Background
On June 26, 1917, Local 800 of the Industrial Workers of the World (or IWW, a labor union), struck the Phelps Dodge Corporation and other mining companies in the town of Bisbee, Arizona. Nearly 3,000 miners (about 38% of the town's total population) walked out. The strike was a peaceful one. However, Walter S. Douglas, the president of Phelps Dodge, was determined to break the strike.
On July 11, Douglas and other Phelps Dodge corporate executives met with Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler to conspire to seize, by force of arms, all the striking workers, forcibly transport (deport) them several hundred miles away from Bisbee, and abandon them in another desert town without food, clothing or funds. To this end, Sheriff Wheeler recruited and deputized 2,200 men from Bisbee and the nearby town of Douglas to act as a posse. Phelps Dodge officials also met with executives of the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, who agreed to provide rail transportation for any deportees. Phelps Dodge and the other employers provided Sheriff Wheeler with a list of all the men on strike, as well as suspected IWW sympathizers.
At 6:30 a.m. on the morning of July 12, the 2,200 deputies moved through town and arrested every man on their list as well as any man who refused to work in the mines. About 2,000 men were seized and taken by armed guards to a baseball stadium two miles away. Several hundred men were freed after being permitted to denounce the IWW. At 11:00 a.m., 23 cattle cars belonging to the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad arrived in Bisbee, and the remaining 1,286 arrestees were forced at gunpoint to board the train. The detainees were transported 200 miles (320 km) for 16 h through the desert without food or water. They were unloaded at Hermanas, New Mexico without money or transportation at 3:00 a.m. on July 13 and told not to return to Bisbee or they would suffer physical harm.
The Luna County sheriff and New Mexico Governor Washington E. Lindsey contacted President Woodrow Wilson for assistance. Wilson ordered US Army troops to escort the men to Columbus, New Mexico. The deportees were housed in tents meant for Mexican refugees who had fled across the border to escape the Army's Pancho Villa Expedition. The men were allowed to stay in the camp until September 17, 1917.
Sheriff Wheeler established armed guards at all entrances to Bisbee and Douglas. Any citizen seeking to exit or enter the town over the next several months had to have a "passport" issued by Wheeler. Any adult male in town who was not known to the sheriff's men was brought before a secret sheriff's kangaroo court. Hundreds of citizens were tried, and most of them deported and threatened with lynching if they returned.
The deported citizens of Bisbee pleaded with President Wilson for law enforcement assistance in returning to their homes. In October 1917, Wilson appointed a commission of five individuals, led by Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson (with assistance from Assistant Secretary of Labor Felix Frankfurter), to investigate labor disputes in Arizona. The commission heard testimony during the first five days of November 1917. In its final report, issued on November 6, 1917, the commission declared the deportations "wholly illegal and without authority in law, either State or Federal."
On May 15, 1918, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest of 21 mining company executives and several Bisbee and Cochise County elected leaders and law enforcement officers. The indictment contained four counts. Three counts alleged conspiracy to violate ยง19 of the United States Criminal Code. A fourth count was dropped before trial. The indictments did not reference any federal law as there was no law in existence at the time made kidnapping (or abduction, felonious or unlawful restraint, or felonious or unlawful imprisonment) a crime. Thus, the government was forced to rely on a dubious claim of an implied federal power in order to prosecute Wheeler and the others.
The defense, led by a Phelps Dodge corporate attorney (provided pro bono), filed a pre-trial motion in a federal district court to release the 21 men on the grounds that no federal laws had been violated. In Wheeler v. United States, 254 Fed. Rep. 611 (1919), the district court threw out the indictments on the grounds that, absent specific statutory authorization, the Constitution did not grant the United States the authority to punish the alleged illegal acts.
The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court. W. C. Herron, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney and brother-in-law of former President William Howard Taft, argued the case for the United States. Former Associate Justice and future Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes led the team which argued the case for Phelps Dodge.
Read more about this topic: United States V. Wheeler
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