Over the Barrel

With Harry Truman's drastic emergency anti-strike bill before them, Senate Democrats were over the barrel. They had to choose between President and Party. There was never any doubt which choice they would make. Elections are only five months away.

Up to the White House went two of Harry Truman's friends of Senate days: Montana's brusque Burt Wheeler and Wyoming's earnest Joe O'Mahoney. Frankly and flatly they told the President that he was asking the party to wreck itself; perhaps it would be better all around if he withdrew the bill. The rail strike was over; the coal strike was close to settlement. Harry Truman was no longer hopping mad; he thought hard about the political implications of his swift decision five days before. He would consider withdrawing the measure, but he gave no promise.

Soon it was much too late. The gust of labor's reaction had grown to a hurricane of anger (see The Presidency). The President, suddenly without any labor friends, stiffened; he would not retreat.

Delaying Action. In the Senate, there were furious backstage maneuvers. Ohio's Republican Robert Taft had already cried the first "Halt!" to the President's whip-cracking proposal (TIME, June 3). Belatedly, Democrats set to work. Florida's Claude Pepper, ambitious to be the leader of Franklin Roosevelt's heirs and of the left-of-center Democrats, began a near-filibuster.

Then loyal Majority Leader Alben Barkley got busy. He tried to avoid the issue, but his move to recommit the bill to committee for "further study" was beaten. The Senate was ready to argue the bill on its merits. And when it came to merits, the proposal to draft strikers into the Army was soundly beaten, 70-to-13. Senator Taft's first lone cry had grown to a chorus.

Stalling Action. It was clear now that every section of the emergency measure was in for rough treatment. Democrats scurried again to recommit the bill, lost again by 40-to-42. Then Alben Barkley showed that the White House itself was squirming to get off the hook. He offered amendments that filed down the bill's sharp teeth in almost every section. He fought hard against others that would have put some teeth back in. The Senate scrambled Party lines, produced curious alliances and strange turnabouts. At one point Alben Barkley remarked: "To see the Senator from Florida [Pepper] coming to the rescue of the American businessman and the Senator from Colorado [conservative Republican Eugene Donald Millikin] coming to the rescue of the American workingman is something wonderful to behold."

After midnight on the fourth full day of straining and snarling, the Senate voted approval of the battered bill, 61-to-20. Although essentially changed, it was still a stringent measure calling for labor responsibility. To the extent that it gave authority to the President to negotiate wages and working conditions at seized plants, it was, like the Smith-Connally Act, an incentive to strike. But it would exact penalties against union leaders who fail to take "affirmative action" to call off a strike after Government proclamation that the industry is vital to the nation's economy (that section was revised to insure that employes would not be liable to penalties). The Senate had also removed a provision depriving strikers of seniority rights, and one which would have given to the U.S. Treasury any profits from Government operation of struck plants.

The bill went back to the House, where a move promptly developed to wait & see what the President did with the tough, permanent Case bill and its charge of political dynamite. The Democrats, as well as the President, were back on the spot.

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