Momentous Meeting

Belatedly--and somewhat reluctantly --Harry Truman had pinned all his hopes on the Labor-Management Conference. As the 36 delegates settled down to work this week in the paneled rooms of the Labor Department, they carried a burden of responsibility and trust such as had seldom been placed by a President of the U.S. on a group of private citizens.

As the conference opened, Harry Truman stood up before the delegates, a grave, grey man in a dark blue suit, and read gravely and greyly from his black looseleaf notebook: "[The eyes of the American people] are turned here in the expectation that you will furnish a broad and permanent foundation for industrial peace and progress. "Our country is worried about our industrial relations. It has a right to be. That worry is reflected in the halls of the Congress in the form of all kinds of proposed legislation. You have it in your power to stop that worry. I have supreme confidence in your ability to find a democratic way to compose industrial difficulties."

No Magic. Harry Truman had not always taken the conference so seriously. Through late summer and early fall, while it was being planned, he left all the details to Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace and Labor Secretary Lew Schwellenbach. He concentrated his own efforts on finding the magic formula which everybody seemed to think the Government could provide for the wage-price problem.

But last week that effort ended in failure. The President decided that there was no formula--at least not within what he considers the limits of the democratic process. In a fireside chat he told the nation it would have to solve the problem itself through collective bargaining (see below). Soon he discovered that he was deep in another kind of failure--the nation was remarkably cool toward the kind of self-reliance he advised.

Almost nobody liked the speech. Labor leaders seemed to feel that the President had betrayed them by refusing to come out flatly for a 30% pay rise. Businessmen seemed to feel that the President had betrayed them by suggesting any rise at all while still insisting that price ceilings be maintained. The whole nation seemed to be so used to taking orders from Washington that it preferred another (to be obeyed grumblingly and with great protestations of personal ruin) to any kind of freedom of choice.

No Fiat. As the returns came in, disappointed Harry Truman decided that the Labor-Management Conference was his last bulwark against industrial strife. He summoned the delegates to the White House; all week long they trooped in to listen to a dead-serious plea for help.

Some of the delegates, after talking to the President, believed that they really could help. Others were openly cynical. Said President R. J. Thomas of the United Auto Workers: "I'm open-minded, but I wouldn't go so far as to say something will be worked out by the conference." Said Vice President James Tanham of the Texas Co.: "The oil industry is suffering from the fruits of collective bargaining right now."

As to the President's mood, nobody could be sure whether he was hopeful or just desperate. But one thing was certain: the wage-price problem was going to be threshed out in the conference, or in similar meetings of management and labor in each industry, or it would have to be fought out the expensive way, in strikes. Harry Truman's Administration would not try to solve it by fiat.

No Clue. Pondering the problem, the President had mulled over a report by Office of War Mobilization & Reconversion economists, chiefly old-line New Dealers, maintaining that business could keep up its profit level in 1946 after granting 24% wage rises (10% made possible by repeal of the excess-profits tax, 9.5% by a reduction of wartime upgrading of workers, 4.5% by reduction of overtime pay as industry in general returns to a 40-hour week). He had seen a Commerce Department report to Henry Wallace stating that industry in general could raise wages an average of 10%, that many manufacturers could stand a 15% rise without upping prices.

If the President found either of these propositions convincing, he gave no outright indication. The only clue to what he might consider a fair solution came from his recommendation to Congress last week that Federal white-collar employes get a 20% raise. And the cases of Government and industry as employers are so vastly different that this might have been no clue at all.

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