THE PRESIDENCY: Labor’s Advocate

Harry Truman had had a fine time at Princeton’s sooth Anniversary (see EDUCATION). He had marched in the academic procession with the world’s intellectual great. Mounting the platform steps to get an LL.D. degree, he had caught his foot in the hem of his purple-trimmed academic gown. “Whups,” he said. “I forgot to pull up my dress.” The ceremonies over, he shook hands warmly. “It’s been a great day for me. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.” Then he had hurried back to Washington and delivered his veto of the labor bill.

He attacked the bill’s basic philosophy, argued that it would compound the troubles it was designed to correct: “It would require the Government, in effect, to become an unwanted participant at every bargaining table . . . involve the Government in the free process of our economic system to a degree unprecedented in peacetime.”

It would disrupt “human relations.” “It would encourage distrust, suspicion, and arbitrary attitudes . . . remove the settlement of differences from the bargaining table to courts of law . . . inevitably embittering both parties.”

It was not workable. Questions of bargaining units, representatives, union security, final strike offers would be “subject to election after election,” all supervised by the NLRB. The effect would be to create a “fiveyear backlog” of election cases, making the disputants “turn in despair from peaceful procedures to economic force.”

It was not fair. “The bill prescribes unequal penalties for the same offense. It would require the NLRB to give priority to charges against workers over related charges against employers. It would discriminate against workers by arbitrarily penalizing them for all critical strikes.”

It would “substantially” increase strikes. Failure to comply with the “highly complex and burdensome” reporting of union finance and organization could be a pretext for denying a union the right to bargain peacefully, force a strike.

Unions could be harassed to death with endless litigation. The requirement that the NLRB seek an injunction whenever a boycott or jurisdictional strike was charged by an employer was “clearly a backward step toward the old abuses of the labor injunction.”

With a glance over his shoulder at John L. Lewis, Truman pronounced the “emergency” procedure for settling nationwide strikes ineffective. The board of inquiry would be only a sounding board. After the 80-day injunction period expired, the whole problem would have to be transferred to Congress, in or out of session—thus throwing major disputes “into the political arena for disposition.” Said Truman: “This entire procedure is based on the . . . erroneous assumption . . . that strikes are called in haste as the result of inflamed passions, and that union leaders do not represent the wishes of the workers.”

Provisions banning political activity by unions and corporations: “a dangerous intrusion on free speech.” Requirement that all union officers sign an affidavit that they were not Communists: “disruptive.” In short, there was not a single thing about it that Harry Truman would admit that he liked.

Then he went on the radio with the same argument—to try to sell his case to the people.