The structure and purposes of this chapter are simple. The MMA was born of and for conflict; this chapter is a narrative of a decade of employer–employee confrontation in the Philadelphia metal trades, where the MMA strove to implement the strategy of both of its parent organizations, the NFA and the NMTA. The MMA emerged victorious, its members' supremacy over their workers quickly, cheaply, and almost bloodlessly reestablished. The chapter's interest lies largely in the detail. When, how, and why did employers provoke, fight, and win strikes? How difficult was it to battle against organized labor, how much did it cost, and what were the results? How vital were violence and the law to achieving desirable outcomes? When, why, and with what effect did the MMA add political action to its defensive armory? At the end of the period, the MMA would be recognized by friend and foe alike as, in the words of its third president, Edward Langworthy, “one of the fixed and important factors in the business life of Philadelphia,” which had “the respect of those whom it has opposed” and on whom it had exercized a “wholesome and restraining influence.” Behind the temperate language lay some drama.

EARLY VICTORIES, 1904–1906

The MMA went into business at a good time for a fledgling organization to confront its first major test. The year 1903 had been what the Philadelphia core-makers' business agent John Clarke called “the most successful … in the past decade for the core maker, and … his Brother molder,” which was what had enabled the IMU to strike such a hard bargain with local NFA members that summer (see Figure 3.2).