Truman (85 page)

When, at a Cabinet meeting, Truman asked for constructive suggestions On how to handle the strike situation, nobody could offer any.

On May 17, with only a day remaining before the scheduled railroad walkout, Truman summoned Whitney and Johnston to his office. Whitney said they had to go through with the strike. “Our men are demanding it.”

“Well then,” Truman replied, hunching forward in his chair, “I’m going to give you the gun.” As they watched, he signed an executive order for the government to seize and operate the railroads, effective the next day.

Not quite twenty-four hours later, on Saturday the 18th, the two labor leaders agreed to postpone the strike for another five days.

On Sunday with apprehensions growing on all sides, Truman took off on a flying visit to Kansas City for the announced purpose of receiving an honorary degree from little William Jewell College at nearby Liberty, Missouri. He also wanted to see his mother. With the help of friends, he and Vivian had finally managed to buy back from the county all of the old homeplace on Blue Ridge, the farm she so loved, even though, because of her deteriorating health, she would be unable to move back there. (She and Mary Jane would continue on in the small yellow frame bungalow in Grandview, where they had been living since 1940.)

In conversation with friends in Missouri, Truman kept referring to Washington derisively as “that place,” and to the graduating class at William Jewell he said leadership wasn’t worth much without some followers. What the country needed was people who were willing to work, he said, speaking without notes.

A White House reporter who made the trip, Felix Belair, Jr., of
The New York Times,
asked Truman’s physician, Colonel Graham, if perhaps the President was working too hard. Graham agreed, adding with emphasis that there was also nothing anyone could do about it. “That’s the way he is,” said Graham. “I try using a little applied psychology, but you know the President has a pretty good psychology of his own. He does the best he can by his job and he knows there’s no use worrying about it after that.”

But two old Truman friends from Independence, Mayor Roger Sermon and Henry Bundschu, a dry goods merchant and neighbor of the Trumans, warned Belair to watch out for the President’s temper. He might be “an easygoing fellow,” but he was also no one to trifle with. “When the ‘feuding blood’ of his Kentucky ancestors was allowed to get the upper hand, Harry Truman was a man to be avoided,” Belair wrote after talking with Sermon and Bundschu, who said they would prefer three or four ordinary men for enemies to one like Harry.

To Belair, the President was becoming an increasingly fascinating subject, not at all the simple man he had supposed but a “complex personality,” something others had known for a long time and would talk of again. In Independence forty years later one of Truman’s nephews, J. C. Truman, Vivian’s second son, would be asked by a visitor how he would describe his uncle Harry, beyond what everyone knew. After a long pause, he answered, “Complicated!”

On Tuesday, day three of the five-day postponement of the railway strike, Ed Flynn of the Bronx flew in to Washington to see if he could help sway Whitney and Johnston, but without success. Nothing seemed to work. No compromise appeared likely. On Wednesday, Truman ordered seizure of the coal mines and proposed an 18½ cent raise for the rail workers—again more than his own emergency fact-finding board had recommended—and still Whitney and Johnston “viewed the proposal unfavorably.!” By Thursday, May 23, the day the strike was scheduled to begin at 5:00
P.M.
, Washington time, the situation at the White House had become extremely tense.

The two union leaders were summoned one more time, along with officials representing management, and assigned to different rooms to resume bargaining, John Steelman moving back and forth between them. When Whitney and Johnston again refused Truman’s offer, Steelman told them they simply couldn’t say no to a President, insisting that that was just not done. Their response was that nobody paid attention to this President anyway.

“This was the fifth day of the postponement of the railroad strike and…[it] turned into one of the wildest days at the White House since the end of the war,” wrote Eben Ayers in his diary:

At about four in the afternoon, with only an hour to go before the strike would begin, Truman went out to the South Lawn to host a reception for nearly nine hundred convalescent veterans from Walter Reed and other nearby military hospitals, among, whom were amputees and others so severely disabled that they moved forward in the receiving line on crutches and in wheelchairs, attended by nurses in starched white uniforms. Such garden parties for hospitalized veterans had been an annual May tradition at the White House since 1919, but were discontinued during the war. Truman, some weeks earlier, had asked that the tradition be revived.

The spring afternoon was ideal, with bright sunshine, blue sky, and flowers in bloom. Several of the Cabinet were present with their wives, as were Admiral Nimitz and General Bradley. The Marine Band played. Strawberry ice cream and lemon punch were served, and for more than an hour Truman stood warmly greeting his guests, who were all in uniform and wearing their campaign ribbons.

Always moved by the sight of wounded veterans, Truman was struck especially now by the contrast between these respectful young men who had made such sacrifices for their country, and who were so plainly pleased to meet him, and the two contentious old union bosses inside. He kept smiling, chatting, patting the men on the back, asking where they were from, making every effort to see that they had a good time.

Only once was he seen glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the Cabinet Room, where the long French windows, under the colonnade, stood open to the air. Rumors were passed of progress in the negotiations. A soldier in a wheelchair said, “Draft all the strikers—all of them.” Another claimed he wouldn’t be President for anything. Truman drank a glass of punch. When a Strauss waltz was played, he walked over beside the band to sit and eat a heaping dish of ice cream, tapping his foot in time to the music. By then it was well past five and the strike was on.

There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill. Of 24,000 freight trains normally in operation, fewer than 300 ran; of 175,000 passenger trains, all of 100 moved. Rush-hour commuters were stranded in New York and Chicago. In the West, coast-to-coast “streamliners” stopped and disgorged passengers at tiny way stations in the middle of the desert.

Newsreel camera crews rushed to film hundreds of freight cars standing motionless in railyards as far as the eye could see, loaded coal cars standing idle, and baggage piled head high in big-city stations.

There were reports of fortunes in lettuce and fruit rotting in Kansas and California. Officials in Washington announced that in Europe hundreds of thousands of people would starve if grain shipments were held up as much as two weeks. Panic buying for food and gasoline broke out everywhere in the country. No one, no community was untouched.

Telegrams flooding the White House came from every quarter and minced no words:

Truman had had all he could take. Alone at his desk upstairs at the White House, on a small, cheap ruled tablet of the kind schoolchildren use, he began to write. It was the draft of a speech, a speech he had no intention of giving, but that he needed desperately to get off his chest. It was another of his “longhand spasms,” and the worst.

He filled seven pages. All the pent-up fury of the past weeks, the feelings evoked by the wounded men on the South Lawn, his sense of betrayal at the hands of old friends Whitney and Johnston—and the sense that they were flouting the highest office, not to say belittling him personally—all his stubborn pride, came spewing forth in one of the most intemperate documents ever written by an American President. It was as though somewhere deep within this normally fair-minded, self-controlled, naturally warmhearted man a raw, ugly, old native strain persisted, like the cry of a frontier lynch mob, and had to be released. Probably he wrote in a state of exhaustion late that night. Possibly whiskey played a part. But no one knows. The “speech” could also have been written in the cold light of the next morning, which, if so, makes it still more appalling.

Under his constitutional powers as President, he would call for volunteers to support the Constitution, he said at the start. Then, after a few pages of praise for the Constitution and for the decisive role America had played in winning the war, he continued with what was on his mind: