This week marks the 65th anniversary of what was to become a turning point in constitutional history, President Harry S. Truman’s order seizing the nation’s steel mills during a labor dispute. Allen Pusey has an article on the episode at the ABA Journal.
The case was to result in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision later the same year in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, rebuking Truman for his lawless action. It was one of American history’s key wins for the successful assertion of a Constitutional rule of law that binds the executive branch as against claims of inherent emergency power.
But Truman’s audacious behavior was itself based on the adventures in Caesarism of earlier presidents going back at least to Woodrow Wilson, and especially those of his immediate predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among other wartime acts of seizure defended on national security rationales, Roosevelt had sent in armed troops on Dec. 27, 1944 to seize (on grounds of defiance of war labor advisories) the Chicago-based catalog and retail company Montgomery Ward. Known for its clothes and household items, Montgomery Ward was almost no one’s idea of a vital war industry. But its head, businessman Sewell Avery, had made himself a leading thorn in FDR’s side in opposition to the President’s New Deal policies. A famous photo showed Sewell Avery being carried bodily out on the street by military men while sitting in his executive chair.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/april-8-1952-president-truman-seizes-steel-mills
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