Lesson Learned When Labor Forced the Hand of a Conservative Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court surprised everyone by upholding the Adamson Act in the face of a looming and crippling national railroad strike just weeks before the U.S. entered World War I.

One of the enduring myths about the U.S. Supreme Court is that in its lofty supposed impartiality it is above and immune from popular pressure, politics, or protest.  Of course, since it first asserted the right to rule on the Constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress and executive actions of the President as a Federalist thumb-in-the-eye to Thomas Jefferson, decisions by the court have often been nearly nakedly political.

Over most of its history the Court was in the continuous hands of the most conservative elements of society and naturally served the interests of the national elite from which its members were almost unanimously drawn.  Which is why until the Warren Court shifted into liberal hands, you never heard charges of judicial activism as it routinely struck down social reforms and efforts to regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

But today we are going to tell the all-but-forgotten tale of how a conservative Court bowed before a powerful and united labor movement which had in its hands the power to bring the economy of the United States to a dead halt.

The Supreme Court in 1917—seated, William R. Day, Joseph McKenna, Chief Justice Edward D. White, Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr., and Willis Van Devanter, and, standing, Louis D. Brandeis, Mahlon Pitney, James C. McReynolds and John H. Clarke.

On March 15, 1917, the Court surprised the nation by ruling that the Adamson Act of 1916 which established an eight-hour workday, with no loss in pay, for interstate railroad workers was Constitutionally sound.  The Court voted 5-4 to reverse a lower court decision which ruled the legislation unconstitutional.  The majority cited the emergency nature of the Act and conformity to the “public character” of interstate rail transportation.  It represented a significant broadening of the interpretation of the Interstate Commerce provision of the Constitution in that it covered a government action that went beyond regulation.

What moved the Court in this unexpected direction?  It was simply the sure knowledge that 200,000 members of the Railroad Brotherhoods acting in full cooperation were prepared to go on a strike that would paralyze the nation.

Those same railroad workers had already forced the hand of both the President of the United States and Congress.

The eight-hour workday had been the holy grail of the labor movement for 60 years.  Wage workers in the rapidly industrializing nation routinely worked 12, 11, and 10-hour days, six days a week in often brutal conditions.  Such drudgery dramatically shortened the life expectancy of laborers, disrupted ordinary family life, and contributed to a culture of heavy binge drinking once a week on paydays as a release from the stress and misery of the job.

The Eight Hour Day had been the Holy Grail of the Labor movement since the Civil War as evidenced by this 1906 newspaper illustration.

In the post-Civil War era the National Labor Union, the country’s first national labor body, launched a series of strikes to demand an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages.  Although the strikes failed, Congress was alarmed enough to pass weak 8 Hour legislation in 1868.  But there was no enforcement mechanism, and no proscribed punishments for employers who ignored it.  The law was essentially dead before the ink dried.

In the 1870s and ‘80s the Knights of Labor took up the call.  A nationwide strike for the eight-hour day supported by the Knights and by the craft unions which would later become the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was called for May 1, 1886.  After the so-called Haymarket Riot in Chicago the executed anarchist editors, organizers, and labor leaders who became martyrs to the movement.

For the next decades virtual open class warfare raged in America.  In some local situations and in some industries, the 8-hour day was won—often to be snatched away later when the repeated cycle of panics of those years routinely drove down wages and set workers fighting amongst themselves for the scraps.

In the early 1890’s Eugene V. Debs united craft divided workers into a powerful industrial union, the American Railway Union (ARU).  Their first great victory against the Great Northern Railway included an eight-hour day.  But in 1892 Federal troops smashed the ARU’s Pullman Boycott and sent Debs and his fellow union leaders to jail.  Although the eight-hour day was not an issue in the Pullman affair, the destruction of the ARU effectively ended progress to winning that goal in the railroad industry.

By the early years of the 20th Century the old Railway Brotherhoods, who regarded themselves as the aristocracy of labor, learned the bitter lessons of being divided by craft.  They agreed to act in concert for a new push for the eight-hour day.

The timing could not be better than 1916.  The country had emerged from yet another Panic and was in a solid boom caused in no small measure by the horrible war raging in Europe.  American industry was stepping in to fill a global market disrupted by the war.  It was also in the process of re-arming America in Preparedness in case the country was dragged into the foreign squabble.

The railway unions announced that they were ready to launch a nationwide strike unless they were given an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages and time and a half pay for overtime.  Railroad operators were intransigent but were aware that the Brotherhoods were well organized, had strong rank and file support, and could rely on broad support from the labor movement.

