Into Federal District Court

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-143
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Federal District Court ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
New Vision ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter recounts the federal district court injunction proceeding instituted by the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop Jersey City from denying leafletting rights and public-speaking permits. Revealing the hearing’s nastiness, the chapter shows that the trial had legal significance beyond exposing Mayor Hague’s misdeeds, as it tested whether Jersey City’s claim of traditional municipal police powers against alleged CIO communists or the ACLU’s new vision of nationally protected speech and assembly rights for workers would prevail, and indeed, whether federal courts would accept jurisdiction. With law in flux, the chapter concludes, the district court broke new ground by assuming jurisdiction, rejecting Jersey City’s old legal vision, embracing new ACLU views, and enjoining Jersey City as requested.

Workers against the City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Law ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This book contributes to legal and labor history by reinterpreting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hague v. CIO (1939) decision, which upheld a federal district court injunction prohibiting Jersey City boss Frank Hague from obstructing workers from the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allies in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from meeting in urban public places. The case involved speech and assembly freedoms, rights essential for CIO workers’ organizing efforts, but, as the book shows, these rights were submerged under municipal police powers to preserve public order until the court brought them under federal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment in Hague. Revising the conventional view, the book argues that Hague was more than simply a civil liberties victory for workers over a dictatorial, antilabor city boss. Drawing on new evidence in city archives, CIO records, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and Jersey City court filings, as well as traditional sources in ACLU records and anti-Hague literature, the book demonstrates that the Hague-versus-CIO controversy emanated more from shifts in the labor movement from craft to industrial unionism, in municipal law, in urban police practices, in the politics of anticommunism and antifascism, and especially in the Supreme Court’s “civil liberties revolution.” With women and African Americans on the periphery, the book concludes, male CIO workers initiated the case, but Hague ultimately benefitted outdoor protests more than it benefitted labor speech.

Street Fight and Media Fight

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-109
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter traces the political and media battle that unfolded 1937-38 over Jersey City’s denial of public speaking permits to the Committee for Industrial Organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, and supporters, including a few women. It shows how the media dominated popular understanding of the controversy by projecting rival discourses of democracy versus dictatorship and law and order versus subversive communism, temporarily obscuring legal questions about municipal police powers, labor law, and free speech that federal courts were on the verge of deciding. The chapter illustrates how the struggle intensified. Mayor Hague staged extravagant anticommunist “Americanism” rallies against the CIO with broad local support, while an outside pro-CIO left-labor coalition denounced Hague as a dictator in Popular Front language of antifascism and working-class Americanism.

Plaintiffs v. Privateers: Litigation and Foreign Affairs in the Federal Courts, 1816–1822

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Arlyck
Keyword(s):  
Federal District ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
District Court ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Federal District Court ◽  
Merchant Ship ◽  
Do So

On January 24, 1817, Don Juan Stoughton, the Spanish consul in Boston, wrote to his colleague in Baltimore, Don Pablo Chacon, to thank him for his recent efforts in supplying Stoughton with information about the Mangore, a private armed vessel recently arrived in the Chesapeake. Stoughton believed that the privateer was responsible for the capture of a Spanish-owned merchant ship that had recently turned up in Massachusetts. Stoughton had recently filed suit in federal district court to recover the vessel and its cargo on behalf of the rightful owners, but to do so he had to establish that, in the course of its recent expedition, the Mangore had violated federal law prescribing American neutrality. In addition to providing intelligence in this matter, Chacon had secured local counsel to represent Stoughton at depositions of privateer crew members being taken in Baltimore.

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