In his judicial career Mr. Taft has rendered some decisions in matters brought before him as a judge, which are bound to be a subject of discussion in the coming campaign. One group of these decisions deals with what may be described as rules of industrial warfare.
International agreement has done much toward civilizing international war. Capital and labor have no Hague Court. The limitations upon the scope and method of their warfare must come from the courts and the legislatures. The Treaty of Paris provided for the rights of neutrals, for the freedom of peaceful ships of commerce from plunder and destruction in war. The rights of neutrals in industrial war are less protected but are no less important. In that warfare the neutral party—the public—stands much as Mr. Pickwick did between the rival editors, receiving the fire-tongs on one side of the head and the carpet-bag on the other. The labor question in its militant phase is a public question largely because the public has no desire to occupy Mr. Pickwick's unhappy position.
It happens that all the so-called labor decisions which Judge Taft made when on the bench involve directly and primarily the rights of the general public and of outsiders having no direct part in any industrial quarrel, who against their will have been drawn into the warfare between capital and labor. In deciding these cases it has been necessary not only to consider the rights of labor in industrial disputes, but to pass upon the right of the general public and of disinterested outsiders to be let alone.
A Veto to Economic Excommunication
The first of these cases was one decided by Judge Taft in 1890 when he was a judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati. A Bricklayers' Union in Cincinnati, having about four hundred members, had a dispute with the firm of Parker Brothers, contracting bricklayers. The Union wanted Parker Brothers to pay a fine it had imposed upon one of their employees who was a member of the Union, to reinstate an apprentice who had left them, and to discharge another apprentice. Parker Brothers refused to do so. A strike was accordingly called. The Union also declared a boycott against Parker Brothers, and its business agent issued a circular to material men, contractors, and owners, which concluded with this announcement: "Any firm dealing in building materials who ignores this request, is hereby notified that we will not work his material upon any building nor for any contractor by whom we are employed. (Signed) Bricklayers' Union No. 1." One of the contractors to whom this notice was sent was the Moore Lime Company, engaged in selling lime in Cincinnati. Parker Brothers were customers of the Moores, and the Moores continued selling lime to them, notwithstanding the notice. Another circular was then sent out by the Union to its members, which read as follows: "Bricklayers' Union No. 1, Ohio. We, the members of the Bricklayers' Union, will not use material supplied by the following dealers until further notice": and in the list they put Moore & Company. The effect of the circular was to interfere with Moore & Company's business and to cause loss to their customers, who feared a similar fate. On these facts the Moores sued the Union for damage which they claimed had been done to their business by a wrongful and malicious conspiracy. The case was tried by a jury, which gave the Moores $2,250 damages. An appeal was taken by the Union to the Superior Court of Cincinnati, where Judge Taft presided.
The facts just related show the issue involved. The Moores' employees had no grievance against them. The only grievance which the Bricklayers had against them was that they refused to permit themselves to be used as a battering-ram in an assault on Parker Brothers. The Union insisted on the right to boycott Moore's Lime Company because Moore's Lime Company would not assist them in injuring the Parkers. Judge Taft decided, as other judges have decided in many cases, that such a combination to injure the Moores was without just cause or legal excuse and was illegal. This, so far as the Moores were concerned, was not a strike case, but a boycott, and in his decision Taft was very careful to draw the distinction and so express himself that the legal rights of labor in a lawful strike should not be impaired. He says:
If the workmen of an employer refuse to work for him except on better terms at a time when their withdrawal will cause great loss to him, and they intentionally inflict such loss to coerce him to come to their terms, they are bona fide exercising their lawful right to dispose of their labor for the purpose of lawful gain. But the dealings between Parker Brothers and their material men, or between such material men and their customers had not the remotest natural connection either with defendants' wages or their other terms of employment. There was no competition or possible contractual relation between the plaintiffs and defendants, where their interests were naturally opposed. The right of the plaintiffs (Moore & Company) to sell their material was not one which, in its exercise, brought them into legitimate conflict with the rights of defendants' Union and its members to dispose of their labor as they chose. The conflict was brought about by the efforts of defendants to use plaintiffs' right of trade to injure Parker Brothers, and, upon failure of this, to use plaintiffs' customers' right of trade to injure plaintiffs. Such effort cannot be in the bona fide exercise of trade, is without just cause, and is, therefore, malicious. The immediate motive of defendants here was to show to the building world what punishment and disaster necessarily followed a defiance of their demands. The remote motive of wishing to better their condition by the power so acquired, will not, as we think we have shown, make any legal justification for defendants' acts.
The doctrine of excommunication, the great engine of the Church in the Middle Ages, has not been revived and transferred from the Pope to the labor unions.
End of the Engineers' Famous "Rule 12"
The next decision of Taft's in a labor dispute came after his elevation to the Federal Bench, and again involved the same principle—the extent to which the rights of a third party, against whom neither labor nor capital has any grievance, can be impaired by involving him against his will in labor disputes. This case arose out of a strike of locomotive engineers on the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad in 1893. The strike had been called after numerous conferences between the railroad officials and Mr. Arthur, the representative of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. It was a legitimate strike, as against the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad, for higher wages. The phase of the controversy which came into court for Judge Taft's consideration, however, was not the strike itself, but grew out of an attempt by the Union to compel other railroads to refuse to receive freight from the Toledo Road and thereby paralyze that road and coerce it into granting the demands of the engineers.