Man on the Spot

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?

A Problem to Face. What the new Labor Secretary had to deal with was a problem in emotional economics, and he had no sound policy to guide him. The unions, now grown to a total membership of 14,500,000, were in no mood to slide back from the earning levels of the war years. Their methods of dealing with management had been developed to a science. Many of them had to demand wage increases and better working conditions to keep from losing their newly acquired membership; many of them, despite the efforts of top-level bosses, were unable to control rebellious and irresponsible locals.

With considerable backing from high Government places, they could (and did) argue that wages could be increased with out upping prices, that increased production efficiency would solve industry's and the public's price problems. This made utterly no economic sense to U.S. management, whose formula was that if wages go up, prices will go up, too. But management, knowing that the Government was running things, kept its head down for the most part, waited anxiously for Washington to state some kind of a policy.

Last week, one U.S. industrialist stuck his head up, and spoke his piece out loud. General Motors' usually reserved President Charles E. Wilson emphatically turned down the United Automobile Workers' demand for a 30% wage increase as "unreasonable and inflationary." He snapped: "While your union may have the power by coercion to close our plants and those of our suppliers, with or without the approval of a majority of the workmen, it is not clear that your union can or will live up to its agreements." The powerful U.A.W. branded this a "propaganda statement," coolly went on with preparations for a Government-approved strike vote Oct. 24. By the decision of U.A.W.'s strategists, G.M. would be the first motor-maker to be forced, by strike if necessary, to increase wages.

More Problems. Over & above such stalemates as this, Lew Schwellenbach had to deal with the constantly changing face of labor. The labor movement no longer had a single dominant force, like Gompers. Labor was now more highly developed and more sharply divided than ever before, represented by hundreds of interests, by dozens of leaders: the miners' scowling, independent John Lewis; C.I.O.'s thoughtful Phil Murray; A.F. of L.'s bland, dull William Green; the auto workers' alert young Walter Reuther; the longshoremen's burly Joe Ryan; the transport workers' belligerent Mike Quill; the oil workers' serious O. A. Knight; the telephone workers' clerklike Joseph Beirne; by bigshots and Joe Blows from New York to San Francisco.

Within such a variegated group, and with unions constantly fighting for position, strikes were called for many different reasons. An example: the telephone workers snarled up the nation's long-distance lines one day last week because an affiliated union had been ordered dissolved by the National Labor Relations Board, on the grounds that it was company-dominated; the workers struck to prove that they were free. Another: longshoremen struck, some because they were sick & tired of lifetime President ($20,000 a year) Joe Ryan, some because they thought no cargo sling should be loaded beyond 2,240 pounds.

The Approach. So far, what had Lew Schwellenbach done in his new job? Mainly he had busied himself with trying to knock an organization together.

To Madame Perkins' roomy office in the Labor Department, he had brought the solid backing of Harry Truman, with carte blanche to do what he wanted. Many of the powers that should have been in the Department had long since been given piecemeal to boards & bureaus like WLB and NLRB. Even if labor lay low for a while, the new Secretary would have had plenty of work to do.

In those first days he had the solid backing of labor, which welcomed its new advocate to Washington. He sat down and hurriedly began to reorganize the Government's labor functions.

Soon he had brought into the sprawling, ineffectual Department the once independent War Labor Board, now dying of natural causes; the War Manpower Commission, also moribund; the U.S. Employment Service, which Congress wants to hand back to the states. He hoped also to bring in the National Labor Relations Board.

But above all, he wanted to stiffen the U.S. Conciliation Service, make it the backbone of his Department. From Chicago he summoned handsome, energetic Regional WLB Chairman Edgar L. Warren, made him boss conciliator, began to talk of better pay and better men in the conciliation setup.

Lew Schwellenbach, believing that the labor storm was somewhere back in the hills, had other plans too. But he scarcely got them on paper when the facts of lift-went thundering past the facts of administrative doodling.

By last week he had pinned his hopes mainly on the labor-management conference--in the manner of Woodrow Wilson's Industrial Conference--to convene in Washington Nov. 5.

