[Baltimore Sun] Kevin Dayhoff: 1952 steel crisis took a toll on President Harry S. Truman
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It was 10:30 in the evening on April 8, 1952, that President Harry S. Truman announced on national TV and radio that he had seized control of the U.S. steel industry. The nation was in the grips of the Korean War and the steel industry was mired in a bitter, seemingly intractable labor dispute.
It was then that the president issued Executive Order 10340 that ordered Charles W. Sawyer, the secretary of commerce, to seize the nation’s steel mills to ensure continued production. After threatening to strike for months, on the next day, April 9, 560,000 steel workers walked off the job. The strike lasted 53 days. It ended on July 24, 1952. The strike impaired the war effort in Korea and resulted in substantial economic, political and social costs to an already crippled post-World War II economy.
On June 2, 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, that President Truman’s assertion of authority was too vague and not authorized by Congress.
According to a series of New York Times articles published in July 1952, before the strike was over 1.5 million workers lost their jobs, and 80% of the country’s small defense contractors closed. Yet, most historians consider the strike to be a significant victory for the steelworkers’ union, in spite of the fact, according to multiple historic accounts, “The strike was settled on essentially the same terms offered to the employers at the start of the strike.”
According to information found on the “Online Archive of California,” website, the “end of World War II was followed by an uneasy transition from war to a peacetime economy. President Truman was faced with the renewal of labor disputes that had remained in a dormant state during the war years, severe shortages in housing and consumer products, and widespread dissatisfaction with inflation, which at one point rose by 6% in a single month. In this polarized environment, a wave of strikes destabilized major industries, and Truman’s response to them was generally seen as ineffective.
“In the spring of 1946, a national railway strike, which had never happened in the country, led virtually all passengers and their luggage to remain at a standstill for over a month. When the railway workers … turned down a proposed settlement, Truman seized control of the railways and threatened to deal with the issue of striking workers with use of the armed forces. In the 1950s the administration of President Truman experienced additional strikes that provoked a number of national crises.”
It is in this context that one can understand that President Truman found refuge in Key West throughout much of his time in office. President Truman, a Democrat, first arrived at the Key West White House, known as the “Little White House,” in November 1946, after he had been in office 19 months, and just days after the majority party in Congress had changed in the mid-term elections. In his case, Republicans reclaimed Congress for the first time since the administration of Republican President Herbert Hoover, the man who had immediately preceded President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat.
Harry Truman (1884-1972) served from 1945-1953 as the 33rd president of the United States. Truman nationalized the steel industry on April 8, 1952. Two months later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he lacked the authority. (Truman Library/Courtesy photo)
In February 2007, I visited President Truman’s Key West White House, and interviewed the executive director of the Little White House Museum, Robert J. Wolz, at great length. Wolz explained that in 1946 Truman was exhausted. He came to Key West “to recover from a cold” at the suggestion of Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz,
Throughout the remainder of his presidency, Truman worked in the Key West White House for 175 days, or 10% of his time in office, during 11 visits.
Meanwhile, the 1952 Steel crisis helps explain why President Truman declined to seek another term in 1952. At the time he had an approval rating of 22%.
According to an April 5, 2009, article in the New York Times, in June 1953, six months after leaving the White House, President Truman and his wife, “packed their Chrysler New Yorker with 11 suitcases and started driving east” from their home in western Missouri.
“When he retired, 10 years before the Kennedy assassination, former presidents had no Secret Service protection. Nor were they entitled to pensions. Truman’s only income was an Army pension of $111.96 a month…”
In that “first summer after leaving the White House, Truman and his wife, Bess, did what ordinary Americans do every summer: they took a vacation. For 19 days they drove around the country, from their home in Independence, Missouri, to the East Coast and back again….
“In Frostburg, Md., the Trumans stopped at the Princess Restaurant, where they splurged on chicken dinners (70 cents each). … A little farther down the road in Frederick, Truman stopped at Carroll Kehne’s Gulf station for gas and a Coke. When Kehne asked him to give his mechanic, Albert Kefauver, a hard time for being a Republican, Truman declined.
“On the drive home, a state trooper on the Pennsylvania Turnpike pulled Truman over for careless driving. … In 1953, The Times said of Harry and Bess Truman’s trip: ‘It is … as it should be that an American ex-president, accompanied only by his wife, with no retinue and no ceremony, can drive his own car around the country and no one think it unusual. It cheers one up, somehow.’”
Happy spring.
Kevin Dayhoff writes from Westminster. His Time Flies column appears every Sunday. Email him at [email protected].
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