The postwar years took a heavy toll on radical activists' influence in the labor movement, and this affected the conceptualization of the union movement as a contest for power.

The decline of the Left as a vital factor in the local labor movement was related to national and international developments. The Bolshevik Revolution in the Soviet Union, which provided a new focus for employer and governmental attacks against radicals led to an entrenched domestic anticommunist. Radicals were labelled as a force for a foreign terrorist plot to take over America. In addition, factional battles between Socialists and Communists contributed to the declining influence of both groups in the local AFL, although the Communist Party remained numerically insignificant in St. Louis .

Throughout the 1920s, many of the old Socialists in St. Louis labor declared any chance for the socialist project over. In the 1920s, the kind of linkages between radical groups and labor that had been such an integral component of the local labor movement faded into memory.

It is within this context that the machinists' (IAM) abandoned its two-decades-long drive to organize the leading NMTA firms as a class power struggle, and embraced antiradicalism and racism.

William Fitzmaurice, the head of IAM District 9, is representative of that transformation. He began the decade as a major force in the local Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA) campaign to build a labor party and ran on the American Labor Party ticket in 1922. He joined the Trades Union Educational League (TUEL), which originated in St. Louis to fight the employers' open shop campaigns of the early 1920s, and developed community-based union campaign in the printers and railroad strikes of the early 1920s. The group organized on a ward-by-ward basis for political activity and included members and their wives in strategic boycotts. Fitzmaurice continued to coax the international to organize on an industrial basis and to lower dues for unskilled workers. The significant defeats of the early 1920s, factional battles over the CPPA, the disastrous decisions of the CP that demonstrated Soviet Union control over the organization, as well as hyperpatriotism led him and others toward antipathy to radicalism.

For Fitzmaurice, the 1920s construction boom led him to narrow business unionism; skilled, loyal, white card-carrying union members could secure jobs in construction and machine shops only through him. Fitzmaurice focused on jurisdictional disputes with other construction trades rather than organizing the unskilled to contest for power. He built a prominent place for himself in the CTLU after he abandoned the labor party idea.

His vituperative antiradicalism eclipsed the voices of Socialists in the local body.

By the early 1930s, Fitzmaurice, now a Republican, was elected president of the CTLU, conclusively signaling the end of the earlier era.

As the hopes of the early 1920s faded, Fitzmaurice and other Catholic influentials in the TUEL such as Mary Ryder of the Printers Union, the TUEL's dynamo, and O. E. Jennings, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers representative who had enthusiastically endorsed the organization of women at Wagner, veered toward the more conservative trade unionism represented by the renamed Trades Union Promotional League, which sought to do mostly charitable works and promote buying union label goods.

Ryder declared that unions would bring about the "consumer commonwealth," not the "socialist cooperative commonwealth."

While in the early part of the century electrical and metal workers were part of a radical milieu and workers' culture that manifested itself prominently in workers' institutions, the new working class that entered the electrical manufacturing plants confronted the political economy of control in isolation from radical influences. In other parts of the country, radicals quietly remained in the industry. In St. Louis , both the union and the companies continued to purge radicals and "troublemakers."

During the intense organizing period of war and postwar, hopes for a meaningful industrial democracy, where workers might acquire more power to control their future, had soared. Employers and much of the media (see right) had suggested a need for more democracy in the workplace. But by the end of the 1920s, employers were fully in control in St. Louis and in the nation, and the dreams of democracy and workers control were suspected, associated with "foreign" ideas.

Electrical Workers in the New Era

Electrical manufacturers benefited considerably from the labor market they had helped to forge even as they were eclipsed by the eastern-based oligopoly in the postwar era. The St. Louis independents faced retrenchment in the postwar era, and sought to use their labor policies as a profit ballast.

Emerson's difficulties began when it raised capital for expansion in 1919 and then could not fulfill its obligations during the postwar, and Century's goals of foreign expansion ran head-on against global contraction.

