White House Press Release, Message from President Harry S. Truman to the United States Congress

239 #680 HOLD FOR RELEASE HOLD FOR RELEASE HOLD FOR RELEASE May 25, 1946 CAUTION: The following Message to be delivered by the President before a Joint Session of the Congress, MUST BE HELD IN STRICT CONFIDENCE and no portion, synopsis or intimation is to be given out or published until delivery has begun. The same release also applies to radio broadcasters and news commentators. bas Please guard against premature publication. CHARLES G. ROSS Secretary to the President MR. PRESIDENT, MR. SPEAKER, MEMBERS OF THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: brts I desire to thank you for this privilege of appearing before you in order to urge legislation which I deem essential to the welfare of our country. For the past two days the nation has been in the grip of a railroad strike which threatens to paralyze all our industrial, agricultural, commercial, and social life. Last night I tried to point out to the American people the bleak picture which we face at home and abroad if the strike is permitted to continue. The disaster will spare one. It will bear equally upon business men, workers, farmers, and upon every citizen of the United States. Food, raw materials, fuel, shipping, housing, the public health, the public safety -- all will be dangerously affected. Hundreds of thousands of liberated people of Europe and Asia will die who could be saved if the railroads were not now tied up. As I stated last night, unless the railroads are manned by returning strikers, I shall immediately undertake to run them by the Army of the United States. vino I assure you that I do not take this action lightly. But there is no alternative. This is no longer a dispute between labor and management. It has now become a strike against the government itself. That kind of strike can never be tolerated. If allowed to. continue, government will break down. Strikes against the government must stop. I appear before you to request immediate legislation designed to help stop them. I am sure that some of you may think that I should have taken this action earlier, and that I should have made this appearance here before today. The reason that I did not do so, was that I was determined to make every possible human effort to avoid this strike against the government and to make unnecessary the kind of legisla- tion which I am about to request. For months, publicly and privately, I have been supervising and directing negotiations between the railroad operators and the twenty different railroad unions. I have been doing the same with respect to the pending labor dispute in the coal mines. Time and again I have seen the leaders of the unions and the representatives of the operators. Many hours have been spent by me personally and many days have been spent by my representatives in attempting to negotiate settlements of these disputes. (OVER)