Second Serving

THE CONGRESS Second Serving

Ohio's Robert A. Taft, dressed in cool seersucker, grinned from ear to ear. The Senate had had a tumultuous week, but always in command of the situation was the tall man with the flat voice and the triumphant smile. Before the week was over, Taft had forced Majority Leader Scott Lucas to throw up his hands in despair and had the Administration in complete rout. The issue in the Senate was the Taft-Hartley Act, which Harry Truman had promised to get repealed.

As the week began, the Senate settled down to voting on amendments to the Administration's Thomas bill, a slightly thickened second serving of the old Wagner Act. The key question was how to handle strikes which jeopardized the national welfare.

The Administration, heedful of its labor support in the election, wanted to bar the hated word "injunction" from any labor act. Attorney General Tom Clark had said reassuringly that the President had "inherent" powers to enjoin strikers in a national crisis; it was not necessary to spell out his powers in the law.

"Cowardly & Illogical." Taft called such a notion "cowardly, pusillanimous and illogical." His own proposition would cross the t's and dot the i's: in the event of peril to the nation, the President should be permitted to enjoin strikers and/or seize plants for a period of 60 days. Hard-pressed Majority Leader Lucas tried to win last-minute friends to the Administration's Thomas bill giving the President power to seize plants (usually a more potent weapon against management than labor). Florida's Spessard Holland wanted an amendment to do just the opposite and permit injunctions, but bar seizures. One after another, ideas were passionately debated, defeated by Taft's phalanx of Republicans and Southern Democrats. The fight was so close that Vice President Barkley flew back from the West Coast to be on hand to break any tie.

In the end, by a safe 50-40, Taft's injunction-seizure amendment won. A.F.L.'s old William Green sent Scott Lucas an angry letter telling him to fight no longer to make "the Taft bill more palatable" since it was already "absolutely unacceptable." This, said Taft, was "probably the most presumptuous statement that any individual has ever made to the Senate."

Wings of the Wind. It was the end not only of that battle but of the war. The vote on the injunction showed the way the wind was blowing and Taft rode the wind to one of the most spectacular triumphs of his career. He offered an amendment to the Thomas bill which actually was a second serving of the Taft-Hartley Act, thinned down with 27 changes.

Majority Leader Lucas, who knew when he was licked, agreed to a vote on the Taft substitute and saw it pass by 49-44. Utah's stolid, scholarly Elbert Thomas, noting sadly that only the first two lines of his bill were left when Taft got through, disowned the whole business. At his suggestion the bill was renamed the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1949, but, as old Bill Green had indicated, it would be known familiarly as the Taft bill.

Kill, Not Cure. Of Taft's 27 other changes, all designed to meet labor's criticisms, one of the most important would continue the ban on closed shops but permit employers to give unions priority on jobs, thus opening the door to the hiring halls supposedly locked up by the Taft-Hartley Act. There would still be bans on mass picketing and jurisdictional strikes, but the ban on secondary boycotts would be slightly relaxed. The new Taft bill would also require management as well as union bosses to sign non-Communist affidavits ; lift Taf t-Hartley's ban on workers voting in a plant election while they were on strike; take away the independent, sometimes overweening authority of the NLRB's general counsel.

All of this went for nothing. Lucas predicted that President Truman would veto the Taft bill if it should pass the House (as was very unlikely). Then the old Taft-Hartley Act, with all the faults in it that Taft admitted to, would remain the nation's labor law. Why? Because the Administration, for obvious political reasons, didn't want it improved; it only wanted to kill it--but couldn't.

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