ABSTRACT
In re Debs, 158 US 564 (1895), arose out of sharp conflict at the end of the nineteenth century between labor and management in the railroad industry and culminated in a holding by the US Supreme Court that allowed the use of injunctions by lower courts to thwart the efforts of labor groups to organize. In June 1894, after the Pullman Palace Railroad Company cut wages by 20 percent, the workers of the American Railway Union (ARU) declined to work on any Pullman Palace railroad cars. The strike immediately immobilized both the east and west lines of rail in and out of Chicago and eventually brought trains in over half the country to a halt. Eugene V. Debs, president of the ARU, and other union officers refused to comply with the injunction. Although Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld objected to forceful federal intervention to end the strike, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to break it up.
