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Over the next twenty-three years, Anderson developed a national reputation for arrogance, severity, and unflinching opposition to working-class protests against the personal hardships caused by the new industrial order. One Indiana state court judge described Anderson as “lord of all he surveyed,” a man who “brooked no opposition” and who “enjoyed playing cat and mouse with trembling defendants.” Another observer described him as arrogant and severe. In 1912, he conducted a mass trial of thirty-eight officers and members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. Again in 1920, Judge Anderson presided at a mass criminal trial of forty-three United Mine Workers (UMW) officials, including union president John L. Lewis. Facing defense attorney Charles Evans Hughes, a future chief justice of the Supreme Court, Anderson was forced grudgingly to dismiss the indictments when Hughes pointed out that Anderson had mistakenly attributed an incriminating statement to Lewis that had been uttered by another person not part of the UMW. Beginning in 1919 and continuing until his appointment to the federal appellate court in January 1925, Anderson handed down harsh sentences for violators of the National Prohibition Enforcement Act and used his bench as a platform for lambasting state and municipal officials about laxity in enforcing prohibition. To middle-class Americans troubled by the incessant class conflict and the violence that arose from the new industrial order, Anderson’s courtroom affirmed the societal order and stability that harkened back to the agrarian Midwest of the nineteenth century. The reality of early-twentieth-century industrial life differed from this view, however. Long work days and weeks, crippling industrial accidents, urban poverty, and economic disorder rocked the lives of railroad workers and working-class families in Indiana.

It was in Anderson’s court that the parents of deceased lineman Albert Fellers filed suit against the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railroad on 3 December 1914. Fellers died like most workers, without property or a will for what little was due him—his paycheck. His life’s savings and a small insurance policy paid for his funeral. His parents’ attorneys filed the lawsuit under the provisions of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act of 1908, seeking $15,000 in wrongful death damages from the railroad and $60 in unpaid wages from his final days of work. The complaint charged that the South Shore’s management had required Fellers, Rusty Warring, and the other linemen to mount temporary, footwide scaffolds atop trestles or sawhorses placed at the ends of each work car and left unsecured to the platform surface. The railroad’s management was negligent, according to the complaint, in a litany of failures: the repair car was old and in disrepair, the platform above the car was “loose, shaky[,] and slippery” because the bolts and rods that attached the platform to the support beams had loosened and had “allowed the platform to shift and dip from one side to the other.” The platform edges beyond the planks were narrow and lacked railings or handholds “as [were] customary and necessary for the safety of employees” working on overhead wires. Finally, the mere placement of the trolley pole’s wheel upon the overhead wire without tying or securing it to the wire constituted negligence, according to the Fellerses’ attorneys, when the very nature of the work required tugging, pulling, and prying the contact wire and jarring the trolley wheel. The use of such insufficient and inferior railroad equipment on a sharp curve, where the overhead wire rose about three feet above its normal height and the outer rail of the curve was elevated several inches above the inside railhead, resulted in the creation of conditions that were hazardous for the linemen.

On 2 January 1915 South Bend railroad attorney F. J. Lewis Meyer answered the Fellers family’s lawsuit, denying every allegation put forth in the complaint. Testimony by the parents in depositions later that month revealed the frightening uncertainty of supporting oneself and one’s family after a debilitating injury. In contrast, the questions posed by the railroad’s attorney set up a counternotion that injured workers were incompetent by suffering injury and, therefore, were unworthy of financial recompense. When Meyer learned that Bert Fellers’s older brother James also worked as a lineman, but had broken his leg nine months earlier and could not work, Meyer questioned the surviving son’s manliness. “Broken leg bids farewell to a good recovery?” he asked the man’s father in a patronizing tone. J. A. Fellers answered politely, “In a general way, yes, sir. He has not fully recovered as he has a large ankle and a weak ankle, but we hope it will disappear.” “That is, he favors it?” the lawyer retorted mockingly. Meyer then questioned why the elder Fellers, a fifty-seven-year-old former farmer and stock buyer with a weak back and an aggravated rupture, could not resume his occupation buying and raising livestock. The father’s testimony and the railroad attorney’s questioning of the abilities of the Fellers men to support themselves had no bearing upon the circumstances surrounding Bert’s work and death, but nonetheless were printed for the court before trial in April.

