Return of the Wildcat

Before the President took to the radio, the wildcat strike of railroad switchmen and yardmen threatened to be one of the ugliest in U.S. history. It was timed cunningly, to put the best face on it. The strikers were out to delay a maximum of Christmas mail and hold up deliveries to Korea, thus win higher pay. The strike started in Chicago, where 8,500 members of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen reported "sick" and refused to work. Within 24 hours, 50,000 trainmen were idle in ten U.S. cities, and traffic was snarled on 30 of the nation's railroads.

In silent yards from St. Louis to Washington, thousands of freight cars stood on the sidings, many of them loaded with high-priority defense materials. An avalanche of Christmas packages clogged the post offices and a partial embargo was slapped on mail. The Railway Express Agency suspended service in 15 states; steel and auto companies began banking their furnaces, shutting down production lines.

The men were striking not at the railroads but at the U.S. Government, which seized the roads last August and put them under Army control, to avert just such a strike. For 21 months, the union had been pressing for 48 hours' pay for a 40-hour work week (the same increase given a million non-operating employees in 1949), while the railroads' best offer had been 44 hours' pay for 40 hours' work. Now that a wage-price freeze seemed imminent, explained union officers, the workers could wait no longer, and so they had gone out on an unauthorized strike. As usual in such cases, union leaders piously protested that they were unable to stop the strike, that their men would pay no attention to them.

Then, as suddenly as it started, the strike was over. The night the President spoke, the National Mediation Board called in the union chiefs, told them to "bring your pillows" for an all-night session. No settlement was reached then, but the men, except for a handful of bitterenders, went back to work, in the morning. They had heard the President of the U.S. say: "No matter how serious you believe your grievances are, nothing can excuse the fact that you are adding to your country's danger. I ask you, in the name of our country, to return immediately to your posts of duty."

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