ABSTRACT
Our work investigates how early twentieth-century American employer organisations drew on the mythology of the frontier and a celebration of up-by-one’s-bootstraps social mobility to justify violent employer and state suppression of labour while glorifying workers who refused membership in labour unions.
We examine two case studies linked to the anti-union Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA). The CIAA was headed by the leading members of employer organisations, though it purported to represent a cross-class movement “For the Protection of the Common People”, as its slogan proclaimed. The first case study analyses the work of Owen Wister, the author of the iconic Western novel The Virginian and a publicist for the CIAA. The second delves into the CIAA’s promotion of several astroturf organisations of “free” (non-union) workers. Both cases show how employer manipulation of the cultural tenets and grassroots appeal of frontier life, social mobility and individualism helped sell an anti-labour and pro-elite message and cast elite-serving collective action as civic engagement while vilifying worker self-organisation as dangerous, unfair to “free workers” and always at risk of tipping over into mob violence.
