When strikes had paralysed General Motors, the oil, lumber, textile and electrical industries, and newspapers had started talking about the workers’ “revolt” and labour’s “rebellion,” President Truman had reached the low point of his Presidency. When the GM strike had been settled and then for 750,000 steelworkers to bank their furnaces and walk out to be followed by 400,000 soft coal miners it seemed like the end of the line. When the railroads’ two key brotherhoods announced that they would withdraw their men in thirty days President Truman had had enough. He called the leaders of the railroad unions to the White House and offered them generous arbitration awards. When they refused the offer he looked at them and said, “If you think I’m going to sit here and let you tie up the whole country you’re crazy as hell.”
When they still wouldn’t budge he stood up. “All right. I’m going to give you the gun. You’ve got forty-eight hours—until this time on Friday—to reach a settlement. If you don’t, I’m gonna take over the railroads in the name of the government.”
“That won’t get the men back to work, Mr. President.”
“Then you’ll all be drafted, regardless of age or situation, into the army. Mark my words, my friends, I mean every word of it.”
Two hours later when the President informed his cabinet of what he intended to do his attorney general shrugged and said simply, “Unconstitutional.” The President said curtly, “We’ll draft ’em first and think about the law afterwards.”
When he told his press secretary to clear the networks for a fireside chat he handed him a draft of his speech for copying and said, “Get it typed up. I’m gonna take the hide right off those sons of bitches.”
The President’s opening words of his fire-side chat were less demotic but even more biting. “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.” He went on to announce that he was calling Congress in session on Sunday afternoon at four o’clock. If the engineers and trainmen were not on the job by then, he would turn them over to General Hershey.
Sunday afternoon came with no surrender from the union bosses who were closeted in a room in the Statler Hotel with a hard-faced government negotiator.
The President entered the House chamber through the Speaker’s office and the piece of paper in his hand as he mounted the podium was asking for authority as the commander in chief, “to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their own government.”
The President was five minutes into his speech when the phone went in Sam Rayburn’s office and a few moments later a scrap of paper was shoved in front of the President. He glanced at it, looked up and smiled around the chamber. “Gentlemen, the strike has been settled.”
The ovation was the prelude to passing the legislation he asked for on the spot. The angry president of the railwaymen announced that every penny of the union’s 47 million dollar funds would be spent defeating Truman in the election in 1948. And John L. Lewis said, “You can’t mine coal with bayonets.” But Truman was in the mood to bring to an end the mine leader’s arrogance and irresponsibility.
Sixty-two per cent of the country’s electricity and 55 per cent of its industrial power was based on coal and there was no point in getting the railwaymen back to work if the miners’ strike meant that there was no coal for the locomotives. The miners’ strike was, quite openly, a challenge to the government by one man. The confrontation was inevitable.
But President Truman had a natural instinct for knowing what the average American was thinking. Mainly because his thoughts were much the same. And instinct told him that John L. Lewis had lost this battle way back in 1943, when, as he put it, “Lewis had called two strikes in wartime just to satisfy his ego.” Lewis had called out 400,000 men from the mines with no thought for the GIs fighting in Europe and the Pacific. And Truman remembered too that scathing editorial in the Middle East edition of Stars and Stripes that ended with “Speaking for the American soldier—John L. Lewis—damn your coal-black soul.”
The strike was in its sixth week already and the President was more subtle in his moves this time. With the Secretary of the Interior now the coal industry’s boss, the President sidetracked Lewis, and the miners were offered most of their demands and an agreed contract was signed. Then the overwhelming ego of Lewis betrayed him. Raising a trivial issue over vacation pay he repudiated the contract and declared that every clause would have to be renegotiated.
The government lawyers told the President that the only recourse available was a court injunction against the union and that was not possible because of the Norris-La Guardia and Wagner Acts. The President ordered them to go ahead all the same because those Acts, he decreed, only covered private employers, not the government.
In the weeks before the court hearing the unions closed down again on Lewis’s edict of “No contract, no work.” Trains ran out of coal and electric power was down to a few hours a day in many States.
In court Judge T. Alan Goldsborough cited Lewis for contempt of court and two days later ruled that “The defendants, John L. Lewis and the Union of Mine Workers of America, have beyond a reasonable doubt committed and continue to commit a civil and criminal contempt of this Court.” The fine would be 3,510,000 dollars. Lewis’s lawyers had to restrain him from haranguing the judge. It was the largest fine in labour history and Lewis was immediately hit by the government with every available legal weapon
