United States v. Wheeler (1920)

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 C. 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. 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 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. ==Decision==

Chief Justice Edward Douglass White wrote the opinion for the 8–1 majority, in which the judgment of the district court was affirmed. Associate Justice John Hessin Clarke dissented, but wrote no opinion. White opened the majority's decision by reviewing at length the four indictments and briefly describing the ruling of the federal district court. Then, in a section widely quoted in American jurisprudence for the next century, White next outlined the history of the "privileges and immunities" clause of Article IV, Sec. 2, of the Constitution. In the space of less than one sentence, White came to the landmark The principle of comity enshrined in Art. IV, Sec. 2, is one of the most fundamental principles in the Constitution, White claimed. It was, he asserted, the very basis for the Union. The right encompassed not only travel between the separate states but also movement within a state, but while the Constitution fused these two rights into one, it reserved exclusively to the states the power to enforce these rights, except when a state violated the rule of comity. Relying exclusively on the Slaughter-House Cases, and United States v. Harris, White noted that Art. IV, Sec. 2, may be invoked solely when a state actor is involved. White distinguished Crandall v. Nevada, by noting that that decision had involved state action. ==Aftermath==

Several of the deported citizens brought civil actions against Wheeler, Douglas and the others. But in State v. Wootton, Crim. No. 2685 (Cochise County, Ariz. September 13, 1919), a jury refused to find in favor of the complainants and give them relief. Defendant Wootton argued that the IWW members were such a threat to public safety that necessity demanded their removal. The jury agreed, making this one of the rare times in American law in which the necessity defense was successfully used. After this failure at law, nearly all the remaining civil suits were dropped (although a handful were settled for small sums of money). Few, if any, of the deported citizens ever returned to Bisbee. In United States v. Guest (1966), the Supreme Court overruled Chief Justice White's conclusion that the federal government could protect the right to travel only against state infringement. ==Impact==

United States v. Wheeler established that the Constitution's Privileges and Immunities Clause had its roots in the Articles of Confederation. According to the legal historian William E. Nelson, by reasoning that the clause derived from Article IV of the Articles of Confederation, the decision suggested a narrower set of rights than those enumerated in Corfield, but also more clearly defined those rights as fundamental. Chief Justice White's statement of the right to travel is frequently cited by courts and remains the classic formulation of the right to travel. The Supreme Court's rejection of ''Wheeler's state actor rationale but acceptance of its strong defense of the right to travel led to a number of additional court decisions and the establishment of a new constitutional test. In Kent v. Dulles, the Court held that the federal government may not restrict the right to travel without due process. Six years later in Aptheker v. Secretary of State (1964), the Court struck down a federal ban restricting travel by communists. But the court struggled to find a way to protect legitimate government interests (such as national security) in light of these decisions. Just a year after Aptheker, the Supreme Court fashioned the rational relationship test for constitutionality in Zemel v. Rusk'', as a way of reconciling the rights of the individual with the interests of the state. The Wheeler Court's establishment of a strong constitutional right to travel has also had far-reaching and unintended effects. For example, the Supreme Court overturned state prohibitions on welfare payments to individuals who had not resided within the jurisdiction for at least one year as an impermissible burden on the right to travel. The Court has used Wheeler to strike down one-year residency requirements for voting in state elections, one-year waiting periods before receiving state-provided medical care, civil service preferences for state veterans, and higher fishing and hunting license fees for out-of-state residents. ==See also==