This book examines how a group of manufacturers of metal products in America's third largest city helped each other to meet the challenges of organized labor (and sometimes an interventionist state) in the half-century between the "second industrial revolution" and the Second World War. It analyzes labor issues by means of a careful local case study, but its conclusions about the interplay of labor, organized capital, law, and the state in determining the fate of workers' rights and employers' interests have broad relevance to the history and politics of twentieth-century industrial relations.