A growing impatience with Congress was manifested in resolutions adopted by successive conventions.  In 1902 the convention authorized the Executive Council to take “such further steps as will secure the nomination—­and the election—­of only such men as are fully and satisfactorily pledged to the support of the bills” championed by the Federation.  Accordingly, the Executive Council prepared a series of questions to be submitted to all candidates for Congress in 1904 by the local unions of each district.

The Federation was more active in the Congressional election of 1906.  Early in the year the Executive Council urged affiliated unions to use their influence to prevent the nomination in party primaries or conventions of candidates for Congress who refused to endorse labor’s demands, and where both parties nominated refractory candidates to run independent labor candidates.  The labor campaign was placed in the hands of a Labor Representation Committee, which made use of press publicity and other standard means.  Trade union speakers were sent into the districts of the most conspicuous enemies of labor’s demands to urge their defeat.  The battle royal was waged against Congressman Littlefield of Maine.  A dozen union officials, headed by President Gompers, invaded his district to tell the electorate of his insults to organized labor.  However, he was reelected, although with a reduced plurality over the preceding election.  The only positive success was the election of McDermott of the commercial telegraphers’ union in Chicago.  President Gompers, however, insisted that the cutting down of the majorities of the conspicuous enemies of labor’s demands gave “more than a hint” of what organized labor “can and may do when thoroughly prepared to exercise its political strength.”  Nevertheless the next Congress was even more hostile than the preceding one.  The convention of the Federation following the election approved the new tactics, but was careful at the same time to declare that the Federation was neither allied with any political party nor had any intention of forming an independent labor party.

In the Presidential election of 1908, however, the Federation virtually entered into an alliance with the Democrats.  At a “Protest Conference” in March, 1908, attended by the executive officers of most of the affiliated national unions as well as by the representatives of several farmers’ organizations, the threat was uttered that organized labor would make a determined effort in the coming campaign to defeat its enemies, whether “candidates for President, for Congress, or other offices.”  The next step was the presentation of the demands of the Federation to the platform committees of the conventions of both parties.  The wording of the proposed anti-injunction plank suggests that it had been framed after consultation with the Democratic leaders, since it omitted to demand the sweeping away of the doctrine of malicious conspiracy or the prohibition of the issuance of injunctions to protect business rights, which had regularly been asked by the American Federation of Labor since 1904.  In its place was substituted an indefinite statement against the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes where none would be allowed if no labor dispute existed and a declaration in favor of jury trial on the charge of contempt of court.