Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Iron Masters
- 3 Laying the Foundations: Peace and War in the Metal Trades, c. 1890–1904
- 4 Combat, Crisis, and Consolidation, 1904–1915
- 5 “The Largest, Strongest, and Most Valuable Association of Metal Manufacturers in Any City”
- 6 Riding the Storm, 1915–1918
- 7 The War After the War, 1918–1923
- 8 Pacific Passage: Quaker Employers and Welfare Capitalism, c. 1905–1924
- 9 A Liberal Interlude: The Modernization of the MMA, c. 1924–1931
- 10 The Deluge: The Great Depression and the End of the Open Shop
- 11 The New World: Accommodation and Adjustment, 1936–1939
- 12 Afterword: “We'll Still Be There. We're Not Going Away”
- Appendix: Databases Referred to in Text: Nature, Sources, Use
- Index
4 - Combat, Crisis, and Consolidation, 1904–1915
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Iron Masters
- 3 Laying the Foundations: Peace and War in the Metal Trades, c. 1890–1904
- 4 Combat, Crisis, and Consolidation, 1904–1915
- 5 “The Largest, Strongest, and Most Valuable Association of Metal Manufacturers in Any City”
- 6 Riding the Storm, 1915–1918
- 7 The War After the War, 1918–1923
- 8 Pacific Passage: Quaker Employers and Welfare Capitalism, c. 1905–1924
- 9 A Liberal Interlude: The Modernization of the MMA, c. 1924–1931
- 10 The Deluge: The Great Depression and the End of the Open Shop
- 11 The New World: Accommodation and Adjustment, 1936–1939
- 12 Afterword: “We'll Still Be There. We're Not Going Away”
- Appendix: Databases Referred to in Text: Nature, Sources, Use
- Index
Summary
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).
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- Information
- Bloodless VictoriesThe Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890–1940, pp. 114 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000