This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bacher with Nick Bunker, the historian in the shadow of fear, America and the world in 1950. The B-36, 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 cold strike of the winter of 1950 that the President regards as his greatest test. We need now to

introduce several players who are lost again to the 20th first century, but were vivid in my

childhood. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Phil Murray of the steel workers, and Walter Ruther 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 in the presidential election, the unions, of course, had strongly supported Harry Truman. And he already 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 Act. Now, Taft, in 1947, had managed to get this thing through Congress. The Taft-Hartley Act. Now, Taft in 1947, had managed to get this thing through

Congress. The Taft-Hardley Act essentially was a piece of legislation designed to regulate the

labour unions to roll back some of the extra powers and privileges they'd been given under Franklin

Roosevelt and to make it essentially more difficult for them to organize, to recruit new members, and to undertake

strike action. Now, the Labor Union has obviously wanted the Taft's hardly out repealed,

but Harry Truman simply never had the votes in Congress on the Democratic Party to do that.

And so there was a degree of disappointment with Truman in the labor unions.

The problem with the coal industry was really quite an acute one. Now, at this particular stage, of course, coal was hugely important to America for heating homes, for pretty much everything, for running trains and so on and so forth. And there were 500,000 coal miners. And the leader of the unions, a man called John L. Lewis, who we mentioned, was a hugely important and a very, very dramatic kind of a figure.

He had come to prominence during the 1930s when basically he had been on the side of Franklin

Roosevelt. During the 1940s in World War II, he had fallen out with Franklin Roosevelt because

John L. Lewis didn't like the kind of wage controls that were imposed during World War II.

But he was still very, very powerful indeed. And he was absolutely determined to ensure

that coal miners

achieved a sustainable, big improvement in their wages or their benefits, particularly he wanted

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