THE TRUMAN PRESIDENCY ★^923other key industries— walked off their jobs, demanding wage increases. The
strike of 750,000 steelworkers represented the largest single walkout in Ameri-
can history to that date. Even Hollywood studios shut down because of a strike
of actors and other employees of the movie industry that lasted for the better
part of a year. One historian calls this period “the closest thing to a national
general strike in industry in the twentieth century.”
President Truman feared the strikes would seriously disrupt the economy.
When railroad workers stopped work and set up picket lines, the infuriated
president prepared a speech in which he threatened to draft them all into
the army and “hang a few traitors”—language toned down by his advisers.
The walkout soon ended, as did a coal strike after the Truman administration
secured a court order requiring the miners to return to work. To resolve other
strikes, Truman appointed federal “ fact- finding boards,” which generally rec-
ommended wage increases, although not enough to restore workers’ purchas-
ing power to wartime levels.
The Republican Resurgence
In the congressional elections of 1946, large numbers of middle- class voters,
alarmed by the labor turmoil, voted Republican. Many workers, disappointed
by Truman’s policies, stayed at home. This was a lethal combination for the
Democratic Party. For the first time since the 1920s, Republicans swept to con-
trol of both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, in the face of vigorous opposition
from southern employers and public officials and the reluctance of many white
workers to join interracial labor unions, Operation Dixie failed to unionize the
South or dent the political control of conservative Democrats in the region.
The election of 1946 ensured that a conservative coalition of Republicans and
southern Democrats would continue to dominate Congress.
Congress turned aside Truman’s Fair Deal program. It enacted tax cuts for
wealthy Americans and, over the president’s veto, in 1947 passed the Ta ft-
Hartley Act, which sought to reverse some of the gains made by organized
labor in the past decade. The measure authorized the president to suspend
strikes by ordering an eighty- day “ cooling- off period,” and it banned sympathy
strikes and secondary boycotts (labor actions directed not at an employer but at
those who did business with him). It outlawed the closed shop, which required
a worker to be a union member when taking up a job, and authorized states to
pass “ right- to- work” laws, prohibiting other forms of compulsory union mem-
bership. It also forced union officials to swear that they were not communists.
While hardly a “ slave- labor bill,” as the AFL and CIO called it, the Taft- Hartley
Act made it considerably more difficult to bring unorganized workers into
unions. Over time, as population and capital investment shifted to states with
What major domestic policy initiatives did Truman undertake?