Middle-aged U.S. citizens were dimly aware that history was repeating itself.
In 1919, a few months after World War I, the U.S. was a boiling cauldron of labor trouble. During the war, wages had been high and unionism had flourished; as the readjustment began, strikes spread over the land in fearsome fury.
President Wilson's National Industrial Conference, even with the labor statesmanship of shrewd little Samuel Gompers, simmered away to nothing on the issue of collective bargaining. By the end of 1919, 4,160,348 U.S. workers had been embroiled in 3,630 strikes.
Toil & Trouble. Last week—22 weeks after V-E day and only eight weeks after V-J day—the cauldron was seething again. In spectacular similarity to 1919, there were strikes or threatened strikes of miners, oil workers, longshoremen, telephone operators, auto workers, a serried collection of lesser union folk. A half million workers were idle.
But the scene was different in two respects: there was no labor statesman like Gompers to try to wrest order from the chaos; there was one man in the Government charged with the job of fitting labor into the most urgent reconversion to peace the U.S. had ever undertaken. The man: Labor Secretary Lewis Baxter Schwellenbach, New Dealing ex-U.S. Senator, onetime federal judge, friend of labor, great & good friend of Harry S. Truman.
Big (185 Ibs., 6 ft.) Lew Schwellenbach sat in the hottest seat in Washington; not even the craft of old Sam Gompers or the ingenuity of John L. Lewis in his best days could have made it comfortable. One of the reasons was that labor had all the weapons: the New Deal reforms had done that. Another was that Government, which had set itself up as the arbiter of labor strife, was prematurely scrapping its wartime labor-industry machinery, and so had fewer tools to work with.
Man in Trouble. By last week, after only 14 weeks in the job, Lew Schwellenbach was already on the griddle. His first big test, the oil strike, had ended in failure. C.I.O.'s oil workers had demanded a 30% wage increase; they wanted 52 hours' pay for 40 hours work—the national labor formula for making as much in peacetime as in war.
Several of the oil companies had offered 15%; it was promptly rejected. Then the new Labor Secretary had stepped in. He suggested the strikers go back to work, arbitrate later in the area between 15% and 30%. When the employers balked at this hiking of their offer, Lew Schwellenbach said, "I am very much disappointed," and took the case to the President. Harry Truman repeated a wartime formula: he seized the refineries. The workers went back to the job, technically under the employ of the U.S. Government.
Almost immediately, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, the question was raised: could Schwellenbach do the job? Was this a sample of his effectiveness? What would he do when the Government could no longer claim a military emergency to stop a strike?