Truman (13 page)

John L. Lewis was of course a case apart. He had separated himself from the Democratic Party, and acted, in Truman's view, with total disregard for the national interest before, during, and after the war. Truman wrote of him with a hard, almost vicious contempt: ‘He is, as all bullies are, as yellow as a dog hound pup. He cannot face the music when the tune is not to his liking. On the front under shell fire he'd crack up. But he can direct the murder, assault and battery goon squads as long as he doesn't have to face them … I had a fully loyal team and that team whipped a damned traitor.'
⁹

The others he regarded differently, but without particular warmth. ‘Big money has too much power and so have big unions', he wrote to his mother and sister on January 23rd, 1946: ‘both are riding to a fall because I like neither.'
¹⁰
As the first half of that unfortunate year went by his feelings became more embittered, with the leaders of the two largest railroad brotherhoods, Alvanley Johnston and A. F. Whitney, who had been his supporters not merely in 1944 but in his nadir year of 1940 as well, moving into the centre of his zone of disapproval. On top of the long-running steel and General Motors strikes of the winter, Lewis brought the coal miners out on April 1st, and a rail strike was called for May 18th and actually started on May 23rd.

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 unions. 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.

Even so, safety valve or not, Truman's draft (‘this frontier diatribe', as Robert Donovan charitably calls it) cannot be totally shrugged off. It is probable that he wrote it early in the morning rather than late at night. Bourbon was therefore unlikely to have made a contribution to its composition. That makes it the more frightening. It was of course wildly inaccurate. There was no question of miners or railroadmen receiving up to forty times the pay of servicemen. Nor did union leaders get ‘from five to ten times the net salary of your President'. They were very well paid by British standards. But in the mid-1940s (or for that matter the mid-1980s) they were not on $350-700,000 a year, even leaving aside the benefits in kind of the White House, Camp David and the presidential yacht. Nor, moving on to slightly less factual ground, was ‘effete' a very appropriate adjective to apply to Lewis or to Truman's erstwhile friends; his task might have been easier had they been more so. Nor is ‘intestinal fortitude' a very nice concept. And, while Bridges may well have been a Communist, who were ‘the Russian Senators or Representatives'? This was all language of which McCarthy might have been proud, but might have been too strong for the delicate stomach of the young Nixon (soon to be elected to Congress). It was all very unfortunate. Perhaps Truman can best be considered as being as close as possible to the opposite of Rochester's view of Charles II,

‘Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one.'

If Truman rarely (in private) wrote a wise word, he was much less inclined in public to do a foolish thing. And that was much better than emulating King Charles.

On the next day, against the background of Truman demanding draft powers from Congress, the railroad strike was settled. It left considerable short-term bitterness. Whitney announced that he would spend all the resources of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainment in fighting Truman's re-election in 1948. The CIO denounced him as ‘the No 1 strike-breaker'. Sidney Hillman and
Harold Ickes added more moderate but at least equally damaging attacks. Mrs Roosevelt wrote privately and wisely: ‘… I hope you realize that there must not be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peace-time situation, into a military way of thinking … I have seen my husband receive much advice from his military advisers and succumb to it every now and then, but the people as a whole do not like it … I hope that now that your anxiety is somewhat lessened you will not insist upon a peacetime draft into the army of strikers. That seems to me a dangerous precedent.'
¹³

Truman received these attacks, warnings and advice with some surface irritation, but in fact he had substantially calmed down on the issue and indeed saw the need to rebuild some bridges. This became easier because May 1946 marked the peak of post-war labour unrest. John L. Lewis was to have another major joust with the government six months later, but his position had become increasingly isolated. The union leaders as a whole were pushed both into a more defensive position and into a greater need for an alliance with the Democratic Party by the return of a Republican Congress in November. And when it came to 1948, Whitney, so far from throwing all his funds against Truman, strongly supported his re-election.

Truman had made an early contribution to the change of atmosphere by a rapid and bewildering switch of direction almost immediately after the industrial crisis weekend of May 23rd-25th. The draconian draft powers for which he had asked the Congress in his dramatic personal appearance on May 24th were granted by a bemused House of Representatives by a 20 to 1 majority after a token debate. The Senate moved more cautiously. An unlikely combination of Robert Taft and a handful of liberal Democrats blocked precipitate decision. It was a sufficiently ill-considered bill that it could only go through at a rush. Delay was fatal to it. Little more was heard of Truman's draft powers. The Senate compensated, however, not with the administration but with antiunion public opinion, by passing the so-called Case Bill, which Representative Francis H. Case of South Dakota had got through the House in February. This measure was not merely anti-strike (it provided for a 60-day cooling-off period), but also hostile to the long-term growth of union responsibilities; it prohibited for instance the administration by the unions of health and welfare funds paid for by employers' contributions.

A major controversy broke out, publicly between the unions and the employers' organization, more privately within the administration, as to whether Truman should veto it. On June 11th he did so. His message of reasons struck an entirely different note from that of May 25th. He had lurched back into a position of balance, but his performance on the tight-rope was more breathtaking than elegant.

He was not much enjoying it himself. Throughout the fifteen months between his return from Potsdam and the mid-term elections such buoyancy as he retained was largely confined to his famous elasticity of step. There was little in his mind. In November 1945, Ickes recorded after a bilateral meeting: ‘Once again he repeated that he had not wanted to be President. He says this to me practically every time that I see him and I wish that he wouldn't. The state of mind of which that is evidence is not good for him or for the country.'
¹⁴
Three weeks later Truman told the Gridiron Dinner: ‘Sherman was wrong. I'm telling you I find peace is hell …'
³
As a joke this was a little too near to the bone to be wise. As an expression of the President's mind it was joyful compared with his December 28th letter to his wife after a brief and apparently not very successful Christmas visit to Independence: ‘Well I'm here in the White House, the great white sepulchre of ambitions and reputations. I feel like a last year's bird nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you.'
¹⁵

In February Harold Smith, the Director of the Budget, wrote of Truman's expression of ‘various notes of despair about the avalanche of things that were piling up on him. ‘While I did not express despair … I came away … with my own despair, accentuated because of the President's inability to use staff as yet.'
¹⁶
This was not a wholly accurate diagnosis. Truman's problem was at least as much that of choosing good staff as of using them properly. Ickes, on his removal from the Department of the Interior in that same month, delivered a damaging blow when he
announced ‘I am against government by crony.'
⁴
This problem began to cure itself during 1946. Some of the cronies departed. Others found their level. And Clark Clifford, moving into a more senior position and well seconded by George Elsey, began to establish some sort of cohesion in the small White House staff.

Inevitably this took some time to pay dividends, and 1946 continued, as it had begun, as a miserable year for Truman. Roosevelt had always aroused plenty of bitter opposition, but it had been balanced by enthusiastic support, and there had never been any serious suggestion that his personality and style were not up to the job. Truman, at this period, had the opposition without the enthusiastic support, and it was precisely his style and character which were most strongly and woundingly criticized. ‘To err is Truman' was a favourite Republican joke of the time.
⁵
But it was not only Republicans who laughed. The old New Dealers were disenchanted, and the general sophisticated view (and sophisticated opinion is always more important, as a counter to country club and Chamber of Commerce opinion, for Democrats than for Republicans) was that the White House was occupied by a jejune little man who had very little idea what he was doing. There were few who thought that he had the slightest chance of being there after 1948.