Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen

The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen was one of the two major railroad unions whose leaders stood firm during the 1946 strike crisis, despite months of negotiations and an impending nationwide shutdown. Its president, A. F. Whitney, represented more than 200,000 trainmen in 1,145 lodges across the country. The union’s influence rested not only on its membership but on the strategic reach of the rail network: a strike could halt passenger service and freight movement from coast to coast.

Organization and Political Ties

Whitney was a veteran labor leader whom Harry S. Truman knew well and liked. Their relationship had a political history. In Truman’s 1940 Senate race, when other support was scarce, Whitney and Alvanley Johnston, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, supplied the largest share of the campaign’s money. Both leaders were also deeply involved in the 1944 effort to make Truman Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate. By 1946, those earlier acts of support made the coming dispute more than a contest between a president and organized labor: Truman was confronting allies whose help had mattered at two pivotal points in his political rise.

Whitney and Johnston were both in their seventies and described as white-haired, veteran battlers. Whitney, whom Truman knew best, headed the larger organization and therefore held particular leverage in the negotiations. Together, the two unions could shut down the railways nationwide, leaving Truman’s administration with little time and few practical alternatives as the strike deadline approached.

The 1946 Strike Crisis

Negotiations between railway management and twenty unions had continued for months over demands for higher wages. Truman used the Railway Labor Act’s sixty-day mediation period to delay a walkout, while Labor Secretary Lewis Schwellenbach and, later, John R. Steelman tried to broker an agreement. By the time the talks reached their final stage, all but two of the unions were prepared to settle. The holdouts were the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—the two organizations whose presidents had once helped Truman politically.

On May 17, with a strike scheduled for the following day, Truman summoned Whitney and Johnston to the White House. Whitney said the trainmen had to strike because their members were demanding it. Truman responded by signing an executive order directing the government to seize and operate the railroads, effective the next day. Within twenty-four hours, the two leaders agreed to postpone the walkout for five more days. The order thus forestalled an immediate shutdown, but it did not settle the wage dispute.

The postponement brought the parties back to bargaining without breaking the deadlock. On May 23, with the strike due to begin at 5:00 p.m. Washington time, Whitney and Johnston again rejected Truman’s offer. Steelman urged them that a president could not simply be told no; the union leaders replied that people paid no attention to this president anyway. Their answer exposed the gap between the authority of the office and the leverage the unions believed they possessed.

Leverage and Conflict

The Brotherhood’s position in the crisis combined a large, organized membership with control over an essential national service. Whitney’s 200,000 trainmen, distributed among more than a thousand lodges, were part of a labor force capable of stopping both passenger and freight traffic across the country. That scale made the union a central participant in a crisis whose consequences extended beyond its own members and employers.

The confrontation also reversed the political meaning of Whitney’s earlier support. The same labor leader who had helped Truman when his 1940 campaign needed money now stood against the president’s wage proposal. Truman, for his part, used federal seizure as an immediate response to the threat of a shutdown, while continuing to seek an agreement. The evidence records the strike’s postponement and the renewed breakdown in talks, but does not establish the final settlement; the episode’s documented outcome is an uneasy delay rather than a resolution.