The two union leaders were summoned one more time, along with officials representing management, and assigned to different rooms to resume bargaining, John Steelman moving back and forth between them. When Whitney and Johnston again refused Truman’s offer, Steelman told them they simply couldn’t say no to a President, insisting that that was just not done. Their response was that nobody paid attention to this President anyway.
“This was the fifth day of the postponement of the railroad strike and…[it] turned into one of the wildest days at the White House since the end of the war,” wrote Eben Ayers in his diary:
Newsmen thronged the lobby, tense and excited. The President was in his office as usual and met from time to time with Steelman, John Snyder and Schwellenbach…. This situation went on all day long. Early in the afternoon the President ordered John Pye, the colored messenger, who runs the executive lunchroom, to prepare some sandwiches…and they were sent in to the railroad people. I did not go out for lunch nor did my secretaries.
During the course of the day Secretary of State Byrnes came over, secretly, so newspapermen did not know of his visit, and he argued with Whitney and Johnston for some time, trying to point out to them the effect upon our international relations of a general rail strike at this time.
At about four in the afternoon, with only an hour to go before the strike would begin, Truman went out to the South Lawn to host a reception for nearly nine hundred convalescent veterans from Walter Reed and other nearby military hospitals, among, whom were amputees and others so severely disabled that they moved forward in the receiving line on crutches and in wheelchairs, attended by nurses in starched white uniforms. Such garden parties for hospitalized veterans had been an annual May tradition at the White House since 1919, but were discontinued during the war. Truman, some weeks earlier, had asked that the tradition be revived.
The spring afternoon was ideal, with bright sunshine, blue sky, and flowers in bloom. Several of the Cabinet were present with their wives, as were Admiral Nimitz and General Bradley. The Marine Band played. Strawberry ice cream and lemon punch were served, and for more than an hour Truman stood warmly greeting his guests, who were all in uniform and wearing their campaign ribbons.
Always moved by the sight of wounded veterans, Truman was struck especially now by the contrast between these respectful young men who had made such sacrifices for their country, and who were so plainly pleased to meet him, and the two contentious old union bosses inside. He kept smiling, chatting, patting the men on the back, asking where they were from, making every effort to see that they had a good time.
Only once was he seen glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the Cabinet Room, where the long French windows, under the colonnade, stood open to the air. Rumors were passed of progress in the negotiations. A soldier in a wheelchair said, “Draft all the strikers—all of them.” Another claimed he wouldn’t be President for anything. Truman drank a glass of punch. When a Strauss waltz was played, he walked over beside the band to sit and eat a heaping dish of ice cream, tapping his foot in time to the music. By then it was well past five and the strike was on.
There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill. Of 24,000 freight trains normally in operation, fewer than 300 ran; of 175,000 passenger trains, all of 100 moved. Rush-hour commuters were stranded in New York and Chicago. In the West, coast-to-coast “streamliners” stopped and disgorged passengers at tiny way stations in the middle of the desert.
There were poignant scenes [reported Newsweek]: The Chicago woman kept from her father’s deathbed in Minnesota; the 13-year-old Arizona boy en route for an emergency brain operation in California; the woman taking the body of her husband back to Cleveland for burial. Other less painful dilemmas: the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra’s San Francisco-bound special train was abandoned by crewmen; ball clubs found their mid-season travels stymied; the circus, scheduled to leave for Philadelphia, was forced to give Boston an extra dose of the biggest show on earth. Everywhere, the stranded who refused to sleep on emergency cots set up in hotel basements or armories took to bus, airplanes, taxis, and hitchhiking. Washington cabbies had a field day; their price for a ride to Boston was $150, to Atlanta $100.
Newsreel camera crews rushed to film hundreds of freight cars standing motionless in railyards as far as the eye could see, loaded coal cars standing idle, and baggage piled head high in big-city stations.
There were reports of fortunes in lettuce and fruit rotting in Kansas and California. Officials in Washington announced that in Europe hundreds of thousands of people would starve if grain shipments were held up as much as two weeks. Panic buying for food and gasoline broke out everywhere in the country. No one, no community was untouched.
Telegrams flooding the White House came from every quarter and minced no words:
ALL TRAIN SERVICE OUT OF NEW YORK CANCELLED. WHAT NOW?…
HATCHERIES [in Henry County, Missouri] NOW PRODUCING MILLIONS OF CHICKS WEEKLY WHICH ARE A TOTAL LOSS UNLESS SHIPPED IMMEDIATELY BY RAIL WHEN HATCHED….
THIS AGRICULTURAL AREA [Coining, Calif.] WILL BE RUINED IF THE STRIKE CONTINUES….
MR. PRESIDENT, ZERO HOUR IS HERE. WHO IS TO RULE OUR NATION? THE LEGALLY CONSTITUTED AUTHORITIES OR ISOLATED DOMESTIC GROUPS?…
PLEASE FORGET SELFISH POLITICS LONG ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT OTHER PEOPLE BESIDES LABOR LEADERS HAVE TO LIVE AND EAT. THEY ALSO VOTE….
