Socialists met harsh political opposition when they opposed American entry into World War I (1914-1918) and tried to interfere with the conscription laws that required all younger men to register for the draft. On April 7, 1917, the day after Congress declared war on Germany, an emergency convention of the Socialist Party took place in St. Louis. It declared the war "a crime against the people of the United States" and began holding anti-war rallies. Socialist anti-draft demonstrations drew as many as 20,000 people. In June 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage Act, which included a clause providing prison sentences for up to twenty years for "hoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty ... or willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment of service of the United States". With their talk of draft-dodging and war-opposition, the socialists found themselves the target of federal prosecutors as scores were convicted and jailed. Archibald E. Stevenson, a New York attorney with ties to the Justice Department, probably as a "volunteer spy", testified on January 22, 1919 during the German phase of the subcommittee's work. He established that anti-war and anti-draft activism during World War I, which he described as "pro-German" activity, had now transformed itself into propaganda "developing sympathy for the Bolshevik movement". The United States' wartime enemy, though defeated, had exported an ideology that now ruled Russia and threatened the United States anew: "The Bolsheviki movement is a branch of the revolutionary socialism of Germany. It had its origin in the philosophy of Marx and its leaders were Germans".