Today in Supreme Court History: December 26, 1907

12/26/1907: Lonzo Bailey entered into written labor contract with the Riverside Corporation. This contract gave rise to Bailey v. Alabama (1911).

The White Court (1911)

 

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 568 U.S. 1401 (decided December 26, 2012): Sotomayor denies stay of enforcement of Affordable Care Act because claimed Free Exercise Clause/Religious Freedom Restoration Act violation was not “indisputably clear” (as we know, the Court later held that there was indeed a Free Exercise/RFRA violation, sub nom. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., summarized here on June 30)

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Not to be confused with an earlier free exercise decision entitled Hobbie v. Unemployment Appeals Comm'n of Florida.

Bailey v. Alabama suggests the broad possibilities of the 13th Amendment to address different types of involuntary servitude. In the New Deal, there was a possibility that federal labor regulation and unions would largely rest on that amendment. Unions are necessary for true free labor in action.

(See, e.g., The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment).

But the federal government and Supreme Court went with an interstate commerce approach.

Meanwhile, today is the beginning of Kwanzaa, set up as a secular alternative for the holidays though later it was made clear that it would be open-ended in nature. The controlling opinions of Allegheny County v. ACLU advanced cultural and religious diversity. A truly diverse holiday display would include Kwanzaa.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That is true. Celebrations of African heritage unfortunately don't tend to diffuse into the larger culture. It is a remote consequence of slavery which practically stamped out native customs and sense of identity. The biggest holiday African Americans celebrate is Juneteenth, which celebrates something that white people did (or undid).

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Black people played an important role in the end of slavery, including their resistance during the Civil War. Blacks, free and fugitive slaves, also joined the Union military in large numbers.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Bullbleep!

There was no Black resistance, not even the cutting of telegraph wires.

[Noscitur a sociis]

I will never grow tired of a guy who can’t stop himself from, apropos of nothing, calling for mass murder, but who is too squeamish to type the word “shit”.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Actually I do grow tired of him. His signal-to-noise ratio is about 1:10. Better than some others, admittedly.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Juneteenth is bullbleep -- the Emancipation Proclamation was a violation of the 5th Amendment and Lincoln knew that -- which is why the slaves in DC were freed by being bought by the Government.

It took the 4th paragraph of the 14th Amendment to end this, although the 13th ended slavery -- except for the slaves owned by the Creek Nation, it took an 1866 treaty to free them.

All Juneteenth celebrates is debt peonage...

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"The biggest holiday African Americans celebrate is Juneteenth, which celebrates something that white people did (or undid)."

No, it was a biracial Union army and navy which crushed chattel slavery. Even if you haven't studied up much on the Civil War, didn't you at least see the movie *Glory*?

Of course, when considered in that light, Juneteenth is problematic because black people were recruited into the Union army with gendered rhetoric - a chance to prove their manhood, which they did. Not that that makes the sexism, heteronormativity, etc., any better (/sarc). Plus, everyone knows that violence never solves anything, at least not when wielded on behalf of the United States of America. (/sarc)

[Dan Schiavetta]

Juneteenth celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by a white guy.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

How do you think that proclamation was enforced? By the military forces of the Union, made up of both white and black soldiers and sailors.

And the specific context of Juneteenth?

As Wikipedia explains, it started in Texas, the last state which got the news of emancipation: "The holiday's name is a portmanteau of the words 'June' and 'nineteenth', as it was on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War."

If Wikipedia is to be relied on, the holiday started in Texas, spread through the South, and came north with the Great Migration. At the time, of course, governmental authorities weren't exactly encouraging of these celebrations of freedom. It spread anyway, and *now* governments are latching onto it and encouraging it.

Anyway, dismissing Abraham Lincoln as "a white guy" is like dismissing Frederick Douglass as "a black guy." Lincoln may have been white, but he was the one who proclaimed an end to slavery and insisted that the military enforce this.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday created by FBI Informants.
Ann Coulter, whose father was a FBI Agent, has written about this at length.

Celebrating Kwanzaa is like celebrating Hitler's Birthday.
Most Black Americans celebrate CHRISTMAS....

[F.D. Wolf]

Alonzo Bailey entered a contract to work for a year as a farmhand at $12 a month, receiving an advance of $15. Bailey quit a little over a month later and was charged and convicted under an Alabama statute that prohibited entering a contract to provide services, receiving advance money on the contract, and not completing the contract without repaying the advance money. The Court struck down the statute as indentured servitude, prohibited under the Thirteenth Amendment.

My sister worked for a large multinational corporation in Singapore for a few years. Foreigners, of course, require work visas to work there. If a foreigner loses his job there, he may literally have government agents meet him that same day to escort him to the airport. (Things are quite a bit laxer in the United States, of course.)

What does this have to do with Bailey v. Alabama? Corporations are always pushing the government to issue more work visas. Why do American corporations prefer foreigners to American workers? One reason they naturally don't publicize is that, unlike American workers, it is harder for them to just leave.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Wikipedia breaks down the voting in the Bailey case.

The justices in the majority - who defended the black guy facing debt peonage, were "[Charles Evan] Hughes, joined by [Edward Douglass] White, [John Marshall] Harlan, [Joseph] McKenna, [William R.] Day, [Willis] Van Devanter, [Joseph] Lamar."

Devanter later became known in progressive demonology as one of the anti-New-Deal "Four Horsemen." Lamar was a Georgian and an old friend of Woodrow Wilson. White was an ex-Confederate soldier who put on a bit of weight after the Civil War, as his official photo, frequently posted on Volokh, indicates. John Marshal Harlan was more than the dissenter in Plessy, he was an upholder of economic freedom of contract. They were able to see through the rationalizations and recognize debt peonage when they saw it. Economic freedom is economic freedom.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Horace Lamar Lurton of Tennessee dissented and thought that locking up Bailey for violating his labor contract was perfectly OK. Wikipedia notes that Lurton, a former Confederate soldier, "sided most frequently on the court with...Holmes..." Holmes had fought for the Union, but the lesson he took away from that experience wasn't defense of slaves and their descendants. His was more of a Nietzschean philosophy about upholding government power, especially in economic matters.

So who were the legal realists in this case? Not Holmes, though he supposedly believed that the life of the law was not logic but experience, but who nonetheless wrote a dissent in Bailey based on a clueless legal logic that missed the forced-labor aspects of the law.