During the first decades of the twentieth century, industrialists like William Ward would not raise wages or bow to union pressures, but they were smart enough to know that thugs and guns could maintain social stability only for so long. When the Wards built their New York bakeries, the memory of Jewish bread riots in 1903 and 1905 had not yet faded, and the experience of a widespread 1910 bakery strike was fresh in the minds of many.
