When the efforts at mediation by the United States Board of Mediation and Conciliation came to naught, President Wilson invited to Washington the executives of the several railway systems and a convention of the several hundred division chairmen of the brotherhoods and attempted personal mediation. He urged the railway executives to accept the eight-hour day and proposed that a commission appointed by himself should investigate the demand for time and a half overtime. This the employes accepted, but the executives objected to giving the eight-hour day before an investigation was made. Meantime the brotherhoods had issued their strike order effective on Labor Day and the crisis became imminent. To obviate the calamity of a general strike, at a time when the country was threatened with troubles on the Mexican frontier and with the unsettled submarine controversy with Germany ready to flare up any moment, the President went before Congress and asked for a speedy enactment of an eight-hour law for train operatives without a reduction in wages but with no punitive overtime. He coupled it with a request for an authorisation of a special commission to report on the operation of such a law for a period of six months, after which the subject might be reopened. Lastly, he urged an amendment to the Newlands Act making it illegal to call a strike or a lockout pending an investigation of a controversy by a government commission. Spurred on by the danger of the impending strike, Congress quickly acceded to the first two requests by the President and passed the so-called Adamson law.[85] The strike was averted, but in the immediately following Presidential campaign labor's "hold-up" of the national government became one of the trump issues of the Republican candidate. This episode of the summer of 1916 had two sequels, one in the courts and the other one in a negotiated agreement between the railways and the brotherhoods. The former brought many suits in courts against the government and obtained from a lower court a decision that the Adamson law was unconstitutional. The case was then taken to the United States Supreme Court, but the decision was not ready until the spring of 1917. Meantime the danger of a strike had been renewed. However, on the same day when the Supreme Court gave out its decision, the railways and brotherhoods had signed, at the urging of the National Council of Defense, an agreement accepting the conditions of the Adamson law regardless of the outcome in court. When the decision became known it was found to be in favor of the Adamson law. The declaration of war against Germany came a few days later and opened a new era in the American labor situation.