Taft-Hartley Act

The Taft-Hartley Act was a labor law that restricted unions and, in the account of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, became both a major policy defeat and a recurring point of decision. Truman vetoed it in 1947, but Congress overrode him. Five years later, as a steel strike threatened production during the Korean War, he refused to invoke the Act’s eighty-day injunction provision. These episodes reveal the law’s double significance: it constrained organized labor, while also giving the president a legal instrument whose use could shift responsibility for a labor crisis without necessarily settling it.

Provisions and Political Context

Passed in June 1947 by a Republican-controlled Congress seeking to curb the power of organized labor, the Act outlawed the closed shop, made unions liable for breach of contract, prohibited union political contributions, required financial reports, and required union leaders to take a non-Communist oath. Together, these provisions subjected unions to new legal and reporting requirements and restricted some of their means of organizing and political action. The law’s passage came amid a broader contest over the place of labor in national politics, not simply a dispute over one workplace or one strike.

For Truman, the measure was also a test of how he would respond to pressure from his own party, his administration, and Congress. The Cabinet was almost unanimous in urging him to sign: only Lewis Schwellenbach and Bob Hannegan stood apart, while even John Snyder, Truman’s closest friend in the Cabinet, favored signing. Clark Clifford instead saw an opportunity for Truman to take a more forceful position in support of labor. The competing advice made the veto a decision with consequences both for policy and for the coalition Truman hoped to keep engaged in Democratic politics.

The 1947 Veto and Override

After two weeks of deliberation, Truman vetoed the bill on June 20. He regarded it as an attack on working people and believed the measure was bad policy. Thousands of letters arriving at the White House also favored a veto. His decision was therefore not presented simply as a response to pressure from labor: it joined a stated judgment about the bill with the political calculation that opposing it could help bring labor back into Democratic politics. As Margaret Truman Daniel later recalled, his presidential conscience and his instincts as a politician were not incompatible.

The veto did not prevail. Within days, Congress voted to override it, and in the House more Democrats voted against the President than with him. The episode exposed the limits of presidential opposition when Congress had the votes to enact its preference. It also sharpened the political contrast within Truman’s own administration: advisers who urged caution or accommodation had to contend with a president who believed the bill itself was wrong and who was willing to defend that judgment even when his veto was unlikely to hold.

The Act in the 1952 Steel Dispute

The Act returned to the foreground during the steel dispute of 1952, when negotiations had deadlocked and a strike threatened production needed for the Korean War and the buildup of NATO forces in Europe. Under Taft-Hartley, the government could seek an injunction delaying a strike for eighty days while an impartial study was conducted. Truman declined to use that authority. He believed the facts were already known and saw little value in postponing a settlement again. Steel workers had remained on the job voluntarily for nearly three months; asking them to continue for another eighty days without a change in pay seemed unfair to him.

His refusal also reflected his aversion to a law disliked by labor and his distrust of the steel companies’ position. He considered their proposed price increase close to profiteering and feared it would undermine his anti-inflation policy while raising the cost of defense. The choice was not a rejection of every possible price increase: Truman conceded that a modest increase might be tolerable, but rejected the industry’s demands. He also went over the head of Charles E. Wilson, who saw merit in the companies’ position, and Wilson resigned—a consequence Truman regretted.

Responsibility and Consequences

When the Supreme Court’s decision was followed by a seven-week steel strike, Congress declined to direct Truman to use Taft-Hartley. Instead, it merely requested that he invoke the Act, returning the decision and its responsibility to him. Whether an injunction would have restarted production was uncertain. Truman complained that Congress and the Court had helped create the impasse and challenged Congress to help end it. His earlier refusal to use the law thus did not settle the dispute; the prolonged stoppage brought the same question back in a form that made the president’s accountability harder to evade.

The strike eventually ended with a settlement that raised workers’ pay by 21 cents an hour and steel prices by $5.20 a ton, including 70 cents for increased freight rates. The account records those terms as the outcome of the strike, not as proof that Taft-Hartley’s injunction would or would not have produced an earlier settlement. Across the two episodes, the Act functioned both as a congressional restriction on unions and as a possible executive remedy in a labor emergency. Truman’s veto was overridden; later, with the law available to him, he chose not to use it. The contrast makes the statute’s practical force inseparable from the president’s judgment about fairness, delay, and who should bear responsibility for a conflict.