Strangers Keep Out

With the air of a Borgia guest spurning a poisoned chop, John L. Lewis rejected President Truman's proposal for a yo-day truce and a three-man fact-finding board to settle the eight-month-old coal dispute. Wrote Lewis: "The mineworkers do not wish three strangers, however well-intentioned, but necessarily ill-informed, to fix their Wages, decree their working conditions, define their living standards and limit the educational opportunities of their children."

That left Harry Truman no alternative. This week, with 372,200 now on strike, he invoked the machinery of the Taft-Hartley Act, a law which Harry Truman sometimes finds useful but also useful to hate. A three-man board of inquiry was ordered to make its report within seven days. An 80-day injunction was the next step. John L. Lewis had dared the President to do his worst: "To use the power of the state to drive men into the mines ... is involuntary servitude ... It is questionable whether one could postulate that such mass coercion would insure enthusiastic service from grateful men."

The latest battle between Lewis and the law he calls a legal blackjack was joined. Miners with hungry bellies, and the nation, facing midwinter with a perilous two-to three-week supply of coal in its bins, could only hope the struggle would be short.

This week, U.S. Conciliator Cyrus Ching asked a 16-day truce in the telephone dispute to avert a strike of 100,000 Communications Workers of America that threatened to paralyze telephone service from coast to coast.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.