Taft recommended such legislation.  In the sessions of the Congress of 1911-1913 the American Federation of Labor hit upon a new plan.  This was the attachment of “riders” to departmental appropriation bills requiring that all work contracted for by these departments must be done under the eight-hour system.  The most important “rider” of this character was that attached to the naval appropriation bill.  Under its provisions the Attorney-General held that in all work done in shipyards upon vessels built for the Federal government the eight-hour rule must be applied.  Finally, in June 1912, a Democratic House and a Republican Senate passed the eight-hour bill supported by the American Federation of Labor with some amendments, which the Federation did not find seriously objectionable; and President Taft 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 employers for controlling government; this was because one branch of the government, namely the judicial one, would not let it alone.