They gave him an ovation, and when he went on anyhow to ask for the legislation permitting him to draft future strikers jeopardizing the public welfare, the House whooped it through on the spot. Still, this was far from his finest hour. At a stroke he had alienated the labor movement, the American Civil Liberties Union, the liberal community, and every thoughtful conservative who had read the constitution the President had sworn to uphold. In the Senate Robert A. Taft, no champion of the unions, used his influence to table the bill; the proposal, he declared, “offends not only the constitution, but every basic principle for which the American Republic was established. Strikes cannot be prohibited without interfering with the basic freedom essential to our form of government.” The embittered president of the railroad trainmen announced that every penny in his brotherhood’s 47-million-dollar treasury would be spent defeating Truman in 1948. In New York the CIO stigmatized the President as the country’s “number one strikebreaker,” and from his aerie in the hills of West Virginia, John L. Lewis cried, “You can’t mine coal with bayonets.”
Maybe not, but the aroused vigilante in the White House was going to try. Lewis was courting disaster. Truman could survive the strikebreaker brand; he would later win labor back with his vetos of the anti-union Case and Taft-Hartley bills. What he could not tolerate was the mine leader’s arrogance and growing irresponsibility. The President came close to the truth when he said Lewis had “called two strikes in wartime to satisfy his ego.” He had marched his 400,000 men in and out of the mines with no thought for the GIs overseas, and they knew it; in 1943 an editorial in the Middle Eastern edition of Stars and Stripes had ended, “Speaking for the American soldier—John L. Lewis, damn your coal-black soul.” The Democratic party owed the old thespian nothing. He hadn’t supported the ticket for ten years. The way was clear, therefore, for a confrontation between two bristling leaders. The very nature of the strike invited federal intervention. The American economy was still based on coal. It provided 62 percent of the country’s electricity and 55 percent of its industrial power. Putting the railroad men back to work would have been useless if the miners didn’t go too; nineteen out of every twenty locomotives in the United States burned coal.
Truman was so determined to stare down Lewis that he hadn’t waited until the brotherhoods were tamed. Five days before they yielded at the Statler he had signed an executive order taking over the mines. Lewis’s strike was then in its sixth week, and at first it appeared that this effort to intimidate him would be as ill-starred as all the others. “Truman doubts the legality of our demands?” he bellowed at a newspaperman. “What does Truman know about the legality of anything?” The President knew enough to be cagier this time. Putting his Secretary of the Interior in management’s seat, he approved a compromise giving the United Mine Workers most of their demands. (The employers, who would have to pay, raged helplessly; in this struggle, reason was as irrelevant as constitutionality.) Then the President waited for the UMW chief to make his next move. Lewis’s swaggering and blustering were sure signs that he was looking for an opening. When he found none, he created one. Raising a trivial point over vacation pay, he repudiated the contract in October and declared that he was reopening negotiations on all its clauses. He wanted “portal-to-portal” pay for his men (payment for travel time from the mine gate to the pithead). Truman told the Interior Department to stand fast while he, like Lewis, found a pretext for action. To their consternation, his New Deal lawyers discovered that there was nothing except the despised anti-union court injunction, which had been outlawed in the Norris-La Guardia and Wagner acts.
Truman wasn’t disconcerted. He decreed that the law covered private employers, not the government. It was a novel interpretation, but now that the duel was in the open neither man could retire without loss of face. Even as the court papers were being served on Lewis in his UMW headquarters at Fifteenth and I streets, his lieutenants were passing the watchword in the mines: “No contract, no work.” While he holed up in his Alexandria mansion, the mines were shut down one by one. In ten days cities were again cutting back electric power, industrial plants were shutting down, and locomotives and empty coal cars were being stranded on sidings. By then the struggle was approaching its climax. UMW lawyers had exhausted their repertoire of stratagems. On Thursday, November 21, Federal District Judge T. Alan Goldsborough cited Lewis for contempt of court, and on Tuesday, November 26, Goldsborough ruled that “The defendants, John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America, have beyond a reasonable doubt committed and continue to commit a civil and criminal contempt of this Court.” The fine was $3,510,000.
Lewis sat down, flabbergasted. It was the heaviest fine in labor history, and he saw himself facing a limited number of options. He couldn’t choose jail, as Debs and Gompers had, because the government had dropped the charge of criminal contempt. He could include the judge among his enemies, and he seemed to be pondering that when he croaked, “Sir, I have already been adjudged in contempt of your court—” but he broke off there. His lawyers were dragging him back to his seat. A judge who would hand down multimillion-dollar fines was dangerous. Appeal was inevitable, but that would only delay the decision. Meanwhile the defendant had become entangled in court orders, writs, citations, briefs, and restraining orders. He had lost sight of his adversary. Where was Harry Truman?
The President had wisely withheld comment from the moment Lewis had knocked his own chip off his own shoulder. Yet a presidential triumph was far from a certainty. The initiative was still with Lewis, and there was only one sure way to wrench it from him. His power base must be eliminated or threatened. If both men remained mute while his lawyers threw up a new screen of legal motions, the national crisis would pass from the inconceivable to the unendurable. The miners might dislike Lewis, and some of them hated him, but they were convinced, almost to a man, that they needed his protection. The pits and tunnels would remain vacant until the men were told to return by him or by an equally persuasive voice. Perhaps the President’s voice was strong enough. Harry Truman decided to try. That Saturday morning, the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Charlie Ross told the press that the President would broadcast a direct appeal to the miners in the evening, asking them to save their country by ignoring their chief and going back to work at once.
It was a breathtaking gamble, with presidential prestige at hazard, but it succeeded. Lewis had been stared down. At four o’clock he called a press conference at Fifteenth and I. Declaring that the Supreme Court deliberations “should be free from public pressure superinduced by the hysteria of an economic crisis,” he said, “all mines in all districts will resume production of coal immediately…. Each member is directed to return to work immediately under the wages and conditions of employment on or before November, 1946.” With those lines he tottered off the stage and into oblivion. He would never again hold the country in ransom, and his defeat, in becoming Truman’s victory, made the President feel like a President, possibly for the first time. “I can tell you, there was a big difference in the Old Man from then on,” Clark Clifford later told Cabell Phillips of the New York Times. “He was his own boss at last.” Another presidential aide put it more succinctly. “When Harry walked back to the mansion,” he said, “you could hear his balls clank.”
***
Emil Mazey, Walter Reuther’s right-hand man, was not available to the automobile workers’ union that winter. He didn’t even know what was happening in Detroit. As a draftee and leader of demobilization riots in Manila, Sergeant Mazey was deprived of mail and visitors and kept under constant watch. The surveillance didn’t stop the rioting. Demonstrations intensified and spread to Tokyo, Guam, China, Calcutta, Hawaii, London, and Vienna; to Le Havre, Paris, and Frankfort. By spring the disturbances had weakened U.S. military morale, damaged American prestige abroad, and dealt the Army a heavy blow.
Morale was already at its lowest since Pearl Harbor. That was why soldiers were so susceptible to skillful agitators. On V-J Day de
mobilization points had been frozen; service after that date won no credits toward an early discharge. Some inequities were unavoidable under the point system anyway, and the unexpectedly early end of the Pacific war increased them. Instead of transporting high-point outfits home in the summer of 1945, the Army had found it convenient to discharge low-point troops who had never seen a ship. The most abrasive issue, however, had nothing to do with mustering out. It was a universal grievance of enlisted men who felt that they were being systematically mistreated by their superiors.
Military precedence lay athwart the thrust of egalitarianism, twentieth-century America’s most powerful social force. Under the best of circumstances enlisted men were anti-authoritarian, and with the coming of peace and the return to barracks life, gaps between the haves and have-nots had widened. Hanson W. Baldwin, military editor of the New York Times and no enemy of privilege, concluded afterward that there had been “solid grounds for real discontent.” Generals, he noted, were literally feasting on caviar and champagne while the troops were fed C rations. Junior officers laid claim to the plushest quarters, the prettiest Red Cross girls, the most comfortable seats at the finest movies. The best buildings were reserved for their clubs, where GI bartenders served them choice liquors until their GI chauffeurs put them to bed. Some commanding officers retained unneeded men merely to defer relinquishment of their own temporary wartime ranks, and the accumulation of legitimate complaints was heightened by inexcusable ignorance and insensitivity at the highest levels, notably on the part of Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson.
