[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.
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