In the White House, President Woodrow Wilson had a problem.  Although he was running for re-election with the boast “He kept us out of war,” he was increasingly convinced that the United States would sooner rather than later be ensnared.  He launched his highly publicized Preparedness campaign to quickly ramp up production of war materials and supplies for a huge new Army and modernized Navy.  A railway strike would disrupt all of that.

Moreover, he had a political problem.  He was running as a progressive Democrat, but unlike 1912, the Republicans were once again united and Deb’s Socialist Party was making serious inroads in his support among urban workers.  He could not afford to force the railroads to continue operations with military force like another Democrat, Grover Cleveland, did in the Pullman Strike.  Such an action would alienate the big city working class without which no Democrat could hope to be elected.  And armed action against the strikers would inflame general anti-war sentiment and threaten national unity he would need to go to war.

Wilson called the Railroad operators and the Railway Brotherhoods together for a meeting at the White House where he offered to act as “an honest broker.”  Wilson proposed the eight-hour workday, but without wage guarantees.  The railroads agreed but the unions balked.  They would not accept a plan that essentially reduced the take-home pay of their members.  They walked away from the negotiations and noisily resumed plans for the strike.

This anti-Wilson political cartoon from 1916 illustrates the pressure on the President over the eight-hour issue before the Presidential elections that year.

Wilson had no good options.  On August 29, 1916, he appeared before a joint session of Congress and demanded emergency legislation to prevent the looming strike.  In a virtual total capitulation to labor he called for the eight-hour day with no loss of wages and the overtime provision which discouraged bosses from simply continuing to schedule long shifts. 

Enabling legislation was introduced by Democratic Congressman William C. Adamson of Georgia.  It sped through congress and passed both houses beating a September 4 strike deadline.

Even though a special commission was set up to allow the railroads to raise their freight rates, which were regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, there was no doubt that the Railroads would turn to the courts to block the new law.  Wilson not only expected it, but he was also pretty sure that the operators would prevail.  He himself vetoed far less sweeping reform legislation in the past based on his constitutional doubts about the authority of government to meddle in private industry.  None-the-less, he directed his Justice Department to defend the expected attacks.

This full-page newspaper illustration shows the owners and managers of the nation's most important railroads united in opposition to the Adamson Act and the pressure they put on Wilson.

The Act was quickly struck down by the United States District Court for Western Missouri.  The unions announced that they would resume preparations for a nationwide strike.  May Day, traditionally tied to the struggle for the eight-hour day, was a likely target which enhanced the possibility that it might even spread into a general strike.

The Justice Department urged the high Court to rapidly consider its appeal.  Questioning lawyers on both sides of the case by the Justices led the press to speculate that the law was doomed.  The Brotherhoods allowed scattered local “wildcat” strikes to occur as demonstrations of power and major rallies and marches were held in cities across the country. The labor and radical press were full of news and offers of support and solidarity.

Finally, on March 15 enough justices bowed to the pressure of an impending national emergency to uphold the Adamson Act by the narrowest of margins.  Chief Justice Edward D. White, a Louisiana Democrat first appointed to the Court by Grover Cleveland and made Chief Justice by William Howard Taft, was the surprising author of the 5-4 majority opinion.

Soon the U.S. was at war. In December Wilson nationalized the railroads for the duration.  They continued to operate under the provisions of the Act, however.  And the law remained in effect after the operators resumed control of their lines.

The war proved to be a body blow to militant labor.  Wilson enthusiastically intervened time and again against strikes in “essential” industries like copper mining and timber.  He equated the most radical wing of the labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the (IWW), major champions of the eight-hour day, with treasonous interference with war effort.  An unprecedented wave of repression stung not only the IWW but Debs and the Socialist Party, and even AFL unions’

After the war was over the great Red Scare saw thousands of labor leaders deported or jailed.

Under those circumstances moves to extend the eight-hour day to other elements of the economy fizzled.  It did not become the law of the land until late in the New Deal when the Fair Labor Standards Act finally went into effect in 1937.

When Open Class War Erupted in the U.S.—The Pullman Strike

In Chicago regular Cavalry escorted mail trains through strike lines with additional heavily armed troops mounted on the engine and the tops of cars.

On May 11, 1894 one of the greatest battles in American labor history erupted as employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company walked off of their jobs to protest wage cuts.  When Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union took up their cause with a national boycott of trains with Pullman cars attached, the strike became a nationwide event.  National Guard and Federal troops were called in to suppress the strike and “move the mails.”

