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 ultimately 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.
When at a few minutes past four Truman walked in, a grim look on his face, the whole room resounded with the biggest ovation he had yet received as President, while in Sam Rayburn’s office close by, Clifford was frantically on the phone again with Steelman, who now said a settlement was “awful close.” Steelman had an agreement on paper in longhand, but it had still to be typed and signed. “He said they had verbally agreed to the points which they had in writing,” Clifford remembered, “but there was no knowing whether they would finally sign.” He would stay by the phone, Clifford told Steelman.
“For the past two days the Nation has been in the grip of a railroad strike which threatens to paralyze all our industrial, agricultural, commercial and social life…. The disaster will spare no one,” Truman said from the rostrum. Strikes against the government must stop. The Congress and the President of the United States must work together—“and we must work fast.”
In the packed press gallery behind him, reporters were writing furiously. “Spotlights blaze, cameras whir, his Missouri voice covers America,” wrote Richard Strout of The New Republic.
He was calling, Truman said, for “temporary emergency” legislation “to authorize the President to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government.” The audience roared its approval.
At that moment, Les Biffle, Secretary of the Senate, hurried into the chamber and handed Truman a slip of red paper, a note from Clifford. Truman glanced at it, then looked up.
“Word has just been received,” he said, “that the railroad strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the President!”
The whole Congress rose to cheer and applaud, everyone on both sides of the aisle. The sudden interruption by Biffle, the red note in Truman’s hand, the surprise of his announcement had all been like something in a movie. (Some in the audience suspected the entire scene had been concocted for effect, which it had not.) Yet Truman himself made no attempt at dramatics. His grim expression never changed and having come that far in the speech, he continued on, delivering the rest of it as he would have anyway.
The President, who of late had seemed so often bewildered and inadequate, had proved himself extremely tough and decisive when the chips were down, and the reaction of the Congress—and of the country by and large—was instantaneous approval. His “bold action” was praised in the press and by leaders in both parties. He had “grown in national stature,” said the Atlanta Constitution. He had “met magnificently one of the greatest tests of courage ever to face an American President,” declared the Philadelphia Record. Harry Truman, wrote Felix Belair in The New York Times, had shown
he could be tough—plenty tough—when the occasion demanded. He was no less “the average guy” on the streetcar…or driving with the family on Sunday such as he had always been pictured. But just now he was also a man who could rise to the occasion.
The House of Representatives gave him all he wanted, passing the bill to draft the strikers by a margin of 306 to 13, after a debate of less than two hours that same evening.
The Senate, however, refused to be stampeded, largely at the insistence of Senator Taft, who was outraged by the bill, certain that it violated every principle of American jurisprudence. And there were concerns among liberals on the Democratic side as well. Claude Pepper said he would rather give up his seat in the Senate than support such a measure.
A. F. Whitney declared that Truman had signed his own political death warrant. “You can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk,” Whitney exclaimed at a cheering labor rally in New York’s Madison Square Park. Placards in the crowd said: “Down with Truman,” “Break with Truman.” He was denounced as the country’s number one strikebreaker, called a Fascist, a traitor to the union movement. Later, vowing revenge, Whitney claimed he would spend the last dollar in the treasury of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen to defeat Harry Truman, should he dare run for reelection in 1948.
Prominent liberals were thunderstruck. Sidney Hillman, who was on his deathbed, spoke out against Truman as he never had. “Draft men who strike in peacetime, into the armed services!” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic. “Is this Russia or Germany?” To Truman, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote politely that “there must not be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peacetime situation, into a military way of thinking.”
Ultimately, the proposal to draft the strikers was defeated in the Senate, 70 to 13, the initial cries of Taft and Pepper having grown to a chorus.
But the strike was over, the trains were running again. To the great majority of Americans, Truman had exhibited exactly the kind of backbone they expected of a President. To most it seemed he had been left no other choice. He had done only what he had to do, and shown at last that somebody was in charge.
“I was the servant of 150 million people of the United States,” Truman himself would later say, “and I had to do the job even if I lost my political career.” He had no regrets.
Days later the coal strike, too, ended. On May 29, John L. Lewis met with the coal operators at the White House to sign a new contract. Lewis, it appeared, would be a problem no more, having achieved all he wished for his miners: an 18½ cent-per-hour raise, $100 in vacation pay, a guaranteed five-day workweek, and the 5 cent royalty on every ton of coal mined to go into a welfare fund. While other labor leaders continued the uproar over Truman, the habitually orotund Lewis at last, amazingly, kept silent.
For Truman himself the crisis had provided a chance finally to stand his ground, even take the offensive, none of which did his spirits any harm. Also, importantly, the crisis marked the emergence of Clark Clifford. In another few weeks, Clifford took Sam Rosenman’s former position as legal counsel to the President, and would remain at Truman’s side almost constantly.
IV
The lift that came from settlement of the rail and coal strikes was shortlived for Truman, and whatever confidence he had gained with the American people by his actions, he seemed incapable of holding onto it. As June came and went, as the summer wore on, criticism in the press, dissatisfaction on the Hill continued. Little went right, and with Bess and Margaret back in Independence through the hot months, Truman found himself beset again by loneliness. In August, when Congress left town for its first real break since before the war, and he attempted a vacation of his own, it got off in the wrong direction at first and ended in a storm. Then, in September, he stepped into a silly tangle with Henry Wallace that made him look more of a bumbler than ever in his career. As George Elsey was to remark years later, “Nothing about the Wallace affair was well done. It was miserably handled from one end to the other.”
On June 6, without warning, Truman announced two major appointments, expecting wide approval. To replace Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who had died in April, he had picked Fred Vinson, the Secretary of the Treasury. To fill Vinson’s place, he chose John Snyder. He thought they were exceptionally able men, and trusted both implicitly. Yet to many they were singularly uninspiring choices and seemed to have been made in haste, an impression Truman had only himself to blame for. Asked the day of the announcement when had he made up his mind on Vinson, he snapped, “About an hour and a half ago.”
As Secretary of the Treasury, Vinson had seemed very suitably cast—solid, knowledgeable, with a broad understanding of government machinery. Truman, who had not known Vinson well in the Senate, had since come to admire him greatly, considered him a “devoted and undemonstrative patriot” with, as Truman would write, “a sense of personal and political loyalty seldom found among the top men in Washington.” But Vinson was known more for political sagacity than judicial brilliance, and the choice of the colorless Snyder as his replacement seemed only to underscore the charge of “government by crony.” Portrayed in the press as a “dour little St. Louis banker,” Snyder seemed hardly adequate for the second highest ranking position in the Cabinet. To liberals and former New Dealers especially, Snyder was a pathetic choice. Unadmiring reporters described him as a “repressed” man, with a “pinched, unhappy look,” who “occasionally tries to loosen up with a hefty intake of bourbon or by telling a dirty story.” Among fiscal conservatives, the best that could be said for Snyder was that he might prove cautious. In fact, he was quite cautious, quite conservative, a “plugger” who worked long hours often seven days a week. His appearance to the contrary, he was also a man of much personal warmth, and though lacking in imagination, he had, like Vinson, a great deal of common sense—a quality Truman had often found wanting in more brilliant or charming men. In Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” the poem still neatly folded in his wallet, was the line affirming that it was “the common sense of most”—the common sense of ordinary humanity—which would ultimately “hold a fretful realm in awe.”
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