Nevertheless there was something disgraceful about the Army’s near-mutiny of 1946. Since the previous September officers had been discharging nearly a million men a month while cutting a soldier’s point requirement to 50 and then to 38. The Navy suffered fewer embarrassing episodes despite greater grievances, and the Marine Corps avoided demonstrations by simply issuing an order forbidding them. The Army riots would have been less shameful if the rioters had been the combat veterans who had won the war, but they weren’t. By Christmas of 1945 most of Bill Mauldin’s Willies and Joes were home and out of uniform.
The first man to cast doubt on the Army’s demobilization policy was, of all people, General MacArthur. On September 17, 1945, without consulting anyone in Washington, he called a press conference to announce that the occupation force in Japan would be cut from 400,000 to 200,000 within six months. Questioned by reporters, President Truman said feebly that though he hadn’t been told, he was glad the general didn’t need as many troops as he had thought. Dean Acheson commented that the size of MacArthur’s force would be determined by policy makers, not the general, and instantly ran afoul of MacArthur’s champions in Congress. (Had the administration been able to see into the future, Acheson later wrote, “we might have recognized this skirmish as the beginning of a struggle leading to relief of General MacArthur from his command on April 11, 1951.”) If a five-star general could cut his garrison in half, restless soldiers reasoned, generals with fewer stars could, too.
The exact opposite happened. On January 6, 1946, the Daily Pacifican, a soldier’s newspaper, reported that Army demobilization schedules had been cut from 800,000 men a month to 300,000 because of the difficulty in obtaining replacements. The replacement shortage, the Pacifican charged in a front-page appeal to President Truman, was of the Army’s own making; General Hershey had cut his monthly draft quota from 88,000 to 21,000. Maintenance of large contingents in Manila was particularly vexing. As the Pacifican saw it, the only legitimate use of citizen soldiers in peacetime was to occupy conquered countries, and Filipinos weren’t enemies: they were to become independent on July 1. Combat training for GIs, which had been resumed to take their minds off worries, had increased them; rumor had it that they would be used to hunt down Communist guerrillas in the Philippines or on the Chinese mainland. To cap it all, Secretary Patterson told an interviewer on Guam that he was “surprised” to hear of the V-J Day five-month-old point freeze.
With Mazey were hundreds of other CIO workers who had been blooded on Detroit picket lines in the late 1930s. In a matter of hours they had mimeographed leaflets, distributed them, and formed a cavalcade of fifteen trucks and jeeps. Honking horns and flourishing such signs as WHEN DO WE GO HOME? and WE DON’T LIKE THIS DEAL, they paused at each camp to pick up volunteers. Altogether there were perhaps 150 of them in that first procession. After hearing a few speeches and passing the hat for a protest ad in the New York Times, they broke up, their fire apparently spent. But the incident had attracted the attention of the press, which served as a megaphone for grievances. Almost overnight, posts on Luzon were transformed into rebellious communes. The crowd that began to form the following evening in front of Manila city hall grew to 2,500, and its mood was ugly. This time the hat was returned to the speakers with a surplus, and supplementary cables were sent to Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. The word was passed all over the island—write your congressman. With time on their hands and nothing better to do, 18,000 soldiers did it. Lieutenant General W. D. Styer, commander of the armed forces in the Western Pacific, then committed a major strategic error. The best way to calm the mob, he concluded, was to let it hear the soothing sound of his voice over a public address system in Manila’s huge Rizal Stadium. All he achieved was a tenfold increase in the crowd’s size. The Times put the story on page one: 20,000 MANILA GI’S BOO GENERAL; URGE CONGRESS TO SPEED SAILINGS.
