In re Debs

In re Debs, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 27, 1895, unanimously (9–0) upheld the government’s use of the injunction against a labour strike, specifically the Pullman Strike (May 11–July 20, 1894).

After the Pullman Palace Car Company, led by George M. Pullman, cut the wages of its workers by 25 percent (in response to the depression of 1893), about 3,000 workers, organized in the American Railroad Union (ARU), walked off the job. An effective nationwide boycott of Pullman cars by ARU members was organized by the union to support the strike. By June 30, 125,000 American railway workers on 29 railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars.

The president and founder of the ARU, Eugene V. Debs, was concerned about the anger expressed by the workers and sent numerous telegrams to the union locals, urging them to avoid violence and not to stop entire trains. On June 29 Debs spoke at a large peaceful gathering in Blue Island, Illinois, to secure support from fellow railroad workers. After he left, however, groups within the crowd became enraged, set fire to nearby buildings, and derailed a locomotive, which (unfortunately for the strikers) was at the head of a U.S. mail train. This greatly upset Pres. Grover Cleveland, because the strike had now prevented the federal government from exercising one of its most important responsibilities, and he vowed to prevent any disruption of the U.S. postal service.

Acting on orders from U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney, federal attorney William A. Woods sought an injunction against the strike and boycott. Woods chose a judge whom he knew to have antiunion sentiments, Peter S. Grosscup. On July 2 Grosscup issued an order preventing ARU leaders from “compelling or inducing by threats, intimidation, persuasion, force or violence, railway employees to refuse or fail to perform duties.” The injunction, which Grosscup based on both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act, also prevented the ARU leadership from communicating with their subordinates.

In early July, Illinois Gov. John P. Altgeld sent in companies of militia to quell any rioting. President Cleveland, in response to a request by Olney, ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago on July 3, despite Altgeld’s insistence that the president’s order was unconstitutional. The strike ended within the week, and the troops were recalled on July 20.

The strike, at its peak, involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states and about 10,000 federal and state troops and police. The ordeal cost the railroads millions of dollars in lost revenue and in damaged and looted property. The striking workers lost more than $1 million in wages, and 12 people were killed in the process.

On July 7, at the height of the violence, federal officers arrested Debs and four other ARU leaders, releasing them on $10,000 bond. They were accused of being in contempt of court for violating the terms of the injunction by continuing to interfere with the railroads. Debs had indeed broken the terms of the injunctions, which were so strict as to forbid any communication with the striking workers. Debs and the others would face two trials, one in civil court for failing to obey the injunction and the other in criminal court for criminal conspiracy. Eventually the government abandoned the criminal charges, but Debs and his codefendants, all officers of the ARU, stood trial for violating the injunction.

At the heart of the government’s argument was a stack of telegrams Debs had sent, dozens every day, to ARU locals. Even though nearly all of them counseled restraint and abjured violence, they did urge union leaders to get the men to strike and boycott.

Debs and his counsel tried to argue that the union leadership itself had never been involved in seizing any railroad property or engaged in violence, and they were therefore not in contempt of court and had not violated the injunction. But the close ties between the government attorneys, the railroads, and federal judges made the union’s argument futile. On December 14, 1894, U.S. circuit court judge William A. Woods ruled that Debs and the others were in contempt of court for violating the original injunction issued on July 2. The long opinion written by Woods displayed his antiunion views. He ordered the defendants to serve three to six months in the McHenry county jail in Woodstock, Illinois. They remained free on bail, however, while their attorneys, who by now included Clarence Darrow, took an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On March 25 and 26, 1895, Darrow, former senator Lyman Trumbull, and the distinguished Chicago attorney Stephen Gregory argued for Debs and his fellow defendants. Attorney General Olney, Assistant Attorney General Edward Whitney, and U.S. attorney Edwin Walker represented the government.

The union’s lawyers emphasized three main points. First, the notion of a judge charging a man with an offense, even a civil offense, and then another judge finding guilt and imposing a jail sentence deprived the defendants of one of their basic constitutional rights: trial by jury. Second, the injunction had not been narrow but was so broad that it struck at what everyone acknowledged to be part of the freedom of labour, the right to go on strike against intolerable conditions. Judge Grosscup had not been trying to prevent damage but to cripple the ability of Debs and others to protest against the Pullman company. Finally, Darrow attacked the very idea that the Sherman Antitrust Act, aimed at the predatory practices of industrial corporations, had ever been meant to apply to labour unions.

The government argued that the case should never have been accepted by the Supreme Court, since it lacked jurisdiction. The contempt citation was “interlocutory”—that is, provisional or temporary, and not final—and only final decrees could be appealed to the Supreme Court. Many observers believed that this technical point was raised only to give the justices an excuse to dismiss the case as improvidently accepted and thus avoid a ruling. The real heart of the government argument, however, was that the circuit court indeed had the power to issue such a sweeping injunction, since the union leaders were challenging the authority of the federal government. The government had not only the power but the responsibility to protect interstate commerce and the delivery of the U.S. mail. The Supreme Court should affirm what the lower court had done, since “similar conditions are likely to arise in the future.” The government also emphasized that this was not a criminal case; it was not trying to label a strike a “criminal conspiracy,” and in fact the government abandoned its efforts to try Debs and the others under that charge.

On May 27, 1895, two months after oral argument, Justice David J. Brewer delivered the unanimous opinion of the court, which, as everyone had expected, upheld the government. He saw two important questions in the case. First, did the federal government have the power to prevent obstructions of interstate commerce and the transportation of the mail? Second, did a federal court have the authority to issue an injunction in support of those efforts to protect interstate commerce and mail delivery? It was clear by this point that the court had completely rejected all of the arguments made by the defense team. This was how Attorney General Olney had wanted the case decided—not on whether workers had a right to strike but on whether the federal government could respond.

Brewer left no doubt that the U.S. Constitution unambiguously gave the federal government powers relating to interstate commerce and the mail. “The strong arm of the national government,” Brewer wrote, could be used to “brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails.” This “strong arm” included the army and state militia, which had in fact been called out against the strikers.

Brewer developed the idea that the injunction was a special form of relief that could be used to prevent irreparable damage to property that could not be adequately compensated in later actions at law. This use of the injunction had long been available to private parties, but Brewer expanded its use to protect public rights and to punish public wrongs. In doing so, he significantly enlarged the federal courts’ “equity jurisdiction” and gave the federal and state governments powerful tools to use against labour.

Brewer made it clear that he disapproved of the strike. The workers, he argued, along with the strikers and the union leaders, had all been wrong in the Pullman dispute; in an increasingly industrialized United States, workers should rely on the courts and the legislatures to protect their interests.

In re Debs contributed to a widely held belief that the Supreme Court was simply a tool of the wealthy and big business. The effects of the Debs case lingered: for the next 40 years business interests hostile to labour unions found the courts willing partners in suppressing strikes through injunction. Following the Great Depression, however, the union movement grew in numbers and power, laying the groundwork for a change in labour relations. In 1932 Congress passed the Norris–La Guardia Act, a landmark legislation that affirmed the freedom of association of labour unions and stripped federal courts of the power to issue injunctions in labour disputes.

The best single book on the subject is David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (1999). Liston Edgington Leyendecker, Palace Car Prince: A Biography of George Mortimer Pullman (1992), provides a detailed account of Pullman’s life. Analyses of In re Debs can be found in the older but still valuable Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross (1949); and Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982). The labour troubles of that period are examined in many works; especially good is Gerald G. Eggert, Railroad Labor Disputes: The Beginnings of Federal Strike Policy (1967). There is an enormous amount of primary material in United States Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June–July, 1894 (1895).