A Supreme Court decision supporting the use of labor injunctions, Buck’s Stove was one of a series of legal cases in the Progressive Era that worked to restrain the political actions of the labor movement. After the turn of the century, the rising tide of labor militancy had provoked a strong, coordinated response from business and financial interests. They demonstrated their antipathy toward labor and collective bargaining in an array of strategies from employer associations like the National Association oe MANUEACTURERS and the American Anti-Boycott Association to strikebreaking with help from local police or state militia. Another tool was to appeal to the judiciary’s known conservatism. Using the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, large corporations and small businesses alike sought court injunctions against strikes and boycotts as illegal restraint of trade. Courts had enjoined labor unions from carrying on community-level boycotts throughout the late 19th century, but they had not interfered with “We Don’t Patronize” lists in union publications. The heightened conflict between capital and labor allowed for little room to bargain. In two separate court cases—Loewe v. Lawlor (known as Danbury Hatters) and Buck’s Stove—the U. S. Supreme Court sided with businesses that sought relief, first as compensation for financial losses during a boycott and secondly when a national labor organization refused to obey a court injunction.
The Buck’s Stove case arose when the Iron Molders International Union struck Buck’s Stove and Range in St. Louis. In the face of the company’s refusal to bargain, the Iron Molders union declared a boycott. As part of the boycott, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) placed the firm on the “We Don’t Patronize List” in its journal, the American Federationist. In 1907, the firm’s owner, who belonged to an antiunion organization, asked the federal courts to issue an injunction against the AFL, citing its use of the boycott list as an unfair restraint of interstate commerce and a violation of the Sherman Act. The courts found in the firm’s favor and ordered the AFL to remove Buck’s Stove from the list. Rejecting the court’s injunction as a violation of the rights to free speech and a free press, AFL president Samuel Gompers refused. The lower courts held that there was no right to free speech if it involved criminal activity. The federal district court found Gompers and his associates, AFL secretary Frank Morrison and United Mine Workers of America president John Mitchell, guilty of violating the Sherman Act and charged them with contempt of court. They fined the union leaders and sentenced them to jail terms. In the appeal, Gompers lost his case before the Supreme Court. By that time, however, the statute of limitations for contempt of court had run out. The Iron Molders Union and the company also had settled the strike. In response, the Supreme Court stayed the lower court sentencing. While union leaders were not forced to pay the fines or endure prison, the Buck’s Stove case, like Loewe v. Lawlor, prompted new caution from union officers in how they used scarce time and resources. Costly court cases, whether fighting injunctions, antitrust suits, or violations of free speech, exhausted the labor movement financially and politically. At the same time, the widespread use of labor injunctions based on antitrust law inspired the AFL to return to the political arena. In the elections of 1908 and 1912, labor mobilized its members to vote for the parties and candidates that would address the mounting list of labor’s grievances.
Further reading: Daniel Ernst, Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
World History
