for all services (including for use of the library). The one small bar charged inflated prices to deter laborers from frequenting it. The inhabitants were not consulted about what they might want and dissenting views were discouraged: there were no town hall meetings. Leases could be terminated on short notice and tenants might find themselves with nowhere else to go in Pullman, and thus effectively expelled from the tycoon’s utopia.
When, in 1883, the U.S. national economy went into a dramatic downturn, the Pullman Company was itself inevitably and acutely affected. Many workers were laid off. Those that held onto their jobs had their wages cut drastically, while rent for their accommodation, which was deducted automatically from their paychecks, remained unchanged. In May 1884, some workers formed a committee and asked the company to lower the rent. A flat refusal sparked wildcat strikes which gathered momentum and escalated the following month into looting, burning, and mob violence. It represented a furious showdown between capital and labor, between the railway industry and the strongest union in the country, the American Railway Union. President Cleveland called it a “convulsion.” 1 It was the defining episode of his presidency.
When union members began to boycott Pullman trains, rail networks in Illinois and beyond were paralyzed. The industrial unrest eventually enveloped twenty-seven states. In a highly contentious move—against the wishes of the Illinois governor and resented by many Americans—President Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and sent in thousands of federal troops. (This would receive legal ex post facto vindication in the Supreme Court.) The White House believed that the strike endangered interstate commerce as well as the movement of federal mail. Cleveland swore that if it took “every dollar in the Treasury and every soldier in the United States Army to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card shall be delivered.” 2
The intervention of federal troops served only to enrage the strikers, who almost immediately began to overturn and set alight train carriages, even to attack the troops. President Cleveland issued a proclamation in which he explained that those who continued to resist authority would be regarded aspublic enemies. The troops had authority “to act with all the moderation and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of the desired end.” 3 But soldiers would be unable, warned Cleveland, to discriminate between the guilty and those who were present at trouble spots from idle curiosity.
Federal troops were reinforced by far less disciplined state troops and marshals. The violence peaked in early June. By the time the strike was over, at least a dozen lives had been lost in the Chicago area and forty more in clashes with troops in other states. A three-man commission quickly produced a 681-page report to examine who was at fault, and what lessons could be learned.
Proving intent does not require a smoking gun.
—New York Times, August 25, 1912
Intention is everywhere in the law—not just in criminal law (where it’s needed to separate, for example, murder from manslaughter), but in every variety of the law: in tax law, anti-discrimination law, contract law, and constitutional law.
That troops killed rioters in the Pullman strike is beyond doubt. What’s more difficult to ascertain is their intention. Did they intend to kill? How would we determine whether they did or didn’t?
There’s a story about Elizabeth Anscombe repeated by so many people who knew her that it’s almost certainly false. She was in Montreal, at supper time, and she arrived at an expensive restaurant where she was planning to eat. “Sorry Madam,” said the maître d’hôtel, “women are not permitted to wear trousers here.” “Give me a minute,” said Anscombe. And she disappeared to the rest room to reappear a couple of minutes later with exactly the