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TABLE 1. FATAL WORK ACCIDENTS ON THE CHICAGO, LAKE SHORE AND SOUTH BEND RAILWAY, 1910-1918

Reporting Year	South Shore Employees	South Shore Worker Deaths	Indiana Interurban Employees	Indiana Interurban Worker Deaths	South Shore Worker Fatality Rate (per 1,000)	Indiana Interurban Worker Fatality Rate (per 1,000)	Nationwide Steam Railroad Worker Fatality Rate (per 1,000)
FY 1910	326	NR	7345	9	NR	1.23	1.99
FY 1911	294	0	8520	7	0	0.82	2.09
FY 1912	248	1	8544	4	4.03	0.59	2.04
FY 1913	254	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	1.98
FY 1914	255	1	9033	15	3.92	1.66	1.84
FY 1915	232	1	NR	4	4.31	NR	1.34
CY 1916	221	1	NR	NR	4.52	NR	1.53
CY 1917	265	1	NR	NR	3.77	NR	1.73
CY 1918	285	2	NR	10	7.02	NR	1.75

Employee numbers include clerical staff, superintendents, and administrative officials with trainmen, maintenance workers, and power distribution employees. NR = data not reported; FY = fiscal year; CY = calendar year. Fiscal years covered 1 July of the preceding year to 30 June of the reporting year, except for CY 1918 data, where the number of worker deaths on all Indiana interurbans was reported for a fiscal year of 1 May 1917–30 April 1918. The archival records of commission reports for all interurbans cover calendar years beginning in 1916; the method by which the commission obtained fiscal year data for its published reports from calendar year submissions is not known. Data for 1919–1924 are missing or too incomplete for comparative use.

Sources: South Shore Line data from Annual Reports of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway to the Indiana Railroad Commission and Public Service Commission of Indiana, Indiana State Archives. Indiana interurban employees data compiled from quarterly and annual data published in each reporting year’s Annual Report of the Railroad Commission of Indiana or Annual Report of the Public Service Commission of Indiana. Annual nationwide steam railroad fatality rates from Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 284.

Railroad workers and their families faced lives of poverty, misery, and dependence upon wavering charity after a serious work-related accident incapacitated or killed a man. A South Shore employee during the 1920s reminded coworkers that when someone suffered an injury, regular wages ended for a household’s main provider. Consequently, household expenses for the family had to be reduced to meet the loss of income for the duration of the worker’s recuperation. A long recovery from a serious injury meant the family’s household income was reduced by the lost work time for the entire period. Hospital and medical bills often exceeded any insurance payment, if a railroad worker even held a policy. Electrical linemen, brakemen, and workers in other risky occupations found that they either could not find an insurer or could not afford the high premiums. As an alternative for the uninsured, railroad relief departments and hospitalization programs were more a feature of mainline steam railroads than short-line interurbans, with company doctors determining medical treatment at the same time they sought to disclaim the company’s liability. After misfortune struck, labor unions and fraternal groups attempted to support members and their families through mutual aid and funeral benefit associations, but these worker-sponsored organizations frequently suffered from fluctuating contributions and overwhelming claims. Many were financially unstable.

The possibility of some modicum of justice through the courts seemed the only option left to many injured workers or to surviving family members. A judicial system largely hostile to railroaders’ and other workers’ complaints against industrial America though, blocked most attempts to secure recompense for serious work-related injuries or death due to conditions, equipment, or practices beyond workers’ control. When men were laboring to construct the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway across northern Indiana in 1906 and 1907, judges still relied upon a common-law notion of labor relations that harkened back seventy or more years to the time of face-to-face employment and labor inside or near the employer’s household. The master-servant relationship between a corporation and a worker came to represent both the divergence of law from the realities of industrial society’s ills between 1890 and 1920 and the target of the railroad brotherhoods’ legislative reform agenda during those years.

