Truman(33)

Truman’s reaction to most of these and to a few other similar disputes was a fairly wild programme of temporary seizure of the industries by the Federal Government. ‘In one year,’ Robert Donovan wrote, ‘he had seized the coal mines twice; he had seized the railroads; he had seized 134 meat-packing plants; he had seized ninety-one tugboats; he had seized the facilities of twenty-six oil producing and refining companies; he had seized the Great Lakes Towing Company. And all he had on his hands now was disaster.’11 He was certainly in danger of reaching too automatically for the weapon of seizure and thus of devaluing any symbolic significance that it might carry.

It was not always clear what practical purpose seizure served, except that of dramatization. It could be held to make the strikes ex post into political strikes against the Government, but as they had manifestly started as industrial strikes for higher wages or better fringe benefits against the companies this neither got the strikers back to work nor provided a particularly effective propaganda weapon against the leaders. It made it legally possible to use the army, but this was only seriously contemplated in the case of the rail strike, and there was clearly a limit to how quickly, effectively and in what numbers soldiers could turn themselves into railroad operatives. The more extreme step of drafting the striking railroadmen themselves (there was a half precedent from the action of the Briand government in France in 1910, but there the majority of the men were reservists) was actually proposed to Congress by the President on the day the strike was settled. Whether this threat, about the constitutionality of which the Attorney-General was hesitant, contributed to the settlement is doubtful.

The reason that Truman reacted with especial violence against the rail strike was not only that it came on top of the other disputes and led to mounting criticism that he was becoming the President of industrial chaos. It was also that, in what was still (just) the age of the train in the United States, such a strike had much the most immediate public impact. There were always some stocks of coal, steel and automobiles (although none of them were very substantial at that time) but there cannot be any stock of commuter or transcontinental journeys. There may also have been at work a sense of betrayal by his special friends in the railroad union  s. In any event it provoked him into composing an appalling draft speech, which mixed resentful hysteria, reactionary populism, and virulent vulgarity of language in about equal proportions. It was all put in terms of American Legion-style patriotism:

‘John Lewis called two strikes in War Time to satisfy his ego. Two strikes which were worse than bullets in the back of our soldiers. The rail workers did exactly the same thing. They all were receiving four to forty times what the man who was facing the enemy fire on the front was receiving. The effete union   leaders receive from five to ten times the net salary of your President.

‘Now these same union   leaders on V.J. Day told your president that they would co-operate 100% with him to reconvert to peace time production. They all lied to him.

‘First came the threatened Automobile strike. Your President asked for legislation to cool off and consider the situation. A weak-kneed Congress didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to pass the bill.

‘Mr Murray and his Communist friends had a conniption fit and Congress had labor jitters. Nothing happened.

‘Then came the electrical workers strike, the steel strike, the coal strike and now the rail tie up. Every single one of the strikers and their demagog [sic] leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased …

‘I am tired of government’s [sic] being flouted, vilified and now I want you men who are my comrades-in-arms, you men who fought the battles to save the nation just as I did twenty-five years ago, to come along with me and eliminate the Lewises, the Whitneys, the Johnstons, the Communist Bridges and the Russian Senators and Representatives and really make this a Government of by and for the people. I think no more of the Wall Street crowd than I do of Lewis and Whitney.

‘Let’s give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, make our country safe for democracy, tell Russia where to get off and make the United Nations work. Come on boys let’s do the job.’12

What is one to make of this extraordinary document, which caused a good deal of perturbation when it first saw the light of day in 1966? First, it was never of course seriously intended to be delivered. It was Truman blowing a safety valve, not preparing a speech. No sooner had he knocked it off than he agreed that Rosenman should be summoned from New York (where he had retreated to private legal practice) in order to prepare with Charlie Ross and Clark Clifford a serious text for the broadcast that evening. They did their work, and while what emerged was a tough speech it was also a rational, even cautious speech.