Between 1890 and 1930, St. Louis emerged as a center of the electrical industry independents, small- and medium-sized companies that were on the margins of the highly concentrated electrical products markets.

GE and Westinghouse, headquartered in New York City and Schenectady , respectively, controlled the production of large generators, turbines, and huge motors, the core products of the industry, as well as some of the key manufacturing components such as copper.

Left: Wagner Plant, in 1917.

Wagner Electric, Emerson Elecric, and Century Election, companies that were known by the 1930s as the "big three" of the St. Louis independents, carved out a niche in smaller motor and electrical products.

They owed that success to their ability to maintain staunch antiunion policies throughout the region's labor market.

By 1913, Wagner's Wellston plant in St. Louis's northwest industrial corridor was the third largest and the most modern in the country. Note the athletic fields outside the plant.

Wagner located its modern plant in Wellston, at the time the growing St. Louis metropolitan area's northwest industrial corridor. The photo at the right is from the early 1920s.

Herbert Wagner came to St. Louis in 1887 to set up a power plant turbine for Westinghouse.

In 1890, bankrolled by "old money" financiers of the dry goods and warehouse industry, Wagner and engineer Francis Schwedtman founded Wagner Electric.

Wagner Electric's first products were motors used to power small appliances. Wagner expanded from a small shop in downtown St. Louis to a burgeoning local enterprise with national market outlets for its transformers and other products.

The company was one of the largest employers in St. Louis 's diverse manufacturing base, growing to forty-five hundred workers thanks to war production contracts during World War I.

514 Elm Street location, 1891

Some of Emerson's workforce in the mid 1890s

By the 1920s, Emerson Electric and Century Electric would join Wagner to form the "big three" of the independents, but they were much smaller enterprises until World War I.

Emerson Electric was established in 1890 by brothers Charles and Alexander Meston, leaders in motor development. In 1892, railroad magnate Herbert Parker bought controlling interest in a partnership with the Mestons. Parker was president and then general manager until 1920.

Emerson started as a producer of fractional horsepower alternating current motors.

By the 1920s, with almost twenty-five hundred employees, it was "one of the largest manufacturing plants making electric fans in the U.S. " Fans remained its most important consumer product line until World War II.

Emerson remained in St. Louis 's downtown manufacturing corridor until the 1940s, in the area around its main plant facility.

Century Electric, 1921, at 18th and Pine

A two-ton boulder found its way onto the streetcar line in a St. Louis workers' neighborhood, revealing labor's spatial base of power in the city. Photo courtesy Missouri Historical Society Pictorial Collections, Henry F. Stege photo.

Although the strike was eventually lost, it inaugurated a period in which St. Louis labor remained at the center of the antimonopoly campaigns, the most important opposition movement to business in the Progressive Era.

During the strike, the business elite formed a posse comitatus, (left) an exhibition of their determination to protect property rights.

Understanding that the labor movement was a threat beyond the workplace, they viewed control of the urban labor market as linked to larger issues of political and cultural power.

Left: Posse Comitatus, St. Louis Street Car Strike, photo by George Stark, courtesy Missouri Historical Society;

After 1904, the local business strategies were framed by officials of businessmen's organizations, like the Citizen's Industrial Association (CIA) and the St. Louis branch of the National Association of Metal Trades Association, (MTA or NMTA)

Wagner Electric managers were the main organizers of the MTA and remained the driving force in the Midwest until the 1920s.

Closely tied to the St. Louis financial elite, Wagner Electric organized the local open shop drive until the 1920s.

The MTA was affiliated with the National Metal Trades Association (NMTA), which Wagner's president, Waldo Layman led as president from 1913 to 1914.

Electrical and machine manufacturers in this era focused on community-level control.

The NMTA served mainly as a clearinghouse for those locally developed strategies. medium-sized companies were on the front lines.

The strength of the working-class community as demonstrated in the 1900 streetcar strike inclined employers to tread carefully.

Over the next two decades, business attempted to meld civic interests with business interests. The local MTA negotiated generous agreements that satisfied the craft unions, thereby undermining the more radical strategies of labor. But with the conclusion of the World's Fair, these employers aimed to reestablish the open shop.

Ferdinand Schwedtman, general superintendent at Wagner Electric and the "right hand" of the James Van Cleave, CIA leader in St. Louis. In 1910, Schwedtman became president of the local association and was a national CIA and the National Association of Manufacturer's leader as well.

Waldo Layman, head of Wagner Electric and the St. Louis MTA, as well as president of the National Metal Trades Association 1913-1914

In order to gain control of the labor market in a diverse industrial base such as St. Louis , the "militant minority" of metal trades employers, who orchestrated the antiunion drive, allied with other local employers though the Citizens Industrial Alliance.

The St. Louis capitalists who established the CIA shared a vision of growth for St. Louis that linked control of civic affairs and the labor market with market dominance of their southern economic periphery and the foreign trade market in Latin America .

This worldview assumed the interdependence of low local wages for unskilled workers, the utilization of labor from the southern geographical periphery, the drive to compete with or transfer capital from the East, and imperialist exploitation.

James Van Cleave , founder and leader of the St. Louis CIA

James W. Van Cleave, a stove manufacturer and founder of the national CIA, which fostered other city-based organizations, coordinated the St. Louis branch St. Louis MTA employers helped to organize and coordinate the CIA, both locally and nationally.

Left: Application for membership in the Citizens' Industrial Association.

The rhetoric of citizenship and community was designed to suggest that the anti-union drive was for the good of the community, and that boycotts were subversive.

The CIA's main target was the extraordinarily effective St. Louis workers' movement boycott strategy, which had been used to organize the brewery workers.

In 1904, after a period of peace during the St. Louis World's Fair, the St. Louis CIA initiated its open shop drive, in coordination with the MTA and other local business groups such as the shoe and garment employers organizations.

The MTA refused to meet with craft unions to negotiate agreements for 1905 and instead announced that it would operate only under a new set of shop rules--no restrictions on output, no limits on apprentices, and no union control over the type of wage payment plan.

Machinists responded righteously: "They do not consult their employees, nor stop to consider whether it is right or wrong, but acting on [the belief] that the Lord in His infinite wisdom gave to the employers the right to lay down laws, rules and conditions and fix prices under which honest men should toil, adopt a set of shop rules and tell us to accept them, whether we like them or not."

Workers bitterly recognized "the hand of Mr. Ferdinand Schwedtman," who, they charged, aimed "to force all other employers to be as unfair to their employees as he is to his." The "men and women who have sacrificed their positions to make this world a better place to live in" were all threatened by the CIA's designs. The machinists promised a fight and even threatened a general strike but reneged when it was evident that they were not strongly enough organized.

Below: the CIA's agenda and principles sought to make boycotts and sympathy strikes and even the union label seem subversive plots. For workers, limiting production protected jobs and was part of a moral code that most adhered to in order to protect their wage levels. For employers, it was an outrageous grab at power that they had to collectively fight in order to reign in radical labor ideas.

Below: St. Louis Bishop John Glennon's letter of support for the CIA. The CIA worked to gather community leaders to its fold.

The Catholic Church's opposition to socialism brought it into coalition with the CIA.

The Church's encyclical doctrines caused some clergy to become involved with workers' causes; to the top officials this also meant fighting radicals vigorously for the hearts and minds of workers. Many priests, such as Father Timothy Dempsey, were concerned with the means of diminishing class conflict, and this led them to mildly support strikes, as long as workers pledged to keep radicals at a distant.