During the eighties, despite the far-reaching development of legal theories on labor disputes, the issuance of injunctions was merely sporadic, but a veritable crop came up during 1893-1894.  Only the best-known injunctions can be here noted.  The injunctions issued in the course of the Southwest railway strike in 1886 and the Burlington strike in 1888 have already received mention.  An injunction was also issued by a Federal court during a miners’ strike at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1892.[38] A famous injunction was the one of Judges Taft and Rickes in 1893, which directed the engineers, who were employed by connecting railways, to handle the cars of the Ann Arbor and Michigan railway, whose engineers were on strike.[39] This order elicited much criticism because it came close to requiring men to work against their will.  This was followed by the injunction of Judge Jenkins in the Northern Pacific case, which directly prohibited the quitting of work.[40] From this injunction the defendants took an appeal, with the result that in Arthur v. Oakes[41] it was once for all established that the quitting of work may not be enjoined.

During the Pullman strike numerous injunctions, most sweeping in character, were issued by the Federal courts upon the initiative of the Department of Justice.  Under the injunction which was issued in Chicago arose the famous contempt case against Eugene V. Debs,[42] which was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The decision of the court in this case is notable, because it covered the main points of doubt above mentioned and placed the use of injunctions in labor disputes upon a firm legal basis.

Another famous decision of the Supreme Court growing out of the railway strikes of the early nineties was in the Lennon case[43] in 1897.  Therein the court held that all persons who have actual notice of the issuance of an injunction are bound to obey its terms, whether they were mentioned by name or not; in other words, the courts had evolved the “blanket injunction.”

At the end of the nineties, the labor movement, enriched on the one side by the lessons of the past and by the possession of a concrete goal in the trade agreement, but pressed on the other side by a new form of legal attack and by the growing consolidation of industry, started upon a career of new power but faced at the same time new difficulties.

FOOTNOTES: 

[29] See above, 6.

[30] See above, 91-93.

[31] Springhead Spinning Co. v. Riley, L.R. 6 E. 551 (1868).

[32] Johnson Harvester Co. v. Meinhardt, 60 How.  Pr. 171.

[33] Chicago, Burlington, etc., R.R.  Co. v. Union Pacific R.R.  Co., U.S.  Dist.  Ct., D. Neb. (1888).

[34] In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).

[35] 107 Mass. 555 (1871).

[36] 5 Pa.  Co.  Ct. 163 (1888).