St. Louis companies acquiesced in the larger companies' command of the national market but through the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (established in 1926 with the support of the St. Louis independents) sought a certain portion of the national market for themselves.They made a gentlemen's agreement that allowed the independents and niche producers to remain in the market, as long as the price for products was determined by the large companies, which aimed to stabilize the industry as well as to ensure their control.

By 1930, electrical manufacturing was St. Louis 's second largest manufacturing industry (after automobiles, which rose quickly as St. Louis became an assembly center).

The St. Louis independents workforce was mostly white men, although Wagner Electric hired a substantially larger number of women and black men. Women made up one-fourth of Wagner labor force during the 1920s, and management encouraged marriage between employees. Wagner sometimes employed entire families and financed housing for them. (Some workers remarked that the entire family had to work to survive on Wagner's low wages). Wagner Electric also hired African American men during and after World War I, especially in their foundry divisions and as laborers, increasing their numbers to roughly 10 percent of the company's workforce.

Century Electric kept many of the women the company had hired during the 1916 strike and augmented their numbers slightly during the 1920s, but less than one-quarter of the workforce were women. Emerson Electric, on the other hand, employed only a few women until the mid-1930s, but its wages on jobs that women held at Wagner and Century were substantially lower for men. Other smaller companies such as Maloney and Superior hired men almost exclusively. All plants continued to place a strict prohibition on hiring African American women.

As St. Louis became more integrated into the national and international economy, businesses such as the electrical manufacturers considered the city's lower community wage an essential asset.

The agricultural and mining depressions of the 1920s brought a flow of young rural migrants to the city. The "rural districts [supply] a constant flow of the hard-working classes," promised a Chamber of Commerce advertisement.

Business boosters touted St. Louis's "southern" characteristic of cheap unskilled labor but also advertised flexible skilled labor that some southern cities lacked. The Chamber of Commerce promised that "starting rates for beginners, both male and female, are . . . lower than in other large industrial centers. . . . Common labor rates here are slightly higher than those farther south, attracting to this district the more ambitious and intelligent class of workers." Census bureau statistics confirm these impressionistic statements. St. Louis wages averaged thirteenth out of the largest fifteen industrial areas but were third among these industrial areas in the ratio of value added by manufacture to average wages. Taken together, these statistics indicate that among large industrial cities, St. Louis was one of the most exploitative.

During the postwar Depression, business successfully enlisted city funds to advertise and promote St. Louis "as an economic point of fabrication and distribution" of hemispheric trade. The courting of national corporations was advocated not only to promote St. Louis's economic growth but also as part of a strategy to diversify local industry in order to act as a "ballast" against labor unrest.

The independents relied on a production workforce that was highly flexible, using the labor market as a reservoir from which to accommodate a more erratic production schedule than Westinghouse's or GE's.

To the independents, low wages and speedup remained the key to competing with the larger firms; they relied on this more than on larger scale or systematized production for their profit margins. During the 1920s, despite their varying fortunes and competition between each other on certain product lines, the independents' united behind the "going wage rate in the community."

Workers in the St. Louis electrical industry were among the lowest-paid industrial workers in the country. It was common for women electrical workers to earn fifteen dollars or less per week.

To Frank Abfall, who earned ten dollars for a forty-eight-hour week in 1926 at Emerson, there was not much difference between Emerson and the sweatshop garment factories located nearby. Abfall, studying a 1929 picture of his coworkers in the field winding department, pointed to four people with physical handicaps in order to illustrate his point that "people who did stay had to stay for one reason or another." Abfall's small income combined with that of his widowed mother's washerwoman's wage and his sister's $2-3 weekly pay for housekeeping to allow them to eke out a living, but years later he remembered the painful hardships they endured.

Margaret Entrikin, a Wagner Electric worker who had started work there at age 15 in 1918, echoed Abfall. To work at the electrical plants "you had to be the type who would have to work or not eat." But in explaining why she and others stayed, she added that "there wasn't very many places to go and they all paid just about the same." 70 Low pay rates thus seemed more immutable because they were, if not universal, preponderant in the community.

