against industrial depressions.

FOOTNOTE:

[28] See below, 159-160.

CHAPTER 7

TRADE UNIONISM AND THE COURTS

While it was in the nineties that trade unionists first tasted the
sweets of institutionalization in industry through "recognition" by
employers, it was also during the later eighties and during the nineties
that they experienced a revival of suspicion and hostility on the part
of the courts and a renewal of legal restraints upon their activities,
which were all the more discouraging since for a generation or more they
had practically enjoyed non-interference from that quarter. It was at
this period that the main legal weapons against trade unionism were
forged and brought to a fine point in practical application. The history
of the courts' attitude to trade unionism may therefore best be treated
from the standpoint of the nineties.

The subject of court interference was not altogether new in the
eighties. We took occasion to point out the effect of court interference
in labor disputes in the first and second decades of the nineteenth
century and again in the thirties. Mention was made also of the court's
decision in the Theiss boycott case in New York in 1886, which proved a
prime moving factor in launching the famous Henry George campaign for
Mayor. And we gave due note to the role of court injunctions in the Debs
strike of 1894 and in other strikes. Our present interest is, however,
more in the court doctrines than in their effects: more concerned with
the development of the legal thought underlying the policies of the
courts than with the reactions of the labor movement to the policies
themselves.

The earliest case on record, namely the Philadelphia shoemakers' strike
case in 1806,[29] charged two offences; one was a combination to raise
wages, the other a combination to injure others; both offences were
declared by the judge to be forbidden by the common law. To the public
at large the prosecution seemed to rest solely upon the charge that the
journeymen combined to raise wages. The defense took advantage of this
and tried to make use of it for its own purposes. The condemnation of
the journeymen on this ground gave rise to a vehement protest on the
part of the journeymen themselves and their friends. It was pointed out
that the journeymen were convicted for acts which are considered lawful
when done by masters or merchants. Therefore when the next conspiracy
case in New York in 1809 wa