The Great Cowboy Strike by Mark Lause

Author:Mark Lause [Lause, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The issue loomed large in the Democratic conventions early in the summer, as the party jockeyed to speak for the antimonopolist sentiment in the state. The city convention in May sent Delmas to the state convention where he headed the platform committee, which denounced Field’s ruling. When some delegates defended the judge, Delmas spoke so eloquently against the court’s siding with the corporations that the resolution passed 453 to 19. His views prevailed in the adoption of a platform generally characterized as a “New Departure” program for the Democrats. A Democratic paper, the Daily Alta California argued that the convention consisted “mainly of the representatives of the new Constitution and Workingmen’s parties” and that “the spirit of the sand-lot” prevailed among the Democrats.9 In the aftermath of the 1884 fall elections, the Alta groused bitterly about Delmas and Heast’s faction, blaming it for the loss of the legislature to the Republicans:10

By August 1885, the Alta was complaining even more bitterly. “The State and the counties thereof very badly needed the money involved,” it reported, “and, as the hearing and determination of the appeal would take considerable time, a most satisfactory arrangement was offered by the railroads, and, after much discussion and consideration, was accepted by the Attorney-General.” Delmas was described as a “small country lawyer” and “the second-class lawyer from the third rate town of San Jose.” “Never in the whole round of history,” the paper wrote, “has so small a trouble created so big a row.”11

The culmination of the case came on January 26–29, 1886. The result left corporations with the legal rights of people and human beings with what rights they could afford. On May 10, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on three cases: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (by which the entire ruling has now come to be known), California v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and California v. Central Pacific Railroad Company.12

The particularly notorious reputation of the case came from its gloss, penned by court reporter Bancroft Davis, himself the former president of Newburgh and New York Railway. On May 26, Chief Justice Morrison Waite assured Davis in a letter that his gloss “expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.”13

The ruling cast a long shadow, but—as with the later Citizens United v. FEC (2010)—was less important than the climate that created it.

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