In St. Louis, skilled workers were able to secure more stable employment and satisfactory conditions because the labor movement had abandoned the threat to organize the unskilled, who provided employers with a flexible labor supply that they could hire at will and abandon easily. Employers traded more decent wages for the skilled for this tacit political agreement.

The companies hired young temporary workers for peak production periods and selected from that group to promote to more steady employment. Century Electric claimed a workforce of two thousand; actually it hired three thousand workers during peak production, and most of its fifteen hundred steady employees experienced regular layoffs and a precarious employment situation.

All three companies structured their policies to build loyalty among core groups of workers, especially skilled and selected semiskilled workers. Those who were cultivated for loyalty were promised the benefit of steady employment, a type of seniority system (though still based on the foreman's sometimes arbitrary oversight), and a week's vacation with pay.

In 1923, when Roy Hoffman was hired at Emerson during the seasonal upswing, his foreman warned him that the company filled its "regular" positions with those workers who had the "best work habits." "Once you were twenty years old," Hoffman attested, "and had demonstrated that you could control your habits and cooperated with the foreman in terms of production," there was more steady employment.

According to Charles Slezak, who was hired in 1918, the foremen were the "absolute masters."

The practice of cultivating a portion of loyal workers who received steady employment and favorable treatment while relying on a steady influx of new workers who had to prove themselves or who considered their stay as temporary made practices based on solidarity difficult.

Photos kept by Wagner's personnel department indicate management's sense of the unevenness of power: one photo of an assembly line is labeled "Speeding Up Work."

Signs in the factory declared "Boys and Girls, You Have Done Fine!" amidst charts that evidenced the human element behind enormous productivity increases.

Wagner was not hesitant to document the human cost in its personnel photographs, including dozens of photos of severed fingers.

In another, a boy with an arm severed at the shoulder looks on blankly, followed by a photo of a sign on a machine that reads, "This is a dangerous machine."

All three companies experimented with what was touted as "industrial democracy," an employees representation plan or works council, in response to the wartime union drive. The plans claimed to give workers a voice without the "outside interference" of unions. Workers for a time used them as vehicles for their grievances, but when the union drive was crushed, Wagner and Century abandoned their plans. Emerson, however, retained its plan, believing it useful to contain worker discontent and as a vehicle for explaining the company's perspective to its workforce.

Signs of discontent among St. Louis electrical workers continued, manifested in short-lived strikes among portions of the workforce at Emerson in 1925 and 1929, at Century in 1926 and 1928, and at Wagner in the mid-1920s.

Frank Abfall remembered his feelings of powerlessness as he and other workers watched "from the window" with sympathy for the winders who walked out of Emerson in 1929. Others later vouched that "morally, the whole shop supported the strike, but there was no organized leadership to coordinate the action."

Lloyd Austin remembered "learning the ropes" at Emerson in the 1920s as a time of confused bitterness. "I remember learning about this stuff in high school, about the great American system, you know. Then, I went to work [at Emerson] and I started to see right away that what I had been told was a lot of bunk.. . . I knew something was wrong. But it wasn't until we started organizing [in the 1930s], when I met people like Bill Sentner and Bob Logsdon and Lou Kimmel . . . , that I could understand it, make sense of it. It was like a lot of bitterness, but nothing to do about it."

Austin 's comments reflected the eradication of the alternative visions from the industry and from public life in St. Louis .

Electrical industry representatives, the "militant minority" that had been so essential to that campaign, no doubt felt that they had done what was best for the city and for their own prosperity by erecting their own wall of solidarity.

While unions survived into the new era, employers had stamped out the kind of trade union vision that suggested that workers should contest broad power connections between the workplace and the community.

The victory had been won with the acquiescence and support of local, state, and federal government and despite the obvious discontent and vigorously sustained--though hardly unified--protest of a significant number of workers.

Employers in St. Louis were thoroughly effective in eliminating the radical tradition of metal and machine workers by the 1920s, despite evidence of worker discontent. When radicalism emerged again in the 1930s, it arose in significant degrees from outside the industry.