5) Truman and postwar reconstruction

• Truman feared rising unemployment when 12 million demobilised veterans returned and wartime production ceased


  Factories switched to consumer goods to meet the pent-up demand from veterans with wartime savings
• Roosevelt's Bill of Rights of 1944


  • Offered veterans 52 weeks unemployment pay and loans for education, homes or businesses
• The post-war baby-boom


  Increased demand for new homes and consumer goods
• The combination of consumer goods shortages (demand exceeded supply), federal government budget deficits, and the weakening of Roosevelt's Office of Price Administration (OPA) by congressional conservatives who sought the restoration of market forces

  Led to inflation
• Truman's failure to win congressional support for the OPA


  Led many to blame him for the inflation, which hit 25 per cent in 1945-46
• Workers sought pay rises to combat inflation

  1. Labour unions staged widespread strikes in 1946, eg 800,000 steelworkers struck in January and 400,000 miners in April

  2. When railroad workers threatened a strike, Truman tried to mediate but union leaders said nobody paid much attention to this President

  3. The public demanded toughness, but just as Truman threatened to conscript railroad workers the House of Representatives approved but the Senate did not, the strike ended

  4. After another miners' strike in winter 1906, the Truman administration defeated the miners' union in court-a rare success
• Taft-Hartley Act (1947)


  • Unions were liable for breach of contract
  • Joining a union could not be a condition of employment
  • The President could order an 80-day cooling-off period before strikes
• In April 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, a threatened steelworkers' strike


  1. Jeopardised munitions production

  2. Truman seized control of the steel mills after lawyers and the Chief Justice assured him it was legal

  3. Many Americans disapproved and the Supreme Court ruled that Truman had exceeded his executive authority

  4. The strike eventually ended (on the terms Truman had suggested months before)

  5. His attempts to steer a middle course between employers and unions had pleased no one
• Truman asked Congress for reforming legislation

  • Free health care
  • Full employment
  • Improvements in education
  • Federally funded low-cost housing
  • Slum clearance
  • Higher and more widely available Social Security payments
  • A higher minimum wage from $0.40 per hour to $0.75
  • Subsidies for agriculture
  • Public works programmes
  • