The Debs Case:

Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts 

of the 1890s

by

David Ray Papke, Professor of Law

Marquette University Law School

Revised by the Federal Judicial Center for inclusion in the project

Federal Trials and Great Debates in United States History

Federal Judicial Center

Federal Judicial History Offi ce

2008

This Federal Judicial Center publication was undertaken in furtherance of the Centerʼs 

statutory mission to “conduct, coordinate, and encourage programs relating to the 

history of the judicial branch of the United States government.” The views expressed 

are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal Judicial Center.

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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Contents

The Debs Case: A Short Narrative, 1

The town of Pullman, 1

A strike and boycott, 2

Management organizes, 3

Federal response, 4

A petition to the Supreme Court of the United States, 6

The Federal Courts and Their Jurisdiction, 9

U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois, 9

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, 9

Supreme Court of the United States, 10

The Judicial Process: A Chronology, 11

Legal Questions Before the Courts, 13

Did the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois have authority to issue 

an injunction against Eugene V. Debs and the offi cers of the American Railway 

Union? 13

Did the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 apply to labor unions as well as trusts and 

monopolies? 14

Did Eugene V. Debs and the other offi cers of the American Railway Union violate the 

injunction? 14

Did the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois have the authority to 

hold Eugene V. Debs and other offi cers of the American Railway Union in contempt 

and to impose jail sentences? 15

Were Eugene V. Debs and other offi cers of the American Railway Union guilty of 

criminal conspiracy to obstruct interstate commerce? 16

Related Cases, 16

Legal Arguments in Court, 18

Lawyers for the U.S. government, 18

Lawyers for Debs and the American Railway Union, 19

Biographies, 21

John Peter Altgeld, 21

American Railway Union, 21

David J. Brewer, 22 

Grover Cleveland, 23 

Clarence Darrow, 24 

Eugene V. Debs, 25 

General Managers’ Association, 27

Peter S. Grosscup, 27 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Richard Olney, 29 

George M. Pullman, 30 

Lyman Trumbull, 31 

United States Strike Commission, 32

William A. Woods, 33 

Media Coverage and Public Debates, 34

Historical Documents, 40

Writ of injunction, U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois, 40

Correspondence of Attorney General Richard Olney, 42

Grand jury charge of Judge Grosscup, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of 

Illinois, 45

United States v. Debs et al., decision of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District 

of Illinois, 47

Writ of habeas corpus, 49

Lyman Trumbull brief, of counsel for petitioner, in the Supreme Court of the United 

States, 50

Clarence Darrow brief and arguments for petitioner, in the Supreme Court of the 

United States, 51

Oral argument of Hon. Richard Olney, Attorney General, in the Supreme Court of the 

United States, 52

Opinion of the Supreme Court In re Debs, Petitioner, 53

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (excerpt), 56

Recommendations of the United States Strike Commission, 57

Eugene V. Debs to Jean Daniel Debs, 60

Eugene V. Debs on the role of the courts, 61

Norris-LaGuardia Act (excerpt), 63

Bibliography, 64
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

The Debs Case: 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 

traffi c 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 

offi cers 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 offi cers 

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 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

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 effi ciency, 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 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

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 offi cials 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 fi ring 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. 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Railroad companies and local offi cials 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 offi cers 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 fi led in the federal circuit court 

a complaint alleging that Debs and other offi cers 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 offi cers “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 

offi cers 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 offi cers 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. 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Debs and other union offi cers 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 offi cers 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 offi cers 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 offi cers 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 specifi c 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 affi rmed 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 offi cers or laborers. Woods sentenced Debs to six months 

imprisonment and the other offi cers to three months. 

 The criminal prosecution of Debs and other union offi cers 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 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

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 offi cials 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 offi cers 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 offi cers had incited any violence. The 

defense attempts to subpoena George Pullman were met by repeated messages that 

he was not in the offi ce 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 offi cers 

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 
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The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

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 offi cers 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 defi ned 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 
8

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

responsibilities and in preventing “injury to the general welfare.” Brewer denied that 

punishment for contempt deprived the union offi cers 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 specifi ed 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.
9

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

The Federal Courts and Their Jurisdiction

U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois

The U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued the injunction 

to prohibit Debs and the union offi cers from any strike activity that might restrain 

interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails. The Sherman Anti-Trust 

Act of 1890 specifi cally granted the U.S. circuit courts authority “to prevent and restrain” any combination or conspiracy intended to restrain trade among the states. 

The Act also instructed U.S. attorneys to institute proceedings in equity to restrain 

any violations of the act, but Debs’ attorneys challenged the application of this act 

to labor unions. 

 The U.S. circuit courts, which were established by the Judiciary Act of 1789, had 

jurisdiction over federal crimes, over suits between citizens from different states, and 

over civil suits in which the United States was a party. For the fi rst century of the 

federal government, the U.S. circuit courts were the most important trial courts in 

the federal system; they also exercised jurisdiction over some appeals from the district 

courts until 1891, when Congress established the U.S. circuit courts of appeal. From 

1891 until they were abolished in 1911, the U.S. circuit courts were exclusively trial 

courts. A circuit judge, a Supreme Court justice assigned to the circuit, any district 

court judge in the circuit, or some combination of two of those judges, could preside 

in the circuit courts.

 The Sherman Anti-Trust Act authorized the U.S. circuit courts to issue injunctions against combinations or conspiracies that obstructed interstate commerce. 

U.S. Circuit Court Judge William A. Woods was the presiding judge sitting with U.S. 

District Court Judge Peter S. Grosscup when the government sought its injunction 

against Eugene V. Debs and the other offi cers of the American Railway Union. William Seaman, a district judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, presided in the 

circuit court in July 1894 and ordered Debs and the other offi cers held in custody 

for contempt of the injunction. Woods heard arguments on the contempt order and 

upheld the order in December 1894.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois

Debs and his fellow offi cers of the American Railway Union were indicted on charges 

of criminal conspiracy by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern 

District of Illinois. District Judge Peter S. Grosscup presided over the trial in January 

1895 and dismissed the jury on February 8, 1895, after one of the jurors became too 

ill to serve. Grosscup’s order allowed prosecutors to retry the case, but a year later 
10

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

the U.S. attorney entered a nolle prosequi order, formally announcing no further 

intention to prosecute.

 The U.S. district courts were established by the Congress in the Judiciary Act of 

1789 and serve as trial courts in each of the federal judicial districts. The U.S. District 

Court for the Northern District of Illinois was established in 1855, when Congress 

divided Illinois into two judicial districts. The U.S. attorney’s offi ce in the Northern 

District of Illinois initiated a criminal conspiracy prosecution under the authority 

of section 1 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which provided criminal penalties for conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce between the states. The district 

courts shared criminal jurisdiction with the circuit courts, except in capital cases, 

which were the exclusive jurisdiction of the circuit courts.

Supreme Court of the United States

After U.S. Circuit Court Judge William A. Woods upheld the injunction and subsequent contempt citation, lawyers for Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway 

Union offi cers petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of error 

and a writ of habeas corpus. The Supreme Court accepted the petition for a writ 

of habeas corpus and heard arguments on the decision of the circuit court to jail 

the union offi cers for alleged violation of the injunction. The Judiciary Act of 1789 

gave the Supreme Court authority to hear habeas petitions, and later decisions of 

the Supreme Court limited these petitions to appeals of decisions by lower federal 

courts. Justice David J. Brewer, who had been a lawyer and judge in Kansas before 

being appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote the unanimous decision in In re Debs, 

in which the Court upheld the contempt citation and affi rmed the authority of the 

federal courts to issue injunctions to protect interstate commerce and the transportation of the mails and to protect the general welfare.

 Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court and granted the 

Court limited original jurisdiction. The Judiciary Act of 1789 granted the Supreme 

Court appellate jurisdiction over cases originating in the U.S. trial courts and over 

appeals of state supreme court decisions relating to questions of federal law and 

constitutionality. An act of 1891 established U.S. courts of appeals and granted the 

Supreme Court greater discretion to select cases it would hear.

 At the time of the Debs case, Melville W. Fuller was the Chief Justice of the United 

States. Since 1869, the Supreme Court has been authorized to have nine justices. 
11

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

The Judicial Process: A Chronology

May 11, 1894

Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike to protest wage reductions and the company’s refusal to lower rents of company-owned housing.

June 26, 1894

Members of the American Railway Union initiated a boycott of work involving Pullman railroad cars.

July 2, 1894

Acting in response to a complaint submitted by the U.S. attorney, Judges William 

A. Woods and Peter S. Grosscup, sitting in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern 

District of Illinois, issued an injunction directing Eugene V. Debs and other offi cers of 

the American Railway Union to cease all activity that might interfere with interstate 

commerce and the delivery of the U.S. mail. 

July 3, 1894

President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops into Chicago to ensure that trains 

would be able to move and to prevent threatened violence. Governor John P. Altgeld 

objected to the order, saying it was unnecessary.

July 10, 1894

A grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois indicted 

Eugene V. Debs, George W. Howard, Sylvester Keliher, and Lewis Rogers for criminal 

conspiracy to interfere with the mail and interstate commerce.

July 17, 1894

In response to informations fi led by the U.S. attorney and a railroad company, Judge 

William Seaman, sitting in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois, ordered Debs and the other union offi cers held on charges of contempt of the 

court’s injunction.
12

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

December 14, 1894

U.S. Circuit Judge William A. Woods ruled in United States v. Debs et al. that Debs 

and other offi cers of the American Railway Union were in contempt of court for not 

abiding by the earlier injunction, and he sentenced them to jail terms. Debs and the 

offi cers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of error and a writ of habeas 

corpus

January 14, 1895

Criminal trial of Debs, Howard, Keliher and Rogers began in the U.S. District Court 

for the Northern District of Illinois.

February 12, 1895

After a member of the jury became seriously ill, Judge Peter S. Grosscup dismissed 

the jury and thereby ended the criminal trial.

March 25–26, 1895

Oral arguments on the petition for a writ of habeas corpus before the Supreme 

Court.

May 27, 1895

Justice David J. Brewer issued a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court upholding 

the contempt citation in the case of In re Debs.

March 12, 1896

U.S. attorney entered an order of nolle prosequi, formally ending the criminal prosecution of Debs and the other union leaders.
13

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Legal Questions Before the Courts

Did the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of 

Illinois have authority to issue an injunction against 

Eugene V. Debs and the offi cers of the American Railway 

Union?

Yes, said the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision written by Justice David J. Brewer.

 On July 2, 1894, Judges William A. Woods and Peter S. Grosscup, sitting in the 

U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois, concluded that irreparable 

harm would be done to the railroads, interstate commerce, and mail delivery if the 

boycott of Pullman cars continued. The judges issued an injunction ordering Debs, 

American Railway Union offi cers, and unnamed others to cease any action that might 

interfere with the movement of railroads operating through Chicago. 

 Injunctions are orders directing somebody to do or not to do something. In British and United States courts, injunctions were generally limited to cases in which the 

person requesting the injunction could demonstrate that irreparable harm to private 

property would result without the court order, that no remedy was available based on 

law, and that criminal prosecution would not prevent the injury to the property.

 On December 14, 1894, Judge Woods, in a decision affi rming the contempt citation against the union offi cers for violating the injunction, justifi ed the injunction 

as a proper method of protecting the government’s property in the mails and cited 

other cases in which injunctions were used to prevent a public nuisance. Woods, as 

he had in the original injunction, also cited the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which authorized the use of injunctions to prevent any obstruction of interstate commerce. 

The original conspiracy against the Pullman cars had become a conspiracy against 

“transportation and travel.”

 The Supreme Court asserted a much broader authority for the injunction based 

on the government’s obligation to protect the general welfare of the nation. The Court 

agreed that the government’s property interest in the mails was suffi cient to justify 

the injunction, but the unanimous justices also asserted the courts’ independent 

authority to rely on injunctions to prevent irreparable damage to public interests as 

well as private property. 
14

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Did the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 apply to labor 

unions as well as trusts and monopolies?

Yes, said the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

 The “Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies” of July 2, 1890, better known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, granted the federal 

courts authority to issue restraining orders against combinations or conspiracies 

that restricted interstate trade. Although the supporters of the act wanted to limit 

the power of large corporate monopolies, by 1893 some federal courts accepted the 

act as authorization to restrain labor unions as well.

 The U.S. attorney in Chicago cited the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in his request for 

an injunction against the American Railway Union, and the injunction issued by the 

circuit court relied in part on the authority of the act. Attorneys for Debs argued that 

the extension of the Sherman Act’s provisions to labor unions was an unconstitutional attempt to punish in a court of equity; they argued that these actions should 

only be subject to criminal prosecution decided by a jury, and there was no access 

to a jury in a court of equity. In Judge William A. Woods’ decision on the contempt 

citation, he concluded that the Sherman Act’s language regarding a “combination in 

the form of trust or otherwise” was meant to extend to any combination, including 

labor unions, or the word “otherwise” would not have been inserted by Congress. 

 In the Supreme Court, Justice David Brewer declined to address the authority 

granted by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but he insisted this should not be interpreted 

as a disagreement with the circuit court. The Supreme Court, Brewer added, thought 

it more important to focus on the “broader ground” for establishing the courts’ jurisdiction to issue injunctions against labor actions. In 1908, the Supreme Court, in 

Loewe v. Lawlor (the Danbury Hatters’ Case), decided that the Sherman Anti-Trust 

Act applied to all combinations in restraint of trade, including those presented by 

labor unions.

Did Eugene V. Debs and the other offi cers of the American 

Railway Union violate the injunction?

Yes, said the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

 On July 17, 1894, attorneys for the railroads and the federal government presented 

the U.S. circuit court with motions asserting that Debs and other union offi cers had 

failed to comply with the injunction and that they should be held in contempt of 

the court. The attorneys presented copies of telegrams from Debs to union members 

urging them to continue their strike and boycott. The comparison of telegrams from 

before and after the date of the injunction, the government attorneys insisted, proved 
15

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

that the union offi cers had not changed or modifi ed their actions in support of the 

strike. 

 Judge William H. Seaman, in the U.S. circuit court, ruled that the evidence demonstrated contempt, and he order the arrest and imprisonment of Debs and the 

offi cers. Lawyers for the union offi cers gained court approval for further arguments 

on the contempt citation.

 In a series of hearings presided over by Judge Woods, the lawyers for Debs argued 

that the strike arose from a vote of the union membership rather than the offi cers’ 

orders, that the offi cers had no knowledge of possible violence, that their communications with local union offi ces indicated no intention to obstruct interstate commerce, 

and that the offi cers had consulted with attorneys to ensure that their actions would 

not violate the injunction. 

 In his decision of December 14, 1894, Judge Woods found “voluminous” evidence 

of the union offi cers’ violation of the injunction. Woods quoted newspaper interviews 

with Debs in which the union president said that the injunction would have no effect 

on his organization of the strike. Woods also concluded that Debs had not expected 

his warnings against violence to be taken seriously by workers. The union offi cers, 

Woods insisted, had full control over the strike and chose not to modify their plans 

after the injunction or after the appearance of violence.

Did the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of 

Illinois have the authority to hold Eugene V. Debs and 

other offi cers of the American Railway Union in contempt 

and to impose jail sentences?

Yes, said the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the U.S. 

Supreme Court.

 Attorneys for Debs and the union offi cers argued that the imposition of jail sentences for contempt of the injunction violated the constitutional guarantee of a trial 

by jury. Since the union offi cers had already been indicted on charges of a criminal 

conspiracy to obstruct commerce, the jail sentence for contempt of the injunction 

also represented double jeopardy.

 Judge William Woods declared that the Constitution granted the federal courts 

equity jurisdiction and that the power to punish for contempt of an equity order was 

an intrinsic part of that constitutional authority. Woods also asserted that the same 

act could constitute contempt and a crime and that an individual could be punished 

for both as long as the proceedings took place in the proper courts.

 Justice David Brewer in the Supreme Court was even more emphatic that the 

authority of a court to issue an order carries with it the authority to punish for disobedience of that order and that the same act could result in both a civil order and a 
16

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

criminal prosecution. Brewer concluded that the jail sentence was not an “invasion 

of the constitutional right of trial by jury.”

Were Eugene V. Debs and other offi cers of the American 

Railway Union guilty of criminal conspiracy to obstruct 

interstate commerce?

No decision was reached in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois because the judge dismissed the jury, and the U.S. attorney chose not to retry 

the case.

 Debs and his fellow union offi cers were indicted in the U.S. District Court for 

the Northern District of Illinois on charges of conspiracy to obstruct interstate commerce and to interrupt the delivery of the mails. In his instructions to the grand jury, 

Judge Peter Grosscup said that any combination of individuals to intimidate workers 

into striking would constitute a criminal conspiracy. Before the jury was dismissed, 

the U.S. attorney argued that the results of the strike, including the violence and the 

separation of Pullman cars from mail trains, were suffi cient evidence of conspiracy. 

Debs testifi ed that the activities of the union offi cers were all well within the recognized rights of striking workers.

 Before the indictment of Debs and the others, special U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker 

wrote to the attorney general that “the results of a trial under the indictment will be 

of little importance”; the indictments alone would have the “restraining effect upon 

Debs and his followers.” 

Related Cases

The use of injunctions against labor actions

The federal courts fi rst issued injunctions against labor strikes during the railroad 

strikes of 1877, when some of the struck railroads were in bankruptcy and thus 

under the protective receivership of the federal courts. During the 1880s, federal 

courts directed injunction orders against strikers from other railroad companies in 

receivership. In 1888, federal courts relied on the authority of the recently enacted 

Interstate Commerce Act to issue injunctions against strikers at railroads that were 

not in bankruptcy. In 1893, William Howard Taft, as a circuit judge sitting in the 

Northern District of Ohio, affi rmed that the Interstate Commerce Act granted the 

courts authority to issue injunctions against strikers who interfered with the interstate operation of railroads, and he narrowed the right to organize sympathy strikes 

or boycotts. In another case of 1893, the U.S. Circuit Court for the Eastern District 

of Louisiana became the fi rst federal court to cite the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as au-
17

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

thority to issue an injunction against strikers. The Sherman Act became the preferred 

authority to use against labor strikes involving interstate commerce.

Loewe v. Lawlor—The Sherman Anti-Trust Act applied to unions

In Loewe v. Lawlor, better known as the Danbury Hatters’ Case, the Supreme Court in 

1908 decided that labor unions as well as corporate trusts were subject to the Sherman 

Anti-Trust Act’s prohibition on combinations or conspiracies that restrained trade.

 Members of the United Hatters of North America organized a boycott of hat 

manufacturers that had not unionized their shops. The much larger American 

Federation of Labor joined in support of the boycott. A Danbury, Connecticut, hat 

manufacturer, Dietrich Loewe, supported by the American Anti-Boycott Association, brought a suit in the U.S. Circuit Court for Connecticut on charges that the 

boycott presented a combination in restraint of interstate commerce, in violation of 

the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. When the judge in the U.S. Circuit Court for 

the District of Connecticut agreed with the union attorneys that the boycott did not 

constitute a combination under the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, attorneys 

for the hat manufacturers appealed to the U.S. court of appeals, which asked for 

instruction from the Supreme Court.

 Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who wrote the opinion for a unanimous Supreme 

Court, said that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act made “no distinction between classes,” 

and the act applied to any restraint of interstate commerce, even if the individuals 

named in the suit were not themselves involved in interstate commerce. Examining 

the congressional record, Fuller noted that the Congress had considered an exemption for farmers and laborers and decided to omit any such exception.

 Justice David Brewer’s decision for In re Debs offered no opinion on the application of the Sherman Act to labor unions, but it pointedly stated that no one should 

conclude that the Supreme Court differed with the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern 

District of Illinois, which had ruled that the act applied to labor organizations.
18

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Legal Arguments in Court

Lawyers for the U.S. government

1. In the July 2, 1894, request for an injunction against the labor leaders 

in the Pullman strike, the U.S. attorney argued that the strike presented 

a threat to the free fl ow of interstate commerce and the delivery of the 

mails, and that therefore the union leaders should be restrained by an 

injunction as authorized by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist stated that almost 100,000 members of Debs’ union 

had gone on strike and that twenty railroads were slowed or entirely stopped. Other 

unions supported the Pullman boycott and conducted wildcat strikes of their own. 

Violence broke out between union members and non-union railroad employees at 

rail yards. Trains carrying produce, meat, and passengers were halted, and in some 

areas trains carrying the U.S. mail could not get to their destinations.

2. In an information presented to the U.S. Circuit Court on July 17, 

1894, the U.S. attorneys asserted that Debs and the other union offi cers 

had violated the injunction and were in contempt of the court.

The government attorneys contended that the union offi cers had not modifi ed their 

leadership of the strike and had continued to urge American Railway Union members to block trains, to prevent men from working for the railroads, and to engage 

in violence and intimidation. The information said that the union leadership had 

full power to call or to end the strike. It also argued that the union leaders knew of 

the strike-related violence before the injunction was issued and that they knew that 

their support for continuing the strike would produce additional violence.

3. In arguments before the Supreme Court, Attorney General Richard 

Olney argued that the federal courts had authority to issue an injunction 

in restraint of the labor leaders in the Pullman strike and to punish for 

contempt of the injunction.

Olney argued that the Pullman strike presented all of the criteria for an injunction. 

The strikers could not be restrained by criminal prosecution, the strike threatened 

irreparable harm in the danger it presented to private property and to interstate commerce, and the strike threatened to undermine the government’s rights and duties 

as the trustee of the nation’s transportation system. Injunctions were usually issued 
19

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

to protect private property, Olney acknowledged, but he said that the federal courts 

had long considered the government’s control of the nation’s highways the equivalent 

of ownership. Debs’ acknowledgment that the orders of the federal court ended the 

strike was, for Olney, confi rmation of the wisdom of the injunction.

 Olney denied that the punishment for contempt of the injunction violated the 

right to a trial by jury. The same act may constitute a crime and present a threat to 

private property that calls for immediate restraint by an injunction.

Lawyers for Debs and the American Railway Union

1. Debs and the other offi cers of the American Railway Union had not 

violated the injunction and therefore could not be found in contempt.

The union offi cers’ attorneys denied that their clients had the authority to call or to 

end a strike, as the government maintained, since only the rank and fi le membership could begin or end a strike. The attorneys also denied that the offi cers had sent 

any telegrams threatening workers who failed to join the strike and boycott against 

the Pullman Company. The offi cers had no prior knowledge of violence and sent 

no messages that sanctioned or encouraged violence, and the offi cers insisted that 

what violence there was had involved no union member participation. The telegrams 

submitted to the court as evidence of violation of the injunction in fact contained no 

reference to any obstruction of interstate commerce. The disruption of commerce, 

according to the union offi cers, resulted from decision of the railroad companies to 

halt all trains from which Pullman cars had been detached. The union offi cers had 

consulted with their counsels for advice on how best to abide by the injunction. In 

his brief submitted to the Supreme Court, Clarence Darrow noted that the information charging violation of the injunction did not include a single allegation of an 

illegal act on the part of the union offi cers, only that some illegal conduct followed 

the legal action of the union.

2. The jail sentence for contempt of the injunction deprived Debs and 

the union offi cers of their right to a trial by jury.

In the petition to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, the union offi cers 

argued that the jail sentence for contempt of the injunction amounted to a conviction without an indictment and without a jury, and thus was a violation of the Fifth 

and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution. They alleged that the government had 

improperly sought an injunction as a means of punishing a violation of the criminal 

code without a jury trial. 
20

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

3. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act authorization for injunctions against 

restraints of trade did not apply to labor unions.

The petition for the writ of habeas corpus argued that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act 

had no application to the facts stated in the injunction or in the information claiming violation of the injunction. Attorney Lyman Trumbull argued in the Supreme 

Court that the section of the Sherman Act conferring the authority to issue injunctions was unconstitutional because Congress could not grant the federal courts the 

power to impose criminal penalties in a proceeding in which there was no access to 

a jury trial.

4. The circuit court’s holding of contempt effectively deprived workers 

of the right to organize and to strike.

In his brief to the Supreme Court, Clarence Darrow warned that the restrictions 

imposed on the union offi cers by the injunction and the contempt order effectively 

destroyed the workers’ ability to organize and engage in any cooperative labor action. 

Darrow said that the court’s distinction between a strike and a sympathetic boycott 

undermined the effectiveness of any cooperative labor action because it would disallow 

any strike except by those who were directly affected by grievances. The foundation 

of the labor movement was the ability to organize in support of one’s fellow workers. 

The right to strike would be made meaningless as well by any attempt to hold workers criminally responsible for violence on the part of others. Darrow acknowledged 

that violence often resulted from strikes, but so too did it result from management 

decisions to cut wages or to lock out workers. In the current confl icts of industrial 

life, strikes were an indispensable defense of workers if they were to “unite for mutual defense, for the betterment of their condition, to work or to cease to work—in 

short, to be free men.”
21

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Biographies

John Peter Altgeld (1847–1902)

John Peter Altgeld was governor of Illinois during the Pullman strike and boycott. 

After immigrating to the United States from his native Germany, Altgeld served as a 

private in the Union Army and worked as a teacher and then as a lawyer in Missouri. 

He moved to Chicago in 1875, became active in the Democratic Party, and served 

as a judge of the Cook County Superior Court from 1886 to 1891. He was elected 

governor in 1892 with strong support from farm and labor groups. Believing that 

the Anarchists convicted in the notorious Haymarket Trial of 1886 had been denied 

a fair trial, he pardoned the three who remained incarcerated in 1893.

 During the Pullman strike and boycott, Altgeld ordered companies of the state 

militia to Danville and Decatur with directions to quell rioting and to clear the 

way for rail traffi c. This initiative seemed to produce calm, but President Grover 

Cleveland appeared unmindful of Altgeld’s efforts and ordered federal troops into 

Illinois. Altgeld was outraged and complained to the President. The railroads, Altgeld 

thought, were disrupted not because men had blocked the traffi c but rather because 

strikers and their sympathizers would not work for railroads carrying Pullman cars. 

Altgeld also protested when U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney and his assistants 

sought and obtained an injunction against Eugene V. Debs and the leadership of the 

American Railway Union.

 Altgeld’s opposition to the use of troops and the injunction made him a great 

hero to many reform-minded Democrats, but it also contributed to his defeat when 

he sought reelection in 1896. Altgeld, however, did not change his opinion. Before his 

death in 1902, he said the decision in In re Debs “marks a turning point in our history, 

for it established a new form of government never before heard of among men, that 

is, government by injunction.” “The Constitution declares that our government has 

three departments,” he said, “the legislative, judicial and executive, and that no one 

shall tread on the other, but under this new order of things a federal judge becomes 

at once a legislator, court and executioner.”

American Railway Union

The American Railway Union was founded in Chicago on June 20, 1893, with the 

goal of uniting railway employees from all types of jobs into one giant union. The 

union founders believed that the trade unions to which different types of railroad 

workers belonged had been ineffective. These brotherhoods were plagued by petty 

jealousies and were unable to present a united front to the railroads. In light of the 
22

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

railroads’ growth and the concentration of railroad capital, the founders argued, the 

need for worker solidarity was especially great.

 The American Railway Union had departments of education, legislation, cooperation, mediation, and insurance, and it included both a central offi ce and local chapters. 

The central offi ce, headed by nine directors, made policy for the entire union, but 

the local chapters were the fi rst to consider specifi c complaints and demands made 

by members.

 Large numbers of railroad workers joined the union in late 1893 and early 1894, 

and in the spring of 1894 the union struck the Great Northern Railroad because it 

had ordered three wage reductions in the preceding eight months. James T. Hill, the 

owner of the Great Northern, agreed to have arbitrators settle the dispute, and this 

victory led even more workers to join the union. Less than one year after its founding, 

the union had 465 local chapters and almost 150,000 members, thereby constituting 

one of the largest labor organizations in the country.

 The union organized meetings just outside the town of Pullman and enlisted 

many Pullman workers. Members of the union attending the organization’s fi rst 

annual convention in Chicago voted in June 1894 to support the Pullman strike by 

refusing to move any trains that included Pullman cars. When rioting and violence 

followed, the federal government obtained an injunction against Eugene V. Debs and 

other offi cers of the union. The judge found these men in violation of the injunction 

and sentenced them to prison terms.

 Even before the circuit court and the Supreme Court 

upheld the prison terms, the strike and boycott collapsed, 

and the union lost almost all of its members. When Debs 

completed his sentence in December 1895, he attempted 

to revive the union, but it was too late. Many who had 

belonged to the American Railway Union were blacklisted and unable to fi nd any railroad employment.

David J. Brewer (1837–1910)

David J. Brewer wrote the opinion for the unanimous 

Supreme Court in In re Debs, upholding the use of the 

injunction against the American Railway Union and affi rming the circuit court’s jail sentence for contempt of 

the injunction. Brewer was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, 

where his parents were Congregational missionaries. He 

attended Wesleyan and Yale, and read law with his uncle, 

David Dudley Field, at the Albany Law School. Brewer 

moved to Kansas to practice law and was appointed a 

commissioner by the U.S. circuit court. He served on 

Justice David J. Brewer

Photograph by Frances Benjamin 

Johnston. Library of Congress, 

Prints and Photographs Division 

[LC-USZ62-90084]
23

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

the Supreme Court of Kansas for fourteen years, and in 1884 President Chester A. 

Arthur appointed him judge of the U.S. Circuit Courts of the Eighth Circuit. In 1890, 

President Benjamin Harrison appointed Brewer to the Supreme Court of the United 

States, and Brewer served until his death in 1910. Brewer was also the nephew of 

Stephen J. Field, who served on the Supreme Court from 1863 to 1897.

 As a justice of the Supreme Court, Brewer restricted government regulation of 

the economy and was protective of state rights against the federal government. He 

protected the rights of individuals, particularly Chinese Americans, but he was very 

concerned about the rise of organized labor and other social movements. He advocated an active role for courts in the protection of private property and the curtailment of strikes, which he feared could lead to violent social revolution. In the Debs

opinion, Brewer praised the government for using the courts rather than “the club of 

the policeman and the bayonet of the soldier.” At the end of his opinion he offered his 

general thoughts on law and legal institutions in American life. “It is a lesson which 

cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly under this government of and by the 

people,” he said, “that the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and 

at the ballot-box, and that no wrong, real or fancied, carries with it legal warrant to 

invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob, with its accompanying acts of 

violence.”

Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)

Throughout the Pullman Strike, President 

Grover Cleveland convened daily meetings 

with cabinet members and advisors to discuss possible responses to the strike that 

increasingly disrupted railroads in large 

portions of the country. Despite advice 

of caution from the commander of the 

U.S. Army for the Chicago area, President 

Cleveland responded to the request from 

the federal marshal in Chicago and, on 

July 3, 1894, ordered federal troops into 

Chicago. Nationally, over 16,000 troops 

were mustered. The soldiers attempted to 

remove obstacles to rail traffi c and arrested 

and sometimes shot boycotters and rioters. 

Cleveland based his order on Civil War-era 

statutes that authorized the President to 

use troops to suppress insurrections that 

threatened to disrupt the federal courts 

President Grover Cleveland

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs 

Division [LC-DIG-pga-02167]
24

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

and the enforcement of federal law. Cleveland defended his decision against the repeated and vociferous objections of Illinois Governor Altgeld. Within days, Cleveland 

also ordered troops to protect railroad lines in western states and territories.

 In late July, Cleveland acceded to requests from labor leaders and appointed a 

commission to study the causes of the Pullman strike and to recommend ways to 

avoid future railroad strikes. 

 Cleveland was born in New Jersey, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and he lived 

much of his adult life in Buffalo, New York, where he worked as a lawyer and became 

active in politics, briefl y serving as mayor. In 1882, Cleveland was elected governor of 

New York, and in 1884 he defeated James G. Blaine in a close race for the presidency. 

Cleveland was the fi rst Democrat to be elected President since before the Civil War, 

but he was popular among conservatives and businessmen in the Republican Party 

because he believed government should not interfere in economic affairs unless there 

was a threat to property rights or to law and order. In 1888, Cleveland won a majority 

of the popular vote in his reelection campaign, but he lost to the Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. Then, in 1892, Cleveland defeated Harrison, 

becoming the only U.S. President to win a second but nonconsecutive term.

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)

Clarence Darrow, one of the most famous 

defense lawyers in U.S. history, represented 

many unpopular and controversial clients 

throughout his career. Born in Ohio, he attended Allegheny College of Pennsylvania 

and the University of Michigan Law School. 

He fi rst practiced law in Ohio and then 

moved to Chicago in 1887. In addition to 

practicing law, Darrow became involved in 

Illinois politics and became a close friend 

of John Altgeld, serving as an advisor in 

Altgeld’s race for governor in 1892. In 1891, 

Darrow became an attorney for the Chicago 

and North-Western Railway and served on 

the General Managers’ Association legal 

committee, but he withdrew from the committee when the Pullman strike began, and 

he took leave from his job to defend Debs 

and the other union offi cers. Darrow represented the union offi cers in the hearings 

on the contempt citation, in the criminal 

Clarence Darrow 

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs 

Division [LC-USZ62-11819]
25

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

conspiracy trial, and in the appeal of the contempt order to the Supreme Court. “I 

really wanted the men to win, and believed they should,” Darrow wrote later in his 

autobiography. “I knew that like all other men they were often selfi sh and unreasonable, but I believed that the distribution of wealth was grossly unjust, and I sympathized with almost all efforts to get higher wages and to improve general conditions 

for the masses.”

 During the conspiracy trial, Darrow obtained and released records of the General 

Managers’ Association showing the managers had themselves conspired to break the 

union. When the court ended the prosecution because a juror was too ill to continue, 

Darrow claimed that a victory for the defense would have been certain.

 In the Supreme Court, Darrow continued to argue for a cause in which he had 

come to believe deeply. He wrote one of the three briefs and made the closing oral 

argument for Debs. “When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of 

labor,” Darrow said, “not because their own rights have been invaded, but because 

the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows, we have no right to say 

they are criminals.” 

 In the years following the Debs case, Darrow was the defense attorney for many 

labor leaders, including “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, who 

had been accused of murdering the governor of Idaho. (Haywood was acquitted.) In 

the 1920s, Darrow gained new fame when he won a reprieve for his clients, Loeb and 

Leopold, who admitted to killing a child in an attempt to commit a “perfect crime.” 

In the highly publicized Scopes trial of 1925, Darrow defended a Tennessee teacher 

indicted for teaching evolution, and, although Scopes was convicted, Darrow further 

cemented his national reputation as one of the most powerful courtroom advocates 

of his age. 

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926)

Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of Alsatian immigrants 

who operated a grocery store. Debs quit school at the age of fourteen and worked as 

a railroad laborer, painter, and fi reman. He became active in the local chapter of the 

Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and rose to leadership in the organization. As 

editor of the Brotherhood’s magazine, he gained a national reputation in the organization that remained a traditional labor association, as much focused on mutual 

support of members as on negotiations with management. After a series of labor 

disputes and strikes in the 1880s, Debs became disenchanted with labor organizations based on a single trade or craft. He helped to establish the American Railway 

Union, an “industrial union” that organized railroad workers across crafts for more 

effective advocacy of workers needs. Debs became president of the American Railway 

Union upon its founding in 1893.
26

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 Less than a year after its founding, 

the American Railway Union had 465 

local chapters and over 150,000 members. A small number of the workers at 

the Pullman Palace Car Company were 

members, and they joined their fellow 

Pullman workers in the strike of 1894. 

Debs worried about the chances for success of a strike in the midst of a national 

depression, but he went to Pullman 

soon after the strike began and quickly 

concluded that the workers needed some 

organized action against the company. 

When the American Railway Union held 

its convention in Chicago a few weeks 

after the start of the strike, the delegates 

voted not only to support the strikers 

but also to refuse to move any Pullman 

railroad cars. This boycott disrupted 

rail service, and government lawyers 

obtained from a federal court an injunction ordering Debs and other offi cers of 

the American Railway Union from any 

action that might encourage strikers.

 When Debs and the offi cers continued to communicate with local union chapters and the disruption of rail traffi c 

spread, the U.S. circuit court ordered the arrest of Debs and the offi cers for violation 

of the injunction. The district court also indicted Debs and his fellow offi cers on 

charges of criminal conspiracy to disrupt interstate commerce. He petitioned for a 

writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme Court of the United States, but the Court 

ruled that the actions of the U.S. Circuit Court in the Northern District of Illinois 

were proper and constitutional. As a result, Debs served a six-month jail term.

 The American Railway Union collapsed in the wake of the broken Pullman 

strike, but Debs remained involved in labor unions, and by the end of the decade 

he emerged as a leader of the Socialist Party of America. Debs was the presidential 

candidate of the Socialist Party in fi ve elections between 1900 and 1920. During the 

First World War, Debs was again the center of a federal trial when he was convicted 

under the Espionage Act of 1917 for anti-war speeches. He was sentenced to ten 

years in prison but was released at Christmas 1921 by President Warren Harding. 

While in prison, Debs stood as the Socialist candidate for President and won 3% of 

the national vote.

Eugene V. Debs

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs 

Division [LC-USZ62-24198]
27

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

General Managers’ Association

The General Managers’ Association represented twenty-four railroad companies 

with terminals in Chicago. These railroad companies included some of the largest 

in the country and together constituted a major portion of the American railroad 

industry. Founded in 1886, the Association attempted to standardize equipment and 

procedures and to propose wage schedules for its employees. The schedules proved 

valuable in labor negotiations and began to approximate a national wage scale for 

railroad employees.

 While George M. Pullman was the chief foe of the workers at his plant when 

they went on strike in 1894, the General Managers’ Association became the chief foe 

of the American Railway Union and others when they boycotted Pullman cars. On 

June 26, 1894, Everett St. John, the chairman of the Association, announced that the 

boycott of Pullman cars would be resisted. The Association chose John M. Egan to 

lead the anti-boycott campaign, and Egan in turn hired private detectives to collect 

the names of railroad men who were supporting the boycott. Those men were fi red, 

and the Association replaced them with workers recruited in the East. The country 

had plunged into a depression, and many unemployed men were only too happy to 

fi nd work. The Association called them “replacement workers,” but the American 

Railway Union members thought of them as “strike-breakers” or “scabs.”

 The General Managers’ Association also took steps to turn public sentiment 

against the striking and boycotting workers. The Association urged members to attach 

Pullman cars to mail trains, freight trains, and even local commuter trains. When 

boycotters refused to move these trains because they included Pullman cars, service 

was halted, and the public grew increasingly hostile toward the strike and boycott.

 Edwin Walker, special prosecutor for the federal government, met regularly with 

representatives of the Association to discuss legal actions against the strikers and the 

American Railway Union. George Peck, chair of the Association’s legal committee, 

advised the government lawyers, and the government lawyers fi led motions and 

requested rulings favorable to the Association. In the midst of the legal proceedings, 

however, Clarence Darrow, one of the attorneys for the American Railway Union, 

obtained and released embarrassing minutes from meetings of the Association. The 

minutes made clear the Association’s determination not merely to counter the boycott 

but also to determine wages and eliminate the American Railway Union.

Peter S. Grosscup (1852–1921)

Peter S. Grosscup was born in Ashland, Ohio. He attended Wittenberg College and 

Boston Law School before returning to Ashland and practicing law there from 1873 

to 1883. He made unsuccessful runs for Congress in 1876 and 1880, then moved 

to Chicago to continue his successful law practice. In 1892, Benjamin Harrison ap-
28

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

pointed Grosscup to the U.S. District Court 

of the Northern District of Illinois. Grosscup 

sat with Judge William A. Woods on the U.S. 

circuit court when it issued the injunction 

against Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union offi cers. Grosscup also presided 

at the ill-fated criminal prosecution of Debs, 

which ended in February 1895, when a juror 

became ill and Grosscup declared a mistrial. 

Grosscup had recused himself from the circuit court hearings on the contempt charges 

because the facts of the case were so closely 

related to the criminal trial. In 1899, President 

William McKinley appointed his old friend 

Grosscup to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 

for the Seventh Circuit. 

 As he had on the district court, Grosscup 

continued to speak out on public affairs as 

a circuit judge. In the midst of the Pullman 

strike proceedings in July 1894, Grosscup 

had delivered a speech on “Labor and Property.” During the Spanish-American War, he 

publicly advocated the annexation of Cuba. 

Although Grosscup was critical of the strikers and big labor unions, he also supported regulation of big trusts. In 1912, he backed Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential 

candidacy for the Progressive Party.

 Grosscup also courted controversy with his private business affairs. As a circuit 

judge he appointed as a receiver to a bankrupt company his close friend and clerk of 

court. As president of a small railroad company, Grosscup was indicted with other 

offi cers in a criminal negligence case that arose out of an accident that killed fi fteen 

people. Both cases prompted calls for impeachment, but President Roosevelt opposed 

the idea. When Grosscup announced that he would retire from the federal courts in 

the fall of 1911, a Chicago newspaper announced that the judge had been the subject 

of a two-year investigation by a magazine, and that offi cials of the Department of 

Justice had cooperated with the investigation, which focused on fi nancial malfeasance. 

The magazine dropped its investigation when Grosscup threatened to withdraw his 

resignation, and Grosscup left the bench, stating that he was not interested in remaining as a circuit judge now that Congress had eliminated all trial duties for circuit 

judges. He moved to New York and returned to law practice.

Judge Peter Grosscup

George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of 

Congress, Prints and Photographs Division 

[LC-DIG-ggbain-06248]
29

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Richard Olney (1835–1917)

Richard Olney was the Attorney General of 

the United States during the Pullman strike 

and directed the government’s litigation 

in the Debs case. Olney attended Brown 

University and the Harvard Law School, 

and he practiced law with former Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Benjamin 

F. Thomas in Boston. Olney’s frequent work 

for railroad companies led to his appointment as counsel and member of the board 

of directors for several railroads, and he 

worked to limit the effects of recent laws 

regulating the railroad companies.

 When President Grover Cleveland appointed Olney U.S. Attorney General in 

1893, Olney asked for and was given assurances that he could continue to provide 

legal services to his clients while serving in 

Washington, D.C. Olney had little political 

experience but he quickly became a trusted 

adviser to Cleveland. When the Cleveland 

administration turned to the federal courts in an effort to stop the Pullman strike 

and boycott, Olney selected railroad attorney Edwin Walker to be a special assistant 

U.S. attorney and to lead the efforts in Chicago. When Eugene V. Debs’ attorneys 

petitioned the Supreme Court following his citation for violating the lower court 

injunction, Olney coordinated the briefs and oral arguments for the government and 

made one of his two appearances before the Court. When the Supreme Court subsequently ruled in the government’s favor, Olney told his secretary that the Supreme 

Court “took my argument and turned it into an opinion.”

 After the Pullman strike and boycott ended, Olney learned that 3,600 loyal railroad employees had also served as special U.S. marshals. The government, he said, 

should be impartial in struggles between labor and capital, and the double-duty of 

the 3,600 employees made government look like “the paid agent and instrument of 

capital.” Olney also endorsed the idea that the federal courts could serve as arbiters 

between railroad employees and railroad owners. Olney himself had remained on 

the payroll of a railroad company that was a member of the General Managers’ Association. When the arrangement became public, he agreed to give up the salary but 

remained as a counsel for the company.

Attorney General Richard Olney

George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of 

Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

[LC-DIG-ggbain-05196]
30

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 On the day after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in In re Debs, 

Secretary of State Walter G. Gresham died, and President Cleveland asked Olney to 

accept the position. The Senate confi rmed Olney’s nomination two weeks later, and 

Olney served as Secretary of State through the remainder of the Cleveland administration

George M. Pullman (1831–1897)

George M. Pullman was born in upstate New York, where his father owned and operated a small company that moved buildings. Pullman took over the company after his 

father’s death and transferred the business to Chicago in the 1850s, when the booming city gave him opportunities for enormous success. Pullman used his newfound 

capital to enter various businesses, including the manufacture of railroad cars.

 Pullman’s earliest railroad cars won praise at the time of the Civil War, and he 

incorporated his railroad car business in 1867. With the backing of Andrew Carnegie, 

Pullman won contracts with leading railroad companies and bought out his leading 

competitor. By 1879, the Pullman Palace Car Company had gross annual earnings of 

$2.2 million and annual net earnings of almost $1 million. The company also built 

and operated passenger and sleeping cars that set new standards for comfort and 

luxury. 

 In 1880 Pullman decided to concentrate his manufacturing operations at a company town he developed south of Chicago. The town of Pullman offered a vision of 

corporate paternalism under which workers would rent housing and enjoy the civic 

institutions planned by the company’s owner. The town of Pullman, built at a cost 

of $8 million, offered workers brick housing, green parks, and social services that 

were strictly controlled by the company’s management.

 The Pullman Company faced several small walkouts in the early 1880s and a strike 

for an eight-hour day in 1886, but nothing on the scale of the labor dispute in 1894, 

when workers voted to leave their jobs in protest of the company’s unwillingness 

to lower rents at the same time that it lowered wages. Pullman felt betrayed by his 

workers for whom, in his mind, he had provided so much, and he met only briefl y 

with workers. When the 1894 strike led to a boycott of Pullman cars by members 

of the American Railway Union and others, Pullman still refused to negotiate with 

the workers in his company town. Eventually the strike collapsed and workers who 

quit the American Railway Union returned to work. Pullman thus prevailed in his 

immediate battle with labor, but during and after the strike, many criticized his infl exibility and insensitivity, and the paternalistic vision of the town of Pullman was 

irreparably damaged.

 Pullman died of a heart attack in 1897. His estate was valued at $17.5 million, 

and his will included a bequest of $1.5 million for a manual training school for the 

children of his workers. Pullman’s will also directed his heirs to coat his casket with 
31

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

asphalt, sink it deeply into the ground, and then fi ll the entire grave with concrete. 

The great industrialist and millionaire George M. Pullman worried prior to his death 

that the workers he had defeated in 1894 would tear apart his corpse.

Lyman Trumbull 

(1813–1896)

Lyman Trumbull’s public career 

extended from the sectional debates of the 1850s to the rise of 

Populism in the 1890s. Trumbull 

was born and educated in Connecticut, and he taught in Georgia 

for a few years before moving in 

1836 to Illinois, where he entered 

law practice. After brief service 

in the state legislature, Trumbull 

served on the Illinois Supreme 

Court from 1849 to 1853. In 

1854, he was elected to the U.S. 

House of Representatives, but 

before the start of his term he was 

elected by the state legislature to 

the U.S. Senate. Trumbull broke 

with the Democratic Party over 

the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the 

question of limiting slavery in the 

territories. By the end of his fi rst 

year in the Senate, he had joined 

the Republican Party.

 Trumbull supported a strong 

effort to defeat the seceded states, 

and he was among the first in 

Congress to advocate the emancipation of slaves as part of the Union’s military 

strategy. As the long-time chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trumbull was 

sponsor of the Thirteenth Amendment and key Reconstruction legislation. He often 

split with the Radical Republicans. Although he regularly opposed President Andrew 

Johnson’s efforts to dilute Reconstruction policy, Trumbull was one of only seven 

Republicans who voted to acquit Johnson in his impeachment trial.

Lyman Trumbull

Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, 

Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-cwpbh-03888]
32

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 Trumbull left offi ce in 1873 and entered the practice of law in Chicago. He also 

became a Democrat and served as counsel to Samuel Tilden in the disputed presidential election of 1876.

 After Stephen Gregory and Clarence Darrow fi led a petition for a writ of habeas 

corpus from the Supreme Court in the Debs case, they asked Trumbull to assist them 

in writing the briefs and making the oral arguments. Gregory and Darrow thought 

Trumbull’s prominence and stature would improve Debs’ chances. Trumbull accepted, 

and he provided his legal services without a fee. Trumbull argued that the U.S. circuit 

court had no authority to issue an injunction against Debs and the American Railway 

Union. 

 Trumbull died only a year after the Supreme Court rejected his arguments in its 

opinion in In re Debs. Before his death, Trumbull commented that the opinion of 

the Supreme Court gave too much power to federal judges. Trumbull also became 

involved with the Populist Party during the fi nal years of his life.

United States Strike Commission

In response to a request from the Knights of Labor and Populist Senator James Kyle, 

President Grover Cleveland on July 24, 1894, appointed a strike commission to investigate the origins of the Pullman strike and to recommend ways to avoid comparable labor disputes in the future. An act of 1888 authorized the President to appoint 

commissions to mediate disputes between interstate railroads and their workers, and 

the act provided that the U.S. commissioner of labor chair such a commission. Carroll D. Wright, the commissioner of labor, and the two other members of the strike 

commission held hearings in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and listened to over 

100 witnesses representing workers from the Pullman Palace Car Company, offi cers 

of the American Railway Union, members of the General Managers’ Association, 

and others. The commission delivered its lengthy report and recommendations to 

President Cleveland in November 1894.

 The commission found the root causes of the strike in the public’s and the government’s failure to regulate trusts or to protect the interests of workers. It documented 

the burden placed on workers as the Pullman Company cut wages in an effort to 

maintain revenues during a national depression. The refusal of the Pullman Company and the General Managers’ Association to meet with workers, according to the 

commission, closed off any chance of settlement. The commission found no evidence 

that the offi cers of the American Railway Union did anything to incite violence, and 

it noted that most of those arrested for violence were not railroad workers. 

 The commission recommended greater legal recognition of labor unions and 

proposed legislation for a permanent commission to promote arbitration of labor–

management disputes. An arbitration bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, 
33

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

but it failed to pass in the U.S. Senate, where opposition to arbitration from leading 

businessmen was infl uential.

William A. Woods (1837–1901)

William A. Woods served as the presiding judge of the U.S. Circuit Court for the 

Northern District of Illinois in July 1894, and with fellow judge Peter Grosscup issued the injunction ordering Eugene Debs and other offi cers of the American Railway 

Union to cease any efforts to disrupt interstate commerce and the transportation of 

the mails through their coordination of the boycott of Pullman railroad cars. Woods 

also presided at hearings regarding the criminal contempt citation issued by another 

federal judge against Debs and the other offi cers for allegedly ignoring the injunction. 

On December 14, 1894, Judge Woods ruled that the injunction and contempt citation 

were legal. The Chicago Daily News reported that Woods’ opinion was “a voluminous 

typewritten affair” and that he read it to a packed courtroom.

 Woods was born in Tennessee, but as a young boy his abolitionist family moved 

to Iowa. Woods went to Wabash College in Indiana and read law. He served in the 

Indiana legislature and was elected as a state judge and as a member of the Indiana 

Supreme Court. In 1883, President Chester A. Arthur appointed Woods judge of the 

U.S. District Court for Indiana, and President Benjamin Harrison appointed Woods 

a circuit judge for the Seventh Circuit in 1891. He was confi rmed in March 1892 and 

served as a circuit judge until his death in 1901.

 When the Supreme Court upheld the contempt citation and related jail sentences, 

Woods described the opinion of Justice David J. Brewer in In re Debs as “highly 

gratifying,” and he said he knew he “was right in issuing the injunction last summer against the offi cers of the American Railway Union, and being right in the law 

the right to punish the men for contempt followed as a natural sequence.” In April 

1897, Woods published an article on labor injunctions in the Yale Law Journal and 

defended his decision. “Nobody in his right mind,” Woods said, “believes that there 

has been usurpation of power by the courts, or that the power exercised is the source 

or beginning of peril to individual or collective rights.”
34

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Media Coverage and Public Debates

The Pullman strike and boycott were important national news, and periodicals as 

well as major daily newspapers devoted signifi cant attention to the strike and boycott 

that spread from the Chicago area to the western half of the country. In an editorial 

of July 7, 1894, the infl uential Harper’s Weekly said the nation was “fi ghting for its 

own existence just as truly as in suppressing the great rebellion.”

 The Harper’s Weekly comparison of the Pullman disorders to the Civil War, 

equating the strikers and boycotters with southern rebels, was typical of the press’s 

negative characterization of the strikers and boycotters. Congress supported President Cleveland’s use of federal soldiers, ministers rose in their pulpits to deplore the 

disorder, and the press for the most part took the side of the railroads. Stopping rail 

traffi c, the argument went, interfered with commerce, stopped the delivery of the 

mails, and generally harmed the nation.

Harper’s Weekly’s criticism of the strikers and boycotters included not only 

editorials and reporting but also sketches and illustrations. Especially noteworthy 

were the drawings Harper’s Weekly commissioned from the famous artist Frederic 

Remington. Remington had made his name with dramatic renderings of heroic soldiers and mysterious Indians from the American West. In Harper’s Weekly of July 21, 

July 28, and August 11, 1894, he portrayed the federal troops in Chicago every bit as 

heroically as he had portrayed them on the frontier. And lest there be any doubt of 

what he meant his drawings to convey, Remington’s accompanying commentaries 

described the troops as halting “a malodorous crowd of anarchist foreign trash.” The 

“Scenes in and About Chicago” excerpt: “Deputies Trying to Move an Engine and 

Car on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacifi c Railroad, July 2, 1894”

Harper’s Weekly, 1894.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-75202]
35

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

“King Debs”

Caricature of Eugene V. Debs, by W.A. Rogers

Harper’s Weekly, July 14, 1894.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-106100]
36

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

citizens of Chicago, he added, were pleased to see the federal troops arrive because 

they could keep “social scum from rising to the top.”

 The covers of Harper’s Weekly also made clear the periodical’s pronounced hostility toward the boycotters, Eugene V. Debs, and those who would sympathize with 

the boycott. The cover of July 14, 1894, featured a drawing of a bigger-than-life Debs 

wearing a crown, casually attired, and apparently blocking interstate commerce. In 

the background grain elevators, factories, and terminals are closed, and trains carrying mail, fl our, vegetables, and dressed beef are stopped dead on the tracks. One 

week later, another cover, featuring the “Vanguard of Anarchy,” again portrayed Debs 

wearing a crown and now seated on a throne, carried by Illinois Governor Altgeld 

and assorted clowns and followed by a monstrous group of men wielding guns and 

waving torches.

 Daily newspapers did not match Harper’s Weekly’s graphic excesses, but they too 

presented the strikers, boycotters, and Debs in a sensational and negative manner. A 

headline in the Washington Post of July 7, 1894, warned, “Fired by the Mob, Chicago 

at the Mercy of the Incendiary’s Torch.” The New York Times on July 9, 1894, con-

“The Great Railway Strikes – The First Meat Train Leaving the Chicago Stock-Yards 

under escort of United States Cavalry, July 10, 1894”

Reproduction in Harper’s Weekly, July 28, 1894, of drawing by G. W. Peters after G. A. Coffi n.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-3526]
37

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

demned Debs for his purportedly excessive consumption of liquor. Using terms of 

the era, the newspaper said Debs suffered from “dipsomania” and urged him to seek 

treatment for his “liquor habit.”

 The half dozen daily newspapers in Chicago gave the strike and boycott extensive 

coverage, and the coverage in the Chicago Tribune was the most extensive and critical. 

The newspaper’s editorial of May 16, 1894, entitled “Wild Demands of the Pullman 

Men,” suggested the workers’ demands were “the work of some Populist-Socialist 

who has strayed here from the West or the South . . . .” A front-page article on June 

30, 1894, reported, “With the coming of darkness last night Dictator Debs’ strikers 

threw off the mask of law and order and began the commission of acts of lawlessness 

and violence.” An editorial on the same date accused Debs and the other offi cers of 

the American Railway Union of wanting “to show that they could wield a colossal 

power over the American people and their interstate commerce and would hesitate 

at no measures which they do not suppose to bring the penitentiary or gallows in 

their train.”

 Between July 3 and 5, 1894, the Chicago Tribune published a series of front-page 

cartoons ridiculing Debs. In the fi rst, Debs wears a lion’s suit, stands on top of a book 

titled “Law,” and brays rudely at Uncle Sam. In the second, Debs smokes a cigar and 

wears a crown, and he props his feet on a table thereby soiling the Declaration of 

Independence. In the third and most curious, Uncle Sam squats to light a fi recracker 

with Debs’ face and name on it. The wand used for ignition reads “U.S. Troops,” and 

the caption says, “Uncle Sam Takes a Hand In It.”

 Press coverage of the legal proceedings in the Chicago courts was limited in the 

national publications, but the Chicago newspapers not surprisingly covered the proceedings and commented upon them in detail. Most of the coverage was supportive 

of the arguments of the railroads and the federal government. The Chicago Tribune, 

for example, ran a front-page article titled “Uncle Sam Will Use the Law Backed by 

Riot Guns” on July 2, 1894, the very day the federal government sought the injunction. 

The article praised the breadth of the injunction. The injunction, the newspaper said, 

will be “of so broad and sweeping a character that interference with the railroads, 

even of the remotest kind, will be practically impossible without incurring penalties 

for contempt of court.” Eagerly anticipating developments once the injunction was 

issued, the newspaper added, “It is said without reserve the arrest of these men [Debs 

and the American Railway Union offi cers] is inevitable . . . .”

 The New York Times, which had predicted confi dently and accurately how the 

Supreme Court appeal would be decided, praised the decision in an editorial of May 

28, 1895. The decision was important in several ways, the newspaper said. “It is the 

fi rst instance in which the Supreme Court has been called upon to consider, fi rst, the 

full scope of the powers of Congress with reference to the vast transportation system 

of the country by virtue of its relations to the Postal Service and inter-state commerce, 

and, second, the procedure by injunction and sentence for contempt in disobeying 
38

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

“The Vanguard of Anarchy”

Caricature of Eugene V. Debs, by W.A. Rogers

Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1894.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-106101]
39

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

an injunction . . . .” The newspaper was especially struck that, despite sectional and 

party differences, the Supreme Court had achieved unanimity. “We had not ventured 

to think that the decision of the Supreme Court would be at once so complete and 

unqualifi ed and be unanimous.”

 An editorial of May 28, 1895, in the Chicago Tribune said the decision did more 

than send Debs to jail. “It is a notice to all Anarchists and other disturbers of the 

public peace that the hands of the General Government are not fettered when it is 

dealing with questions which are under its exclusive control.” The result of the decision, the Chicago Tribune said, is that “there will be no more attempts except on the 

part of train robbers to stop the transportation of the mails or to tie-up inter-state 

commerce. There will be no more insurrections like that of last July.” The Inter 

Ocean, while praising the Supreme Court, took advantage of another opportunity 

to criticize Debs and his union. “The Debs movement was the most absurd as well 

as the most iniquitous that ever was devised by the unwit of man,” the newspaper 

said in its editorial of May 28, 1895. “Had it [the Debs movement] been legalized 

into a precedent no class would have been doomed to such suffering as that which 

would have fallen upon the wage-earners. In its last analysis, the Debs plan was that 

of organized anarchy . . . .”
40

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Historical Documents

Writ of injunction, U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern 

District of Illinois, July 2, 1894

U.S. Attorney Thomas Milchrist, with the approval of the U.S. Attorney General 

and the advice of Special U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker, submitted a complaint asking the U.S. circuit court in Chicago to issue an injunction restraining the American 

Railway Union offi cers in their support of the Pullman strike and the boycott of 

Pullman cars. Injunctions had been issued by English and American courts for centuries to protect private property from immediate and irreparable harm, but federal 

injunctions against labor strikes dated only to 1877, when the courts had issued 

injunctions against railroad workers striking against companies that were under 

federal bankruptcy protection. More recently federal courts had issued injunctions 

under the authority of the Interstate Commerce Act, and in 1893, a federal court 

approved the use of a labor injunction against striking workers under the authority of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which authorized injunctions against 

any company or group that obstructed interstate commerce. The U.S. circuit court 

agreed to issue a broad injunction that prohibited almost any participation in the 

Pullman strike by the union offi cers. 

 [Document Source: Writ of Injunction, fi led 2 July 1894; Civil Case File 23421, 

United States of America vs. Eugene V. Debs, George W. Howard, L.W. Rodgers 

[sic], Sylvester Keliher, The American Railway Union, and others; Civil Case 

Files, 1871–1911; Records of the U.S. Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois, 

Eastern Division at Chicago; Record Group 21, National Archives and Records 

Administratio–-Great Lakes Region, Chicago. Missing text supplemented from 

United States v. Debs et al., 64 Federal Reporter 724 (1894).]

 

 And now on this day, this cause coming on to be heard on the motion of complainant, for a preliminary restraining order or injunction, as prayed in said bill, and 

complainant having exhibited its sworn bill to the Honorable William A. Woods, 

Circuit Justice, and Peter S. Grosscup, District Judge, and the Court being now fully 

advised in the premises and having read said bill, it is ordered, that a writ of injunction issue out of and under the seal of this court, commanding the said defendants, 

Eugene V. Debs, George W. Howard and L.W. Rogers, and the American Railway 

Union, Sylvester Keliher, Lloyd Hodtchkins, A. Pazybok, H. Elfi ne, James Hannon, 

John Masterbrook, William Smith, Edward O’Neil, Charles Nailer, John Duff y, 

William McMullen, E. Shelly, Fred Kitchum, John W. Doyle, and all other persons 

combining and conspiring with them, and all other persons whomsoever, absolutely to 

desist and refrain from in any way or manner interfering with, hindering, obstructing 
41

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

or stopping any of the business of any of the following named railroads, to wit: [list 

of twenty-two railroad companies]; as common carriers of passengers and freight 

between or among any states of the United States; and from in any way or manner 

interfering with, hindering, obstructing or stopping any mail trains, express trains, 

or other trains, whether freight or passenger, engaged in interstate commerce, or 

carrying passengers, or freight between or among the states; and from in any manner interfering with, hindering or stopping any trains carrying the mail, and from 

in any manner interfering with, hindering, obstructing, or stopping any engines, cars 

or rolling stock of any of said companies engaged in interstate commerce, or in connection with the carriage of passengers or freight between or among the states; and 

from in any manner interfering with, injuring, or destroying any of the property of 

any of said railroads engaged in or for the purpose of, or in connection with interstate 

commerce, or the carriage of the mails of the United States, or the transportation of 

passengers or freight between or among the states; and from entering the grounds 

or premises of any of said railroads for the purpose of interfering with, hindering, 

obstructing, or stopping any of said mail trains, passenger or freight trains engaged 

in interstate commerce, or in the transportation of passengers or freight between or 

among the states, or for the purpose of interfering with, injuring, or destroying any 

of said property so engaged in or used in connection with interstate commerce, or 

the transportation of passengers or property between or among the states; and from 

injuring or destroying any part of the tracks, roadbed, or road, or permanent structures 

of said railroads, and from injuring, destroying, or in any way interfering with any of 

the signals or switches of any of said railroads, and from displacing or extinguishing 

any of the signals of any of said railroads and from spiking, locking or in any manner fastening any of the switches of any of said railroads and from uncoupling or in 

any way hampering or obstructing the control by any of said railroads or any of the 

cars, engines or parts of trains of any of said railroads engaged in interstate commerce or in the transportation of passengers or freight between or among the States, 

or engaged in carrying any of the mails of the United States; and from compelling 

or inducing or attempting to compel or induce by threats, intimidation, persuasion 

force or violence, any of the employees of any of said railroads to refuse or fail to 

perform any of their duties as employees of any of said railroads in connection with 

the interstate business or commerce of said railroads or the carriage of the United 

States mail by such railroads or the transportation of passengers or property between 

or among the states; and from compelling or inducing or attempting to compel or 

induce by threats, intimidation, force or violence, any of the employes of any of said 

railroads who are employed by such railroads and engaged in its service in the conduct of interstate business or in the operation of any of its trains, carrying the mail 

of the United States, or doing interstate business, or the transportation of passengers 

and freight between and among the states, to leave the service of such railroads; and 

from preventing any persons whatever by threats, intimidation, force or violence, 
42

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

from entering the service of any of said railroads and doing the work thereof, in the 

carrying of the mails of the United States, or the transportation of passengers and 

freight between or among the states; and from doing any act whatever in furtherance of any conspiracy or combination to restrain either of said railroad companies 

or receivers in the free and unhindered control and handling of interstate commerce 

over the lines of said railroads, and of transportation of persons and freight between 

and among the states; and from ordering, directing, aiding, assisting or abetting in 

any manner whatever, any person or persons to commit any or either of the acts 

aforesaid.

 And it is further ordered that the aforesaid injunction and writ of injunction 

shall be in force and binding upon such of said defendants as are named in said bill 

from and after service upon them severally of said writ by delivering to them severally a copy of said writ or by reading the same to them and the service upon them 

respectively of the writ of subpoena herein, and shall be binding upon said defendants 

whose names are alleged to be unknown from and after the service of such writ upon 

them respectively by the reading of the same to them or by publication thereof by 

posting and printing, and after service of subpoena upon any said defendants, named 

herein shall be binding upon said defendants and upon all other persons whatsoever 

who are not named herein from and after the time when they shall severally have 

knowledge of the entry of such order and the existence of said injunction.

Correspondence of Attorney General Richard Olney

Attorney General Richard Olney maintained regular contact with Edwin Walker, 

special U.S. attorney in Chicago. This selection of correspondence between the two 

describes the legal strategy that the Cleveland administration developed to suppress the Pullman strike and disable the leadership of the American Railway Union. 

Walker makes it clear that his priority was to bring the strike to an end as soon as 

possible.

 [Document Source: Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States 

for the Year 1896 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1896): 60, 

63–64, 93–94.]

 

Attorney General Richard Olney to Edwin Walker, special U.S. attorney, 

Washington, D.C., June 30, 1894

 Sir: I am in receipt of your telegram informing me that you will act for the United 

States in such proceedings as the United States may legally take in connection with 

the conspiracy and combination now on foot, by which all the great railroad systems 

centering in Chicago are tied up and the carrying of the United States mails practically 
43

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

prevented. I am greatly gratifi ed that you consent to represent the Government in 

this matter. I am aware that you do it not wholly for the compensation, since Uncle 

Sam is always a poor paymaster, but largely from public spirit. It has seemed to me 

that if the rights of the United States were vigorously asserted in Chicago, the origin 

and center of the demonstration, the result would be to make it a failure everywhere 

else and to prevent its spread over the entire country. With yourself directing matters 

for the Government, I am sure all legal remedies will be resorted to that the facts 

will warrant.

 In this connection it has seemed to me advisable not merely to rely on warrants 

against persons actually guilty of the off ense of obstructing United States mails, but 

to go into a court of equity and secure restraining orders which shall have the eff ect 

of preventing any attempt to commit the off ense. With that view I sent a telegram 

to Mr. Milchrist this morning citing some decisions, which I think may probably be 

availed of in the present exigency.

 Th e marshal and the district attorney have wired me about the employment of 

50 deputies. I authorized it, of course. But I feel that the true way of dealing with the 

matter is by a force which is overwhelming and prevents any attempt at resistance. 

In that particular, however, I must defer to the better judgment of one who is on the 

spot and familiar with all the facts of the situation and therefore, must ask you to give 

such advice to Messers. Milchrist and Arnold as, in your judgment, the emergency 

calls for.

 Very respectfully yours, Richard Olney

Edwin Walker to Attorney General Richard Olney, Chicago, Ill., July 2, 

1894

 Dear Sir: Upon return to my offi ce after an absence of a few days, I found awaiting me your telegrams relative to the railroad strikes and interruption in the transportation of the mails. I found that Judge Milchrist, after conference with several 

attorneys representing diff erent railway corporations, had prepared a bill to be fi led 

in the circuit court, under the act of 1890, for an injunction restraining interference 

with all trains engaged in interstate commerce as well as the transportation of mails. 

. . . 

 As I telegraphed you, I do not believe that the marshal and his deputies can 

protect the railroad companies in moving their trains, either freight or passenger, 

including, of course, the trains carrying United States mail. Possibly, however, the 

service of the writ of injunction will have a restraining infl uence upon Debs and 

other offi cers of the association. If it does not, from present appearances, I think it 

is the opinion of all that the orders of court can not be enforced except by the aid 

of the Regular Army.
44

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 I will keep you thoroughly advised by wire. I am decidedly of the opinion that 

there should be a special grand jury called for presentation of indictments against 

Debs and other offi cers of the association, and all other persons who have been, or 

are still engaged in wrongfully detaining and delaying this transportation of mail. I 

think the Government should proceed with a fi rm hand, not only by bill of equity, 

but also by criminal procedure against all violating the law. 

 Judge Milchrist is not inclined to agree with me in this respect, for the reason 

that the fi ne that can be imposed is but $100, and for the further reason that he fears 

there will be diffi culty in procuring evidence to convict under the indictments. Th e 

result of a trial under the indictments will be of little importance, and there may be 

no necessity of such trial. Th e very fact, however, that the Government has called a 

grand jury for the purpose of investigating these off enses, and the return of indictments which in my opinion are sure to follow, will have a greater restraining eff ect 

upon Debs and his followers than our proceeding by injunction.

Edwin Walker to Attorney General Richard Olney, Chicago Ill., July 26, 

1894

 Dear Sir: Further proceedings in the matter of contempt in the case against Debs 

and others have gone over until September 5.

 Th ere were several reasons why this postponement became necessary. In the fi rst 

place, Judge Woods could not remain longer than the present week, on account of 

other engagements, and we could not have concluded the matter during this week. 

. . .

 My health has been such during the week that I could not have participated in 

the court proceedings for a few days at least. Th e heat was really stifl ing, and the 

crowd of strikers present at the hearing made the air of the room intolerable. Besides 

all this, I think it better for the Government that the hearing should not take place 

before September. As the strike is now thoroughly broken, the American Railway 

Union badly demoralized, and local unions continually withdrawing, it is my opinion 

that by the 1st of September there will be little left of this organization.

 Th e contempt proceedings are still resting over the offi cials, and the court admonished them several times during the hearing that the orders of the court must 

be obeyed, and Judge Woods openly said that if the acts complained of should be 

repeated it would aggravate the contempt. Th e main cause pending here will be prosecuted to a fi nal hearing, and if the courts sustain the position of the Government, 

that equity has jurisdiction to restrain such confederacies and enforce the rule of 

non-interference with the transportation of the mails and interstate commerce, there 

will be no more boycotting and no further violence in aid of strikes. If employees 

should leave in a body other employees may take their places without interference 

or intimidation.
45

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 Th e real question now at issue is whether the law is stronger than mob violence. 

If it is not, or if the orders of the court can not be enforced against individuals, then 

it would seem to follow that the strong arm of the Government would have to be 

asserted, and martial instead of civil law would be the remedy. Believing that the law 

can be asserted and the decrees of court enforced, I have no fear of the fi nal issue.

 Very respectfully, Edwin Walker

Grand jury charge of Judge Grosscup, U.S. District Court 

for the Northern District of Illinois, July 10, 1894

Special U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker determined to pursue a criminal indictment 

of Debs and the American Railway Union offi cers at the same time that they were 

under the restrictions of the injunction. Representatives of the General Managers’ 

Association wanted to see the union offi cer jailed, and Walker was convinced that 

the parallel legal actions would cripple the strike. Judge Peter S. Grosscup of the U.S. 

District Court for the Northern District of Illinois charged the grand jury on July 

10, 1894, in language that almost demanded indictment. The grand jury brought 

indictment against the union offi cers on July 10.

 [Document Source: “Judge Grosscup’s Strong Charge,” New York Times, July 

11, 1894, p. 1.] 

 

 Gentlemen of the Grand Jury: You have been summoned here to inquire whether 

any of the laws of the United States within this judicial district have been violated. 

You have come into an atmosphere, and amid occurrences, that may well cause reasonable men to question whether the Government and laws of the United States 

are yet supreme. Th anks to resolute manhood and to that enlightened intelligence 

which perceives the necessity of a vindication of law before any other adjustments 

are possible, the Government of the United States is still supreme.

 You doubtless feel as I do, that the opportunities of life under present conditions 

are not entirely equal, and that changes are needed to forestall some of the dangerous 

tendencies of current industrial life. But neither the torch of the incendiary nor the 

weapon of the insurrectionist nor the infl amed tongue of him who incites to fi re and 

sword is the instrument to bring about reforms. To the mind of the American people, 

to the calm, dispassionate, sympathetic judgment of a race that is not afraid to face 

deep changes and responsibilities there has as yet been no appeal. Men who appear 

as the champions of great changes must fi rst submit them to discussion—discussion 

that reaches not simply the parties interested, but the wider circles of society, and 

must be patient as well as persevering until the public intelligence has been reached 

and public judgment made up. An appeal to force before that hour is a crime not 
46

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

only against the government of existing laws, but against the cause itself, for what 

man of any intelligence supposes that any settlement will abide which is induced 

under the light of the torch or the shadow of an overpowering threat?

 With the question behind present occurrences, therefore, we have, as ministers 

of the law and citizens of the Republic, nothing to do. Th e law as it is must fi rst 

be vindicated before we turn aside to inquire how law or practice as it ought to be 

can be eff ectually brought about. Government by law is imperiled, and that issue is 

paramount . . . .

 Insurrection is a rising against civil or political authority; the open and active 

opposition of a number of persons to the execution of a law in a city or State. Now, 

the laws of the United States forbid, under penalty, any person from obstructing or 

retarding the passage of the mail and make it the duty of the offi cer to arrest such 

off enders and bring them before the courts.

 If, therefore, it shall appear to you that any person or persons have willfully obstructed or retarded the mails, and that their attempted arrest for such off ense has 

been opposed as such by a number of persons as would constitute a general uprising 

in that particular locality, and as threatens for the time being, the civil and political 

authority, then the fact of an insurrection within the meaning of the law has been 

established . . . . 

 It is also provided that if two or more persons conspire together to commit any 

off ense against the United States and one or more of such parties do any act to eff ect 

the object of the conspiracy, all the parties therefore shall be subject to a penalty . . . .

 If it shall appear to you that two or more persons corruptly or wrongfully agreed 

with each other that the employes of the several railroads carrying the mails and 

inter-State commerce should quit, and successors should, by threats, intimidation, or 

violence be prevented from taking their places, such would constitute a conspiracy. 

. . .

 Th ere is honest leadership among these our laboring fellow-citizens, and there is 

doubtless, dishonest leadership. You should not brand any act of leadership as done 

dishonestly or in bad faith unless it clearly so appears. But if it does appear, if any 

persons are shown to have betrayed the trust of these toiling men, and their acts 

fall within the defi nition of crime as I have given it to you, it is alike the interest, 

the pleasure, and the duty of every citizen to bring them to swift and heavy punishment.

 I wish again, in conclusion, to impress upon you the fact that the present emergency is to vindicate the law. If no one has violated the law under the rules I have 

laid down, it needs no vindication; but if there has been such violation, there should 

be quick, prompt, and adequate indictment . . . . Let us fi rst restore peace and punish the off enders of the law, and then the atmosphere will be clear to think over the 

claims of those who have real grievances. First vindicate the law. Until that is done, 

no other questions are in order.
47

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

United States v. Debs et al., decision of the U.S. Circuit 

Court for the Northern District of Illinois, December 14, 

1894

Two weeks after the issuance of the injunction against the offi cers of the American 

Railway Union, the U.S. attorneys presented the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern 

District of Illinois with an information asserting that Debs and the other offi cers 

had violated the injunction and were guilty of contempt. The court agreed and 

sentenced the union offi cers to jail time. Debs’ lawyers denied that the court had the 

authority to issue an injunction or to punish for contempt without a trial by jury. 

On December 14, 1894, Judge William A. Woods ruled that the U.S. circuit court 

had authority to issue the injunction, that the union offi cers had violated the court 

order, and that the court had authority to enforce its order through a jail sentence 

for contempt. The “act of July 2, 1890,” to which Judge Woods refers in the following 

excerpt is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which the U.S. attorneys argued granted the 

courts authority to issue injunctions against labor unions as well as corporate trusts 

that obstructed interstate commerce.

 [Document Source: United States v. Debs et al., 64 Federal Reporter 724 

(1894).] 

 

 Th e question here, therefore, is whether the case presented by the petition was 

of a class which in a federal court admits of remedy by injunction.

 Without going into the details of averment, the charge made against the defendants was that they were engaged in a conspiracy to hinder and interrupt interstate 

commerce and the carriage of the mails upon railroads centering in Chicago, by means 

and in a manner to constitute, within the recognized defi nitions, a public nuisance. 

. . . 

 Accordingly, it is contended, and numerous decisions and texts are cited to show, 

that “equity had jurisdiction to restrain public nuisances upon bill or information 

fi led by the attorney general on behalf of the people.” . . .

 But while the reasons to justify, on the grounds considered, the issuing of the 

injunction for the purpose of protecting, against obstruction or interruption, either 

the mails alone or interstate commerce, of which the carrying of the mails is a part, 

are strong, and perhaps ought to be accepted as convincing, there seems to be no 

precedent for so holding, and the responsibility of making a precedent need not now 

be assumed.

 While, however, the point is not decided, the authorities on the subject have 

been brought forward so fully because, in part, of their bearing upon the question 

now to be considered, – whether or not the injunction was authorized by the act of 

July 2, 1890. It was under that act that the order was asked and was granted; but it 

has been seriously questioned in this proceeding, as well as by an eminent judge and 
48

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

by lawyers elsewhere, whether the statute is by its terms applicable, or consistently 

with constitutional guaranties can be applied, to cases like this . . . .

 It is therefore the privilege and duty of the court, uncontrolled by considerations 

drawn from other sources, to fi nd the meaning of the statute in the terms of its provisions, interpreted by the settled rules of construction. Th at the original design to 

suppress trusts and monopolies created by contract or combination in the form of 

trust, which of course would be of a “contractual character,” was adhered to, is clear; 

but it is equally clear that a further and more comprehensive purpose came to be 

entertained, and was embodied in the fi nal form of the enactment. Combinations are 

condemned, not only when they take the form of trusts, but in whatever form found, 

if they be in restraint of trade. Th at is the eff ect of the words “or otherwise.” . . . 

 I have not failed, I think, to appreciate the just force of the argument to the contrary of my opinion, – it has sometimes entangled me in doubt, – but my conclusion 

is clear that, under the act of 1890, the court had jurisdiction of the case presented 

in the application, and that the injunction granted was not without authority of law, 

nor for any reason invalid.

 Th is brings me to the question of fact: Did the defendants violate the injunction? 

Th e evidence upon the question is voluminous, but need not be reviewed in detail 

. . . .

 [Th e defendants’] original intention, it is true, was only to prevent the use of 

Pullman cars, but fi nding, as they did, immediately, that that aim would be thwarted 

by the discharge from service of men who refused to handle those cars, they began 

as early as June 27th, the day after the boycott was proclaimed, to issue orders to 

strike; and from that time to the end, to the extent of their ability, they conducted 

and controlled the strike with persistent consistency of purpose; and with unchanged 

methods of action . . . .

 Th e evidence leaves no feature of the case in doubt. Th e substance of it, briefl y 

stated, is that the defendants, in combination with members of the American 

Railway Union and others, who were prevailed upon to co-operate, were engaged 

in a conspiracy in restraint or hindrance of interstate commerce over the railroads 

entering Chicago, and, in furtherance of their design, those actively engaged in the 

strike were using threats, violence, and other unlawful means of interference with 

the operations of the roads; that by the injunction they were commanded to desist, 

but, instead of respecting the order, they persisted in their purpose, without essential 

change of conduct, until compelled to yield to superior force.

 Much has been said, but without proof, of the wrongs of the workmen at Pullman, 

of an alliance between the Pullman Company and the railway managers to depress 

wages, and generally of corporate oppression and arrogance. But it is evident that 

these things, whatever the facts might have been proved or imagined to be, could 

furnish neither justifi cation nor palliation for giving up a city to disorder, and for 

paralyzing the industries and commerce of the country. 
49

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Writ of habeas corpus

Following the U.S. circuit court’s decision to punish Debs and the other union offi -

cers for contempt of the court’s injunction, the union offi cers petitioned the Supreme 

Court for a writ of habeas corpus. In the petition, they argued that the punishment 

for contempt was an unconstitutional infringement of their rights to due process 

and to a trial by jury. They also argued that the circuit court did not have authority to issue the injunction, which they claimed was an attempt to enforce a 

criminal statute through an order from an equity court and thereby avoid a trial by 

jury. They denied that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 authorized injunctions 

against unions, and if it had, the authorization would be unconstitutional because 

Congress cannot give to an equity court jurisdiction over crimes.

 [Document Source: Transcript of Record, October Term 1894, vol. 3, 2–5.]

 

 To the Honorable John Marshall Harlan, one of the Associate Justices of the 

Supreme Court of the United States.

 . . . And your petitioners further show that they were tried on the charge of having violated said injunction by the said court without a jury and upon informations 

and not under indictment of a grand jury contrary, as your petitioners are advised, to 

the Constitution of the United States, and particularly to the fi fth and sixth amendments thereto, and that said informations did not state or show, as they are advised 

by counsel, any violation of said injunction by your petitioners.

 And your petitioners further respectfully show, as they are advised, that the order 

for said injunction was void, in this, that the bill praying therefor and under which 

the same was allowed made and stated no case whatever of which the said circuit 

court of the United States could take jurisdiction or cognizance or in which that 

court could make any lawful order against your petitioners; that said bill was in eff ect 

a bill by the Government of the United States to maintain the public peace and to 

enjoin violations of the penal code of the United States. . . .

 And your petitioners further respectfully show that, as they are advised and verily 

believe, the act of the Congress of the United States entitled as aforesaid [“An act 

to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies,”] and 

approved the 2d day of July, 1890, has no application or reference to such facts and 

conditions as are in said bill stated and confers no jurisdiction whatever upon the 

circuit courts of the United States in respect of the matters and things in said bill 

set forth, and that the same is, particularly as to section 4 thereof, unconstitutional 

and void, in that it is an attempt to commit the enforcement of a penal statute to the 

circuit courts of the United States, sitting in chancery, and thus to deprive persons 

charged with its violation of the right not to be put upon trial except on presentment or indictment by a grand jury, and of the right of trial by jury secured by the 
50

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

provisions of the Constitution of the United States, and particularly by the sixth 

amendment to the Constitution. 

Lyman Trumbull brief, of counsel for petitioner, in the 

Supreme Court of the United States, March 25, 1895

Former Senator Lyman Trumbull joined the legal defense for Debs and the union 

offi cers when their petition for a writ of habeas corpus came before the Supreme 

Court. The respected Illinois lawyer, by then in his eighties, submitted a brief arguing that Congress could not have authorized the federal courts to enforce a criminal 

statute through an injunction, which was a type of order limited to courts of equity. 

 [Document Source: Records and Briefs of the U.S. Supreme Court, October 

Term 1894, no. 11.]

 

 It is not in the power of Congress to confer upon a court of equity jurisdiction 

unless of an equitable nature, which jurisdiction over crimes is not. Th e Constitution 

recognizes and confers upon the judicial department jurisdiction in certain cases in 

law and equity, and provides that trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment 

shall be by jury, and in common law cases preserves the right of trial by jury. It is 

not competent for Congress to break down this distinction between law and equity 

by conferring upon courts of equity, jurisdiction of criminal and common law cases 

and thereby deny parties the right to a jury trial.

 Th e act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies 

does not apply to the case stated in the bill. If it does, then it is unconstitutional. If 

a court of equity is authorized to restrain and prevent persons from the commission 

of crimes and misdemeanors prohibited by law, it must have the power to enforce 

its restraining order. In this case some of the parties are sentenced to imprisonment 

for six months, and for what? For doing some of the things forbidden by a criminal 

statute. If they have done none of the things forbidden, they have not violated the 

injunction, for it could only restrain them from doing what the law forbade. It follows 

that by indirection a court of equity under its assumed jurisdiction to issue injunctions 

and punish for contempts, is made to execute a criminal statute and deprive persons 

of their liberty without a jury trial. Th is a court of equity has no power to do, nor is 

it competent for Congress to confer such a power on a court of equity.
51

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Clarence Darrow brief and arguments for petitioner, in the 

Supreme Court of the United States, March 25, 1894 

Darrow’s brief for the Supreme Court arguments included an impassioned defense 

of the right to strike and the legitimacy of sympathetic strikes or boycotts. Critics of 

unions insisted that strikes precipitated violence, but Darrow replied that violence 

was endemic to industrial confl ict and was as likely to arise in response to layoffs 

or cuts in pay as from the collective action of strikers. Darrow likened the confl icts 

between labor and capital to fi elds of battle and held that only the right to join together in common defense of their interests secured workers a degree of protection 

against the overwhelming power of corporations.

 [Document Source: Records and Briefs of the U.S. Supreme Court, October 

Term 1894, no. 11.]

