Napoleon’s words sent me into one of my research kicks, and so I’ve been digging around a bit, reading a lot of material from the first quarter of the 20th century. There’s a lot I could cite, but this one here was really good, as it deals with the position of strength US workers found themselves in during WW1, when the country depended too much on production to have management doing its thing. A walkout in these conditions would not only threaten their employer’s operation, but perhaps the war effort as well. So unions were strong in these times, but once the war ended it was a different story. In this excerpt we’ll see the Supreme Court playing a role (as it already has begun to under Chief Justice Roberts see ‘Supreme Court Decides to Favor Discrimination Against Women Workers‘).
Excerpt from ‘Labor and the New Nationalism‘ by Robert W. Bruere
Published in May 1919, Harper’s Magazine (Subscription Req’d)
“…For it is when one looks to the tradition of our courts and of our public policy, and especially when one contrasts that tradition with the actual practice of our government during the war, that one discovers the most baneful point of irritation. The roots of our tradition with respect to labor strike back into the ancient English commonlaw doctrine of criminal conspiracy, which was first applied in this country in 1806 against the shoemakers of Philadelphia, whom a jury convicted of “conspiracy to raise their wages.” According to Commons, who analyzes the issues in his History of Labor in the United States, the verdict was received by a divided public opinion. The Jeffersonian newspapers throughout the country made the cause of the workers their own and bitterly arraigned the court and the law under which the shoemakers were convicted. But the workers were then in the main unfranchised, and, though the courts shifted the emphasis in their adverse interpretation of the law, their attitude toward organized attempts to increase wages or better working conditions remained generally hostile. The right to organize and bargain collectively is possibly the most coveted right to which wage-workers have aspired for more than a century . To secure the full recognition of that right and its implied privileges, they have made their greatest sacrifices. It is frequently assumed that this right to organize is no longer in dispute in America; that collective bargaining is no longer a question of law, but rests exclusively with the discretion of the employers and the organized strength of the workers. This assumption is far from true.
The attitude of the courts toward collective action remains hostile, as appears most clearly perhaps in two comparatively recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court. On January 25, 1915, this court held unconstitutional a law of the state of Kansas which forbade any employer to require from employees or prospective employees an agreement, either written or verbal, not to join or to continue as members of trade-unions. Violations were classed as misdemeanors, punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both. On July I, 1911, T. B. Coppage, a superintendent employed by the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Company at Fort Scott, Kansas, instructed a switchman named Hedges to sign an agreement to withdraw from his union. Hedges refused and was discharged. The trial court found Coppage guilty of a misdemeanor. Coppage, contending that the statute under which he had been convicted was unconstitutional, took an appeal. The highest appellate tribunal of Kansas upheld the law and affirmed Coppage’s. conviction. But the United States Supreme Court later reversed the state court by a divided vote, Justices Day, Holmes, and Hughes dissenting.
Subsequently, in December, 1917, in the case of Hitchman Coal & Coke Co. us, Mitchell et al., the Supreme Court reinforced the position taken in the Coppage case by declaring it unlawful for agents of a labor union to attempt to recruit members among workmen who, as a condition of their employment, had signed such individual agreements as the legislature of Kansas had sought to outlaw…”