His optimistic air disquieted informed callers, who wondered among themselves when he would face the inevitable reappearance of the Depression. “A war boom?” Frederick Lewis Allen had written in Since Yesterday (1940). “No gain thus made could be lasting.” In Harper’s Bernard De Voto warned his readers to be prepared for the return of all of it: labor-baiting, Father Coughlin, and hand-to-hand fighting on the barricades as “the waves of reaction” gathered strength “in the years immediately ahead of the United States.” Leo Cherne peered into the future and saw a “cold breeze” sweeping through America. Hungry veterans would roam the streets in packs, he predicted; “Occasionally you will see them in strikes and riots…. The newly set up employment offices, particularly at first, will grind slowly… an occasional soldier will be found on a street corner selling a Welcome Home sign. Others will start house-to-house canvassing in their uniforms.” Some economists foresaw another 1932, with 15 million jobless men. Political scientists spoke of revolution, and from his deathbed H. G. Wells concluded in 1945 that since faith in scientific progress had plummeted, man, already “at the end of his tether,” was doomed to rapid extinction.
The harder they looked, the more convinced employers were that there was no way to turn industry’s juggernaut of superproductivity toward peaceful pursuits without stumbling into disaster. Preoccupied as they were by the Crash and all that had followed, they overlooked one massive difference between Herbert Hoover’s America and Harry Truman’s. In 1932 people couldn’t enter stores, because they were broke. If hard times had taught them nothing else, the importance of saving had been drilled into them. Since Pearl Harbor average weekly earnings in the United States had almost doubled, rising from $24.20 to $44.39 for the 48-hour week—soon to be the 40-hour week, with no loss in pay, after Truman set the example with federal employees. Partly because the Depression had made them frugal and partly because there had been so little on store shelves, the American people had spent the four war years accumulating Liberty Bonds and queuing up at bank deposit windows. There were 85 million bondholders alone. With the shooting over, the public had socked away 136.4 billions in savings institutions and liquid securities. It was burning a hole in their pockets, and the administration’s real quandary—one which could never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction—was how to prevent a national buying spree in the black market.
Thus the nightmare of factory gates being stormed by jobless GIs was the last bitter legacy of the shabby 1930s. Those terrible years were dead at last; 52–20 unemployment compensation was evidence of it, and so was the GI Bill. Finding jobs for all discharged soldiers would take time, but meanwhile they could learn trades, start small businesses of their own, or move to college campuses. And jobs weren’t all that tight anyhow. Women war workers were quitting beltlines by the million to go home and have babies.
***
A New York Daily News headline read:
PRICES SOAR, BUYERS SORE,
STEERS JUMP OVER THE MOON
In Kansas City the President of the United States strutted through downtown streets at the head of an American Legion parade. From a curb Eddie Jacobson, his old partner in haberdashery, called, “Harry, what about inflation?”
“I’ve got my eye on it,” Truman called back.
He needed a quick eye. The economy was shifting daily as it hurtled ahead, trying to catch up with black marketeers peddling five-dollar nylons, fifteen-dollar shirts, and twenty-dollar recapped tires. The war had receded into history and the convulsions of readjustment were at their height. Affluence lay in the certain future, but reaching it was an agonizing struggle. When Vinson had prophesied “the pleasant predicament of having to learn to live 50 percent better,” he had failed to mention that first the people must face shortages, riots, labor strikes, and the skyrocketing prices of postwar inflation.
Yet controls were exasperating. By the war’s end the Office of Price Administration had become a government-within-a-government, with 73,000 full-time employees, 200,000 volunteers, and an office in every community down to the town level. It was an intolerable tyranny, a mockery of freedom, and all that could be said for it was that there was no alternative. Somehow it had managed to hold price rises to 30 percent over their 1939 levels. Not to put too fine a point on it, in 1946 the economy was virtually glued together by the gum on the back of red and green stamps. Even so, it was near chaos. There were a thousand ways to circumvent OPA regulations, and sharpers found them all. You could tip the head waiter twenty dollars and a choice roast would appear. You might barter an automobile for an apartment, say, or a car battery for scotch whisky. The scotch might have been acquired by also agreeing to buy a case of wine or beer. That ruse was called the “tie-in” sale, and its possibilities were unlimited. In Oklahoma City, for example, a car dealer would sell you an automobile if you also bought his dog for $400; afterward the dog would find his way back. Other dealers offered new cars if you would trade your old one in for a two-dollar bill, and in Cincinnati an imaginative customer greeted an auto salesman by saying: “I’ll bet you seven hundred dollars I can hold my breath for three minutes.” In addition there were endless “bonuses”—a $150 bonus for the landlady who would rent an $80-a-month cold-water flat, or three dollars to the butcher who found a thick steak in his refrigerator.
