Alexander F. Whitney

Alexander F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, was both a major labor power broker and an old political ally of Harry S. Truman. During the 1946 railway crisis, their connection became a source of particular strain: Whitney had helped Truman when his political prospects were bleak, but as a union leader he refused the President’s pressure to avert a strike. Their break turned a national labor confrontation into a test of whether prior loyalty could outweigh the demands of a leader’s constituency—and, ultimately, a threat to Truman’s political future.

Union Power and Political Influence

Whitney was one of two veteran labor leaders whose decisions could bring the nation’s rail system to a halt. In his seventies, white-haired and a longtime union battler, he represented more than 200,000 trainmen organized in 1,145 lodges nationwide. His influence was matched in a different railway union by Alvanley Johnston, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, who represented 80,000 locomotive engineers. Together, the two unions could stop passenger and freight traffic from coast to coast, giving their leaders leverage at a moment when the country was already struggling with a coal strike.

Whitney’s power was not confined to the workplace. He had backed Truman in the 1940 Senate race, when Truman was in what the book calls his “hour of greatest need” and few others were willing to help. Whitney and Johnston supplied the lion’s share of the campaign money. They also took an active part in the 1944 effort to make Truman Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate. The later collision was therefore not a dispute between strangers: Truman faced a leader who had materially supported his rise, and Whitney faced a President whose political career he had helped advance.

The 1946 Railway Strike Confrontation

Negotiations between railway management and twenty unions had continued for months. Invoking the Railway Labor Act’s sixty-day mediation period, Truman had delayed a strike scheduled for May 18. John R. Steelman, who replaced Lewis Schwellenbach as the President’s principal representative in the talks, made progress with most of the unions. The two holdouts, however, were the largest and most consequential: Whitney’s Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and Johnston’s Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

On May 17, with only a day left before the threatened walkout, Truman summoned Whitney and Johnston to his office. Whitney said the strike had to proceed because “Our men are demanding it.” Truman answered, “Well then, I’m going to give you the gun,” and signed an executive order directing the government to seize and operate the railroads beginning the next day. The order showed the formal force available to the President, but it did not settle the dispute. Less than twenty-four hours later, the two leaders agreed to postpone the strike for five more days.

The postponement brought no durable agreement. Ed Flynn came to Washington to try to persuade Whitney and Johnston, without success. Truman then ordered the coal mines seized and proposed an eighteen-and-a-half-cent wage increase for railway workers, exceeding the recommendation of his own emergency fact-finding board. Whitney and Johnston still viewed the offer unfavorably. On May 23, the day the strike was scheduled to begin at 5:00 p.m. Washington time, they again refused Truman’s proposal as John Steelman moved between the union leaders and management representatives, who had been assigned separate rooms for bargaining. Steelman insisted that they could not simply say no to a President; the union leaders replied that, in their view, nobody paid attention to this President anyway.

From Ally to Political Opponent

The railway dispute widened beyond negotiations over wages and timing. The House passed a bill to draft the strikers into military service by 306 votes to 13, but the Senate rejected it, ultimately by 70 to 13. Whitney made the proposal a direct political indictment of Truman. At a labor rally in Madison Square Park, he declared that Truman had signed his own political death warrant and exclaimed, “You can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk.” The crowd’s placards called for people to break with Truman, while speakers and demonstrators denounced him as a strikebreaker, a Fascist, and a traitor to the union movement.

Whitney’s opposition carried a specific electoral threat. Vowing revenge, he said he would spend the last dollar in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen’s treasury to defeat Truman if the President dared to seek reelection in 1948. That threat made visible the cost of the break: the union leader who had helped sustain Truman’s 1940 campaign now promised to direct organized labor’s resources against him. The conflict also reveals the divided obligations behind Whitney’s actions. His earlier support for Truman was real, but when the strike came, he presented the demand as coming from the trainmen he represented, not as a matter he could resolve through personal allegiance.

Significance in Truman’s Political Story

Whitney’s role gives the railway crisis a personal dimension without reducing it to a quarrel between two men. His union’s reach gave him the capacity to disrupt the nation’s transportation system; his connection to Truman made that capacity politically charged. Truman’s seizure order demonstrated that presidential authority could be used to take control of the railroads, yet Whitney and Johnston still negotiated the timing of the strike, rejected successive proposals, and answered presidential pressure in public. The sequence distinguishes legal power from the ability to secure cooperation.

The episode also marked a reversal in the relationship between political assistance and political accountability. Whitney had backed Truman at moments when other supporters were scarce and had helped place him on the national ticket. But those past services did not prevent a showdown when Truman confronted the union leaders over a strike. Whitney’s threat to use the union treasury against Truman in 1948 carried their conflict beyond the immediate emergency: the old ally became a declared opponent, and the machinery that had once helped Truman could now be turned against him.