IS THE PRESENT INCUMBENT IMPOTENT IN THE RAILROAD STRIKE? IF SO HE SHOULD RESIGN….
WHY DON’T YOU GO AHEAD AND ACT IN THIS NATIONAL CRISIS. YOU'RE OUR LEADER….
PROMPT ACTION IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE OUR COUNTRY….
LESS TALK AND MORE ACTION….
QUIT PLAYING POLITICS….
TIME TO GET TOUGH….
RESPECTFULLY URGE YOU TO RISE TO THE OCCASION….
Truman had had all he could take. Alone at his desk upstairs at the White House, on a small, cheap ruled tablet of the kind schoolchildren use, he began to write. It was the draft of a speech, a speech he had no intention of giving, but that he needed desperately to get off his chest. It was another of his “longhand spasms,” and the worst.
He filled seven pages. All the pent-up fury of the past weeks, the feelings evoked by the wounded men on the South Lawn, his sense of betrayal at the hands of old friends Whitney and Johnston—and the sense that they were flouting the highest office, not to say belittling him personally—all his stubborn pride, came spewing forth in one of the most intemperate documents ever written by an American President. It was as though somewhere deep within this normally fair-minded, self-controlled, naturally warmhearted man a raw, ugly, old native strain persisted, like the cry of a frontier lynch mob, and had to be released. Probably he wrote in a state of exhaustion late that night. Possibly whiskey played a part. But no one knows. The “speech” could also have been written in the cold light of the next morning, which, if so, makes it still more appalling.
Under his constitutional powers as President, he would call for volunteers to support the Constitution, he said at the start. Then, after a few pages of praise for the Constitution and for the decisive role America had played in winning the war, he continued with what was on his mind:
At home those of us who had the country’s welfare at heart worked day and night. But some people worked neither day nor night and some tried to sabotage the war effort entirely. No one knows that better than I. John Lewis called two strikes in war time to satisfy his ego. Two strikes which were worse than bullets in the back to our soldiers. He held a gun at the head of the Government. The rail unions did exactly the same thing. They all were receiving from 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 cooperate 100% with him to reconvert to peacet
ime 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 demagogue leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased….
I am tired of the government’s being flouted, vilified and misrepresented. 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 [head of the maritime union] 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 us give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell the Russians where to get off and make the United Nations work. Come on boys, let’s do the job.
It was patriotism run amok, as well as absurdly inaccurate. Rail workers earned nothing like forty times the pay of a soldier. The salaries of the union leaders were less, not more, than Truman’s own of $75,000 a year, and to describe Whitney or Johnston or John L. Lewis as “effete” was laughable. He was even off in his math, calculating the time elapsed since his war of 1918.
What was very accurately reflected, however, was the intensity of his rage and his determination now to set things straight.
The look on Truman’s face as he strode into a special meeting of the Cabinet Friday morning, May 24, was one White House reporters would not forget. The gray-blue eyes blazed behind his glasses. His mouth was “a thin, hard line pulled down at the corners,” his back straight as a rod of steel. “In the manner of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation,” remembered Cabell Phillips of The New York Times, “he had summoned them not to solicit their views but to tell them what he was going to do.” It was a Harry Truman they had not seen before, but that some on his staff knew well and liked.
“He’s one tough son of a bitch of a man,” Harry Vaughan would say. That was the key to understanding Harry Truman.
With the Cabinet assembled around the table, he asked for suggestions on operation of the railroads. No one had any.
He would go before Congress the following day, he told them, but first address the country by radio that night. He had decided to draft the striking rail workers into the Army.
There was a moment of stunned silence. The Attorney General, Tom Clark, questioned whether the President was overstepping the bounds of the Constitution. Truman was not interested in philosophy. The strike must stop. “We’ll draft them and think about the law later,” he reportedly remarked.
His seven-page speech draft was handed over to Charlie Ross, who, having read it, told Truman as an old friend that it wouldn’t do. Sam Rosenman was sent for and a new speech written, with Rosenman, Ross John Snyder, and Truman himself all contributing. But the main work and at Truman’s request, was done by a rising new star at the White House, Navy Captain Clark Clifford, who had been posted temporarily the summer before as assistant to Jake Vardaman, and then, when Vardaman was removed, had stepped in as naval aide. Clifford was thirty-nine years old, over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders, slim-waisted, and handsome as a screen actor, with wavy blond hair and a silky baritone voice. In his Navy uniform he looked almost too glamorous to be true, or to be taken seriously; but he was calm, clearheaded, polished as a career diplomat, and, as Truman had quickly perceived, exceedingly capable. Indeed, Clifford’s almost chance presence on the staff would prove to be one of the luckiest breaks of Truman’s presidency.
