The report to President Nixon submitted on June 11th 1971 by the U. S. Tariff Commission considered the petition of the “Pipe Organ Workers Federal Labor Union, AFL-CIO, with the assistance of the United Furniture Workers of America, AFL-CIO … for a determination of eligibility to apply for adjustment assistance on behalf of production and maintenance workers, members of Local Union 21108, formerly employed by M. P. Moller, Inc., Hagerstown, Maryland.”
The petition had been filed two months earlier by a number of laid-off Moller Pipe Organ workers. The four members of the tariff panel who considered the case were split evenly on the case. Two ruled that foreign imports had not cost the petitioners their jobs; the two others (including George Moore of Maryland) asserted that all four requirements of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 had been met so as to rule in favor of the workers: “(1) Imports must be increasing; (2) The increase in imports must be a result in major part of concessions granted under trade agreements; (3) The workers concerned must be unemployed or underemployed, or threatened with unemployment or underemployment; and (4) The increased imports resulting in major part from trade-agreement concessions must be the major factor causing or threatening to cause the unemployment or underemployment.”
The report informed the President that Smoot-Hawley Tariff had set the rate for organ imports at 40%, reduced to 35% the next year, then to 25% in 1936 and 17.5% in 1939. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) brought the rate down to 15% in 1948, then 10% in 1951. By 1971 it lay at 6%, scheduled to shed another percentage point the following year. Those tariff board members sympathetic cited the flood of organ imports (pipes not human body parts) from Canada that bi-literal agreements had allowed, but also, beginning in the 1950s, the influx of instruments from West Germany and The Netherlands.
The board’s split decision meant that the Moller workers were out of luck. Looming across the ensuing decades were the OPEC oil embargo, the austerities of Carter neo-liberalism with high interests that peaked above 20%. Once the biggest organ company in the world, Moller went bankrupt in 1992 having churned out nearly 12,000 organs across its 120-year history and survived the Depressions of the 1870s and the 1930s, not to mention the Panic of 1893. It was de-industrialization that did Moller in.
Two fascinating books by Bynum Petty, long-time archivist of the Organ Historical Society, chronicle the entrepreneurial spirit of the company’s founder M. P. Moller. Trained as a furniture maker in his native Denmark, he had emigrated to the United States in1872 as an eighteen-year-old with seven dollars in his pocket. He died in 1937 a wealthy man, owner of the world’s biggest organ factory, one that employed hundreds. Along the way Moller had become president of a bank, proof for Petty of his resourcefulness, resolve, even, perhaps, his righteousness.
The title of the first of Petty’s volumes captures the energy of American industry as it approached its peak: An Organ a Day: The Enterprising Spirit of M. P. Möller (Pendragon Press, 2013). That level of output had been achieved in the 1920s, the legion of workers bolstered by a team of hardworking salesmen armed with the company’s belief that all should be able to afford organs—churches, synagogues, funeral homes, auditoriums, cinemas, schools, office buildings and private homes. Petty tells us that Moller was convinced that productivity had been boosted by the 18th Amendment, the sober Dane claiming that “we are indebted to prohibition … for this unusual prosperity in our line of work.”
Moller instruments, most of them of modest size, were sent from sea to shining sea. Large-scale projects were also important for the balance sheet. Crucial contracts came from the military, for whom bigger is and always will be better. In 1910 Moller won the bid for the organ in West Point’s Cadet Chapel. The firm’s Opus 1200, continually expanded over the ensuing decades to its now-nearly 25,000 pipes, purports to be the largest organ in the world in a religious building. The Moller organ built for the Naval Academy boasts a mere 15,000.
Petty’s second book on the company, M.P. Möller: The Artist of Organs — The Organ of Artists richly chronicles technological developments, shifting aesthetic and social conditions, business developments, and economic headwinds. Oral histories of the surviving workers, especially the petitioners of 1971, would make for a welcome third volume in the series. Petty’s subtitle overstates the aesthetic value of these instruments, unless we take that title more as a play on the name of the company’s most popular model that pushed their serial numbers into five digits.
I learned to play on a Moller Artiste organ at the Episcopal church on Bainbridge Island Washington. The instrument had been installed in the 1940s, the opus number somewhere in the high 6,000s. By electric sleight-of-hand the same few sets of pipes (called ranks) were wired up to various, differently named stops so as to give the impression at the console of a much bigger organ with a substantial and varied sonic palette. This ruse couldn’t fool half-way discerning organists.
Though it is hard to tune back into those teenage years and ears, especially after so much subsequent time spent playing historic organs of Europe, I do remember thinking that every pipe of that Moller Artiste produced a hard, industrial sound. There was nothing beautiful about any of it. Like a steam whistle, the instrument had the decibel power to organize the small church’s congregation into corporate song. But Bach’s music, ever-resilient, could not be machined into oppressive blandness by the Artiste, and I learned large chunks of it on that trusty Made-in-America machine.
As often as I could, I took the ferry across the Puget Sound into Seattle to play two foreign imports both arrived in 1965: one by the Dutch firm of Flentrop in the Episcopal Cathedral and the other by the West German firm of von Beckerath. Both of these organs had come from the countries deemed sometime threats, during the disruptive decade cited by those tariff commissioners sympathetic to the unemployed Moller workers in 1971.
These European competitors also used older methods of construction, crucially adopting mechanical action keyboards that let wind into the pipes through an intricate network of slender wood batons (called trackers) rather than the on-off magnets of late-model Mollers. The members of the tariff commission who had denied the laid-off organ workers, concluded that the awarding of contracts to foreign firms resulted from taste and was not driven by economic factors.
Other crucial developments were taking place behind the front lines of these trade wars. A new generation of American builders became interested in antique organs of Europe (and to a lesser extent, those of their own country), and pursued the artistic aspects of their craft as handcraft, rather than maximizing production and sales, even while they had to remain fiscally afloat—an often-precarious endeavor.
Some of these men were seeking refuge from the military industrial complex. Charles Fisk, a Harvard physicist who had been involved in the Manhattan Project, turned to making mechanical action organs. Most of these took years to make. None was made in a day.
John Brombaugh had trained at Cornell as an electrical engineer, then studied with Rudolf von Beckerath in Germany. Brombaugh spent a long career making scrupulous historically, non-electric instruments, one of which from 1978 I also had the good fortune to visit often in Tacoma, Washginton. There I heard the legendary European organists Klaas Bolt and Harald Vogel, from The Netherlands and Germany respectively.
In 1977 another apprentice of von Beckerath in Germany, George Taylor founded a small firm along with John Boody that handcrafted baroque style organs in a repurposed schoolhouse in their rural outpost of Staunton, Virginia.
The Pacific Northwest builder Paul Fritts was taught the trade by his father in Tacoma, but he also learned from and contributed to the projects of his global colleagues. Fritts produced dozens of exquisite organs for the region and for churches and universities across the country; he has also made substantial additions to and renovations of the landmark Flentrop organ in Seattle that I so often played as a teenager. These American firms exported organs to Japan, Sweden, Canada, and England. Artisans from around the world came to study with these masters. On interconnected artisanal, scholarly, and aesthetic levels, these builders reshaped and reinvigorated global organ culture even while being rooted in the local.
What emerged from the wreckage of the organ industry were works of musical art rather than commodities. The lessons to be drawn from these developments in the history of the King of Instruments—one that extends for more than a millennium in Europe and its colonial outposts into the globalized present and perhaps post-globalized future—is that a culture of artistic quality, built on the local but animated by a cosmopolitan openness thrived even as the neo-liberal order toppled the biggest organ company that the world had ever seen. Long before the end, it had been too big not to fail.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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