Learn about the case — historical background and documents
A Short Narrative
In 1894, a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company and a supporting boycott by railroad workers presented the federal courts with questions about workers’ rights to organize protests against management and the government’s authority to restrict the activities of labor unions. The Pullman Palace Car Company was the nation’s largest manufacturer and operator of passenger railroad cars, and the supporting boycott of work on Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, a labor organization headed by Eugene V. Debs and open to all railroad workers, effectively stopped rail traffic in the United States from Chicago to the West Coast. Alarmed by the national impact of the strike and the outbreak of violence against railroads, the U.S. attorney in Chicago asked the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois to stop Debs and his union from pursuing the boycott. The circuit court ordered the union officers to cease any activity that might prevent the operation of the railroads, and when the boycott continued, the circuit court cited Debs and other union officers for contempt and sentenced them to jail terms. U.S. attorneys throughout the nation, acting under directions from the U.S. Attorney General, secured similar orders against railway workers supporting the Pullman strike. The strike and boycott soon collapsed, and Debs turned to the federal courts to defend the union’s ability to challenge employers. A sweeping decision of a unanimous Supreme Court would have a dramatic impact on striking workers for nearly forty years.
The town of Pullman
In 1880, the millionaire industrialist and businessman George Pullman established a company town, just south of Chicago, devoted to the production of railroad cars. Located on a tract near Lake Calumet, the town of Pullman was not an actual municipality but rather a two-square mile parcel of private property that Pullman’s company owned, maintained, and used for manufacturing and for housing company employees. George Pullman also hoped his town would be a model for a cooperative community of workers and employers. The town of Pullman was hardly an average community. Architects and managers for the company spent countless hours planning the town. Housing corresponded to employees’ jobs. Freestanding houses were available for foremen and executives, while skilled and senior workers could rent tenements or row houses. The lowest-ranking laborers lived in a large cluster of rooming houses. In general, the brick structures with cellars, water and gas, and nicely painted living units were superior to what might have been found in most parts of Chicago. Employees of the company were not required to live in Pullman, and close to one-fourth of them lived in nearby towns where the rents were lower. Those who lived in Pullman received two checks—one for their wages and the other for rent. When the checks were delivered, employees could simply endorse the rent check and return it to the company.
The town featured a church, a library, a shopping arcade, and a hotel named after Pullman’s daughter, Florence. Regulations maintained town life in keeping with Pullman’s moral vision of a proper and respectable town. Taverns were not allowed, and residents were required to keep up their apartments and houses. Some women worked in the upholstery shops and laundry, but, in general, men were to provide for their wives and families by working in the factory. Initially, tenements and row houses were to be just for families, but after the economic downturn of the mid-1880s, the company allowed families to accept boarders in their homes, and by 1892 half the housing units had at least one boarder.
Pullman wanted his town to exemplify the way industrial society could work with propriety and efficiency, and he was proud of his efforts. Between 1883 and 1893, his company published four books, complete with cutting-edge photography, extolling the accomplishments of the company and the town. Magazines and newspapers touted the town and accepted the company’s self-appraisal. George Pullman enjoyed a reputation as a progressive who had appealingly imagined the future. Only a skeptical few questioned the enterprise. Richard Ely, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, visited the town and published a critical article in the February 1885 issue of Harper’s Monthly. Ely acknowledged that the buildings and streets were pleasant and appealing, but he emphasized the way George Pullman and his company controlled everything. None of the workers felt like the town was really a home; they felt like they were living in a giant hotel. Ely likened Pullman himself to the German Kaiser or Russian Czar. What the town of Pullman truly represented, Ely complained, was the “establishment of the most absolute power of capital, and the repression of all freedom.”
A strike and boycott
Many Pullman employees believed that labor organizations would serve their interests, despite the fact that the company forbade any union activity within the town of Pullman. Pullman workers in particular crafts (cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, and freight-car builders) formed unions in the 1880s, and the Knights of Labor, a national organization, also signed up 1,800 Pullman employees. In 1886, the Knights called a general strike in Chicago as part of their national campaign to secure an eight-hour day, and Pullman employees stayed away from work in support of the strike.
A national economic depression caught up with Pullman in the late summer of 1893. The company and town had avoided the effects of the depression for several months because of an unusual demand for railroad cars prompted by the Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s World Fair, but eventually the market for new cars fell off. Pullman released workers and reduced by about one-third the wages of those who remained. He refused, however, to lower the rent in the company housing. Wages and rents, Pullman thought, were separate matters.