 

 Whether the cause for striking grew out of a direct injury to the railway employees, or what is known as a sympathetic strike, is a matter that can not aff ect the 

legality or the illegality of the act. If no man could strike except he were personally 

aggrieved, there could be no strike of a combination of working men. Under modern 

industrial conditions, where hundreds of men are working together to a common 

purpose, and where the business of the country is intertwined more or less directly, a 

strike would be impossible unless those who are not directly and personally aggrieved, 

have the right to cease labor for the benefi t of their fellows. Th e theory on which all 

labor organizations are based is that workingmen have a common interest, and that 

“an injury to one is the concern of all.” Th ey are organizations whose principle and 

whose purpose is to help redress the grievances of each other, and to aid one another 

in establishing better conditions and fairer relations. If it should be said that if one 

man should suff er a special grievance, the others could not unite to redress it, then 

to what purpose can an organization of laboring men exist? . . .

 It has been sometimes held by courts that every strike is attended with violence 

and bloodshed, and that, therefore, no men have the right collectively to cease work. 

While, in the light of history, if it were conceded that violence generally followed 

strikes, it would by no means follow that a great body of men would not have the 

right to lay down the tools and implements of their trade to better the conditions of 

themselves and their fellow-men, although growing out of this violence, bloodshed 

and crime would surely come.

 As violence and bloodshed frequently follow strikes, so do they frequently follow 

lockouts and reductions of wages, but these facts are not suffi cient to deprive men 

of their free moral agency and make their acts subject to the control of courts.

 It is not claimed in this argument, neither would it be claimed by any parties to 

this suit, that the present social system is an ideal state. Strikes are deplorable, and 

so are their causes. All men who engage in them hope for a time when better social 
52

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

relations will make them as unnecessary as any other forms of warfare will some day 

be. But under the present conditions of industrial life, with the present confl icting 

interests of capital and labor, each perhaps blindly seeking for more perfect social 

adjustments, strikes and lockouts are incidents of industrial life. Th ey are not justifi ed 

because men love social strife and industrial war, but because in the present system 

of industrial evolution to deprive workingmen of this power would be to strip and 

bind them and leave them helpless as the prey of the great and strong. It would be 

to despoil one army of every means of defense and aggression while on the fi eld of 

battle, and in the presence of an enemy with boundless resources and all the equipments of warfare at their command.

Oral argument of Hon. Richard Olney, Attorney General, 

in the Supreme Court of the United States

Attorney General Richard Olney, who had worked closely with the U.S. attorneys 

in Chicago in devising the government’s legal challenges to Debs and the American 

Railway Union, presented the central arguments for the government in the Supreme 

Court. Olney confi dently asserted that only the injunction from a court of equity 

would have been adequate to halt the strikers’ obstruction of interstate commerce, 

against which criminal prosecution or a suit for damages would have been useless. 

The government’s responsibility for maintaining unencumbered commerce between 

the states, furthermore, gave the government an interest equivalent to the ownership 

of property, and thus the grounds for requesting a restraining order from a court of 

equity.

 [Document Source: Records and Briefs of the U.S. Supreme Court, October 

Term 1894, no. 11.]

 

 What fi tting remedies in its courts, then, did the United States have in the 

summer of 1894? It could—I take no account, as your honors will remember, of 

the act of 1890—it could arrest and prosecute for obstruction of the mails and for 

conspiracy to obstruct them. But the wholly imperfect character of that remedy as 

against mobs of thousands of people, and when the great object was not so much to 

punish interference with interstate-railroad transportation as to free it from such 

interference, is so obvious that it need not be dwelt upon. Had the United States 

any other available remedy through the medium of its courts? It had, I submit with 

great confi dence, the exact remedy which it did apply for and which the courts did 

in fact furnish. It had the right to go into its courts of equity, to set out the facts by 

proper bill, and to ask that upon those facts the defendants and their confederates 

should be restrained from a wrongful interruption of interstate-railroad transportation which was working private and public injury of the most widespread and most 
53

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

irreparable character. It had the right to bring such a bill and to ask and to get such 

relief on the most incontestable grounds. Th e sovereign can always resort to its own 

courts under circumstances which authorize private individuals to resort to them, 

and for the same purposes. Th e United States by the bill in question presented a case 

of equitable cognizance beyond all cavil—a case to which criminal prosecutions and 

actions for damages were wholly inadequate, a case involving innumerable suits and 

great and entirely irreparable injury unless the imminent and impending mischiefs 

were averted through the restraining orders of a court of equity. . . .

 Th e inherently equitable nature of the case made by the Government bill being 

conceded because indisputable, the real contention is that the United States was 

not a proper plaintiff to any such bill and had no right to bring it. Having no direct 

property interest involved, the United States, it is claimed, could not be plaintiff 

in such a bill without express enabling legislation on the part of Congress. But the 

proposition is, I submit, neither sound in principle nor supported by precedent. A 

trustee’s right and duty to protect by suit the subject-matter of the trust are in no 

wise aff ected because he is without private interest in that subject-matter. Yet, as 

regards interstate railroad transportation, what is the United States but a trustee for 

all parties and interests concerned? as trustee bound by its relations to the States as 

well as to individuals to sue at law or in equity whenever such suit will aid in the 

discharge of the trust? 

Opinion of the Supreme Court, In re Debs, Petitioner

Justice David J. Brewer wrote the opinion for the unanimous Supreme Court decision delivered on May 27, 1895. Brewer quickly established the government’s interest in preserving the free fl ow of interstate commerce, and he then devoted most of 

the opinion to discussion of authority for the use of an injunction to help the government carry out its duty to protect commerce. Brewer said the government had a 

right to prosecute individuals who interfered with commerce of the transportation 

of the mails, and the government could use its “strong arm,” such as military force, 

to restore interstate commerce, but he wanted to establish a broader ground for the 

restraint of strikers. Brewer went beyond even Attorney General Olney in asserting 

that the government could seek an injunction from a court of equity not only based 

on the government’s responsibility to protect interstate commerce, but also its constitutional responsibility to protect the general welfare. The sweep of Brewer’s assertion 

of governmental power suggested that the executive branch could approach federal 

courts of equity for restraining orders against a broad range of perceived threats to 

national interest. Brewer added that anyone who tried to redress grievances outside 

of elections or the judicial process would be subject to government restraint.

 [Document Source: In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).]

 
54

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 Th e case presented by the bill is this: Th e United States, fi nding that the interstate 

transportation of persons and property, as well as the carriage of the mails, is forcibly 

obstructed, and that a combination and conspiracy exists to subject the control of such 

transportation to the will of the conspirators, applied to one of their courts, sitting as 

a court of equity, for an injunction to restrain such obstruction and prevent carrying 

into eff ect such conspiracy. Two questions of importance are presented: First. Are the 

relations of the general government to interstate commerce and the transportation 

of the mails such as authorize a direct interference to prevent a forcible obstruction 

thereof? Second. If authority exits, as authority in governmental aff airs implies both 

power and duty, has a court of equity jurisdiction to issue an injunction in aid of the 

performance of such duty? . . .

 As, under the constitution, power over interstate commerce and the transportation 

of the mails is vested in the national government, and Congress, by virtue of such 

grant, has assumed actual and direct control, it follows that the national government 

may prevent any unlawful and forcible interference therewith. But how shall this 

be accomplished? Doubtless, it is within the competency of Congress to prescribe 

by legislation that any interferences with these matters shall be off ences against the 

United States, and prosecuted and punished by indictment in the proper courts. But 

is that the only remedy? Have the vast interests of the nation in interstate commerce, 

and in the transportation of the mails, no other protection than lies in the possible 

punishment of those who interfere with it? To ask the question is to answer it . . . . 

If all the inhabitants of a state, or even a great body of them, should combine to obstruct interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails, prosecutions for such 

off enses had in such a community would be doomed in advance to failure. And if the 

certainty of such failure was known, and the national government had no other way 

to enforce the freedom of interstate commerce and the transportation of the mails 

than by prosecution and punishment for interference therewith, the whole interests 

of the nation in these respects would be at the absolute mercy of a portion of the 

inhabitants of that single state.

 But there is no such impotency in the national government. Th e entire strength 

of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise 

of all national powers and the security of all rights intrusted by the Constitution to 

its care. Th e strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away 

all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the 

mails. If the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the 

service of the nation to compel obedience to its laws.

 But passing to the second question, is there no other alternative than the use 

of force on the part of the executive authorities whenever obstructions arise to the 

freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails? Is the army the 

only instrument by which rights of the public can be enforced, and the peace of the 

nation preserved? Grant that any public nuisance may be forcibly abated, either 
55

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

at the instance of the authorities, or by any individual suff ering private damage 

therefrom. Th e existence of this right of forcible abatement is not inconsistent with, 

nor does it destroy, the right of appeal, in an orderly way, to the courts for a judicial 

determination, and an exercise of their powers, by writ of injunction and otherwise, 

to accomplish the same result . . . .

 So, in the case before us, the right to use force does not exclude the right of appeal to the courts for a judicial determination, and for the exercise of all their powers 

of prevention. Indeed, it is more to the praise than to the blame of the government, 

that, instead of determining for itself questions of right and wrong on the part of 

these petitioners and their associates, and enforcing that determination by the club 

of the policeman and the bayonet of the soldier, it submitted all those questions to 

the peaceful determination of judicial tribunals, and invoked their consideration and 

judgment as to the measure of its rights and powers, and the correlative obligations 

of those against whom it made complaint. And it is equally to the credit of the latter 

that the judgment of those tribunals was by the great body of them respected, and 

the troubles which threatened so much disaster terminated.

 Neither can it be doubted that the government has such an interest in the subject 

matter as enables it to appear as party plaintiff in this suit. It is said that equity only 

interferes for the protection of property, and that the government has no property 

interest. A suffi cient reply is that the United States have a property in the mails, the 

protection of which was one of the purposes of this bill. . . .

 We do not care to place our decision on this ground alone. Every government, 

instructed by the very terms of its being with powers and duties to be exercised and 

discharged for the general welfare, has a right to apply to its own courts for any 

proper assistance in the exercise of the one and the discharge of the other, and it 

is no suffi cient answer to its appeal to one of those courts that it has no pecuniary 

interest in the matter. Th e obligations which it is under to promote the interest of 

all and to prevent the wrongdoing of one, resulting in injury to the general welfare, 

is often of itself suffi cient to give it a standing in court. . . .

 Th at the bill in this case alleged special facts calling for the exercise of all the 

powers of the court is not open to question. Th e picture drawn in it of the vast interests involved, not merely of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, but of 

all the states, and the general confusion into which the interstate commerce of the 

country was thrown; the forcible interference with that commerce; the attempted 

exercise by individuals of powers belonging only to government, and the threatened 

continuance of such invasions of public right, presented a condition of aff airs which 

called for the fullest exercise of all the powers of the courts. If ever there was a special 

exigency, one which demanded that the court should do all that courts can do, it was 

disclosed by this bill, and we need not turn to the public history of the day, which 

only reaffi rms with clearest emphasis all its allegations . . . .
56

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 It must be borne in mind that this bill was not simply to enjoin a mob and mob 

violence. It was not a bill to command a keeping of the peace; much less was its 

purport to restrain the defendants from abandoning whatever employment they 

were engaged in. Th e right of any laborer, or any number of laborers, to quit work 

was not challenged. Th e scope and purpose of the bill was only to restrain forcible 

obstructions of the highways along which interstate commerce travels and the mails 

are carried. And the facts set forth at length are only those facts which tended to 

show that the defendants were most engaged in such obstructions.

 A most earnest and eloquent appeal was made to us in eulogy of the heroic spirit 

of those who threw up their employment, and gave up their means of earning a livelihood, not in defence of their own rights, but in sympathy for and to assist others 

whom they believed to be wronged. We yield to none in our admiration of any act 

of heroism or self-sacrifi ce, but we may be permitted to add that it is a lesson which 

cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly that under this government of and by 

the people the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and at the ballot-box, and that no wrong, real or fancied, carries with it legal warrant to invite as a 

means of redress the co-operation of a mob, with its accompanying acts of violence. 

. . .

 Th e petition for a writ of habeas corpus is denied.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (excerpt)

The U.S. attorney in Chicago cited the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as authority for 

the injunction restraining Debs and the other American Railway Union offi cers. 

The judges who issued the injunction also cited the authority of the act, and in his 

decision upholding the contempt, Judge William A. Woods concluded that the act 

gave the courts jurisdiction to issue injunctions against any group or conspiracy in 

restraint of trade. The act had its origins in congressional efforts to restrict the monopolies of the great trusts, such as Standard Oil, but a change in the language of 

the bill to read “trust or otherwise” rather than just “trust” gave the courts grounds 

to restrict labor strikes. 

 [Document Source: U.S. Statutes at Large 26 (1891): 209–10.]

 

 Chap. 647. An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints 

and monopolies. July 2, 1890. 

 Sec. 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign 

nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any such 

contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of 

a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fi ne not exceeding 
57

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

fi ve thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said 

punishments, in the discretion of the court.

 Sec. 4. Th e several circuit courts of the United States are hereby invested with 

jurisdiction to prevent and restrain violations of this act; and it shall be the duty of 

the several district attorneys of the United States, in their respective districts, under 

the direction of the Attorney-General, to institute proceedings in equity to prevent 

and restrain such violations. Such proceedings may be by way of petition setting forth 

the case and praying that such violation shall be enjoined or otherwise prohibited. 

When the parties complained of shall have been duly notifi ed of such petition the 

court shall proceed, as soon as may be, to the hearing and determination of the 

case; and pending such petition and before fi nal decree, the court may at any time 

make such temporary restraining order or prohibition as shall be deemed just in the 

premises.

Recommendations of the United States Strike Commission

On July 26, 1894, following the end of the Pullman Strike, President Grover 

Cleveland appointed a commission to examine the causes and ramifi cations of the 

labor dispute. The Strike Commission held hearings in Washington and Chicago 

and solicited testimony from representatives of labor unions, including Debs, and 

members of the General Managers’ Association. In November 1894, the commission 

delivered to the President its report, which the government soon published along 

with the testimony. 

The fi rst excerpt is the commission’s comment on the need to respect and engage 

labor unions; the second excerpt is the formal recommendation of the commission.

 [Document Source: United States Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago 

Strike of June–July, 1894 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1895): 

XLVIII, LII-LIV.] 

 

1.