The employer-worker relationship during the interurban era rested in theory upon an understood but unwritten contract between the two parties, in which the worker possessed the right to enter into a contractual relationship with an employer freely and to provide one’s labor voluntarily in exchange for the employer paying a wage. In a series of judicial decisions dating back to 1837–1842 that involved railroad workers’ injuries and the question of liability, state court judges in both slave- and free-labor states extrapolated the ideas of the master-servant relationship in order to craft three legal precedents that became barriers to workers’ recompense. The first common law doctrine, called the fellow-servant rule, stipulated that an employer could not be held legally liable for a worker’s accidental injury caused by a fellow worker’s negligence. The second doctrine held that any hint of contributory negligence by a worker, however minor in comparison with an employer’s greater negligence, barred a worker from recovering any judgment against the employer. The third legal doctrine that state court justices articulated, the assumption of risk, put forth the argument that a railroad worker not only took upon himself the ordinary dangers of employment when accepting a job, but also “assumed” the burden of extraordinary dangers, such as unsafe equipment, broken tools, or dangerous track (and overhead wire, in the case of interurban roads), if the worker either knew or should have known about the danger and accepted employment or continued working despite knowledge of the hazard. The old admonition caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) could properly have been modified to describe the essential truth of railroad and industrial employment during the Progressive Era of the 1890s and 1910s: caveat faber—worker, beware!

As a direct result of the judicial decisions that formed the doctrines of the fellow-servant rule, contributory negligence, and the worker’s assumption of risk, a legal dilemma evolved in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century that made it cheaper for employers to settle after an accident or death than to prevent such incidents beforehand. Sometimes a railroad company paid as little as $300 to a widow in a lawsuit settlement for a trainman’s death, if the railroad paid anything at all. Because county court juries often sympathized with injured railroaders or their surviving relatives, railroad companies benefited from the federal Railroad Removal Act of 1868, which allowed a railroad company to “remove” a lawsuit from a supposedly hostile or corrupt county court to an allegedly neutral (and practically probusiness, antiworker) federal court when the railroad company and worker were “citizens” of different states and the damages exceeded a certain dollar amount. The theory that an employer stood on equal terms when contracting with a wage earner seeking employment, but then became a master disclaiming responsibility for a servant worker’s accident when caused by negligent actions of company agents or other workers, constituted an outright refusal to accept the imbalance of power and the economic reality of industrial labor markets during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “These rules are archaic and unfitted to modern industrial conditions,” wrote the chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1911. Railroaders had to compete for positions; employers did not have to compete for applicants. The pressures of stagnant wages, declining purchasing power, and the necessity of a railroader seeking employment by traveling involuntarily from region to region shaped labor-management conflicts during the Progressive Era.

Gradually, though, state legislatures during the Progressive Era enacted employers’ liability laws to overturn the common law doctrines of the fellow-servant rule, contributory negligence, and some aspects of assumed risk as they affected workers engaged solely in commercial activities within each state. In Indiana as early as 1885, Vigo County state representative and Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen member Eugene V. Debs fought unsuccessfully for a bill making railroad companies responsible for work-related injuries suffered by men through no fault of their own. In 1893 the Indiana General Assembly enacted a weak employers’ liability law for railroad workers. Twelve years passed before Indiana established a regulatory Railroad Commission, which later was replaced by a Public Service Commission with broader powers beginning in 1913. Other state legislatures also passed protective legislation to establish maximum hours of work and safer working conditions, two common goals of Progressive social reformers from the 1890s through the 1910s. However, the initial reform laws often lacked corresponding methods for enforcement, while appropriations for state railroad inspectors often proved insufficient. State courts also commonly pared down the effectiveness of such protective laws, or found their provisions unconstitutional in violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of contract between worker and employer. A Texas state appellate court in 1909, for example, struck down a law extending certain safety protections to motormen on electric railways in Beaumont Traction Company v. Texas.