After Pullman refused to listen to workers’ grievances, representatives of the employees met into the early morning hours of May 11, 1894, in Turner Hall in nearby Kensington, and voted 42–4 to go on strike. Close to 3,000 Pullman workers walked off their jobs, saying they would not return until Pullman restored wages to the level of June 1893, or, at a minimum, reduced rents to balance the wage cuts. Pullman claimed that the working and living conditions of his employees were better than those of workingmen elsewhere, and he refused all attempts at arbitration. The company closed its manufacturing facilities on the evening of May 11.
The American Railway Union sent officials to consult with the Pullman workers preparing to strike, but initially Debs’ union did not join the strike. Debs worried that the strike could not succeed because the nation’s depression had created large numbers of unemployed workers who would take the jobs of strikers in Pullman. Nevertheless, Debs encouraged the strikers at a meeting in Kensington, where he told the employees that George Pullman was “a rich plunderer” and urged them “to strip the mask of hypocrisy from the pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor of labor.”
One month after the strike began, leaders of the American Railway Union gathered in Chicago for an annual convention, and the Pullman strike became the most important issue on the agenda. The conventioneers listened to speeches from striking Pullman employees, such as seamstress Jennie Curtis, who told them that “Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic.” Convention delegates agreed that unless Pullman agreed to arbitration by June 26, 1894, members of the 150,000-person union would refuse to handle any Pullman cars or trains with Pullman cars. The unions’ boycott would have a national impact because, in addition to selling Pullman cars to railroads, the company rented cars along with the services of conductors, cooks, and waiters. Thousands of Pullman cars and employees were in service throughout the country. Company executives, acting on George Pullman’s orders, told the union representatives that the company would not enter into any discussions with union representatives, and the boycott began on June 26.
Management organizes
By late June, 40,000 workers had walked off their jobs and disrupted almost all rail lines west of Chicago, where union organization had been strongest. The General Managers’ Association, a consortium of railroads with lines in Chicago, aggressively challenged the strikers and, especially, the American Railway Union by firing all strikers and hiring replacements, and by seeking court restraining orders. The Association heightened tension and increased the likelihood of government intervention by refusing to drop any Pullman cars from its trains, thereby maximizing the disruption of commerce. Railroad companies and local officials called on Illinois Governor John Altgeld to mobilize state militia to protect railroad property, but Altgeld, determined to lessen tensions, sent troops only when he was sure that violence was a real threat.
Federal response
In Washington, President Grover Cleveland met daily with advisers, including military leaders and Attorney General Richard Olney, who coordinated the federal response. The most dramatic federal action came on July 3, 1894, when, despite the lack of violence in Chicago, and over the protests of Governor Altgeld, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago, where they camped along the lakefront and patrolled the rail yards to prevent blockades of the trains.
Olney had already initiated a legal strategy against the leaders of the strike and the boycott. The Attorney General appointed Edwin Walker as a special deputy U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois. Walker was a long-time attorney for a railroad company, and he and U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist, in consultation with Olney, devised a combination of civil and criminal actions to disrupt the labor union’s boycott of the railroads. Debs later told a federal commission established to investigate the strike, “The men went back to work, and the ranks were broken, and the strike broken up . . . simply and solely by the action of the United States courts in restraining us from discharging our duties as officers and representatives of the employees.”
Government attorneys initiated the most important civil proceedings on July 2 in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Encouraged by Attorney General Olney, the U.S. attorney in Chicago filed in the federal circuit court a complaint alleging that Debs and other officers of the American Railway Union (ARU) had conspired to interfere with the transportation of the mails and to violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which prohibited any collaborative action “in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states.” The U.S. attorney asked the court to issue an injunction that would order Debs and the union officers “to desist and refrain” from any joint action to interfere with the business of twenty-two named railroad companies.
The court issued an injunction so broad in its application that the New York Times referred to it as a “Gatling gun on paper.” The court order prevented the union officers from almost any activity related to the boycott of trains with Pullman cars and from any communication that might encourage someone to participate in the boycott. In addition to delivering the injunction to the union officers cited, the U.S. marshal published it in newspapers, distributed public copies, and ordered it read before assembled strikers. U.S. attorneys secured similar injunctions in other states affected by the Pullman strike and boycott, and marshals recruited thousands of deputies who might be used to enforce the injunctions.
