And by then, Truman was caught up in telephone and telegraph strikes, land the threat of another nationwide steel strike. He was showing the strain as those close to him had seldom seen. He looked stern in repose, his face deeply lined. After one morning staff meeting, when William Hopkins put the usual stack of papers in front of him to sign, Truman begged off until later, “when I’m not so shaky.” He was tired, terribly tired, he admitted. At the White House the evening before, he had fallen asleep in his chair, something he almost never did.
He seemed overburdened by his duties and decisions in a way he had never been before. It was as if the decision not to run again, the prospect of not being President, had taken something from him.
In his diary, Roger Tubby wrote:
McGrath, Korean truce talks perhaps heading up to a settlement, the steel, telegraph and telephone strikes, and his decision not to run again have been among the recent events draining on his emotional reserves…we were urging him to take a weekend off, to cut down on his afternoon appointments. He brightened, said he thought [it] a good idea to go down river on the Williamsburg…. But Matt reminded him he could not get away, there was a wreath laying ceremony Sunday at the Jefferson Memorial. “God, what a three weeks,” he said with feeling.
His appointment schedule for Tuesday, April 8, the crucial day, was typical and did not even include what was to be the most important event of the day.
As it turned out, he did not speak at the Shoreham as scheduled—the Secretary of State took his place—for it was that night, in a nationwide radio and television broadcast from the White House, that he announced he was seizing the steel mills.
It was one of the boldest, most controversial decisions of his presidency, and like so much else, the seriousness of the crisis was compounded by Korea, the war that had come to overshadow his whole second term and that was rarely ever out of his thoughts. “These are not normal times,” he would stress in his broadcast. “I have to think of our soldiers in Korea…the weapons and ammunition they need….” Also, it being an election year, with, as he saw it, his whole domestic and foreign program at issue, he had no wish to alienate labor.
From his reading of history, Truman was convinced his action fell within his powers as President and Commander in Chief. In a state of national emergency, Lincoln had suspended the right to habeas corpus, he would point out. Tom Clark, now on the Supreme Court, had once, as Attorney General, advised him that a President, faced with a calamitous strike, had the “inherent” power to prevent a paralysis of the national economy.
Truman’s legal advisers supported his views. And so, significantly, did Fred Vinson. According to later comments by John Snyder, the Chief Justice had confidentially advised the President that, on legal grounds, he could go ahead and seize the mills. Such counsel clearly violated the division between branches of government and was particularly improper in this instance, since a seizure of the steel industry was bound to be challenged in the courts and thus Vinson himself, very likely, would wind up having to weigh the case. But out of friendship and loyalty, Vinson offered advice that was taken quite to heart.
The path was clear, Truman told the ever cautious Snyder, who opposed seizing the mills. “The President has the power to keep the country from going to hell,” Truman would assure his staff.
A steel crisis had been a long time coming. Driven by the demands of the war, the mills were producing record tonnage. Profits, too, were on the rise. Yet steel workers, unlike workers in the auto and electrical industries, had had no pay raise since 1950. In November 1951, the 650,000 United Steel Workers, who were part of the CIO and headed by Phil Murray, called for a boost in wages of 35 cents an hour. Management refused to negotiate. The union gave notice that it would strike when its contract expired on December 31. On December 22, Truman referred the dispute to his Wage Stabilization Board recommended an hourly raise of 26 cents, and the union quickly agreed, the companies denounced the proposal as unreasonable, unless they could add a hefty increase of $12 a ton to the price of steel.
Negotiations continued, only to end in deadlock. With the April deadline approaching, the country, as said in the press, was caught “squarely on the griddle.” To Truman, the pay increase proposed by the Wage Stabilization Board seemed both “fair and reasonable,” and the most direct way to prevent a strike that would not only be a national emergency but would critically impair the flow of munitions to Korea and to the buildup of NATO forces in Europe, which he saw as crucial.
Secretary of Defense Lovett [Truman later wrote] said emphatically that any stoppage of steel production, for even a short time, would increase the risk we had taken in the “stretch-out” of the armament program. He also pointed out that our entire combat technique in all three services depended on the fullest use of our industrial facilities. Stressing the situation in Korea, he said that “we are holding the line with ammunition, and not with the lives of our troops.” Any curtailment of steel production, he warned, would endanger the lives of our fighting men.
Truman refused to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act—by which the government could enjoin a strike for eighty days pending an impartial study—because he saw no sense in delaying a settlement still further and felt the facts were already well known. Also, the steel workers had remained on the job voluntarily for nearly three months as it was. For them to continue thus another eighty days with no change in pay seemed to him unfair. Nor did the prospect of resorting to a law he disliked, and that labor despised, have any appeal.