On the national scene, Congress responded to public pressures about railroad worker accidents and safety with a program of progressive legislation beginning in 1906. In addition to annual appropriations for the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to employ inspectors of railroad safety appliances, Congress passed a maximum hours of service law on 4 March 1907, limiting a railroader’s workday to sixteen consecutive hours followed by an eight-hour rest. A 1908 law required that steam locomotives be equipped with ash pans that could be emptied and cleaned without requiring a worker to crawl under the locomotive. In 1909 the ICC received an appropriation to investigate the possible use of automatic block signal systems on American railroads that had not yet installed them. The following year, the ICC began reporting steam railroad workers’ accidents individually.

The most significant legislation in terms of its subsequent impact, though, made work accidents too expensive for employers to accept. On 11 June 1906 Congress passed the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, which dismantled railroad corporations’ common-law defenses and held them responsible for correcting insufficient or defective equipment, tracks, and surroundings. Subsequent lawsuits on the behalf of men injured or killed in service provoked fierce opposition by the railroad companies and several appeals to the Supreme Court within a year—an indication of the high court’s interest in reviewing speedily such radical legislation. On 6 January 1908 the majority of five justices ruled that the Federal Employers’ Liability Act exceeded constitutional authority in regulating both interstate and intrastate commerce. Congress responded just as swiftly over the next three months by enacting a new Federal Employers’ Liability Act on 22 April 1908. The new statute fixed responsibility upon the employing railroad corporations for injuries or deaths suffered by railroaders due to negligent acts by officers, agents, or employees of the company, as well as “any defect or insufficiency, due to it’s [a railroad’s] negligence, in its cars, engines, appliances, machinery, track, roadbed, works, boats, wharves, or other equipment.” In addition, the new law overturned the judicial traditions of pinning contributory negligence and assumed risk upon a deceased or injured worker in accidents where the railroad company had violated an existing safety law.

Railroaders on both the steam and electric railroads placed great importance in the new law’s potential for deterring hazards that previously had been ignored by companies, as well as its provisions for securing punitive financial damages. An ever-increasing number of injured railroad workers filed suits under the new law in federal courts and, beginning in 1910, in county courts. On 15 January 1912 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the second Federal Employers’ Liability Act. Under federal law, workers no longer had to tolerate dangerous, insufficent, and unrepaired equipment, or uncorrected problems with structures and surroundings. Railroad companies and their managers now were responsible for correcting problems and ensuring that work conditions were as safe possible. Subsequently, motormen and conductors injured on electric interurban railroads such as the Kansas City Western Railroad, the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad, and the Washington Railway and Electric Company, or their widows, fought their employers through grueling litigation all the way to the Supreme Court to secure the protections of the federal railroader safety laws or, if those failed, the right of recovering damages under the liability act. In state legislatures and state courts, those remaining interurban railroad workers who were employed in intrastate commerce won the protection of state workers’ compensation laws in Illinois in 1911 and Indiana in 1915.

The political, economic, and social beliefs of wealthy, long-sitting federal district and appellate judges did not change overnight because of a Supreme Court ruling, though. Despite the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act in the first days of 1912, federal trial court judges demonstrated reluctance to abandon the orthodox common-law traditions that placed property rights and commercial development above the well-being of individual workmen. Indiana’s federal judiciary was no exception, and few federal judges displayed judicial insensitivity and intransigence more boldly than Indiana’s U.S. District Court Judge Albert B. Anderson.
Anderson reigned as the sole U.S. District Court judge for the District of Indiana during most of the Progressive Era and the boom years of Indiana’s interurban railroads. Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1857, Anderson embraced classical legal doctrines while studying at Wabash College. Subsequently, he won admission to the bar in 1881, then entered private law practice and Republican politics. By all descriptions a stern moralist, Anderson allied with Senator Albert Beveridge in disputes with the regular Republican party leadership in Indiana. When a vacancy developed on the district court bench for Indiana, Beveridge nominated Anderson, who won approval and commenced his judicial duties at age forty-five on 8 December 1902.