The Background. To solve the U.S. labor problem, Harry Truman had picked a man whose career was a curious mixture of the dull and the intriguing. As a Senator, Lew Schwellenbach had been among the most violent of the New Deal's "young Turks," but his personal life has been in every instance conservatively planned. A mild man who chews his cigars, wears horn-rimmed spectacles and sports a zippered sport jacket on the job. Schwellenbach is studious by temperament but short of temper; judicial-minded but a bear at partisan politics; labor-minded but with a sense of fairness to industry. He is also a man who did not want the job of Labor Secretary: he took it on the urging of his old Senate crony, now the President of the U.S.

Wisconsin-born, 51-year-old Lew Schwellenbach is a man with a purpose. A boyhood admirer of William Jennings Bryan, serious-minded young Lew sold newspapers and magazines on the streets of Spokane, where his family moved when he was eight, saved every cent for a college education. At the University of Washington he became a formidable debater, a campus politico, a precinct committeeman in the Democratic Party before he left the classroom. Friends recall that he became a Democrat because the state was full of Republicans; he figured he could get in on the ground floor.

The Lawyer. In 1919 he started a modest law practice, earning about $35 a month. Soon (1921) he found himself in the limelight of Seattle's famous Mahoney trunk murder. His client. James A. Mahoney, was convicted and hanged, but every crime-reading family in the Northwest knew of Lew Schwellenbach's fight to save him.

But mostly he handled labor cases. In 1923, as state commander of the American Legion, he won labor's cheers by bringing the Legion and state labor leaders to a common understanding.

Through his labor practice, Lawyer Schwellenbach became a director of the Brotherhood (of Locomotive Engineers) Bank & Trust Co. and president of the Superior Service Laundries Inc., another Brotherhood business. The laundry failed and investors lost heavily. When he ran for the Senate in 1934 (he had lost out for governor two years before), the opposition called Schwellenbach "Lewie the Laundryman."

The Senator. Nevertheless, with solid labor backing, Schwellenbach was an easy winner. At Washington he showed that Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealing policies were precisely to his liking. He became the friend and crony of Senate New Dealers such as Indiana's Sherman ("Shay") Minton, now a federal judge, Pennsylvania's Joe Guffey, Missouri's Harry Truman. It was Debater Lew Schwellenbach who led these young Turks, and the vacillating oldtime leadership, in a fight to smash the filibustering tactics of redhaired, Roosevelt-hating Huey Long.

But neither the hurly-burly of the U.S. Senate nor the Washington climate agreed with Lew Schwellenbach. Soon he began to look longingly at the bench--especially the highest bench in the U.S.

Franklin Roosevelt passed him over for the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1940 appointed him to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. There he won repute as an able, fair-minded jurist, was studiously attending to his duties when ex-crony Harry Truman handed him the toughest job in the Cabinet. Lew Schwellenbach would still rather have been a Supreme Court Justice.

The Secretary. Lew Schwellenbach's philosophy of labor is clear:

He believes in a high-wage economy. He advocates raising the minimum wage level to 65-c-: "Our high wage economy has shown that it can outproduce low-wage economics by maintaining a higher degree of productive efficiency."

He looks on himself not as the arbiter between labor and management but as an advocate of labor--although many a labor leader privately feels that Schwellenbach has too much of the judicial temperament to promote the cause of labor.

He still believes that the Labor Department, particularly through strengthening the Conciliation Service, can be made an active arm of the Government in labor relations, in contrast to the statistics-collecting agency it was under its previous Secretaries.

He hopes to achieve industrial peace on the basis of free collective bargaining--to be brought about through a labor-management agreement at the forthcoming conference. And he insists on a sense of responsibility in labor.

In Washington last week, it looked as if the months ahead would take all of Lew Schwellenbach's labor advocacy and judicial talents too. His sandy hair mussed, his cigar chewed to shreds, he found himself catapulted from one major crisis to another. The week's end saw him face to face with belligerent, threatening John Lewis, whose miners were once more on the rampage.

In the White House, worried presidential advisers were pressing Harry Truman to go to the people, make a direct appeal for an end to strikes.

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