American Steel & Wire Co. v. Wire Drawers' & Die Makers' Unions Nos. 1 & 3

90 F. 608, 12 Ohio F. Dec. 128, 1898 U.S. App. LEXIS 2516
CourtU.S. Circuit Court for the District of Northern Ohio
DecidedOctober 18, 1898
DocketNo. 5,812
StatusPublished
Cited by18 cases

This text of 90 F. 608 (American Steel & Wire Co. v. Wire Drawers' & Die Makers' Unions Nos. 1 & 3) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Northern Ohio primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
American Steel & Wire Co. v. Wire Drawers' & Die Makers' Unions Nos. 1 & 3, 90 F. 608, 12 Ohio F. Dec. 128, 1898 U.S. App. LEXIS 2516 (circtndoh 1898).

Opinion

HAMMOND, J.

The foregoing is a sufficient and fair summary of the facts established by the proof. The court is not now engaged, as a criminal or police court, in trying offenders for assaults and battery, nor for engaging in tumults, riots, or mob violence, wherefore much of the testimony on both sides is quite irrelevant and inappropriate to this inquiry. It is not one of the present duties of the court to locate the blame for the occurrences which have been detailed in the affidavits and by the witnesses; and, indeed, either side may be blameworthy, or both, and that fact should not affect the question to be now decided; neither is the court properly concerned at this time about the rightfulness or wrongfulness of the strike, in relation to the causes which brought it about; and therefore the foregoing statement of facts does not at all deal with the details of the transactions and occurrences so voluminously set out in the proof. The only question is, does this proof, as a whole, justify a reasonable apprehension on the part of the plaintiffs that the defendants, in maintaining their strike, will illegally disturb their business and injure it by unlawful acts of violence and intimidation of outside laborers — “scabs,” if you please — willing to work for the plaintiffs at the wages which they offer? Even “scabs” and those who employ “scabs” in time of a strike have rights' which the strikers are bound by the law to respect. The most important of these rights is an unobstructed access to the place where the work is to be done, over the streets and highways by which it is to be approached. Nor is this freedom of access at all inconsistent with any right the strikers have to use the same streets and highways. for the lawful conduct and maintenance of their strike by intercepting any one going to work in their place for the purpose of peaceful entreaty or argument against supplanting them. One authenticated instance in this proof where the strikers, meeting a single “scab,” or a group of them, or an organized body of them, had stood aside, opened up the street, and allowed him or them to pass to the mill without more ado, after the entreaty or argument had failed to convince, would be worth more, as a matter of evidence showing the good faith of the strikers in their assertion that they were on the street only for an opportunity of entreaty and argument, than all the affidavits filed in this case. If the strikers, after their victory over Paulowski and his body of “strike breakers,” had only lined themselves on each side of the street, and permitted them to go to work at the mill, that would have been conclusive evidence of their honesty and good intentions in the matter of confining their operations to entreaty and argument. So, of the struggle on the next day but one, when the officers of the plaintiff company led the “strike breakers,” and of all the other occasions when workmen attempted to go to the mill notwithstanding the entreaty and argu[613]*613ment which had been presented to them. That was precisely what the men wishing to go to the mill had a right to do after they had lingered or been detained long enough to receive the argument and entreaty of the strikers not to supplant them, that was precisely what the plaintiffs had a right to demand, and that right is guarantied to them by the law of every free country where the right to work as one pleases, and to contract for labor as one, chooses, is protected by law. It is the right not so much of property as of that liberty which every man enjoys in this country as his birthright; which is not confined to political rights alone, but extends as well to personal activities in and about one’s daily business, be he laborer or capitalist; it is this right wl'icli lies at the foundation of the strikers’ own freedom when they would work or refuse to work on any terms but their own; it is a right the striker lawfully cannot deny to the ‘’scab,” — the right to pass freely through the streets and highways to his work. In this country this right to contract in business is a constitutional freedom, which not even state legislatures can impair; and certainly not strike organizations, for surely they cannot lawfully do what the legislature may not. Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U. S. 578, 589, 590, 17 Sup. Ct. 427.

It was frequently urged in argument that .the strikers have a right to be on the streets; and so they have, so long as they do not trespass on the right of others to use them. The right of the use of streets by any one is a qualified right. The owner of a house, be it dwelling house, store house, or mill house, has a distinct right of property in the streets adjacent thereto, and used as approaches to it. It is the right of access, — free and uninterrupted ingress and egress. Any one who uses the streets must use them subject to this right of the householder; and there is not a particle of difference in respect of this between a dwelling house and a mill house or large factory employing large bodies of men, wbo always go to the polls and vote at elections, and sometimes go out on a strike. Nor is the freedom of contract and right of access through the streets to one’s work at all affected by assumed peculiarities of conditions attending the struggles of men in the economic conflicts between laborers and capitalists, nor by any considerations of public policy in respect of these conflicts. In one of the great cases to be cited presently, what was said by an English judge is quite pertinent to this matter of strikes and boycotts, and" interfering between employer and employé, namely, that public policy is “an unruly horse, and, when once a judge is astride it, he may he carried far away from sound law.” Tf any one violate the right of the householder to the streets that are appurtenant to his property, as a part of it, by impairing Ms ingress and egress, be has a civil action, and he may also abate it by injunction in equity as a private nuisance. In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564, 587, 15 Sup. Ct. 900; Griffing v. Gibb, 2 Black, 519; Railroad Co. v. Ward, Id. 485; Hart v Buckner, 5 C. C. A. 1, 54 Fed. 925; Story, Eq. Jur. (13tb Ed.) §§ 920-924, and note a; 924a-927, and note 2, citing cases, 928, 929; Daniell, Ch. Prac, (5th Ed.) 1635-1639, and notes 3, 4; Cooley, Torts [614]*614(2d Ed.) 732-736, and note 7, citing cases, 737, and note 2. It is just as much a nuisance to block up the street and impair the right by the continual presence of bodies of men,- great or small, who obstruct the ingress and egress, as it would be to build barricades and embankments in the street. In re Debs, supra. There can be no denial of this; and, when the blockading is done for the especial purpose of impairing the ingress to a particular house, it is directly a nuisance, which may be abated by injunction, if necessary. Id. This is sound law, from which no unruly horse of public policy should carry a judge any distance at all, no matter how ably it is ¡urged upon him by learned and eloquent counsel pleading for the rights of labor as against capital, corporations, and despised foreigners, who organize “scabs” to resist the strikers in favor of odious trusts.

The (defense that the plaintiff is a trust was sufficiently disposed of at the hearing by the statement that it cannot thus be made, — collaterally. If ousted by a judicial decree declaring it a trust, at the suit of the attorney general, then possibly it might be pleaded, but not now and here.

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Bluebook (online)
90 F. 608, 12 Ohio F. Dec. 128, 1898 U.S. App. LEXIS 2516, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/american-steel-wire-co-v-wire-drawers-die-makers-unions-nos-1-3-circtndoh-1898.