h 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.

Previous to that, on March 12, 1917, when war seemed inevitable, the
national officers of all important unions in the Federation met in
Washington and issued a statement on "American Labor's Position in Peace
or in War." They pledged the labor movement and the influence of the
labor organizations unreservedly in support of the government in case of
war. Whereas, they said, in all previous wars "under the guise of
national necessity, labor was stripped of its means of defense against
enemies at home and was robbed of the advantages, the protections, and
guarantees of justice that had been achieved after ages of struggle";
and "labor had no representatives in the councils authorized to deal
with the conduct of the war"; and therefore "the rights, interests and
welfare of workers were autocratically sacrifi