1894 was the nadir of one of those devastating financial panics that erupted with regularity in the 19th Century.  Just outside of Chicago George Pullman, a pious and leading Universalist layman famous as a benevolent and paternalistic employer, deeply cut the wages of the thousands of employees at his railway sleeping car factory.  But he did not also reduce the rents he charged his workers for their homes in his model community or the prices at the company stores, which were the only ones allowed to operate in the Town of Pullman.  

Only the labor press was sympathetic to the plight of the workers in George Pullman's "ideal" company town.

Some workers found their wages reduced below what they owed in rent.  Workers complained that, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.”

When a committee went to petition Pullman for relief, they were all summarily fired.  The workers, who had not been organized by any union, went on strike.  They petitioned Debs and the ARU for assistance.  Despite the misgivings of some of his associates, Debs felt that the union owed the Pullman workers support.  

                        Eugene V. Debs in 1897.

The ARU was just coming off of a highly successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in which  the united power of all workers organized in a single industrial union instead of divided between skilled craft unions and unorganized laborers was demonstrated.  The prestige of Debs and his union among working people was undisputed.   

Debs ordered a boycott of all trains carrying a Pullman Palace Car.  Ordinarily, this would have affected only long distance passenger service.  But the railroad companies, seeing an opportunity, attached Pullman cars to all mail trains.  

The national press depicted Debs as an evil manipulator strangling the mails and American commerce.

The strike at its peak involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states.  Violence erupted across the country as workers determined to keep trains from moving.  Hundreds of rail cars were destroyed and there were pitched battles between armed railroad guards, police, and National Guardsmen on one side and strikers on the other.  

Debs and the ARU Executive Board were charged with conspiracy to interfere with the mails.  

Democratic Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld who in an earlier term had pardoned the surviving Haymarket prisoners, tried to dissuade President Grover Cleveland from intervening with Federal Troops arguing that the National Guard and local police had the situation in hand.

President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops in to “ensure that the mails move.”  This was done despite the pleas of fellow Democrat, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who assured the President that local and state forces could handle the situation.  

Federal troops arrived in Chicago on July 6.  Cavalry “escorted” strike breakers moving trains in Chicago and other cities, charging strikers with drawn sabers.  Within days the boycott and the strike in Pullman were crushed and the ARU was shattered. 

Debs and other leaders were tried and convicted of contempt of court for interfering with the mails and sentenced to jail.  Fearing that mobs of workers would attack the Cook County Jail in Chicago and free the men, authorities whisked Debs and his associates to sleepy Woodstock, Illinois nearly 50 northwest of the city and presumed to be safe. 

But Debs’ stay in the Woodstock jail was far from unpleasant. Sheriff George Eckert, like Debs of Alsatian heritage, promptly made Debs and his associates trustees.  They often gathered on chairs in front of the jail to conduct education and self-improvement sessions.  Debs was very fond of the Sheriff’s children and sometime watched them for the family.  In return, Mrs. Eckert fed the prisoners sumptuous home cooked meals.

Debs conducted the business of his dying union from the jail and entertained a string of visitors from around the country.  Among them was a Milwaukee socialist and future U.S. Representative, Victor Berger, who brought volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital newly translated into English for the first time and published in Chicago by Charles H. Kerr & Co.  Armed with these and other books like Edward Bellamy’s popular novel Looking Backward, Debs and his friends embarked on a systematic study and a discussion adapted from the Platonic question and response method. 

By the time his sentence was up Debs, a Democrat who had served as Terra Haute, Indiana City Clerk and in the Indiana legislature had become a committed socialist. 

Debs addressing the huge crowd assembled in Woodstock Square after his release from the McHenry County Jail (middle building.  After speaking the crowd carried him on their soldiers to railway depot for a special train to Chicago.

When Debs was released from jail on November 22, 1895, he was greeted by the largest crowd ever to assemble in Woodstock, estimated to number about 10,000 and including many admiring locals.   The cheering crowd hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him to the railroad station two blocks away where a special train waited to take him to Chicago.  In the city more than 100,000 thronged to greet him.

Within a few years Debs founded the Socialist Party, a social democratic party.  Four times he was the Party’s nominee for President of the United States, garnering more than three million votes in 1912.  Along the way, he was also a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which kept his dream of industrial unionism alive.  He was a tireless orator and a gifted writer.  

A campaign pin from Debs's final run for President on the Socialist Party ticket as an inmate of the Federal prison in Atlanta.