 However men may diff er about the propriety and legality of labor unions, we must 

all recognize the fact that we have them with us to stay and to grow more numerous 

and powerful. Is it not wise to fully recognize them by law; to admit their necessity as 

labor guides and protectors, to conserve their usefulness, increase their responsibility, 

and to prevent their follies and aggressions by conferring upon them the privileges 

enjoyed by corporations, with like proper restrictions and regulations? Th e growth 

of corporate powers and wealth has been the marvel of the past fi fty years. Corporations have undoubtedly benefi ted the country and brought its resources to our doors. 

It will not be surprising if the marvel of the next fi fty years be the advancement of 

labor to a position of like power and responsibility. We have heretofore encouraged 

the one and comparatively neglected the other. Does not wisdom demand that each 

be encouraged to prosper legitimately and to grow into harmonious relations of equal 
58

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

standing and responsibility before the law? Th is involves nothing hostile to the true 

interests and rights of either.

2. Recommendations of the Strike Commission

I.

(1) Th at there be a permanent United States strike commission of three members, with duties and powers of investigation and recommendation as to 

disputes between railroads and their employees similar to those vested in 

the Interstate Commerce Commission as to rates, etc.

a. Th at, as in the interstate commerce act, power be given to the United 

States courts to compel railroads to obey the decisions of the commission, after summary hearing unattended by technicalities, and 

that no delays in obeying the decisions of the commission be allowed pending appeals.

b. Th at, whenever the parties to a controversy in a matter within the jurisdiction of the commission are one or more railroads upon one side 

and one or more national trade unions . . . upon the other, each side 

shall have the right to select a representative, who shall be appointed 

by the President to serve a temporary member of the commission in 

hearing, adjusting, and determining that particular controversy. . . .

c. Th at, during the pendency of a proceeding before the commission 

inaugurated by national trade unions, or by an incorporation of employees, it shall not be lawful for the railroads to discharge employees 

belonging thereto except for ineffi ciency, violation of law, or neglect 

of duty; nor for such unions or incorporation during such pendency 

to order, unite in, aid, or abet strikes or boycotts against the railroads 

complained of; nor, for a period of six months after a decision, for 

such railroads to discharge any such employees in whose places others shall be employed, except for the causes aforesaid; nor for any 

such employees, during a like period, to quit the service without giving thirty days’ written notice of intention to do so, nor for any such 

union or incorporation to order, counsel, or advise otherwise.

(2) Th at chapter 567 of United States Statutes of 1885–86 be amended so as 

to require national trade unions to provide in their articles of incorporation, 

and in their constitutions, rules, and by-laws that a member shall cease to be 

such and forfeit all rights and privileges conferred on him by law as such by 

participating in or by instigating force or violence against persons or property during strikes or boycotts, or by seeking to prevent others from working through violence, threats, or intimidations; also, that members shall be 
59

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

no more personally liable for corporate acts than are stockholders in corporations.

(3) Th e commission does not feel warranted, with the study it has been able 

to give the subject, to recommend positively the establishment of a license 

system by which all the higher employees or others of railroads engaged in 

interstate commerce should be licensed after due and proper examination, 

but it would recommend, and most urgently, that this subject be carefully 

and fully considered by the proper committee of Congress . . . . 

II.

(1) Th e commission would suggest the consideration by the States of the adoption of some system of conciliation and arbitration like that, for instance, in 

use in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Th at system might be reenforced by additional provisions giving the board of arbitration more power 

to investigate all strikes, whether requested so to do or not, and the question 

might be considered as to giving labor organizations a standing before the 

law, as heretofore suggested for national trade unions.

(2) Contracts requiring men to agree not to join labor organizations or to leave 

them, as conditions of employment, should be made illegal, as is already 

done in some of our States.

III.

(1) Th e commission urges employers to recognize labor organizations; that such 

organizations be dealt with through representatives, with special reference 

to conciliation and arbitration when diffi culties are threatened or arise. It is 

satisfi ed that employers should come in closer touch with labor and should 

recognize that, while the interests of labor and capital are not identical, they 

are reciprocal.

(2) Th e commission is satisfi ed that if employers everywhere will endeavor to 

act in concert with labor; that if when wages can be raised under economic 

conditions they be raised voluntarily, and that if when there are reductions 

reasons be given for the reduction, much friction can be avoided. It is also 

satisfi ed that if employers will consider employees as thoroughly essential to 

industrial success as capital, and thus take labor into consultation at proper 

times, much of the severity of strikes can be tempered and their numbers 

reduced.
60

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Eugene V. Debs to Jean Daniel Debs, January 14, 1895

After Judge William A. Woods’ ruling, Eugene V. Debs was sent to the McHenry 

County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois. Despite his defeat in the U.S. Circuit Court for 

the Northern District of Illinois, Debs remained optimistic. He tenderly responded 

to a letter from his father, an elderly shopkeeper in Terre Haute, Indiana. Governor 

Davis H. Waite was the Populist governor of Colorado.

 [Document Source: J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs, vol. 

1 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 82–83.]

 

My dearest Father:

 Your letter fi lled with kindness and cheer, characteristic of the stock, especially 

when the times are on that “try men’s souls,” is with me. I have immense satisfaction 

in knowing that you and mother, notwithstanding your years, are as proud, heroic 

and defi ant as the rest of us and even our enemies admit that we have the courage 

of our convictions. My imprisonment is doing much to arouse the public conscience. 

No disgrace attaches to the family. You need not blush. In good times the right will 

prevail and then reward and vindication will come. A steady stream of letters is 

pouring in here from all parts of the country. No one can imagine what a wave of 

indignation is arising. Judge Woods is not so much at ease as I am. My jail quarters 

are large, airy, clean and comfortable and I am perfectly at home with the sheriff ’s 

family whose residence adjoins the jail. Sunday Charley Gould was here and we 

spent the afternoon in the Sheriff ’s parlors, regaling ourselves (after a good dinner of 

stuff ed roast chicken) with a musical concert. Saturday Governor Waite of Colorado 

was with us from 11 to 2, taking dinner with us. He is a fi ne old man of about your 

age. He is chock full of fi ght and don’t care what the plutocratic press say about him. 

We may get out pending the decision of our case by the U.S. Supreme Court and in 

that event I will see you before the close of the week. Th e signs of the times are all 

hopeful and the future is full of cheer. You and mother must carry yourselves like the 

Spartans of old. Th is is not a time for sighs or tears but for heroic fortitude which 

does not waver, no matter how trying the ordeal. If the night is dark the dawn is 

near. Our day is coming. Just a little patience and we will celebrate our jubilee with 

becoming eclat.

 My heart is with you always. Kisses to you both and to Eugenie. Th e jail but 

makes our attachment the stronger.

Your devoted son

Eugene 
61

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Eugene V. Debs on the role of the courts

After the Supreme Court had ruled, Eugene V. Debs and his fellow defendants were 

ordered to report to the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois, to complete 

their sentences. The other defendants arrived on June 11, 1895, but Debs himself 

arrived a day later than the others. After serving his six-month sentence, Debs returned to his home and family in Terre Haute, Indiana, where on November 23, 

1895, he gave the following speech.

 [Document Source: Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: 

Pathfi nder Press, 1970): 50–52.] 

 

 In our cases at Chicago an injunction was issued at a time when the American 

Railway Union had its great struggle for human rights and they were triumphant 

in restraining myself and colleagues from doing what we never intended to do and 

never did do; and then we were put in jail for not doing it.

 When that injunction was served on me, to show that I acted in good faith, I 

went to two of the best constitutional lawyers in the city of Chicago and said, “What 

right, if any, have I under this injunction? I am a law-abiding citizen; I want to do 

what is right. I want you to examine this injunction and then advise me what to 

do.”

 Th ey examined the injunction. Th ey said, “Proceed just as you have been doing. 

You are not committing any violence; you are not advising violence, but you are trying to do everything in your power to restrain men from the commission of crime 

or violating the law.” I followed their advice and got six months for it.

 What does Judge Lyman Trumbull say upon that subject? Judge Trumbull is one 

of the most eminent jurists the country has produced. He served sixteen years in the 

United States Senate; he was chairman of the Senate Committee on [the] Judiciary; 

he was on the Supreme Bench of the state of Illinois; he has held all of the high 

offi ces but he is a poor man. Th ere is not a scar or blemish upon his escutcheon. No 

one has ever impugned his integrity. What does he say about this subject?

 To use his exact language he says: “Th e decision carried to its logical conclusion 

means that any federal judge can imprison any citizen at his own will. If this be true, 

it is judicial despotism, pure and simple, whatever you may choose to call it.”

 When the trials were in progress at Chicago Mr. George M. Pullman was summoned to give some testimony. Mr. Pullman attached his car to the New York train 

and went East, and in some way the papers got hold of the matter and made some 

publication about it and the judge said that Mr. Pullman would be dealt with drastically. In a few days Mr. Pullman returned and he went into chambers, made a few 

personal explanations and that is the last we heard about it. Had it been myself, I 

would have to go to jail. Th at is the diff erence.
62

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

 Only a little while ago Judge Henford cited Henry C. Payne, of the Northern 

Pacifi c, to appear before him to answer certain charges, and he went to Europe and 

is there yet. Will he go to jail on his return? Of course not. Th e reason suggests itself. 

If it were a railroad striker he would be in Woodstock instead of Berlin.

 Governor Altgeld, in many respects the greatest governor in the United States, 

says: “Th e precedent has now been established any federal judge can now enjoin any 

citizen from doing anything and then put him in jail.”

 Now what is an injunction? It has all of the force and vital eff ect of a law, but 

it is not a law in and by the representatives of the people; it is not a law signed by a 

President or by a governor. It is simply the wish and will of the judge. A judge issues 

an injunction; serves it upon his intended victim. Th e next day he is arrested. He is 

brought into the presence of the same judge. Sentence is pronounced upon him by 

the same judge, who constitutes the judge and court and jury and he goes to jail and 

he has no right of appeal. Under this injunctional process the plain provisions of the 

Constitution have been disregarded. Th e right of trial by jury has been abrogated, 

and this is at the behest of the money power of the country.

 What is the eff ect upon the workingmen and especially railway employees to bind 

them to their task? Th e government goes into partnership with a corporation. Th e 

workingmen are intimidated; if there is a reduction of wages they submit; if unjust 

conditions are imposed they are silent. And what is the tendency? To demoralize, to 

degrade workingmen until they have reached the very deadline of degradation.

 And how does it happen and why does it happen that corporations are never 

restrained? Are they absolutely law-abiding? Are they always right? Do they never 

transgress the law or is it because the federal judges are their creatures? Certain 

it is that the united voice of labor in this country would be insuffi cient to name a 

federal judge. If all the common people united and asked for the appointment of 

a federal judge their voice would not be heeded any more than if it were the chirp 

of a cricket. Money talks. Yes, money talks. And I have no hesitancy in declaring 

that money has even invaded, or the infl uence, that power conferred by money, has 

invaded the Supreme Court and left that august tribunal reeking with more stench 

than Coleridge discovered in Cologne and left all the people wondering how it was 

ever to be deodorized.

 Th ere is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as 

to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through and the federal judge is as 

far removed from the common people as if he inhabited another planet. As Boyle 

O’Reilly would say: 

 “His pulse, if you felt it, throbbed apart

 from the throbbing pulse of the people’s heart.”
63

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

Norris-LaGuardia Act, March 23, 1932 (excerpt)

In the midst of the Depression, and following a decade in which federal courts issued a record number of injunctions and restraining orders aimed at labor unions, 

Congress passed an act that narrowly restricted the use of such orders in labor disputes. The act included the following declaration of policy that guaranteed workers 

the rights of association and collective bargaining to balance the power of corporate 

association, which, as the act stated, had been developed with the help of the federal 

government. In addition to the declaration of policy, the act included a list of specifi c 

rights for striking workers.

 [Document Source: U.S. Statutes at Large 47 (1932): 70.]

 

 An Act To amend the Judicial Code and to defi ne and limit the jurisdiction of 

courts sitting in equity, and for other purposes. 

 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of 

America in Congress assembled, That no court of the United States, as herein defi ned, shall have jurisdiction to issue any restraining order or temporary injunction 

in a case involving or growing out of a labor dispute, except in a strict conformity 

with the provisions of this Act; nor shall any such restraining order or temporary or 

permanent injunction be issued contrary to the public policy declared in this Act.

 Sec. 2. In the interpretation of this Act and in determining the jurisdiction and 

authority of the courts of the United States, as such jurisdiction and authority are 

herein defi ned and limited, the public policy of the United States is hereby declared 

as follows:

 Whereas under prevailing economic conditions, developed with the aid of governmental authority for owners of property to organize in the corporate and other 

forms of ownership association, the individual unorganized worker is commonly 

helpless to exercise actual liberty of contract and to protect his freedom of labor, and 

thereby to obtain acceptable terms and conditions of employment, wherefore, though 

he should be free to decline to associate with his fellows, it is necessary that he have 

full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of 

his own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of his employment, and that 

he shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or 

their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in 

other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual 

aid or protection; . . . 
64

The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s

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John S. Cooke

About the Federal Judicial Center

The Federal Judicial Center is the research and education agency of the federal judicial system. It 

was established by Congress in 1967 (28 U.S.C. §§ 620–629), on the recommendation of the Judicial 

Conference of the United States.

 By statute, the Chief Justice of the United States chairs the Center’s Board, which also includes 

the director of the Administrative Offi ce of the U.S. Courts and seven judges elected by the Judicial 

Conference.

 The organization of the Center refl ects its primary statutory mandates. The Education Division 

plans and produces education and training programs for judges and court staff, including satellite 

broadcasts, video programs, publications, curriculum packages for in-court training, and Web-based 

programs and resources. The Research Division examines and evaluates current and alternative federal court practices and policies. This research assists Judicial Conference committees, who request 

most Center research, in developing policy recommendations. The Center’s research also contributes substantially to its educational programs. The two divisions work closely with two units of the 

Director’s Offi ce—the Systems Innovations & Development Offi ce and Communications Policy & 

Design Offi ce—in using print, broadcast, and online media to deliver education and training and to 

disseminate the results of Center research. The Federal Judicial History Offi ce helps courts and others study and preserve federal judicial history. The International Judicial Relations Offi ce provides 

information to judicial and legal offi cials from foreign countries and assesses how to inform federal 

judicial personnel of developments in international law and other court systems that may affect their 

work.