The Gift That Keeps on Giving

This chapter focuses on employer efforts to institutionalize open-shop ideas. It opens by considering the postwar political landscape and employers’ analysis of it. It next turns to shifts in how employers dealt with their workers, exploring modern personnel management, welfare capitalism, and company unions. Finally, it examines the segment of the open-shop campaign that formed the bulk of the National Association of Manufacturers’ expenditures of time and money: publicity. The 1920s publicity push, in accordance with the new emphasis on preparing for the long haul, aimed at entrenching employer ideas everywhere from churches to colleges and universities. In this, it presaged the sophisticated and far-reaching public relations campaigns of the post–World War II era.