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. 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.