But it was Truman’s fundamental feeling about the giants of the steel industry, the old distrust of big corporations that he had voiced with such passion during his years in the Senate, that moved him now, more than sympathy for the position of the steel workers. He considered the industry’s proposed price increase little better than profiteering, and saw the steel companies, with U.S. Steel in the lead, attempting to force a compromise that would ultimately play havoc with his anti-inflation policies and raise the cost of the war. “The attitude of the companies seemed wrong to me, since under the accelerated defense program the government was by far the biggest customer for steel and steel products. To hike prices at this time meant charging the government more for the tools of defense.”
While conceding that a modest ($4.50) increase in steel prices might be tolerated, Truman stubbornly rejected industry demands out of hand and went over the head of his own director of defense mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, who saw validity in the industry position. As a result Wilson resigned, a turn of events that Truman regretted and that brought down still more criticism on him.
To Truman, seizure of the mills was a temporary last resort. On Tuesday, April 8, only hours before the mills were scheduled to be struck, he made his move, signing Executive Order No. 10340.
“The plain fact of the matter is that the steel companies are recklessly forcing a shutdown,” he told the country when he went on the air at 10:30 that night.
They are trying to get special, preferred treatment…. And they are apparently willing to stop steel production to get it. As President of the United States it is my plain duty to keep this from happening…. At midnight the Government will take over the steel plants….
The broadcast over, on his way to his room, Truman looked so exhausted Joe Short thought he might collapse.
In some ways it was as though, in the last act of his presidency, with less than a year to go, he had reverted to the man he had been in the spring of 1946, after less than a year in office, when, faced by the great railroad impasse, he had tried to draft the striking workers into the Army.
At some eighty-eight steel mills across the country, the morning of April 9, 1952, things appeared the same as usual. The morning shifts arrived, production continued, the mills worked by the same men and managed by the same officials. The one clearly visible sign of change were the American flags that flew over the mills. In Washington, the Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, had assumed legal command of the industr
y.
But Truman had brought on an additional crisis, a constitutional crisis, just as he would have in 1946 had the railroad unions not agreed at the last minute to settle the strike. The outcry now was instantaneous and as scathing nearly as what he had faced after the firing of MacArthur. He was called a Caesar, a Hitler, a bully and lawbreaker. In reporting his action to Congress, in a special message delivered to the Hill immediately that same day, April 9, he stressed that his action had been taken with utmost reluctance: “The idea of government operation of the steel mills is thoroughly distasteful to me and I want to see it ended as soon as possible.” He acknowledged the power of Congress to supersede his policy and act on its own to pass a new law enabling the government to operate the mills as an emergency measure. Such legislation, he said, might be “very desirable.” But Congress did not choose to grant him such power. Instead, there were calls for congressional investigations, calls for his impeachment.
The President’s “evil deed” had no precedent in history, said the head of Inland Steel, Clarence Randall, in a radio and television broadcast. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, all attacked Truman. The “Truman talent for trouble,” said Newsweek, gave him and the nation no rest. The New York Times accused him of acting on “almost inconceivably bad advice.” The Washington Post predicted his seizure of the mills would probably go down in history as one of the most high-handed acts ever committed by an American President. Truman, said the Post, had grossly usurped the power of Congress, and in a constitutional democracy there was no more serious offense against good government. “Nothing in the Constitution can be reasonably interpreted as giving to the Commander in Chief all the power that may be necessary for building up our defenses or even for carrying on a war.”
If he could seize the steel mills under his inherent powers, could he therefore, Truman was asked at a press conference, also seize the newspapers and radio stations?
“Under similar circumstances, the President of the United States has to act for whatever is best for the country,” he answered abruptly and imprudently, stirring speculation that he was indeed planning to seize the press, an idea that had never occurred to him and that he couldn’t imagine happening.
The steel industry sued to get its property back. Swiftly, a federal district judge, David A. Pine, determined that seizure of the steel industry was illegal and the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case.
“I believe,” wrote Judge Pine in a 4,500-word opinion, “that the contemplated strike, if it came, with all its awful results, would be less injurious to the public than the injury which would flow from a timorous judicial recognition that there is some basis for this claim to unlimited and unrestrained Executive power….”
He had read the Pine opinion, Truman told his staff—“read it, read it and read it”—and still could not understand why he had been judged wrong. To Secretary of Commerce Sawyer, he confided that he would be “terribly shocked, disappointed and disturbed,” should the Supreme Court, too, decide against him.
The President was depressed, recorded Roger Tubby after a morning staff meeting.
[I] had never seen him so quiet and down. Occasionally there seemed to be…[an] effort by him to laugh at our sallies, but the laughs were brief, his countenance mostly serious…. Of course the steel wrangle has troubled him, the touch-and-go situation in Korea, the Democratic Party uncertainties—and he’s been terribly tired.
He would, of course, abide by the Court’s ruling, Truman told reporters. He had no ambition to be a, dictator. He just wanted to keep the country running.
