signed it.

Still better proof of the slight influence of the Federation upon
government is furnished by the vicissitudes of its anti-injunction bills
in Congress. The Federation had been awakened to the seriousness of the
matter of the injunction by the Debs case. A bill of its sponsoring
providing for jury trials in "indirect" contempt cases passed the Senate
in 1896 only to be killed in the House. In 1900 only eight votes were
recorded in the House against a bill exempting labor unions from the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act; it failed, however, of passage in the Senate. In
1902 an anti-injunction bill championed by the American Federation of
Labor passed the House of Representatives. That was the last time,
however, for many years to come when such a bill was even reported out
of committee. Thereafter, for a decade, the controlling powers in
Congress had their faces set against removal by law of the judicial
interference in labor's use of its economic strength against employers.

In the meantime, however, new court decisions made the situation more
and more critical. A climax was reached in 1908-1909. In February 1908,
came the Supreme Court decision in the Danbury Hatters' case, which held
that members of a labor union could be held financially responsible to
the full amount of their individual property under the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act for losses to business occasioned by an interstate
boycott.[72] By way of contrast, the Supreme Court within the same week
held unconstitutional the portion of the Erdman Act which prohibited
discrimination by railways against workmen on account of their
membership in a union.[73] One year later, in the Buck's Stove and Range
Company boycott case, Gompers, Mitchell, and Morrison, the three most
prominent officials of the American Federation of Labor, were sentenced
by a lower court in the District of Columbia to long terms in prison for
violating an injunction which prohibited all mention of the fact that
the plaintiff firm had ever been boycotted.[74] Even though neither
these nor subsequent court decisions had the paralyzing effect upon
American trade unionism which its enemies hoped for and its friends
feared, the situation called for a change in tactics. It thus came about
that the Federation, which, as was seen, by the very principles of its
program wished to let government alone,--as it indeed expected little
good of government,--was obliged to enter into competition with the
employ