Transcript: Chapter 19

Title Card: Part Three: Hell

NARRATOR: Twelve million GIs were coming home. They wanted jobs and houses and cars ... coffee, butter and meat on the table. After years of going without, they longed to get on with their lives. But Harry Truman knew he couldn't give them all they wanted.

ROBERT DONOVAN: You can't imagine a president having more on his shoulders that President Truman did in those days after the end of the war. The whole thing came down on his head. There had not been planning very well on post-war policy because the economists had been given to understand that the war might last until 1946, in any case, the war with Japan. All of a sudden the atomic bomb threw everything out of kilter.

NARRATOR: For four long years, Americans everywhere had worked together to fight and defeat fascism. Now that spirit of cooperation had vanished.

Labor and business were once again at each others' throats. During the war, the government had kept a tight lid on wages and prices. And in return, the unions had agreed not to strike. Now, their patriotic sacrifice over, workers walked off the job. They wanted higher wages, and they wanted Truman to hold the line on prices.

VICTOR REUTHER: The expectations of working people zoomed because they wanted to make up for all the years that were lost. You know when you keep people in a straight jacket for as many years as the war lasted you have an explosion.

NARRATOR: Truman was determined to keep prices from rising. But facing increasing pressure from businessmen, who wanted to set prices themselves, Truman wavered. He held the line on some prices and let others go up.

ALONZO HAMBY: He doesn't give the country any sense of direction. He comes to be the person that a public fed up with one strike after another blames for labor disorder.

NARRATOR: But the president was determined to prove that he could lead the nation ... that he could carry on in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. On September 6, 1945, Truman proposed an increase in the minimum wage, aid for housing, and a bill for the first pre-paid medical insurance in the nation's history. But a coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats refused him everything. The presidency, Truman wrote, was "like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed."

Christmas morning, 1945, Truman woke to find the Capitol covered in ice and snow. Bess and Margaret were in Independence, and the president missed them.

KEN HECHLER: I've never known an individual who loved his wife and his daughter and his family so deeply but they, of course, were always interested in trying to get excuses to go back to Independence.

NARRATOR: Anxious to see his family, desperate to escape the turmoil in Washington, he ordered the presidential plane to fly him home.

Editorials would call the flight foolhardy, absurd, "one of the most hazardous sentimental journeys ever undertaken." The plane, buffeted by sleet and snow, arrived an hour late.

ALONZO HAMBY: When he finally gets to the Wallace house on Delaware Street, Bess is furious at him, for taking so long to get out there, for taking such a big risk. Three days later, back in Washington, forlorn, Truman wrote Bess a letter:

"Well I'm here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least a hundred things I didn't want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I'm something the cat dragged in ... He finished the letter, but Bess never got it. He left it tucked deep inside his desk drawer.

NARRATOR: The new year brought a new wave of strikes -- 5,000 before the year was over. As a Democrat, Truman needed union support, but he had removed the lid on prices, appeasing businessmen, and the unions were angry.

The cost of almost everything skyrocketed, and working men and women demanded that their wages keep up. At one point, more than a million workers walked off the job at the same time. Truman believed that the unions were holding the country hostage, and personally betraying him.

VICTOR REUTHER: While Harry supported labor and the right to strike, he was never happy when there was a strike. He was seeing it as a small businessman and it could wreck a small business. He just didn't like strikes of any kind. And he was very frank about that.

NARRATOR: Then, in May, the railway workers went out, forcing the country to a standstill. Truman was furious. While negotiators searched for a compromise, a frustrated Truman proposed a solution no president had ever dared: he threatened to draft the striking railway workers into the army.

VICTOR REUTHER: That kind of a threat wasn't even made during the war! And, ah, I think everyone in the labor movement was quite shocked by that, but they felt, "Well, this is, ah, ah, an off-the-cuff Truman threat, but he won't carry through on that."

NARRATOR: But Truman stuck by his plan. When his attorney general questioned its constitutionality, Truman told him: "We'll draft 'em and think about the law later."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: [It] was as high-handed as -- unconstitutional a measure as imaginable. But he meant it -- because he saw the country being -- the very life of the country, at stake.

NARRATOR: Never before had there been a total nationwide rail strike: more than 17,000 passenger trains, 24,000 freight trains -- nearly all of them had stopped running. The country was paralyzed. Telegrams flooded the White House. "... zero hour is here. Who is to rule our nation?" "... why don't you go ahead and act in this national crisis?" "... less talk and more action."

ALONZO HAMBY: Truman's annoyed at criticism. He thinks people are not taking him seriously enough and maybe he's still got this sneaking suspicion to overcome that he's not quite up to the job. Truman faced every new challenge with feelings of inadequacy. This leads to a build-up of anger that erupts every once in a while, with particularly vivid consequences in the presidency.

NARRATOR: Deeply troubled, Truman sat down at his desk and drafted one of the strangest speeches ever to come from a president's pen: "I am tired of government being flouted," he wrote. "Let us give the country back to the people, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell Russia where to get off ... Come on boys, let's do the job."

CLARK CLIFFORD, White House Counsel: He called me and said, "I want to get your reaction to this speech." And I started out and ... this is the worst I ever saw. I believe it was his way of letting off steam. And I finally asked him, said, "Do you intend to give that speech?" He said, "Well, not quite this speech."

ARCHIVAL SOUND ON FILM: TRUMAN ADDRESSING CONGRESS

NARRATOR: On May 25, 1946, even while negotiations to settle the strike continued, the president went before a joint session of Congress.

TRUMAN: "This is no longer a dispute between labor and management. It has now become a strike against the government of the United States itself. ... I request the Congress immediately to authorize the president to draft into the armed forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government."

CLARK CLIFFORD: He was getting to the crescendo. And I got a call ... it said the railroad strike has been settled. And I wrote on a piece of paper and I took it to Les Biffle, the secretary. And Les then takes it up. Enormously dramatic.

ARCHIVAL SOUND-ON-FILM: TRUMAN "Word has just been received that the rail strike has been settled on terms proposed by the president."

CLARK CLIFFORD: Great cheers. Great cheers. And it was they worked out the details after and the railroads were running.

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