struggles “over here,” the war over there finally came to end with the disintegration of Austria–Hungary and German overtures for peace.

The signing of the Armistice saw the CTUA in a worse position than when war first began. Western Union had discharged many of its most active members and local leaders when Konenkamp had taken the NWLB's promises – and powers – too seriously; federal administration had only added to the damage, at the same time nurturing a company union that threatened the CTUA with complete irrelevance. Moreover, this had all occurred when, in general, labour's bargaining position, and self-confidence, were exceptionally strong. With the conflict over, this general position quickly turned on its head as the war stimulus ended and returning servicemen re-entered the labour market. Now, inexorably, CTUA activists turned to industrial action as their final remedy, despite the far less favourable prospects for such a course after the Armistice. Konenkamp initially deployed the threat of strike action only as a bargaining chip. “The willingness of the telegraphers to allow a reasonable time for an adjustment of their grievances,” he had explained to the Wire Board on 28 October 1919, after the wage award had been announced, “has been mistaken by some who doubt their ability to rectify our grievances by force if necessary. We do not favour a course although well able to follow it.” Amongst the CTUA membership, he warned the NWLB in the same month, there was a “storm that is steadily rising and will soon burst.”Footnote ⁶²

But these threats enjoyed scant success. Local unionists, in any case, forced Konenkamp's hand. On 16 February 1919, the CTUA's Philadelphia section called unanimously for a national strike vote, “unless the United States Telegraph and Telephone Administration grants the right of collective bargaining and representation through duly chosen representatives of organized labor, and agrees to adjust all outstanding grievances without further delay.”Footnote ⁶³ Needless to say no such reforms occurred. In March, telegraph messenger boys again showed their new militant spirit, and struck after managers dismissed members of the newly constituted Telegraph Messengers’ Union on account of their affiliations.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the same month, the CTUA, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers all voted for a joint general strike against virtually every telegraph provider. Konenkamp confirmed this to the NWLB, itself by now in the advanced stages of terminal decline, in early April. In May, many consumers joined the clamour aimed at Burleson and his administration after the Postmaster General again hiked telephone and telegraph rates.Footnote ⁶⁵

In June 1919, the storm finally burst. The CTUA struck the government-owned Keystone Telegraph Company on the 3rd. “The sole issue at this time,” Konenkamp emphasized, “is the RIGHT TO ORGANIZE.” On the 11th the union struck Western Union itself, demanding union recognition, higher wages and equal pay for women, and protesting continued discrimination against union members. But these were not the heady days of 1917 and early 1918, and Carlton and Burleson's wartime offensive against the CTUA had taken a readily discernible toll. Union spokesmen put a brave face on events, claiming that “virtually all lines of communication have been paralysed.” Western Union managers, however, proved closer to the truth, stating that “an insignificant percentage of operators obeyed the [strike] order.” Union picket lines were sparsely staffed, and apart from the CTUA's approximately 3,500 remaining members, most telegraphers were swayed less by union solidarity than the managerial promise of bonuses for non-strikers. On 26 June, an AFL committee failed to broker a compromise with the Wire Board, after Burleson had already come to an agreement with the IBEW's telephone workers that left the CTUA isolated. The strike quickly fell to anticlimactic defeat.Footnote ⁶⁶

Burleson was left with the last word. In a remarkable feat of contradictory reasoning, he justified his decision to let Western Union determine the fate of strikers through reference to Taft and Walsh's May 1918 plan, and its provisions against strikes. The fact that Burleson had ignored all the other provisions of this document was left unstated by all except the union. But the CTUA's protests were to no avail, and its precarious beachhead at Western Union was quickly smashed. Konenkamp resigned in favour of pursuing a career in law. Defeat also engendered long-term consequences. Until the late 1930s, when legislation outlawed company unions, the AWUE continued to advance, representing nearly 100 percent of Western Union employees at the time of its demise. The NWLB's weakness, Western Union's strength, and the Wire Board's connivance with management all conspired to consign the CTUA to the wilderness, where it languished until the next global conflict revived its sagging fortunes.Footnote ⁶⁷

The CTUA's wartime story, then, was one of unremitting defeat. But is it representative of wider developments? We would have to ignore all the quantitative evidence detailing the AFL's growing numbers, and the very real gains made in some previously nonunion industries, to answer that question with an unqualified yes. In The State and Labor, the most comprehensive recent treatment of that subject, Melvyn Dubofsky lists the First World War as one of six periods where state action directly aided the cause of labour. “‘Only where unions had been absent in the prewar period, still fought among themselves, or lacked able organizers,” he writes of federal war labour policy, “did the policies of the advocates of the status quo still prevail.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Not for nothing has he written an article describing the war as a period of “abortive reform.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The Western Union case appears in this interpretation as an anomaly. The CTUA, while of course not the most powerful of organisations, was certainly not absent. It possessed good working relations with other unions in the telegraphic and allied industries like the ORT and IBEW. Its leaders, if ultimately ineffectual when it came to advancing the CTUA's position in wartime, were committed and relatively competent. Yet unlike many other industries – previously organized or not – where unions did make great strides, thanks directly or indirectly to state intervention, federal intervention had purely negative consequences. This does not overturn the arguments of Dubofsky, McCartin, Haydu and Conner that, in general, state involvement in labour relations led to gains for (AFL) unions. These scholars do also deal with the ambiguous nature of this involvement, and mention the reverses as well as the successes of the Federation in wartime.

