United States Congressional serial set: Issue 5266
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine: Volume 42
William H. Weber and John Haddow .."
Mentions
Address of Senator Philander Chase Knox at Pittsburgh, Pa., Friday, October 30, 1908
The case to which I refer is the one of Weber and Haddow, who were ad- judged guilty of contempt of the United States Court for the Western District of Virginia and were sentenced to jail for six months and one month respectively. These men filed a petition for pardon, which was transmitted to me as Attorney-General for investigation and report. In making my report to the President, recommending a pardon, I expressed an unwillingness to agree with the Court, that the ultimate purpose of the United Mine Workers' Union was not legal. I thought that the Court was mistaken in 37 that view and I felt that the difficulties at the mine were aggravated by the arbitrary discharge of union workmen. The pardon was granted. It by no means follows that because the executive branch of the Government considered that the writ of injunction in that case had been unwisely issued and too severely enforced, that the courts all over this Union should be deprived of the power to prevent a restriction of wrongful acts and to preserve the status of persons and things pending litigation; or that the right of tens of thousands of people engaged in various occupations throughout this land to resort to the courts to prevent unlawful interference with their right to carry on their business should be taken away. One would imagine from the hue and cry that has been raised in some quarters 38 against the writ of injunction that its prin- cipal office was to restrain workingmen from exercising their rights. This is wholly untrue. An examination of the cases will disclose that courts of equity have issued injunctions in aid of workingmen's rights more frequently than it has been invoked against them and such examination will also disclose that in a great majority of cases where it has been invoked against labor it has been refused. Besides, this writ is resorted to annually in hundreds of cases where labor is not involved to one where it is. [1]
