t was during that decade that charges like "inciting
to riot," "obstructing the streets," "intimidation," and "trespass" were
first extensively used in connection with labor disputes. Convictions
were frequent and penalties often severe. What attitude the courts at
that time took toward labor violence was shown most strikingly, even if
in too extreme a form to be entirely typical, in the case of the Chicago
anarchists.[30]

But the significance of the eighties in the development of relations of
the courts to organized labor came not from these cases which were,
after all, nothing but ordinary police cases magnified to an unusual
degree by the intensity of the industrial struggle and by the excited
state of public opinion, but in the new lease of life to the doctrine of
conspiracy as affecting labor disputes. During the eighties and nineties
there seemed to have been more conspiracy cases than during all the rest
of the century. It was especially in 1886 and 1887 that organized labor
found court interference a factor. At this time, as we saw, there was
also passed voluminous state legislation strengthening the application
of the common law doctrine of conspiracy to labor disputes. The
conviction of the New York boycotters in 1886 and many similar
convictions, though less widely known, of participants in strikes and
boycotts were obtained upon this ground.

Where the eighties witnessed a revolution was in a totally new use made
of the doctrine of conspiracy by the courts when they began to issue
injunctions in labor cases. Injunctions were an old remedy, but not
until the eighties did they figure in the struggles between labor and
capital. In England an injunction was issued in a labor dispute as early
as 1868;[31] but this case was not noticed in the United States and had
nothing whatever to do with the use of injunctions in this country. When
and where the first labor injunction was issued in the United States is
not known. An injunction was applied for in a New York case as early as
1880 but was denied.[32] An injunction was granted in Iowa in 1884, but
not until the Southwest railway strike in 1886 were injunctions used
extensively. By 1890 the public had yet heard little of injunctions in
connection with labor disputes, but such use was already fortified by
numerous precedents.

The first injunctions that attained wide publicity were those issued by
Federal courts during the strike of engineers against the Chicago,