Adlai in Wonderland

September 15, 1952

Mr. Truman has never been one to let a mere fact get in the way of his campaign oratory. “It was the Republicans,” he said on Labor Day, who “put across the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.” This is unjust to his Democratic colleagues. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed by a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress and even passed over Mr. Truman’s veto by a majority of Democrats in the House. The President has been insisting that Taft-Hartley is a slave-labor act and a union-busting act; and yet, after five years of that act, he inconsistently boasted on Labor Day that union membership had grown from less than 3,000,000 in 1933 to a record 16,000,000 now.

Candidate Stevenson was more subtle—but considerably more confusing. He began his Labor Day speech by telling the union leaders that he is no captive of theirs, that “I intend to do exactly what I think right”—but then it turned out, by miraculous coincidence, that what he thought right was exactly what the union leaders were insisting on. What he thought right did not quite coincide, however, with what he thought right just before his nomination. Then he wanted only “modification” of Taft-Hartley; now he calls for outright repeal.

He wants the act repealed, as far as I can make out, so that it can be passed all over again under a different name. Most of his “five general principles” and other ideas are already embodied in the existing Taft-Hartley Act; wherever they are not, it is Stevenson who is wrong. He piously declares that “we cannot tolerate shutdowns which threaten our national safety.” But then he wants to deprive even the government of the right to request an injunction—the only weapon that the Taft-Hartley law provides for at least postponing a nationwide strike that threatens our safety. Even Mr. Truman, in vetoing the Case bill on June 11, 1946, told Congress: “Injunctions requested by the government itself and designed to restrain strikes against the government in . . . a condition of national emergency are, to my mind, an essential element of government authority.”

Though he is supposed to be a lawyer, Stevenson thinks that Congress passed the Norris-La Guardia Act in 1932 “to prohibit the labor injunction.” This is untrue. The Norris-La Guardia Act, although it narrowly restricts the conditions, sanctions injunctions against union “fraud or violence.”

What remedy, then, does Stevenson propose in place of the injunction? He won’t say. “I have no miracle-drug solution for this problem.” In short, he has no solution at all. But what he actually proposes is that the President be given in advance his “choice” of practically unlimited powers against employers. Among these he specifies all the powers that failed so disastrously in the steel strike when Mr. Truman used them legally or by usurpation—government “recommendation of settlement terms”; “arbitration” (presumably compulsory), and “seizure” of companies that don’t accept a union-dominated government’s “settlement terms.” And then Stevenson blandly describes this law—which would allow the President to seize the employer’s property and impose settlement terms—as a law that would “keep these cases out of the White House” and “leave the obligation to settle these disputes where it belongs—and that’s with the parties!” This makes the arguments in Alice in Wonderland sound comparatively sane.

The real defects and contradictions in our present labor laws the Democratic candidate did not even discuss. The employer is prohibited from firing a man for joining a union, but he is permitted, encouraged, and even forced to fire a man for not joining a union. This one-sided denial of individual rights to workers Stevenson passes over in complete silence. And he passes over in complete silence, also, the notorious fact that the reason industrywide unions have the power “to stop the national economy” unless their terms are met is precisely because the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act legally compels the employer to recognize and bargain with such unions.