The question here is one of emphasis. While Haydu is inclined to treat struggles like those of Western Union and elsewhere as largely (but not only) a function of their prewar industrial-relations context, the others present a narrative emphasizing (ambiguous) gains and reforms during wartime, and (equally ambiguous) defeats after the Armistice. Thus the Western Union case, and particularly the nationalization of the telegraphs, is dealt with largely for the ways in which it contributed to the NWLB's power, and not so much for the effects of these events on the telegraphs and telegraphers themselves. Yet the CTUA's wartime history, while it does not in any way overturn the reality and urgency of what McCartin describes as a wartime struggle over “industrial democracy,” does nevertheless help to qualify this struggle. After all, the sum total of industrial democracy enjoyed by CTUA telegraphers consisted in their isolation and dismissal by management, not only tolerated but also directly encouraged by the federal telegraph administration, and the establishment of what was a virtually compulsory company union, again given material aid from federal sources. Industrial democracy was not absent from the telegraphs – but it came in a rather undemocratic form, and from antiunion management. More research concerning other industries than those – metalworking, carpentry, shipbuilding and the like – generally approached in studies of wartime labour would help better elucidate whether the Western Union case was indeed so anomalous as it is usually portrayed.

Another way to view the war years, and one which complements and adds to, rather than substitutes for, existing scholarship, would be to approach Dubofsky's question in reverse. How did federal intervention play out in industries where unions were absent, or fought among themselves, or lacked able organizers? Not so well, as Dubofsky implies. Or, to go further, were there other unions who met his conditions and yet found federal intervention far from salutary? The lumber industry, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), provides one analogy. Lumber and the telegraphs were very different industries. Both were large employers, however, and during the war both industries played host to new labour organizations antagonistic to independent unions. In the telegraphs this was the AWUE, created by Carlton but greatly aided by the Wire Board. In lumber this was the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen.

The 4Ls, as it was known, was the direct creation of the federal government, a coercive body designed to counter the IWW's successful organizing efforts. Like the AWUE it renounced the strike, and considered itself more concerned with supporting the efforts of management: in its early months, Robert Tyler writes, “the only real function of the [4Ls] local was to meet production quotas, foster patriotism, and perhaps manage a suggestion box.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike the AWUE, the 4Ls demanded a patriotic and martial pledge of allegiance from all of its members, many of whom were actually federal soldiers brought in when IWW disruptions proved too effective. In subsequent years the 4Ls proved more effective than Carlton's body at resolving some of the grievances of its coerced members.Footnote ⁷¹ But one decisive similarity bound the two organizations together. Both emerged in industries where federal officials found no bargaining agents deemed credible or acceptable. The IWW proved too radical, the CTUA too weak. Yet the President's Mediation Commission, the NWLB and countless other federal agencies and organs proclaimed the necessity of some kind of collective bargaining. Federal officials in lumber and the telegraphs paid their respects to this call for industrial democracy, at least formally. They created bargaining agents out of whole cloth or assisted at their birth.

The experiences of the IWW, the CTUA or other unions who lost heavily from federal intervention are, of course, present in the writings of recent historians concerning the war years. Present as well are examples of employers using wartime to introduce nonunion representation schemes like Carlton's. The case of Midvale Steel, whose president, William B. Dickson, successfully diverted the overworked NWLB's call for industrial democracy towards company unionism in wartime, has been covered in a number of different works, including McCartin's.Footnote ⁷²

Historians of wartime labour have also charted in detail the rise of the “American Plan,” based on the exclusion of independent labour organizations and, to some extent, on company unions, which prevailed throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁷³ What the Western Union case illustrates is the degree to which the American Plan was as much a product of the war years as was the new, more labour-friendly industrial order eventually consummated through the New Deal. In other words, at the same time when organized labour – at least, those unions that weren't repressed out of existence or, like the CTUA, left to the attentions of hostile managers – saw definite gains and hoped to consolidate them after the war, the outlines of the industrial order of the 1920s had already emerged in some industries in the midst of wartime, and with federal help.

This is, again, mainly a question of emphasis and not of wider interpretation per se. Scholars who deal more with the repressive aspects of wartime federal policy are more likely to view the war period in a negative light than those whose subject matter largely concerns the organs of state–labour cooperation like the NWLB and other federal arbitration agencies. There might also be other concerns at work. Joseph McCartin, who amongst others has so reinvigorated the study of labour and the state in wartime, argues that the contemporary revival of organized labour rests largely on the redevelopment of a “strong regulatory state.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His writings and those of other scholars provide this view with a persuasive historical foundation. It might also be worth insisting that a “strong regulatory state” carries with it a raft of repressive organs and agencies that, in the last several decades at least, have proved far more resilient and powerful than those which hitherto aided the growth of organized labour. This is not to conflate the present with the past, and McCartin adds that behind this regulatory state there must exist a strong political will, one that is currently lacking. But we are concerned here mainly with the effects of federal policy and agencies and not with their intent. And as Konenkamp and the CTUA found during wartime, questions of emphasis could prove important indeed.