ABSTRACT: Open Shop or Open Season on Dallas Workers?: Trade Union Militancy and Management's Response after World War I

As trade union strength reached its peak in Dallas at the end of World War I, a gulf between the city's militant rank-and-file and prosperous union leaders allowed for the co-optation of much of the union hierarchy by business leaders. In their zeal to di scredit aggressive building trades officials, conservative delegates to the Central Labor Council, which represented more than 50 locals, ignored the threat posed by the Open Shop Association and helped undermine the city's largest and most powerful union s.
Dallas building tradesmen ignored the Labor Council's warning to avoid strikes and led twelve affiliated unions representing 5,000 workers in a sympathy strike supporting electrical linemen during the summer of 1919. A riot involving strikebreakers and un ion men, during which a company guard was killed, and demands for unscheduled wage increases by Dallas carpenters, iron workers, and painters alarmed Dallas businessmen. In response, they formed the Open Shop Association.
Labor's relative weakness in Dallas (and throughout much of the southwest) has generally been explained as the result of businessmen's early ability to thwart the establishment of unions. Dallas employers organized to promote open shops forty years after the city's building tradesmen founded their powerful unions. Since Dallas's history remains largely uncharted, however, the characteristics of the city since World War II have been transferred onto over 60 years of virtually unexplored terrain. As a resul t, labor's legacy of aggressive tactics and building trades militancy is not well known. This essay is an attempt to recover a part of that legacy and to explore the historical reasons for the demise of the city's trade unions during the 1920s.