A chain reaction had begun. As radio broadcasts and newspapers described the behavior of Styer’s men, sympathetic demonstrations were staged on bases around the world. In Calcutta instigators demanded the liquidation of the China-Burma-India war theater. Secretary Patterson tried to explain the situation to occupation troops in Yokohama and was heckled. In Tokyo men paraded under signs reading, SERVICE, YEA, BUT SERFDOM NEVER and JAPS GO HOME, WHY NOT US? Calling “Eleanor! Eleanor! Eleanor!” thousands of London-based soldiers gathered beneath Mrs. Roosevelt’s window in Claridge’s Hotel and asked her to find out why transport room was found for GI brides and not them. (She appeared briefly, smiled, and told them she would try to find out.) The Paris reaction began early one afternoon when soldiers tacked up crudely lettered red-crayoned signs on the bulletin boards of both the Columbia and Rainbow Corner Red Cross Clubs: BACK UP YOUR MANILA BUDDIES. MEETING TONITE 8:30 ARC DE TRIOMPHE. At the Place d’Etoile polite gendarmes explained that because the arch was a French shrine, the rally must be held elsewhere. One group headed for the Trocadéro, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, yelling “Scabs!” at soldiers who refused to join them. The other column marched four abreast down the Champs Elysées to the Place de la Concorde, brandishing magnesium flares and chanting: “We wanna go home! We wanna go home! We wanna go home! We wanna go home….”
The most offensive of the Wanna-Go-Home riots, as they were thereafter known, was in Germany. The Paris demonstrators at least knew how to keep step. In Frankfort four thousand GIs turned into a mindless, howling rabble. Agitators shinnied up lampposts and waved the horde on toward the I. G. Farben Building with flashlights. Turned back there by the points of MP bayonets, the protesters shouted derisively that General Joseph T. McNarney was too cowardly to confront them. McNarney was in Berlin at the time. On his return he became one of the few commanding officers to call ringleaders in and talk to them plainly. Eisenhower had referred all inquiries to his theater commanders, vaguely telling the press that he was in favor of sending home any soldiers “for whom there is no military need,” and Wedemeyer all but apologized to China-Burma-India men for red tape that delayed their discharges. McNarney explained American commitments in Europe. Then he said, “We will get you home as quickly as we possibly can, but if your congressman gets the impression from his mailbag that what the public wants is ‘to get the boys home and to hell with international commitments,’ then you’ll go home regardless of what happens to… chores in Europe that the nation accepted.”
The general was sarcastic. In reality he had hit upon th
e key to the worldwide campaign. Already Capitol Hill was being swamped with complaints bearing APO return addresses. And that was only the beginning. In the second wave, parents, wives, and sweethearts joined the din with what Undersecretary of War Kenneth C. Royall called “that philosophy of ‘me and my son John’ that’s flooding our congressmen with a deluge of criticism of demobilization.” One senator received over two hundred pairs of baby bootees with “I miss my daddy” notes. The campaign was a test of congressional courage, and Congress flunked. “Every father, every mother, every child want their loved one to be with them at home,” Robert F. Rich of Pennsylvania said. He added: “Remember, there is no place like home.” John Rankin introduced a measure which would release every soldier who had been in uniform eighteen months, had dependents, or wanted to go to school—in other words, every draftee. Representative Mike Mansfield of Montana told reporters that he saw “no reason why the men overseas cannot be sent home and discharged as quickly as possible.” Senators Tom Connally (Democrat) and Arthur Vandenberg (Republican) issued a bipartisan statement pledging support of the rebels, and a Senate subcommittee flew to the Philippines to take testimony from Sergeant Mazey and other instigators.
The New York Times, horrified, expressed dismay at the impact of the “breakdown of Army discipline” on foreign spectators. It pointed out that the demonstrators “are not yet civilians; they are still soldiers. What they have done,” the editorial said bluntly, “is indefensible, and they must be made to understand this.” In the Times view, Congress was guilty of abetting “a bring-the-boys-home campaign which disregards our international responsibilities and encourages such exhibitions as those in Manila and Le Havre.”
From the administration’s standpoint, the timing of the disturbances could scarcely have been worse. President Truman was trying to rally congressional approval for his plan to integrate all three armed forces into a single Department of Defense. Senior officers were touchy enough as it was. The brass already distrusted the White House. If the administration let them down in this new matter, the entire reorganization plan might be jeopardized. Therefore the President announced that after reviewing Army and Navy procedures he was “convinced that the services are carrying out demobilization with commendable efficiency and with justice to all concerned.” All he achieved was a switch in congressional targets, from the War and Navy departments to himself.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 61