Truman Seizes Railroads: Government Intervenes to Stop Strike

Railroad workers had been threatening a national strike since the end of World War II. On August 25, 1950, President Truman ordered the Army to seize control of the nation's railroads to prevent a walkout that would have crippled the Korean War supply chain. The railroads carried ninety percent of the military's domestic freight, and a shutdown would have stranded troops, ammunition, and equipment at depots across the country while American and South Korean forces were fighting a desperate retreat in Korea. It was the second time in five years Truman had nationalized the railroads. He had done it in May 1946 under the same threat, when two rail unions walked out despite a White House settlement that the other eighteen unions had accepted. Truman went before Congress and threatened to draft the striking workers into the Army and order them back to work in uniform. A note was passed to him at the podium: the strike had been settled. He read it aloud. But the threat was not a bluff. He had already signed a draft executive order and was prepared to implement it. The 1950 seizure was handled more quietly. The Army nominally took control but left existing railroad management in place, and negotiations continued under the supervision of a presidential emergency board. The railroads were returned to private control after the unions accepted new contracts. The legal authority for these seizures rested on wartime emergency powers that had been broadly interpreted since World War I. Truman would attempt a similar seizure of the steel mills in 1952, only to be overruled by the Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer.