“A New Solution” to the Labor Problem: Making Sense of Anti-union Kidnapping in the Progressive Era

In their efforts to weaken and intimidate organized labor, numerous employers in the Progressive Era embraced a variety of vigilante activities, including kidnapping. The period’s first major kidnapping occurred in Tampa, Florida in 1901, when the Citizens’ Committee snatched thirteen union leaders and forced them on a Honduras-bound boat during a cigar workers’ strike. Although the banished men ultimately made it back to Tampa, the union lost the strike and this managerial technique inspired other employers. Indeed, in 1903, mine owners in Colorado, impressed by Tampa’s cigar manufacturers, kidnaped their own troublemakers, forcing them outside of the community. Numerous newspapers celebrated the activities of these vigilantes, calling the kidnapping of strikers, in the words of the Florida Star, “a new solution” to the so-called labor problem.

Not all kidnapping campaigns were designed to remove labor activists from workplaces. Some employers, working closely with private guards and public authorities, kidnapped union activists because they wanted them jailed. Authorities affiliated with organized employers in Idaho, for example, kidnapped Industrial Workers’ of the World members Big Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone after the 1905 assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg. And Walter Drew, a union-busting architect, helped to kidnap union activist John McNamara following the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times’s building in 1911. In these cases, the employers wanted these men tried for their crimes.

Employer-organized kidnapping in this “age of reform” illustrates a dark side of managerial history, illustrating the continuity of nineteenth-century styles of vigilantism. While many scholars have insisted that we focus on the emergence of more benevolent forms of management in this period, I insist that we continue to focus on employer forms of thuggery.