The trial took place before Anderson and a jury on 20 and 21 April 1915 in the district court chambers in Hammond, Indiana, within a mile of the State Line curve where Fellers died. Warring took the stand first. While he was answering a question about alternative methods of fastening a trolley pole or other grounding device to the live 6,600-volt overhead wire to draw off the static electricity, Anderson abruptly interrupted him. The train had to move after every clip was attached, the judge stated, so fastening the pole would slow down the pace of work or was otherwise impractical. Warring corrected the judge’s hasty conclusion: linemen usually attached four or five clips on a curve, not just one, before the train would need to move. Also, he knew of other electric railroads that utilized a wire to ground the overhead wire to the car the men stood upon: “When we wanted to move, it would not take but a minute or two to unfasten this wire.” He had seen a moveable platform on smaller line cars, but not one the size of the converted gondola car. Also, he had seen other jobs where men used two or three footwide planks for scaffolding, not just a single board. On cross-examination by Meyer, Warring admitted that he, Fellers, and “all the boys helped in putting the planks up there.” In legal terms, this meant that each lineman possessed prior knowledge about the trestles and planks and continued to work, so each arguably assumed the risk created by the railroad’s provision of insufficiently low work platforms and unsteady scaffolds.

The question of the static electricity felt by the men became a lawyer’s exercise in dissecting a split-second instinctive reaction that led to a man’s death. Warring told the courtroom, “When the trolley pole flew off we men got a static. Just a current from the—I don’t know exactly what it is.” C. F. Buckley later admitted, “I cannot explain what the static is.” Buckley then testified that in past jobs on the South Shore Line the men had used a grounding wire on the regular line car, the tool car with the insulated platform. “It makes it safer than the trolley pole, because it would not come off.” Anderson struck Buckley’s conclusion from the written record of testimony. Buckley, a seasoned member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, then took the judge and the railroad attorney head-on, pointing out that immediately after the accident the railroad company lengthened the trestles at the ends of the platform cars from four feet to six feet to accommodate more scaffolding planks. Clearly, this act implied that the former equipment had been insufficient—a de facto admission of company liability under the 1908 federal law. Meyer objected, stating that the subsequent alterations to the work equipment had nothing to do with the legal case. Anderson tuned out the witness and echoed almost verbatim the corporate lawyer’s assertion: “Yes, that has nothing to do with this case.”

Buckley and the railroad attorney tussled again when Buckley pointed out that the work cars had neither handholds nor toe rails along the edges to keep a worker from falling. Meyer attacked the idea that a safer platform could have been constructed. Ignoring the possibility of a platform that could be raised and lowered, both the defense attorney and the judge arrogantly mocked the lineman’s assessment that a permanent platform could have addressed the higher wire from the State Line curve to Pullman, Illinois. “You would have to work bending down, as the court suggests, get down on your hands and knees and work, wouldn’t you?” Buckley responded by pointing out the misleading nature of the judge’s attempted derailment of his testimony: the lower overhead wire already had been strung across northern Indiana with the existing platforms, so a higher standing surface was not needed at the beginning, only when the crew reached the numerous railroad crossings of East Chicago and Hammond. The judge missed the point: as new difficulties arose for the linemen, the foreman or superintendent of overhead should have authorized new construction of railings and higher permanent platforms to address the problems.

Lineman Charles Hunter was called to the stand next. He described how the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway’s regular line and tool car had an insulated platform that could be raised to meet changing wire heights. When the Fellers family’s attorney questioned Hunter about his own experience with other methods of diverting the static charge besides the use of a trolley pole, Meyer cut Hunter off. “Now that has been gone over, and there won’t be any dispute on that, your honor; what is the use of taking up more time?” Anderson agreed: “You [the parents’ attorney] have already gone into that, and there is no dispute about it, so that is enough.”

The railroad attorney cross-examined J. A. Fellers, about his late son’s savings account, the father’s withdrawal of the money to pay partial funeral expenses, and his collection of an insurance benefit from his son’s death to pay the balance. The family’s attorney objected four separate times, but Anderson overruled his objections every time. The existence of a lineman’s savings account had no bearing in a wrongful death suit and the existence of an insurance policy would only reduce a possible court award for damages by the amount it paid. The Fellers family did not constitute the worthy poor and therefore, Meyer implied, they did not need the money.

