Veteran labor militant Jay Fox looks at the history of government intervention, anti-trust laws, and injunctions to break labor organizing.

‘Labor and the Law’ by Jay Fox from Labor Herald (T.U.E.L.). Vol. 1 No. 9. November, 1922.

CLARENCE DARROW has said: “I don’t care who makes the law if you let me interpret it.” Darrow meant that the judges interpret the law to suit their own interests and prejudices, no matter how it is written. If anyone knows the ways of the courts surely he does. A long experience as defender of the workers in the courts has taught him how corporation lawyers in the judges’ seats interpret the law.

Benjamin Harrison, at an unguarded moment, said: “The principle function of the law is to keep the poor in subjection.”

Keeping in mind the opinions of these two eminent lawyers, let us take a look at the Sherman anti-trust law that is now being used to break the shopmen’s strike. Originally it was a measure intended, so its proponents said, to curb the trustification of industry; a law to protect the public from being held up by combinations of capitalists intent upon controlling the supply and fixing the price of commodities. As I remember, organized labor got behind the measure and shared in the glory of its passage by Congress in 1890.

Fine. Now we would see if the greedy plutocrats were going to continue fleecing the public, all their trusts having become “unlawful combinations in restraint of trade.”

How the Anti-Trust Law Worked

The sugar trust was selected as the first victim. It controlled 98% of the output of refined sugar and could have been easily dissolved if the attorney general and the courts really intended to enforce the law. Thirty-two years have passed and we are still paying toll to the sugar trust and all the other trusts that were made unlawful combinations by the Sherman act, that we, in our ignorance of economic law, thought was going to rid the country of these pests.

Now comes the proof of Harrison’s statement. In 1892 Eugene V. Debs organized the American Railway Union, which admitted to membership every employee from the section hand and engine wiper to the conductor and engineer. This vigorous industrial union when but a year old tied up the Northern Pacific and brought the lordly Jim Hill to his knees. The General Managers’ Association decreed that the A.R.U. must be crushed before it got too strong. The Pullman Co. discharged members of the A.R.U. and cut wages, forcing a strike and the refusal to haul Pullman cars, which resulted in a general tie-up.

The government jumped in to help the railroads with troops, but trains didn’t move. Then they dug up the anti-trust law and framed an injunction prohibiting the officers of the union from performing their lawful duties as directors of the strike, with the result that the strike was lost and Debs and other officers of the union were imprisoned for six months on the charge of violating the drastic injunction. Thus the law that labor sponsored as a trust breaker was used by the courts and the government as a strike breaker.

Railroad Men Subject to Compulsory Labor

Do railroad men know that they may be restrained from striking? Shortly before the Debs case was pulled Bill Taft, then a U.S. Circuit judge, issued an order forbidding the men on the Penn. from striking. An engineer quit after the order was issued, and Taft fined him $50.00 with a warning of both fine and imprisonment for a second offense.

That was the beginning of government by injunction. It was more. It was the beginning of a new form of slavery. There is no need of a compulsory labor law for railroad men. The precedent is established. Any U.S. judge may enjoin railroad men from quitting, and jail them if they but lay off without the consent of their masters. If that is not slavery what is it?

That the practice has not been generally carried out is probably due to its clumsiness. If men in large numbers ignored an order of that sort there wouldn’t be jails enough to hold them. The plan adopted in the Debs case and repeated in the present strike is a better one. Let the men strike, then make it impossible for them to function as an organization and the strike is crippled and soon broken.

After the Debs trust was dissolved the anti-trust law had a long rest. The next trust to raise its villainous head was that of the Danbury hatters. These wicked workers had the nerve to quit their jobs in a bunch, thus cutting down the profits of their masters. After several weeks of watchful waiting for the men to return to their tasks, the masters got together and estimated the amount of profits they were through the obstinacy of the workers at $175,000. Then they went into court and got judgment for twice the amount under the very generous terms of the anti-trust law. To satisfy that outrageous judgment the workers’ homes were seized and sold over their heads. And thus was justice triumphant and the majesty of the law vindicated.

Shopmen’s Trust Raises Its Brazen Head

Another long wait and the multi-headed railroad shopmen’s trust brazenly appears on the scene; and the government “of, for and by the people” running true to form, ever ready to succor the weak and oppressed, went before its latest appointee on the federal bench and got his signature to a document that left no room for doubt as to where Wall St. stands in the controversy between labor and capital. Said the Wall St. emissary, “It is with great regret that I am compelled to institute these proceedings, but they are necessary for the protection and preservation of the unions themselves.” And to make it plainer still how deeply solicitous the Washington agency is for the preservation of the unions, man Friday continues: “So long and to the extent that I can speak for the government of the U.S. I will use the power of the government within me to prevent the destruction of the open shop.” If that doesn’t open the eyes of union men to their true relations to the plutocratic agencies at Washington, nothing will.

That’s the real stuff, the stuff that makes men think. We have been waiting a long time for that plain talk, and it does one good to hear it at last. Strikebreaking is now at last admitted. to be a function of the government. Backed by the government Wall St. is going the limit. Every liberty that labor possessed has been swept away. All that labor may now do legally is submit to the exactions of the plunderbund. Slavery is the only proper term to apply. Every person with an ounce of brains has known for long that Wall St. controls the powers at Washington. Now even Henry Dubb may know that labor has no friends outside of its own ranks. Acting through its agencies, the government and the press, Wall St. is firmly intent upon smashing the unions and fastening the chains of vassalage upon the workers. In every contest the unions have been forced to retreat. Wages are being slashed in every industry and labor with its fourteenth century system of organization is powerless to resist.

Gompers Offers a Solution of Problem

In the face of this terrific onslaught upon labor, what has Brother Gompers and the executive council to offer. This august body, while in- haling the ocean ozone at Atlantic City, considered ways and means for excommunicating what it called “unprincipled radicals” from the unions. As an alternative, another praiseworthy method of attacking Wall St. was also considered. The council thought the U. S. constitution ought to be amended. And these men are the leaders of the American labor movement. Is it any wonder that labor is in retreat? A group of 16 year old kids from a back country village would have a better grasp of the situation. And right here occurs the question: Is the labor movement directed by men with village school-boy minds, or by crafty placeholders bent upon keeping things as they are for fear that a change might affect their social standing, their salaries and their jobs? If the executive council was composed of real labor leaders, its meeting would be held in Chicago, the bubbling center of industrial strife, and not at Wall Street’s summer resort; and instead of considering ways to Daughertyize the labor movement they would be rallying all the forces of labor for a united front against Wall St.

Rank and File Must Drive for Industrial Control

In the absence of a leadership capable of grasping the grave dangers that confront the labor movement, it is up to the rank and file to take the reins in its own hands. Wall Street’s great power lies in its control of industry, and so long as it retains that control it will continue its mastery over the government, the courts, the press and all other avenues of the people’s activities. The place to attack the tree of evil is at the roots. It is childish to lop off branches or to tinker around budding on new shoots. The power of injunction will be curbed when Wall St. is curbed, not before.

The issue is clearcut. Control of industry is the key to all power. Labor will be master when it controls the industries it has built with its own sweat and blood; and, obviously, the way to achieve industrial control is by industrial organization. Wall St. acquired its great power by militant, aggressive, industrial organization. Let labor adopt these progressive tactics and forge its way to freedom.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

Link to PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v1n09-nov-1922.pdf