On June 20th he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Bill. How much this sprang from conviction as opposed to political calculation is open to a little doubt. He was not instinctively against some curbs on union power. ‘We have got to have a certain restriction on the union element,’ his own records show him as having told a group of broadcasters in January, ‘because if we don’t, we go haywire. You take the underdog and put him on top, and he is just as bad on top, and sometimes a little worse.’8 He was straining the old Roosevelt coalition in several directions. The South was already unhappy about the appointment of his Civil Rights Commission and its report, due in October, was almost certain to produce further strains. And his robust attitude towards the 1946 strikes, while good for his general popularity, had subtantially disaffected the labour union s. In 1946 however he was dealing with short-term situations on his own presidential initiative. In 1947 the question was whether he was to endorse long-term curbs imposed by a Republican Congress. If he had, he could have said goodbye to any substantial union support in the 1948 election.
Curiously his Cabinet were almost all in favour of his accepting the bill. The only two against were Schwellenbach, the egregious Secretary of Labour, who naturally had his clients to consider, and Hannegan, the Postmaster-General, whose primary business was not mails but the fostering of the Democratic Party machine. Snyder, Truman’s closest Cabinet friend, was particularly strong in favour of his signing the bill. At the least equally curiously, the White House mail on the subject was both huge and overwhelmingly in favour of a veto. Over 750,000 communications were received. It was of course largely an organized campaign, but it was not the sort of organization at which the union s were usually very good.
There was no certainty until the last moment about what Truman was going to do. Then on June 20th he came out against the bill with a message of exceptional length—over 5,000 words. There was no reflection of hesitancy in the tone of this message. The bill was ‘a shocking piece of legislation … bad for labor, bad for management and bad for the country’. There was an element of bathos about this ‘veto’, which so far from stopping the bill in its tracks, merely held it up for three or four days while the House overrode the President’s view by a majority of 4 to 1 and the Senate by nearly 3 to 1.10
Nevertheless his disapproval of it earned him considerable credit with the union s. A year earlier the President of the Brotherhood of Railways Trainmen had threatened that the Brotherhood would ‘open its treasury’ to defeat Truman in 1948. Now Alexander Whitney caused his spokesman to state: ‘It is indicated that our Brotherhood will throw all its resources behind President Truman and his Administration in an effort to elect a Congress which will back the President’s liberal programme’, thus demonstrating both the union ’s flexibility and its faithfulness to good trade union jargon.
At least equally importantly, Truman’s ‘veto’ of Taft-Hartley, following the Marshall speech, clutched back the liberal wing of the Rooseveltians from the enticements of Wallace. In early 1947 Americans for Democratic Action had been founded, with Mrs Roosevelt as its figurehead, a number of old New Dealers as its Praetorian Guard, those patriarchal New York immigrant clothing worker union leaders, Dubinsky and Potofsky, as its godfathers, Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers as a whipper-in, and the then relatively junior John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as its young Turks. This body at first had no commitment to Truman. Indeed as late as February 1948 ADA refrained from endorsing him. But the Taft-Hartley veto made them neutral. Wallace’s withdrawal from support of the Marshall Plan when the Russians walked out in Paris disenchanted them with him. And the sponsors of his candidature (announced in Chicago in December 1947) made them profoundly suspicious, for they were always firmly hostile to Communist front organizations. Thereafter ADA flirted around a little, even with Eisenhower, but never with any seriously possible Democratic candidate for 1948, before coming solidly to Truman’s support in the campaign itself.
During most of 1947, however, Truman was far from being pre-occupied with thought of the 1948 election. In the first place he was doubtful whether he wanted to run. Although there is no direct documentary evidence there is strong oral support for the view that at some time (possiby on several occasions) during the year he renewed his 1945 suggestion to Eisenhower and offered to step aside and support him for the Democratic nomination. This is testified to by Rosenman who wrote many of Truman’s speeches, Steelman of his White House staff, and from the other side of the fence by Milton Eisenhower, the General’s brother. The reasons why it was not subsequently confirmed in the writings or words of either of the principals are fairly obvious. Eisenhower did not wish to confirm that he had let Truman think he was a Democrat. And Truman, partly as a result of Eisenhower not rallying to Marshall’s defence against the calumnies of McCarthy, moved into a position of such abiding dislike of his successor that he preferred not to recall that he had ever thought of promoting him as President of the United States. But there seems little doubt that, at any rate during the first half of 1947, Truman was still attracted by the idea, and spoke accordingly to Eisenhower, who said that he had no intention of going into politics (such dissimulation was another subsequent count against him in Truman’s eyes), but not that he was not a Democrat.