It was impractical to wipe out the black market with stiff fines and heavy prison sentences, and infeasible, now that the war was won, to retain bipartisan support for controls. The Republicans were feeling truculent once more. In August 1945 they reluctantly decided not to challenge Truman’s “hold-the-line” executive order, which envisaged a gradual reduction of wage and price controls, but in September party lines were drawn tight on this issue for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Calling Congress back into special session, the President demanded broad domestic powers. He wanted rationing to continue—some controls were due to expire automatically six months after the war’s end—and in addition he asked for congressional approval of a social and economic program whose most notable measures were a 65¢-an-hour minimum wage, nationalization of the housing industry, expansion of natural resources development, federal control of all unemployment compensation, and a fair employment practices bill with teeth. Republican congressmen gagged. Minority leader Joe Martin accused the President of “out-dealing the New Deal,” and Charlie Halleck said, “This is the kick-off. This begins the campaign of 1946.”
On January 14, 1946, Congress reassembled to hear Truman’s first State of the Union message. The heart of it was a request for another year of OPA, with controls being relinquished, commodity by commodity, as the supply and demand of each reached their natural level. But he had telegraphed his punch in September, and now he confronted a formidable alliance: the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Republican leadership. They had prepared intricate charts and graphs to persuade committees that free enterprise was doomed unless Congress struck “the shackles from American business.” Outside the Senate’s marbled caucus room, corporation public relations men fought for a sellers’ market by marshaling parades of clerks, junior executives, ministers, physicians, Legionnaires, Rotarians, and newspaper boys, all of whom testified to the virtues of John Stuart Mill and the wickedness of Karl Marx, who, they insisted, was their true adversary. There was even a sad troupe of bankrupt businessmen, who told of their former prosperity in a free market and how mischievous OPA officials had ruined them.
Lobbying was intense on both sides. OPA’s Chester Bowles fielded his own team of expert witnesses, Truman’s congressional liaison men swarmed through the Capitol buttonholing congressmen, and the unions, consumer groups, and women’s clubs paraded in the plaza outside, holding pro-OPA signs aloft. On April 19 they staged what the following morning’s New York Times called “the climax” of the consumers’ “crusade.” Over a thousand housewives, representing every state, marched up the Hill demanding a twelve-month extension of controls without crippling amendmen
ts. According to the Times, the demonstration
…served to emphasize that the fight over OPA, in and out of Congress, has reached proportions of bitterness, stridency, and obfuscation which have not been matched in years…. The NAM has spearheaded the fight over OPA with the… enthusiastic assistance of associations representing the meat industry, retail trade, real estate and others…. As the battle has grown each side has become progressively more voluble, they have started to call each other names, and a few blows have been struck below the belt.
Congress’s reflex reaction to so savage a struggle was to compromise, and as Bowles had pointed out, wage and price controls were all or nothing. OPA’s death rattle followed. So did inflation. Within a month food prices had doubled, angry consumers formed The Militant Marketers to picket stores, livestock men kept cattle in the stockyards until beef would bring over a dollar a pound, and the overall cost of living rose 33 percent and then 75 percent. In August worried congressmen reconvened to pass new controls, dropping Taft’s amendment, but it was too late. OPA had lost its grip on the economy. There was no way to turn the spiral back upon itself, and in October Truman bowed to the irresistible force; the lifting of all controls began. Two years later, when the electorate’s memory of OPA had mellowed, he would remind voters that he had been battling for price regulation while Republicans had fought on the NAM’s side. By then he would be moving in stride with events. At the time, however, the first Taft-Truman confrontation could only be called a draw at most. Presidential popularity dipped in the polls.
***
Luckily Truman seldom worried about polls. In general he was suited by temperament for the hard choice. This was true even when his decisions hurt those who had supported his political fortunes, which, in the unsettled years after the war, it often did. Taking on the NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was relatively easy for a Democratic chief executive. Disciplining organized labor was something else. Not only was labor essential to the coalition Franklin Roosevelt had forged; its leaders had been among those who had urged Truman’s vice-presidential candidacy upon FDR in 1944. Without labor he would have remained a senator, and another man, either Jimmy Byrnes or Henry Wallace, would be in the White House. Nevertheless, nagging management about prices was pointless unless the administration was ready to take an equally strong stand on wages. And there was no point in that if the workers were always on strike, which at times in 1946 they seemed to be. During that first full year after the war, nearly five million men struck at one time or another and 107,476,000 man-days of work were lost to strikes. Coming when they did, these disruptions deepened middle-class antagonism toward labor. Young couples awaiting their first car were infuriated by photographs of an idle automotive worker. They were applying a double standard, judging the unions more harshly than employers, but that had always been the posture of the middle class. Even Truman, so representative of the American center, was more respectful of white collars than blue.
Blue-collar contributions to the 1941–45 production miracle deserved more recognition than they were getting. Army-Navy E pennants had been earned because employees, sharing their employers’ vision of peace and triumph, had sweated themselves for long hours on the line, agreed to speedups, volunteered for swing shifts, and put their money in war bonds. In the week after the Japanese attack on Hawaii, President Roosevelt had asked the unions for no-strike pledges, to be honored until the fighting was over. Every labor leader had agreed, and with the exception of two coal miners’ strikes and a threatened walkout by railroad workers—all in 1943—the pledges were kept. Even when the few wildcat strikes were counted, less than .0006 of 1 percent of total production time had been lost. By V-J Day, however, the pressure of accumulated grievances was intolerable.
