Sold With the 1908 Election Days Away, TR Speaks Up For Taft

At the turn of the 20th century, injunctions were used and abused as affirmative weapons by both labor and management, though in very unequal proportion. Labor obtained occasional injunctions, mainly to protect the union label from being removed from goods by anti-union sellers. Management regularly sought court interventions to enjoin unions from using their most effective weapons of industrial warfare (strikes, picketing, and boycotts), and to imprison labor leaders. As examples, in the case of a strike by steelworkers in Cleveland, a judge issued an injunction against picketing; and in another, the AFL placed the Bucks Stove and Range Co. on its "We Don’t Patronize" list. The company asked for an injunction against the boycott and received one that was made permanent on March 23, 1908.    

President Roosevelt was not generally sympathetic to organized labor, but he was opposed to using injunctions to stymie workers. The 1908 Republican nominee, William H. Taft, felt differently, and the party platform ended up more conservative than Roosevelt and other progressive Republicans would have liked. It avoided the larger question of the use of injunctions to strangle labor, but left those modalities in place and limited itself to the side-show aspect of judicial notice. Thus Roosevelt, while yet in office, was already having disagreements with Taft on the issues, so it is not surprising that the two men would soon have a parting of the ways.    

A similar position to Roosevelt’s was taken by Wall Street attorney and former judge Reuben D. Silliman, with whom TR corresponded. With the 1908 presidential election just days away, TR expressed his pleasure that Taft was ahead, but made it clear that he would insert more progressive language on the injunction issue in the upcoming State of the Union message.    

Typed Letter Signed on White House letterhead, Washington, October 28, 1908, to Silliman. “I thank you for your letter and the encouraging view of the outlook of the campaign which it contains. I wish your whole article could have been used. As it has not been, I shall at least make use of certain of the ideas, either in my message to Congress or on some other occasion when I am able to speak of the judiciary.”    

This he did on December 8, 1908, indicating that  “There are certain decisions by various courts which have been exceedingly detrimental to the rights of wageworkers…There is also, I think, ground for the belief that substantial injustice is often suffered by employees in consequence of the custom of courts issuing temporary injunctions without notice to them, and punishing them for contempt of court in instances where…they have no knowledge of any proceedings….Organized labor is chafing under the unjust restraint which comes from repeated resort to this plan of procedure…The power of injunction is a great equitable remedy, which should on no account be destroyed. But safeguards should be erected against its abuse…”    

President Woodrow Wilson would be the one to resolve the issue. He prevailed on Congress in 1914 to pass the Clayton Act, which prohibited, in most instances, the use of the injunction in labor disputes, and expressed the principle that strikes, peaceful picketing, and boycotts do not violate federal laws.