“I’d never been in the White House,” Clifford would remember. “Never occurred to me I ever would be in the White House. Oh, it was exciting! And [at first] as naval aide, there wasn’t much to do. You’re kind of a potted plant…. The first time I arrived there, the first day, Vardaman took me in, he said, ‘President Truman, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Clifford who is going to look after my office.’ And Truman looked up and said, ‘Big fellow, isn’t he!’ ”
Clifford had been raised in the fashionable west end of St. Louis. His father was an official with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, his mother a lecturer and author of children’s books. An uncle, for whom he was named, Clark McAdams, had been a brilliant editorial page editor for the Post-Dispatch. Educated at Washington University, where he also took a law degree, Clifford himself had been a highly successful trial attorney in St. Louis before the war, while still in his early thirties.
“I think he did feel an affinity with those who had come from that part of the country and been schooled in that part of the country, and spoke very much as he did,” Clifford would say of the President years later. “It was an important factor. I’m not sure he would have admitted to its being, but it happened to be so.” But in no respect did Clifford resemble the other Missourians around Truman. He was of a different generation, an entirely different style, as even the sharpest critics of the administration would acknowledge. “Alone of all the Truman entourage, Clifford has the brains, the personal élan, and the savoir-faire requisite of a big-leaguer,” Washington correspondents Robert S. Allen and William V. Shannon would soon write in a highly critical book called The Truman Merry-Go-Round. Clifford, they judged, was “really of White House class.”
Clifford, who had had little knowledge of Truman, or any particular interest in him, prior to coming to the White House, soon found himself greatly impressed—devoted to the man in a way he would never have expected. “The President is intelligent, forthright and reasonable,” Clifford had written to his mother. “I have developed a deep and abiding affection for him and hope and trust that I may be able to be of some small assistance to him….”
Late the afternoon of the 24th, with no time to spare, Clifford went to work on his first major assignment. Alone at the long, polished table in the Cabinet Room, he labored as he would often again, “grubbing it out” with a yellow legal pad and a soft pencil. For all his many abilities, Clifford was not a facile or inspired writer, nothing like Sam Rosenman. He was not even a good writer, as he conceded, but he worked intensely, writing, erasing, and rewriting one sentence after another, laboriously down the page. He began at five o’clock. By eight a rough draft was ready, and by then a dozen people were in the President’s office, waiting to take part. The revisions went on to the very last minute. Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, was still typing the final pages of his reading copy as he went on the air.
Truman’s own efforts on the ruled tablet paper, meantime, were tucked away in Clifford’s file, to remain undisclosed for another twenty years.
Truman spoke to the country at ten o’clock, eastern time. Margaret, who had been in New York to see a play with her friend Drucie Snyder, John Snyder’s daughter, and who, because of the strike, had had to borrow a car and drive back to Washington, fighting heavy traffic the whole way, arrived at the White House as her father’s broadcast was about to begin. She would remember him looking as tired as she felt.
“I come before the American people tonight at a time of great crisis,” he said. “The crisis of Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy. The crisis tonight is caused by a group of men within our own country who place their private interests above the welfare of the nation.”
His voice was firm, deadly serious. It was “time for plain speaking.” This was no contest between labor and management, but between two willful men and their government.
I am a friend of labor…[but] it is inconceivable that in our democracy any two men should be placed in a position where they can completely stifle our economy and ult
imately destroy our country.
He called on the striking railroad workers to return to their jobs as a duty to their country, and warned that if a sufficient number did not return by 4:00 P.M. the next day, he would call out the Army and do whatever else was necessary to break the strike.
He did not say anything about drafting the strikers. That he was saving for his speech to Congress the next afternoon.
Sam Rosenman, who was up most of the night working on the Congress speech, was opposed to the whole idea of drafting the rail workers. Attorney General Clark had also by now put his concerns in writing: “The Draft Act does not permit the induction of occupational groups and it is doubtful whether constitutional powers of the President would include the right to draft individuals for national purposes.” Jimmy Byrnes, too, was strongly opposed. But Truman would not be budged.
The conference on the speech to Congress took place Saturday morning in Truman’s office. John Steelman, meanwhile, had hurried off to see Whitney and Johnston at their suite at the Statler Hotel, determined to make one last try. Truman’s appearance before Congress was scheduled for four o’clock.
The speech was nearly ready at three when Steelman called from the hotel to say he was making progress. The strike might be settled within the hour.
Rosenman and Clifford went into the Cabinet Room and wrote three or four alternative pages. At 3:35 Steelman called again, to report the, situation still unresolved. By now it was past time for Truman to leave for the Capitol. Clifford, the new pages in hand, had to run to catch the President’s car.
It was another sparkling day and as warm as summer. In the crowded House Chamber, even with the air conditioning on, many of the members sat mopping their brows. In the gallery Bess and Margaret could be seen quietly waiting.
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