THE PULLMAN CASE: THE CLASH OF LAW AND CAPITAL IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA by David Ray Papke. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999. 118pp.
Reviewed by Richard A. Brisbin, Jr., Department of Political Science, West Virginia University. E-mail: rbrisbin@wvu.edu.
Among the many bitter contests between management and labor in late nineteenth century America, the Pullman strike of 1894-1895 had the greatest legal significance. The Supreme Court's subsequent opinion on efforts to enjoin the strike and punish union leaders for contempt, IN RE DEBS (1895), came to shape decades of labor-management relations. In this brief but stimulating book, law professor and historian David Ray Papke offers a straightforward account of the context and events of the strike, a careful exposition of the litigation that ended at the Supreme Court, and an assessment of the impact of the strike on people and policy. Although some of the material about the Debs case was coupled with a more critical interpretation in Papke's HERETICS IN THE TEMPLE: AMERICANS WHO REJECT THE NATION'S LEGAL FAITH (1998), in THE PULLMAN CASE he provides much more detail about the events surrounding the case and the politics of the personalities who participated in its resolution. Additionally, despite his direct and uncomplicated historical presentation of events and personalities, Papke still manages to point to the critical political issue in the case - the role of the federal government in supporting corporate domination or "paternalism" of industrial workers.
	Papke opens the book with a chapter about the context of the strike. He illustrates how, couched in a "free labor" ideology, entrepreneur George Pullman asserted "workplace hierarchy," paternalism, and close surveillance of the workers at his rail car factory located in a company town he had constructed near Chicago. Although not a factory beset by deep labor-management differences, unaddressed grievances caused a minority of workers at the plant to join the American Railway Union headed by Eugene V. Debs. After Pullman fired members of a union committee who sought to bargain about grievances, the union struck and effectively closed the factory.
In the second chapter Papke illustrates a series of events with parallels in many strikes. Pullman stonewalled. The union adopted more confrontational tactics. After some weeks of hesitation, the union leadership initiated a secondary boycott of railroads suing Pullman cars. Strikes across the nation's railroads broke out, and furious but often poorly disciplined strikers engaged in physical confrontations with strikebreakers recruited by railway executives. Railway executives then claimed a threat to public order, and they convinced federal Attorney General Richard Olney of the need to dispatch federal troops to protect railway property, jail Debs and other union leaders, and disperse the strikers. More confrontations and forty deaths ensued until support for the strike and boycott waned.
The third chapter examines the use of federal injunctions to provide a legal justification for the use of troops and the incarceration of union leaders. Papke especially points out how the judiciary's development of an omnibus injunction effectively disabled the union, provided a basis for arresting union leaders for contempt of court or criminal conspiracy, and gave federal authorities a reason to "ransack" union offices. In sorting through these events, Papke provides a very clear delineation of the separate civil and criminal aspects of the legal action against the union and its leaders. He also exposes the political and professional linkages between railway lawyers and federal prosecutors and trial judges. When discussing the review of the case by the Supreme Court in Chapter Four, Papke recounts the arguments of counsel, including Clarence Darrow for Debs, scrutinizes the unanimous opinion of the Court against Debs and the union written by Justice David Brewer, and he reflects on the ideological or attitudinal basis of the justice's decision.
In the final chapter, Papke assesses the impact of the case. He argues that the decision reinforced managerial paternalism and domination of the workplace. Confronting this reality, Eugene Debs abandoned labor organization and moved to the political left to launch the Socialist Party. From the strike Debs learned that only control of lawmaking and influence over the judiciary might advantage labor. Finally, Papke indicates that the case changed the attitudes of some of the lawyers in the case. Particularly, his experiences in the Pullman Case made Clarence Darrow chose the path of cause lawyering and a career devoted to contesting the arrangements of power that are embedded in American law.
As a publication in the Kansas Press's series on Landmark Law Cases and American Society, Papke has certainly lived up to the objectives of the series through the presentation of a readable study of a case in a text that is accessible to students and general readers. However, political scientists who occasionally teach about labor issues or IN RE DEBS in constitutional law courses will benefit from the information provided through a reading this book. They also might find it to be a useful supplementary text in a various law and politics classes.
However, law and politics scholars might find problems, occasioned by editorial decisions, with Papke's book. Despite a very useful bibliography, this book and others in its series eschew footnotes because the series editors assume that notes distract students and general readers (p. 103). However, for scholars it would be useful to know the source of the many quotations in Papke's book. Also, since the structure of the series means that authors focus on a single case, some of the historical context of legal change or pattern of political and doctrinal evolution is slighted.
As for the content of Papke's presentation, my major concern is that his focus is on elite behavior. Perhaps this approach was dictated by the lack of surviving accounts of workers' experiences during the strike. Nonetheless, it means that the strikers too often appear as faceless objects in a series of events in which they played a critical role. Indeed, despite the role of Debs and the lack of specific sources about rank-and-file attitudes, Papke clearly demonstrates that local job actions by nameless workers and their culture of solidarity made the strike work and forced the heavy hand of management. Another criticism is that Papke implies that the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 ended both the use of the kind of injunctions permitted in the Debs case and the close association of management and government in the discipline of industrial labor (p. 98). The Act did shift the labor relations playing field, but not to the extent that Papke implies. As James Atleson (1989) has shown, the injunction remains a powerful tool for the combined managerial and governmental containment or suppression of job actions by workers. The paternalism in the law of employment and labor organizations that Papke exposes in the Pullman case thus still survives today. It is a political lesson that students need to learn.
REFERENCES
Atleson, James B. 1989. The Legal Community and the Transformation of Disputes: The Settlement of Injunction Actions. LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW 23: 41-73.
Papke, David Ray. 1998. HERETICS IN THE TEMPLE: AMERICAN'S WHO REJECT THE NATION'S LEGAL FAITH. New York: New York
University Press.
IN RE DEBS, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).