In Re Debs - in context and after

 

In Re Debs 158 U.S. 564 (1885)

 

 In Re Debs is grounded in the comfortable acceptance of the assertion of federal authority.  Before the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments no such broad asertion would have been possible: EXCEPT for the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, and its enforcing acts.  Those principles and statues were the most dramatic statements of state sovereignty. until the defeat of the secessionists in the Civil War 1861-1865.  

But post 1877 the system of racial segregation - our apartheid - sharply limited the federal, that is, national power embedded in our structure by the post-Civil War Amendments.

But now - faced with the rise of indusrial unioism - the U.S. Mail, a Constituional power became the tool of choice to combat the labor movement's tool of the strike which could threaten the power of the great railroads.  Protection of interstate commerce  and the refusal of the RR companies to operate mail trains without Pullman cars were key elements of the President Grover Cleveland and the Department of Justice decision to heed the call of the railroads to break the sympathy strike. 

Nothing at that scale had happened before.  Though there were some local injunctions none was cited by the Supreme Court.  Despite the familiar language of state sovereignty and enumerated powers neither the Illinois Governor nor the Chicago Mayor had been consulted or notified of the DOJ’s decision to intervene. *  

The decision of the railroads to refuse to run trains without Pullman Cars was a key stratagem.  It nationalized the conflict.  If the mails were delivered, and trains ran without Pullman sleeping cars, the strike would have been seen as an inconvenience, a matter principally affecting one company and first class passengers on inter-city trains.

 

An interesting split in the Democratic Party appeared.  Grover Cleveland was a former New York Governor and leader of the so-called Bourbon Democrats – generally pro-business, pro gold standard, and anti-imperialist. He was in his second (split) term – re–elected after four years out of power.  Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson, were the only Democrats elected as President from the civil war until Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.[1]

The bold assertion of authority by the national government ran counter to southern Democratic Party resistance to the national government.  An attitude that Jefferson Cowrie, winner of last year’s Pulitzer for history – Freedom’s Dominion – called ‘racialized anti-statism’.

 

Grover Cleveland, a Buffalo lawyer, former mayor, Democrat and second term President, acceded to the railroad General Managers Association demand for exercise of national power.  But his fellow northern Democrats – Governor John Peter Altgeld -and Carter Harrison, four term Democratic Party  mayor of Chicago both believed that they were already were successfully handling the few outbreaks of picket line violence.

Illinois Governor Altgeld saw the strike’s law enforcement problems as well in hand.  He had deployed the state militia [National Guard] to the few hot spots, none of which was in the rail center of Chicago.  The Mayor too was neither alarmed nor consulted by the Department of Justice – then only fifteen years old.  But the state of good order would change when the Department of Justice swore in as deputies and deployed 5,000 Pinkerton men in Chicago alone.

 

The Courts were ready and willing converts to the anti-labor cause.  Not only did the issuance of broad anti-strike injunctions, displacing state power, become routine, but also the Lochner v. New York  (1905) era followed.  The courts, relying on the ideology of freedom of contract, repeatedly struck down state laws governing age and hours of labor.  The high court found impermissible New York’s limit of labor hours to ten per day and sixty per week.  Child labor laws too would soon fall.

 Only with the passage of the jurisdiction stripping 1932 Norris LaGuardia Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act did the routine deployment of the U.S. courts to break strikes come to an end.

-        GWC

-        updated 9/21/2025

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[1]Republican domination was aided by creating the large, thinly populated states of the upper mid-west and Rocky Mountains.  Their votes countered the disproportionate southern Democratic strength achieved by disenfranchising Black voters.

* cf. Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.