The Making of:
In the early to mid 1980s, I was trying to work out what my next project would be, after The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). I started out thinking that I would do a similar period-focused work on nationwide industrial relations history, probably on the Progressive Era and First World War, i.e. I did not have any very clear ideas, so thought I could build on (repeat?) what I knew. However, I was better at writing fellowship applications for this work than actually doing it, probably because no clear shape, structure, or purpose began to emerge from all of the reading that I did. So I was very content to take Dave Brody's suggestion that, if I was interested in business thinking and behavior during the Open Shop Era, I should look into the records of a local employers' group, the Metal Manufacturers Association of Philadelphia (MMA), which had recently come into the public domain. This gave my work its necessary focus.
But I always knew that I wanted to set a local case-study in a national context -- the only thing that could give it a point -- so I kept doing plenty of reading about that context as well as getting deeply buried in relevant archival materials about business and labor in the Philadelphia metal trades. As I read, I kept coming across references to an industry I had hardly encountered before, except via mentions of the work of William Sylvis, founding president of the Iron Molders' Union, in a labor history course I did as a graduate student, and in David Montgomery's Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967), one of the first American history books I had read as an undergraduate. The industry was stove making, the craft was stove molding. Its significance for labor relations history was that the industry was the site of one of the first, and most successful, employers' associations and national collective-bargaining contracts in the United States. As such, it provided a model for other metal-trades employers when they too confronted the challenge of labor in the turn-of-the-century conflicts from which the MMA was born. So I reckoned that, in order to explain the MMA's origins, one of the things I needed to do was to tell the stove trade's story.
The reading underpinning this chapter began in the mid-1980s, and there was probably a very early draft of this at about the same time, because I had the opportunity to discuss it with David Montgomery himself, when he was a visiting professor at Oxford. The version made available here is the one that I submitted to Cambridge University Press in 1995, but in origin it was the oldest piece of the book. The submitted draft book MS had many problems, but the greatest of them was length. In order to make the thing publishable, plenty had to go, including this chapter. But I knew that there was a story to come back to.
Extras:
[t.b.a.]