Debs and other union officers soon faced both a grand jury inquest for criminal conspiracy to disrupt mail delivery and interstate commerce and the threat of jail time for alleged violations of the injunction. On July 17, Judge William Seaman, sitting in the U.S. circuit court, ordered Debs, ARU Vice President George W. Howard, ARU Secretary Sylvester Keliher, and ARU newspaper editor Lewis W. Rogers held pending a further hearing on the U.S. attorney’s assertion that the officers violated the injunction. The defendants waived bail and were temporarily sent to the Cook County jail in the heart of downtown Chicago.
The defendants’ lawyers, now joined by the famed Clarence Darrow, denied that Debs and the officers had done anything to disrupt commerce or to incite violence. They also challenged the court’s authority to issue the injunction. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act authorized the use of injunctions against obstructions of commerce, but the defense attorneys denied that the act, which had been passed to restrict large corporate monopolies, could apply to a labor union. The government attorneys presented telegrams as evidence that the union officers continued to communicate with striking workers after the injunction, and they argued that the strike had created a public nuisance, which was an established criteria for a court injunction.
(Injunctions were orders of courts exercising a long-standing type of jurisdiction called equity. Equity jurisdiction, which had originated in medieval England and was recognized in the U.S. Constitution, differed from jurisdiction based on statute or common-law traditions. Equity jurisdiction was based on established rules of fairness rather than specific laws and allowed judges to order or prohibit certain actions, often to prevent irreparable harm to private property. Equity has not been a separate area of jurisdiction in the federal courts since 1937, but this complicated area of the law was the subject of public debate in the late-nineteenth century because federal courts increasingly relied on it to prohibit strikes and to punish people who had not been found guilty by a jury.)
On December 14, 1894, after what he described as “protracted and painstaking” deliberation, Judge William A. Woods affirmed nearly every argument of the government attorneys and ruled that the injunction had been properly issued. Woods concluded that the court had authority to issue the injunction in response to a public nuisance, to protect the delivery of the mails, and to enforce the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. That act, Woods concluded, prohibited any combination of people in restraint of trade, whether corporate officers or laborers. Woods sentenced Debs to six months imprisonment and the other officers to three months.
The criminal prosecution of Debs and other union officers ran parallel to the proceedings related to the injunction and contempt. Thomas Milchrist doubted that the government could establish the evidence for conviction, but Edwin Walker, as he reported to the Attorney General, wanted to pursue criminal indictments because he believed they would have “a greater restraining effect upon Debs and his followers than our proceedings by injunction.” Walker thought the results of the trial “of little importance ” and acknowledged that there might not be need for a trial, but he wanted a grand jury to investigate everyone involved in any disruption of the mail. On July 10, soon after the injunction was issued by the circuit court, the U.S. attorney presented a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois with evidence that Debs and the other officials of the American Railway Union engaged in a criminal conspiracy to disrupt mail delivery. In his charge to the grand jury, Judge Peter S. Grosscup said that an agreement by two or more individuals to encourage railroad workers to strike would constitute a conspiracy to interfere with the delivery of the mails and with interstate commerce. The grand jury indicted Debs, Howard, Keliher, and Rogers, all of whom were released on bail. The same grand jury indicted nearly seventy people on similar conspiracy charges, and throughout the country other grand juries indicted people involved in the Pullman strike.
The criminal trial of Debs and the ARU officers began in the U.S. district court in Chicago on January 24, 1895, but it would remain a side show to the other court proceedings. Clarence Darrow argued that the defendants had a legal right to organize a strike of their union members and that they never incited any violence or disruption of the mails. The railroad managers, Darrow reminded the court, had chosen not to move the trains from which Pullman cars had been removed. Milchrist, supported by the judge, insisted that he need only demonstrate that the violence and disruption of the mails was a logical consequence of the strike organized by the American Railway Union.
Debs offered testimony of his involvement in the Pullman strike and repeatedly stated that neither he nor any other union officers had incited any violence. The defense attempts to subpoena George Pullman were met by repeated messages that he was not in the office or had left town.
Darrow was convinced that the jury would acquit the defendants, but the case never went to the jury. When a juror became ill and was dismissed by Judge Grosscup, Grosscup discharged the other jurors and left the case to be retried at the discretion of the U.S. attorney. A year later the U.S. attorney entered a formal order indicating that he would drop the prosecution. Charges against most of the people indicted in Chicago and elsewhere had been dropped long before.