In 1919 he would return to prison under much harsher circumstances after being convicted of giving a speech in opposition to American participation in the First World War.  He ran for president a final time as an inmate of the Federal prison at Atlanta. 

Despite being pardoned by President Warren G. Harding in 1921, Debs’ health was broken.  He died in an Elmhurst, Illinois sanitarium in 1926.

 

When Labor Forced the Hand of a Conservative Supreme Court

 

The United State Supreme Court surprised everyone by upholding the Adamson Act in the face of a looming and crippling national railroad strike just weeks before the U.S. entered World War I.

One of the enduring myths about the U.S. Supreme Court is that in its lofty supposed impartiality it is above and immune from popular pressure, politics, or protest.  Of course, since it first asserted its right to rule on the Constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress and executive actions of the President as a Federalist thumb-in-the-eye to Thomas Jefferson, decisions by the court have often been nearly nakedly political.

Over most of its history the Court was in the continuous hands of the most conservative elements of society and naturally served the interests of the national elite from which its members were almost unanimously drawn.  Which is why until the Warren Court shifted into liberal hands, you never heard charges of judicial activism as it routinely struck down social reforms and efforts to regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

But today we are going to tell the all but forgotten tale of how a conservative Court bowed down before a powerful and united labor movement that had in its hands the power to bring the economy of the United States to a dead halt.

The Supreme Court in 1917—seated, William R. Day, Joseph McKenna, Chief Justice Edward D. White, Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr., and Willis Van Devanter, and, standing, Louis D. Brandeis, Mahlon Pitney, James C. McReynolds and John H. Clarke.

On March 15, 1917 the Court surprised the nation by ruling that the Adamson Act of 1916 that established an eight-hour workday, with no loss in pay, for interstate railroad workers was Constitutionally sound.  The Court voted 5-4 to reverse a lower court decision which had ruled the legislation unconstitutional.  The majority cited the emergency nature of the Act and conformity to the “public character” of interstate rail transportation.  It represented a significant broadening of the interpretation of the interstate commerce provision of the Constitution in that it covered a government action that went beyond regulation.

What moved the Court in this unexpected direction?  It was quite simply the sure knowledge that 200,000 members of the Railroad Brotherhoods acting in full cooperation were prepared to go on a strike that would paralyze the nation.

Those same railroad workers had already forced the hand of both the President of the United States and Congress.

The eight-hour workday had been the holy grail of the labor movement for 60 years.  Wage workers in the rapidly industrializing nation routinely worked 12, 11, and 10-hour days, six days a week in often brutal conditions.  Such drudgery dramatically shortened the life expectancy of laborers, disrupted ordinary family life, and contributed to a culture of heavy binge drinking once a week on paydays as a release from the stress and misery of the job.

The Eight Hour Day had been the Holy Grail of the Labor movement since the Civil War as evidenced by this 1906 newspaper illustration.

In the post-Civil War era the National Labor Union, the country’s first national labor body, launched a series of strikes to demand an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages.  Although the strikes failed, Congress was alarmed enough to pass weak 8 Hour legislation in 1868.  But there was no enforcement mechanism, and no proscribed punishments for employers who ignored it.  The law was essentially dead before the ink dried.

In the 1870s and ‘80s the Knights of Labor took up the call.  A nationwide strike for the eight-hour day supported by the Knights and by the craft unions which would later become the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was called for May 1, 1886.  After the so-called Haymarket Riot in Chicago the executed anarchists became martyrs to the movement.

For the next decades virtual open class warfare raged in America.  In some local situations and in some industries the 8-hour day would be won—often to be snatched away later when the repeated cycle of panics of those years routinely drove down wages and set workers fighting amongst themselves for the scraps.

In the early 1890’s Eugene V. Debs united craft divided workers into a powerful industrial union, the American Railway Union (AUR).  Their first great victory against the Great Northern Railway included an eight-hour day.  But in 1892 Federal troops smashed the AUR’s Pullman Boycott and sent Debs and his fellow union leaders to jail.  Although the eight-hour day was not an issue in the Pullman affair, the destruction of the AUR effectively ended progress to winning that goal in the railroad industry.

By the early years of the 20th Century the old Railway Brotherhoods, who regarded themselves as the aristocracy of labor, had learned the bitter lessons of being divided by craft.  They agreed to act in concert for a new push for the eight-hour day.

