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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past rediscovered.

It had been a bad few weeks for the man in the Oval Office.

Congress wouldn't cooperate with him.

He couldn't bend the government to his very strong will.

Backed into a corner, he seemed to have only one option left, declare a national emergency.

So in came the TV cameras, and the president took his case directly to the American people

through their televisions. My fellow Americans, he said, tonight our country faces a grave danger. These are not normal times.

These are times of crisis. It was April 8, 1952. The president was Harry S. Truman.

So, what was the national crisis?

Well, the Korean conflict was well underway.

And back home, there was a big-time dispute between steel companies and their workers

that threatened to deny U.S. troops the weapons

and tanks they needed to fight over in Korea.

So on TV that night, Truman explained why he had just directed his Secretary of Commerce

to seize control of the country's steel mills, a truly extraordinary action. I would not, he said,

be faithful to my responsibilities as president if I did not use every effort to keep this from

happening. Truman's actions 67 years ago sparked a fiery constitutional dispute that rocketed all the way to the Supreme Court.

And now, as President Trump considers claiming similar emergency powers to build his long, promised border wall,

scholars are looking back at Truman's gambit and the legal precedent it created.

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