The case against the President was argued in the Supreme Court by the attorney for the U.S. Steel Corporation, white-haired John W. Davis, who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1924 when he lost to Calvin Coolidge, and who in a distinguished career had argued more than a hundred cases before the Court. Defending the President was Solicitor General Perlman, whom Truman would later describe as an “outstanding” lawyer who presented the government’s case ably and forcefully.
On Monday, June 2, the Court declared the President’s action unconstitutional by a crushing majority of 6 to 3. Those in the majority were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the official opinion, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, as infuriated Truman, Tom Clark.
“We cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production,” Justice Black read slowly and calmly. “This is a job for the Nation’s lawmakers, not for its military authorities.”
“Today,” wrote Justice Douglas, in a concurring opinion, “a kindly President uses the seizure power to effect a wage increase and to keep the steel furnaces in production. Yet tomorrow another President might use the same power to prevent a wage increase, to curb trade unionists, to regiment labor as oppressively as industry thinks it has been regimented by this seizure.”
The Chief Justice, who strongly upheld the President, arguing that he had acted entirely within his constitutional responsibilities, was joined in the minority by Justices Stanley F. Reed and Sherman Minton. Any man worthy of the office of the presidency, Vinson argued, should be “free to take at least interim action necessary to execute legislative programs essential to survival of the nation.” Nor was there any question that “the possession [of the steel industry] was other than temporary in character and subject to Congressional approval, disapproval,” or regulation of “the manner in which the mills were to be administered and returned to the owners.”
For Truman it was a humiliating defeat, and at the hands of old friends and fellow spirits. It was a liberal Court. Hugo Black had been an ardent New Dealer. All nine justices had been appointed either by Truman or Roosevelt. That Tom Clark had gone against him would anger Truman for years. Putting that “damn fool from Texas” on the Supreme Court, he would one day tell the author Merle Miller, was the biggest mistake he made as President, though this, like others of his observations to Miller, was more harsh than he meant or than he indicated at the time.
As a gesture of friendship and goodwill, Hugo Black invited the President and the justices to a party at his beautiful home across the river in Old Town Alexandria. At the start of the evening, Truman, though polite, seemed “a bit testy,” remembered William O. Douglas. “But after the bourbon and canapes were passed, he turned to Hugo and said, ‘Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.’ ”
The steel strike that began after the Court decision of June 2 dragged on for seven weeks, until midsummer 1952, making it the longest, most costly steel strike in the nation’s history. Losses in production, losses in wages were unprecedented—21 million tons of steel and $400 million in wages, as 600,000 steel workers and 1,400,000 others in related industries were idle. The military output scheduled for 1952 was cut by a third. “No enemy nation could have so crippled our production as has this work stoppage,” said Robert Lovett bitterly. “The weird and tragic thing is that we have done this to ourselves.”
The settlement called for a 21 cent an hour raise for the workers and a steel price increase of $5.20 a ton, which was the same as the $4.50 offered by the government months earlier, plus 70 cents for increased freight rates.
In the long weeks of the strike, Truman had grown increasingly distressed over congressional inaction. Congress declined to do anything more than request—rather than direct—him to use the Taft-Hartley Act, thus sending the problem—and responsibility for the decision—right back to him. And whether steel production would resume, were he to invoke Taft-Hartley, was highly debatable.
“The Court and Congress got us into the fix we’re now in,” he told his staff. “Let Congress do something about getting us out.”
Discouraged that so few Democrats on the Hill had come to his support, discouraged that practically no Democrats “up there” were fig
hting for his foreign aid bill, he grumbled that maybe it might be good for the Democrats to be out of power for a while.
For the first time since taking office, he felt ill. At the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, years earlier, a special Presidential Suite had been set up on the third floor, in the event that he needed medical attention, but it had never once been used. Truman had never been sick until the morning of July 16, when he awoke feeling “poorly” and Wallace Graham found he was running a low fever. Two days later, with what Graham called a mild virus, he was driven to Walter Reed. He stayed three days, during which he was gone over by some eight different specialists. He ate well, slept well, signed more than two hundred bills, and, as he later told his staff, spent a lot of time thinking about what he would say at the Democratic Convention. He delivered his speech to the bedpost, Truman said. “If the doctor had come in then he would have found my temperature up two degrees and might have thought me off my trolley.” He wanted to talk not only about his record, “but about the future and what we can make of it.”
What could be done about the steel strike, Joe Short asked him his first morning back at the Oval Office, July 21, when Truman still looked pale and subdued. He didn’t know, Truman said.
“It’s a lockout, that’s what it is. U.S. Steel is against the little fellows, want to take them over, and of course they’re against labor and against me.”
Three days later, on July 24, he summoned Phil Murray and the head of U.S. Steel, Benjamin Fairless, to his office, demanded a settlement, and got it. “This should lead to a speedy resumption of steel production,” he said in a brief formal announcement that the strike was over.
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