Fragment of a Speech of Senator Harry S. Truman

Take our war plants, where a battle is on for control of American industry and through it control of the nation, and where those with the soundest views can win out only if they fight the hardest for them. Most management and labor want to cooperate to win the war. But there are extremists in both camps who either secretly or openly believe in a finish fight, war or no war. M-Day for them will be the day the last shot is fired overseas. They dominate the majority whose confused and tepid loyalties are no match for the passionate partisans of these alien philosophies of conflict. I know leaders of management who, though war has forced them to bargain collectively, are inwardly convinced that labor will eventually have to be taught its place by the police or the Army. I know labor leaders who take the view of a prominent leftist in a key industrial center when asked recently why he put on a show of cooperation with management when his personal allegiance was to a philos- ophy of class conflict. "Hell," he replied with unprintable emphasis, "we've got to play ball with them till we lick Hitler. But after that we'11 show them who the real enemy is. We'll talk to them the way they did in Russia - with lead." The head of a large war plant in that same city on being told this story re- fused to take it seriously, saying he didn't know what was meant by subversive \ forces, that he had always had good relations with his workers and paid a person- nel expert a four-figure salary each month to keep them in order. Two days later radical elements closed down the plant, 25,000 of his men walking out on a wild- cat strike. Perhaps those who are blind to ideological issues, and refuse to be taught, can be the most dangerous of all. is NARA TRUMAN Another major factory comes to mind where management, far from being blind