The first sign of trouble came in September 1945; Ford was held up by a rash of spontaneous suppliers’ strikes. Then, as the GM walkout was followed in 1946 by wave after wave of strikes from Montauk Point to Malibu Beach, paralyzing the oil, lumber, textile, and electrical industries, newspapers began talking about the workers’ “revolt” and labor’s “rebellion.” It was hard to believe that so widespread an upheaval wasn’t planned, that it was a spontaneous backfire to the end of wartime austerity. This much was certain: the cumulative effect of the disruptions was threatening reconversion. If strikes against the public interest loomed, the President might feel it his duty to take a longer step than the appointment of impotent commissions. That is precisely what happened, and in the process Truman reached the low point of his Presidency.
His anger was understandable. No sooner had the GM strike been settled than 750,000 steelworkers banked their fires and hit the bricks. After eighty days they returned, but before the country could take a deep breath the 400,000 soft coal miners in twenty-one states left their pits. On April 18, with the miners still out, the railroads’ two key brotherhoods announced that they would withdraw all their men in thirty days. The nation’s transportation grid would stop functioning. The leaders of the two unions had long been allies of the Democratic party, and when Truman called them to the White House three days before the strike deadline and offered generous arbitration awards, he expected them to accept. Instead they shook their heads stubbornly.
“If you think I’m going to sit here and let you tie up this whole country,” he said, “you’re crazy as hell.”
“We’ve got to go through with it, Mr. President,” one of them replied. “Our men are demanding it.”
Truman rose. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to give you the gun. You’ve got just forty-eight hours—until Friday at this time—to reach a settlement. If you don’t, I’m going to take over the railroads in the name of the government.”
The forty-eight hours passed, the deadlock remained unbroken, and so, on that Friday, May 17, 1946, he signed an executive order seizing the railroads. He was now the brotherhoods’ new employer. In that role he gave them another five days of reprieve. Nothing happened. The best he could get in exchange for his leniency was a curt note from them ending: “Your offer is unacceptable.” By now it was Friday of the following week. The effect of the soft coal strike was beginning to reach the cities; to conserve the little they had, some were already cutting electricity during certain hours. A railroad strike at this juncture would have the effect of a national strike. He couldn’t allow it. At issue was less what he would do than how he did it. The method he chose was deplorable.
Summoning his cabinet, he informed it that he would appear before a joint session of Congress Saturday and ask for authority to draft all railroad men, regardless of age or situation, into the Army. His attorney general said, “Unconstitutional.” The President snapped, “We’ll draft ’em first and think about the law later.” He told his press secretary, Charles G. Ross, to clear all networks for a coast-to-coast fireside chat that same evening, and he handed him a dozen-page holograph on ruled tablet paper. “Here’s what I’m going to say,” he said tautly. “Get it typed up. I’m going to take the hide right off those sons of bitches.”
Back in his own office, Ross couldn’t believe what he was reading. It was probably the most splenetic outburst ever set down in the White House. It was also inaccurate, slanderous, and, toward the end, a dangerous incitement. He planned to tell the country that while America’s young men had “faced bullets, bombs and disease to win the victory,” the leaders of the coal and railroad unions had as much as fired “bullets in the backs of our soldiers” by holding “a gun at the head of the government.” They were all liars, he said, and he singled out John L. Lewis and “Mr. Murray and his communist friends” for intimidating “a weak-kneed Congress.” Next came the extraordinary statement:
Every single one of the strikers and their demigog [sic] leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased and drawing from four to forty times the pay of a fighting soldier.
The coda read:
Let’s give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back
to work, hang a few traitors, and make our own country safe for democracy.1 Come on, boys, let’s do the job!
It might as well have ended, “Right on!” Here was a President who proposed to demand power for the people and save democracy by stringing up labor leaders. The expletives uttered in the elegant Grosse Pointe mansions of automobile executives in darkest 1937 had scarcely been worse. Ross didn’t think Truman really wanted to encourage necktie parties, certainly not that explicitly, and Clark Clifford concurred. Together they persuaded the President to accept a different draft. Even so, it was scathing. “The crisis at Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy,” he began. “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.” He announced that he was calling Congress in session Sunday afternoon at four o’clock. If the engineers and trainmen weren’t on the job then, he would turn them over to General Hershey.
It was a strange way to run railroads, his advisers privately thought, but their chief was going through with it. Sunday afternoon arrived with no capitulation from the brotherhoods. Their leaders were locked in a Statler Hotel room at Sixteenth and K streets, slowly giving ground to a jawboning administration negotiator, when the President rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, entered the House chamber through the Speaker’s office, and mounted the podium to ask for authority permitting him, as commander in chief, “to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their own government.” In Rayburn’s office Clark Clifford kept vigil over the telephone. Five minutes after Truman had begun his speech, it rang. The negotiator said, “It’s signed!” Clifford scribbled frantically on a scrap of paper, “Mr. President, agreement signed, strike over,” and sent it to the lectern. Truman glanced at it. He looked up from his text, and smiled at the packed chamber. He said, “Gentlemen, the strike has been settled.”
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