The employers’ fight on the political front was in charge of the National Association of Manufacturers.  This association was originally organized in 1895 for the pursuit of purely trade interests, but about 1903, under the influence of the Dayton, Ohio, group of employers, turned to combating trade unions.  It closely cooperated with other employers’ associations in the industrial and legal field, but its chief efforts lay in the political or legislative field, where it has succeeded through clever lobbying and manipulations in nullifying labor’s political influence, especially in Congress.  The National Association of Manufacturers saw to it that Congress and State Legislatures might not weaken the effect of court orders, injunctions and decisions on boycotts, closed shop, and related matters.

The “open-shop movement” in its several aspects, industrial, legal, and political, continued strong from 1903 to 1909.  Nevertheless, despite most persistent effort and despite the opportunity offered by the business depression which followed the financial panic of 1907, the results were not remarkable.  True, it was a factor in checking the rapid rate of expansion of unionism, but it scarcely compelled a retrogression from ground already conquered.  It is enough to point out that the unions managed to prevent wage reductions in the organized trades notwithstanding the unemployment and distress of 1907-1908.  On the whole trade unionism held its own against employers in strictly competitive industry.  Different, however, was the outcome in industries in which the number of employers had been reduced by monopolistic or semi-monopolistic mergers.

The steel industry is the outstanding instance.[68] The disastrous Homestead strike of 1892[69] had eliminated unionism from the steel plants of Pittsburgh.  However, the Carnegie Steel Company was only a highly efficient and powerful corporation, not yet a “trust.”  The panic of 1893 dealt another blow to the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers.  The steel mills of Alleghany County, outside Pittsburgh, were all put upon a non-union basis before 1900.  In Pittsburgh, the iron mills, too, became non-union between 1890 and 1900.  There remained to the organization only the iron mills west of Pittsburgh, the large steel mills of Illinois, and a large proportion of the sheet, tin, and iron hoop mills of the country.  In 1900 there began to be whisperings of a gigantic consolidation in the steel industry.  The Amalgamated officials were alarmed.  In any such combination the Carnegie Steel Company, an old enemy of unionism, would easily be first and would, they feared, insist on driving the union out of every mill in the combination.  Then it occurred to President Shaffer and his associates that it might be a propitious time to press for recognition while the new corporation was forming.  Anxious for public confidence and to float their securities, the companies could not afford a labor controversy.