A petition to the Supreme Court of the United States
Before the start of the criminal trial, Debs and the American Railway Union officers appealed to the Supreme Court for a reversal of their jail sentences for contempt of the circuit court’s injunction. The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on their petition for a writ of habeas corpus, in which the defendants asserted that the injunction and the subsequent imprisonment were attempts to enforce a criminal law in an equity proceeding, where the defendants had no access to a jury, and that the proceedings thus violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections of due process and trial by jury.
At the oral arguments in March 1895, the galleries of the Supreme Court were jammed with spectators. The elderly and distinguished former senator, Lyman Trumbull, now joined the team of lawyers for Debs, and Trumbull argued that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act had not authorized the federal courts to use an injunction or other order in a court of equity to enforce a criminal statute. In his submitted brief previewing his oral arguments, Clarence Darrow offered a passionate defense of the right of workers to organize and strike in defense of fellow workers. He dismissed the government’s attempt to distinguish between the Pullman workers’ strike and the supporting boycott by the American Railway Union. If workers could not join together to protect their fellow laborers, the well-established right to strike would be meaningless. All of the telegrams and other evidence presented by the government attorneys demonstrated that Debs and the other union officers had urged only support for the strike and never did anything to incite violence.
The government attorneys were led by Attorney General Richard Olney, who insisted that criminal prosecutions were useless against “mobs of thousands of people” who obstructed interstate commerce and endangered private property. The government had a right, even a duty, to seek an injunction, which was the proper and the only practical way to restrain activities that threatened irreparable damage to private and public interests. To those who argued that only the owners of private property threatened by the violence could seek an injunction, Olney replied that the government had an interest in interstate transportation that was the equivalent of ownership. He also noted the executive branch’s responsibility to enforce congressional statutes “enacting in substance that interstate railroad transportation shall be free.”
On May 27, 1895, a unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice David J. Brewer, denied the petition for habeas corpus and held that the injunction and the contempt citation were proper. Brewer broadly defined the government’s constitutional authority to prevent any obstruction of interstate commerce and to enforce “the full and free exercise of all national powers.” “The strong arm of the national government” could prosecute those obstructing commerce and could mobilize the military to prevent interference with commerce, but the executive branch could avoid the use of force by calling on the federal courts to issue injunctions protecting potential damage to property and public interests. Without challenging the circuit court decision that defended the injunction as an enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Supreme Court wanted to establish “broader ground” for the use of injunctions to remove any obstructions to interstate commerce. A court’s issuance of an injunction usually depended on evidence of a threat to property, such as a railroad company’s equipment or the government’s mail, but Brewer wrote that the government also had a right to call on its courts for assistance in exercising its responsibilities and in preventing “injury to the general welfare.” Brewer denied that punishment for contempt deprived the union officers of their right to a trial by jury because a court must possess the power to enforce its own orders.
Attorney General Richard Olney told his secretary that the Supreme Court “took my argument and turned it into an opinion,” but even Olney had not argued for as broad a reach of federal authority as that outlined by the Supreme Court. Clarence Darrow complained that the opinion in In re Debs “left the law so biased that, in cases involving strikes, at least, a man could be sent to prison for a crime without trial by jury.” Debs, now facing six months behind bars, characterized the decision as “absolutely in the interest of the corporations, syndicates, and trusts, which dominate every department of the federal government, including the Supreme Court.” “Every federal judge is now made a czar,” Debs added.
The injunction quickly became the most common legal strategy to curtail strikes, as prosecutions of union leaders for criminal conspiracy declined. Governor Altgeld warned that the Debs case would lead to “government by injunction.” Between 1880 and 1930, courts issued at least 4,300 labor injunctions, and new groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Anti-Boycott Association, organized legal strategies to curtail boycotts and sympathetic strikes. The percentage of sympathetic strikes subject to injunctions increased from 15% in the 1890s to nearly 50% in the 1920s.
Organized labor responded with their own legal defense and with “Labor’s Bill of Grievances,” presented by the American Federation of Labor in 1906, but it would be more than a quarter century before Congress endorsed legislation to restrict the use of injunctions against labor strikes. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, drafted in part by Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court, sharply limited the federal courts’ jurisdiction to issue injunctions and restraining orders in response to labor disputes. The act included a declaration of the public policy of the United States guaranteeing the rights of workers to organize for collective bargaining with management, and Congress specified the protected rights of strikers. Injunctions were permissible in labor disputes only when a court heard evidence of unlawful activity or of the possibility of irreparable harm that would be greater than that suffered by laborers if their activities were restrained. The act required a trial by jury in any proceeding to determine contempt of a labor injunction. In 1938, the Supreme Court upheld the Norris-LaGuardia Act.
The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s