This is a series, I in the world. I'm John Batter with Nick Bunker, the historian in the

Shadow of Fear, America and the World in 1950. The B36, the super bomb, we now know as the H bomb,

Stalin, the concerns that everybody has in Washington about segregation, about the fair deal, and

what does Truman really care about at Christmas time into the new year?

Any of these weigh on his mind? No, we learn now it's the

coal strike of the winter of 1950 that the president regards his greatest

test.

We need now to introduce several players who are lost again to the 20th century, but were

vivid in my childhood.

John L. Lewis of the United Mind Workers, Phil Murray of the

steel workers, and Walter of the auto workers. Unions were extremely powerful and did Truman have the struggle

with them because of the Taft Hartley Act? Did they blame him for that?

Well, to some extent, now the situation of course was that in

1948 the presidential election, the unions of course had strongly supported

Harry Truman and he always regarded the labor unions as part of his kind of core

constituency.

Labor unions on the one hand and farmers on the other.

But indeed there was a problem that he was unable to repeal this piece of legislation,

the Taft Hartley Acts.

Now Taft, in 1947 had managed to get this thing through

Congress. The Taft-Hartley Act essentially was a piece of legislation designed

to regulate the labor unions, to roll back some of the extra powers and privileges they've been given under Franklin Roosevelt

...