"At the beginning of the year 1907," recalled August Blesch, secretary of the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company and the president of the Employers’ Association of Detroit (EAD), "the business agents of the various unions were wearing ‘smiles that would not come off,’ and at every opportunity they volunteered the information that in the early spring organized labor was going to put the Employers' Association out of business.” 

In 1903, Frank Bartlett, the general manager of the Ideal Manufacturing Company, signed the charter of the Employers’ Association of Detroit, making Ideal one of the 73 founding members of the EAD.  Within two years, both Bartlett and Ideal would find themselves at the center of one of the most protracted labor battles of the early 1900s. 

In the summer of 1983, I had the opportunity to sit down and record an interview with Employers’ Association of Detroit (EAD) Vice-President Kenneth Porter the year before his retirement.  Porter, who had been with the EAD since the early 1950s, was immensely knowledgeable about the history of the association and labor relations in Detroit more generally.  I vividly recall his description of the EAD in the period after its founding in late 1902:

Chester Murphy Culver served as the general manager of the Employers’ Association of Detroit (EAD) from 1916 to 1952.  Long before he took that position, however, he was intimately connected to the people who created the EAD in 1902. 

When a small group of employers gathered in December, 1902, to form the Employers’ Association of Detroit (EAD), one of their top priorities was to create and staff an employment (or labor) bureau that would provide them with reliable information about the workers passing through their shops.  “If a man is an agitator and trouble breeder you will know it when you hire him (and that is a good time to find out,” noted Henry Leland.  “If he is lazy, if he is a...