Railway Labor Act

The Railway Labor Act was invoked by Harry S. Truman during a 1946 railroad labor crisis to postpone a threatened strike and allow negotiations to continue. Its role in the episode was procedural but consequential: the sixty-day mediation period created time for bargaining as the prospect of a shutdown threatened to compound the effects of an ongoing coal strike.

Use in the 1946 dispute

Negotiations between railway management and twenty railway unions had dragged on for months. Labor Secretary Lewis Schwellenbach served as mediator, with limited success, while John R. Steelman, a labor specialist newly on the White House staff, assisted. Invoking the Railway Labor Act’s sixty-day mediation period, Truman ordered a delay in the strike.

The delay did not resolve the dispute. In April, negotiations broke down and a strike was set for May 18. Steelman then replaced Schwellenbach as Truman’s principal representative, and further talks appeared to be making progress. By that point, all but two of the twenty unions were prepared to reach an accommodation.

The limits of the cooling-off period

The two holdouts were the major unions, led by Alexander F. Whitney of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and Alvanley Johnston of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Their resistance carried a particular political weight for Truman: both men had supported his 1940 Senate campaign when other backing was scarce, and both had been active in the 1944 effort to make him Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate.

The episode shows the act’s practical function in this account: it gave mediation a defined interval and let negotiations proceed before a strike, but the pause could not compel agreement. With two major unions still holding out, the crisis remained unresolved even as most of the unions moved toward settlement.