Thomas v. Collins

Thomas v. Collins arose during a period in which the relationship between unions and employers was undergoing a great deal of change. The case was part of a series of legal victories for labor, which included a ban on the intimidation by employers of workers attempting to organize. While the U.S. Supreme Court had expressed a willingness to restrict that kind of expression on the part of employers, it was less inclined to put limitations on the free speech rights of workers. Thomas v. Collins reinforced the doctrine that only in the presence of "clear and present danger" could that right be restricted.

Thomas v. Collins involved a Texas law that required labor union organizers to obtain a special license from the Texas secretary of state before engaging in membership recruitment. Roland Jay Thomas, president of the United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implements Workers (UAW) and a vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), sought to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Thomas was involved in an effort to organize workers at the Humble Oil & Refining Company plant in Bay Town, Texas, into the Oil Workers Industrial Union, an affiliate of the CIO. Thomas traveled to Houston on 21 September 1943 in order to address a widely publicized mass meeting on the subject scheduled two days later.

About six hours before he was to speak, Thomas was served with a restraining order preventing him from doing so, on the grounds that he had not registered as an organizer. After consulting with his lawyers, Thomas decided that the Texas law requiring organizers to obtain an "organizer's card" was an illegal infringement of his right to free speech. Ignoring the restraining order, he went ahead with his planned speech. After the meeting, Thomas was arrested and subsequently convicted of contempt for violating the restraining order.

The Texas Supreme Court sustained the registration law, regarding it as a "valid exercise of the State's police power, taken `for protection of the general welfare of the public, and particularly the laboring class.'" According to the Texas court the act, while "interfering to a certain extent with the right of the organizer to speak as the paid representative of the union," did not unduly impose "previous general restraint upon the right of free speech . . . It merely requires paid organizers to register with the Secretary of State before beginning to operate as such."

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where attorneys Lee Pressman and Ernest Goodman argued on Thomas's behalf that the Texas act did indeed impose such prior restraint on Thomas's right of free speech, in direct violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court agreed, and the contempt conviction was reversed on a vote of 5-4. The majority opinion was written by Justice Rutledge, with Justices Black, Douglas, and Murphy concurring. Rutledge's reasoning was that the only circumstances under which the First Amendment permitted restriction of free speech or free assembly were in the presence of clear and present danger. Alluding specifically to the Thomas case, he wrote that "Lawful public assemblies, involving no element of grave and immediate danger to an interest the State is entitled to protect, are not instruments of harm which require previous identification of the speakers." Since all Thomas had done was address a perfectly peaceful meeting, the requirement to register beforehand represented an invalid restriction of his rights.

While the decision was a victory for labor, there was reason for employers to take heart as well. In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Jackson pointed out the distinction between the regulation of speech and the regulation of a professional vocation. Jackson noted that it takes only a small step to push Thomas's actions into the realm of business activity, which does not enjoy the same constitutional protections as speech. He also indicated that employers should also be permitted unrestricted speech, a right which recent cases involving the National Labor Relations Board had denied them.

Justices Roberts, Stone, Reed, and Frankfurter dissented. To them, Thomas's speech fell into the category of mere business activity. As a professional union organizer, his work could be regulated as much as that of a doctor, lawyer, or stock broker. Roberts, in his dissenting opinion, wrote that "We may deem the statutory provision under review unnecessary or unwise, but it is not our function as judges to read our views of policy into a constitutional guarantee, in order to overthrow a state policy we do not personally approve . . . "