THE NATION: The ’48 Line Is Drawn

President Truman threw the whole ball of fat into the fire. With a 5,500-word message which left no doubts as to which side he had picked, he vetoed the Taft-Hartley labor bill. Harry Truman had chosen the Left side of the line. He had followed the advice of Administration labor specialists and his close adviser, Clark Clifford. He had bought labor’s case, lock, stock & barrel; on many points his vehement, sharply worded message to Congress (see col. 3) squared exactly with the analysis of Lee Pressman, the C.I.O.’s able counsel, a Communist-line leftist.

Harry Truman’s action was a direct flouting of the Republican majority and of the Democratic conservatives in Congress who together had approved the bill by overwhelming majorities. His action opened the 1948 presidential campaign with a roar and a hiss.

Gamble for Labor. Harry Truman’s political motives were fairly sound: 1) he would win back labor’s support, missing in 1946; 2) he would cut the underpinning out from under Henry Wallace and collapse the third party which some dissident New Dealers were jerry-building; 3) he would make a lot of people angry, but his advisers hoped that they would be mostly the people who would not vote for him anyhow. Presumably the advisers preferred not to think of the independent voters, who might decide that Harry Truman was a man without convictions.

The President’s gamble was for support in the big cities. He did not have to worry about the Right-wing grumblings in the Solid South. The Solid South would be with him whether it liked him or not.

As his political advisers analyzed the case, on purely tactical grounds, it did not matter that his action was a reversal of policy. Twelve months ago Harry Truman had taken a merciless rawhiding from organized labor after he broke the railroad strike and proposed drastic emergency anti-strike action such as jail terms for recalcitrant labor leaders, and Army conscription of workers who balked. “Slave bill” had been labor’s name for that measure, as it was for the Taft-Hartley bill. Labor’s rallying cry then was: “Down with Truman” (TIME, June 10, 1946). Cool heads in Congress—notably Bob Taft’s—had got Harry Truman off that hook by beating his bill.

Crystal Gazer. Before the week was out he had proof that his veto and reversal would win him friends—at least for the time being. Alexander Fell Whitney, who once threatened to spend millions of his Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen’s dollars to beat Harry Truman, wired that his Brotherhood was “deeply grateful.” Said tired Phil Murray: “President Truman is a good political crystal gazer and he knows that if he is going to be a successful candidate in 1948, he has to have the support of organized labor. Whether the veto is or is not a matter of principle with him, I am not in a position to say.”

This week, after a tumultuous storm in the Senate, the veto was overridden (see The Congress). Despite a year of dodging, the Truman Administration had a new labor law in its unwilling hands. Even that looked as if it might be a good political break to Truman Democrats. They had their cake and they could eat it, too. They were freed from responsibility. It was on the Republicans; if the law brought on labor strife, or failed to curb it, it would be the G.O.P.’s doing.

But more than political fortunes were at stake in the President’s action. The Republican majority, put on its fighting mettle by the President’s veto of both labor and tax bills, was less than ever in a frame of mind to accept Harry Truman’s pronouncement that any piece of legislation was good, or bad for the country. The battle of Congress v. President, Republican v. Democrat, which would grow increasingly bitter, might stalemate some legislation still to be completed. The nation’s foreign policy, already shaky on its bipartisan foundation, was an immediate case in point.