Lineman Charles Harper of Michigan City testified that he saw the steel wire spring against Fellers and that he could not stay on top of the plank and keep clear of the wire. The railroad’s attorney then attempted to pick apart the logic of Fellers’s instinctive avoidance of the 6,600-volt wire in the last moment before he lost his balance: “If he had taken hold of that wire he would not have got a shock, would he?” The parents’ attorney objected, but Anderson overruled the objection and required an answer. Hesitantly, Harper thought about the logical answer: “I do not think he would.”

The Fellerses’ attorney rested the case. Immediately, the railroad’s attorney asked the judge to direct a not-guilty verdict for the railroad. The judge agreed, stating, “Now, in the first place I think it is perfectly plain that the railroad company was not guilty of any negligence whatever; in the next place I think it is perfectly plain that the plaintiff’s decedent assumed the risk, on either one of which theories you cannot recover.” The next day, the Hammond Times summed up the trial succinctly: “Judge Anderson in the federal court at Hammond yesterday made short work of the jury case before him, when he instructed a jury to return a verdict for the defendants [sic] in the case of J. A. Fellers, administrator for his son, against the South Shore Line. The ruling was made after the plaintiff had rested his case, and was based [upon] assumption of risk law [sic].”

Anderson’s foreclosure of any jury decision in the Fellers case revealed not only the interference of a federal judge in factual questions more properly left to a jury but also the inconsistency of his opinions in comparison with other cases involving nearly identical circumstances on other electric railroads. In spring 1914, a New York jury awarded $75,000 to a severely injured electrician for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The electrician, a foreman working on an overhead wire, was shocked when another foreman mistakenly gave the order to turn on a power switch that the first man had directed to be disconnected. The electrician survived, but his burned arms had to be amputated and he required the constant attention of a nurse. An attorney filed suit on his behalf in a county court against the New Haven Railroad under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act and won the award, despite threats by railroad officials against a witness, bribery attempts, and indictments of witnesses whose testimony the New Haven Railroad Company attempted to coerce. Other electrical linemen or their heirs who sued the New Haven Railroad under federal law in 1913 or 1914 won damages or settlements ranging from $16,000 to $27,500 for injuries or $20,000 to $37,500 for wrongful deaths.

Finally, as a result of circumstances closely resembling those in the Fellers accident, a lineman working for the New York, Boston and Westchester Railway Company, a New Haven Railroad subsidiary, was killed in February 1914. The lineman, William Millette, was directed to work on an unsecured scaffold plank that rested on greasy railings surrounding live electrical equipment. While Millette was standing on the plank and working, his feet slipped and he fell against a breaker charged with 11,000 volts AC. Millette died in the hospital later that same day. His widow filed suit against the railroad in the Supreme Court of Westchester County under the provisions of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. A jury awarded the widow and her minor son $22,750.

How could Americans preserve individual rights amid the increasingly corporate, bureaucratic, economically volatile and violent industrial conditions taking hold of American life? How could judges persist with classical laissez-faire liberalism about employer-worker relations while ignoring the imbalance of power relationships in a modern, urban, industrial, class-based society? Should industrial employers temper their quest to maximize profits with the installation of faster, more complex machinery and work processes by utilizing devices and practices that improved worker safety, but increased the operating costs of production? More fundamentally, who held responsibility for industrial accidents—careless or ignorant workers? Negligent, heartless employers seeking maximum profits? Or some abstract force of economic “progress” for industry that came at the cost of individual workers’ lives and limbs? Who would pay the costs of supporting permanently injured and indigent workers, their wives or widows, and their children? The churches and synagogues? Private charities? Relatives? Tax-supported public hospitals, poor farms, and police departments?

The questions raised by Bert Fellers’s death were not new. In truth, they merely repeated the public-policy debates in newspapers, magazines, political arenas, and the shop floors and union halls of that time. The circumstances surrounding Fellers’s work and his death represented the larger social problems and class conflict that churned and fractured American society during the twenty-five years from the 1890s until the nation’s descent into world war early in 1917. The attempts of social reformers to rectify the injustices done to workers by exhaustingly long work hours, unsafe work conditions, unenforced or nonexistent state and federal safety laws, and intransigent, unsympathetic judges represent one of the greatest areas of achievement during the Progressive Era.