The time could not be better than 1916.  The country had emerged from yet another Panic and was in a solid boom caused in no small measure by the horrible war raging in Europe.  American industry was stepping in to fill a global market disrupted by the war.  It was also in the process of re-arming America in Preparedness in case the country was dragged into the foreign squabble.

The railway unions announced that they were ready to launch a nationwide strike unless they were given an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages and time and a half pay for overtime.  Railroad operators were intransigent but were aware that the Brotherhoods were well organized, had strong rank and file support, and could rely on broader support from the labor movement.

In the White House President Woodrow Wilson had a problem.  Although he was running for re-election with the boast “He kept us out of war,” he was increasingly convinced that the United States would sooner rather than later be ensnared.  He launched his highly publicized Preparedness campaign to quickly ramp up production of war materials and supplies for a huge new Army and modernized Navy.  A railway strike would disrupt all of that.

Moreover, he had a political problem.  He was running as a progressive Democrat, but unlike 1912, the Republicans were once again united and Deb’s Socialist Party was making serious inroads in his support among urban workers.  He could not afford to force the railroads to continue operations with military force like another Democrat, Grover Cleveland had done in the Pullman Strike.  Such action would alienate the big city working class without which no Democrat could hope to be elected.  And armed action against the strikers would inflame general anti-war sentiment and threaten national unity he would need to go to war.

Wilson called the Railroad operators and the Railway Brotherhoods together for a meeting at the White House where he offered to act as “an honest broker.”  Wilson proposed the eight-hour work day, but without wage guarantees.  The railroads agreed but the unions balked.  They would not accept a plan that essentially reduced the take home pay of their members.  They walked away from the negotiations and noisily resumed plans for the strike.

This anti-Wilson political cartoon from 1916 illustrates the pressure on the President over the eight-hour issue before the Presidential elections that year.

Wilson had no good options.  On August 29, 1916 he appeared before a joint session of Congress and demanded emergency legislation to prevent the looming strike.  In a virtual total capitulation to labor he called for the eight-hour day with no loss of wages and the overtime provision that would discourage bosses from simply continuing to schedule long shifts. 

Enabling legislation was introduced by Democratic Congressman William C. Adamson of Georgia.  It sped through congress and passed both houses beating a September 4 strike deadline.

Even though a special commission was set up to allow the railroads to raise their freight rates, which were regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, there was no doubt that the Railroads would turn to the courts to block the new law.  Wilson not only expected it, but he was also pretty sure that the operators would prevail.  He himself had vetoed far less sweeping reform legislation in the past based on his constitutional doubts about the authority of government to meddle in private industry.  None-the-less, he directed his Justice Department to defend the expected attacks.

This full page newspaper illustration shows the owners and managers of the nation's most important railroads united in opposition to the Adamson Act and the pressure they put on Wilson.

The Act was quickly struck down as unconstitutional by the United States District Court for Western Missouri.  The unions announced that they would resume preparations for a nationwide strike.  May Day, traditionally tied to the struggle for the eight-hour day, was a likely target which enhanced the possibility that it might even spread into a general strike.

The Justice Department urged the high Court to rapidly consider its appeal of the lower court decision.  Questioning of lawyers on both sides of the case by the Justices led the press to widely speculate that the law was doomed.  The Brotherhoods allowed scattered local “wildcat” strikes to occur as demonstrations of power and major demonstrations were held in cities across the country. The labor and radical press was full of news and offers of support in solidarity.

Finally, on March 15 enough justices bowed to the pressure of an impending national emergency to uphold the Adamson Act by the narrowest of margins.  Chief Justice Edward D. White, a Louisiana Democrat first appointed to the Court by Grover Cleveland and made Chief Justice by William Howard Taft, was the surprising author of the 5-4 majority opinion.

Soon the U.S. was at war. In December Wilson nationalized the railroads for the duration.  They continued to operate under the provisions of the Act, however.  And the law remained in effect after the operators resumed control of their lines.

The war proved to be a body blow to militant labor.  Wilson enthusiastically intervened time and again against strikes in “essential” industries like copper mining and timber.  He equated the most radical wing of the labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the (IWW), major champions of the eight-hour day, with treasonous interference with war effort.  An unprecedented wave of repression stung not only the IWW but Debs and the Socialist Party, and even AFL unions’

After the war was over the great Red Scare saw thousands of labor leaders deported or jailed.

Under those circumstances moves to extend the eight-hour day to other elements of the economy fizzled.  It did not become the law of the land until late in the New Deal when the Fair Labor Standards Act finally went into effect in 1937.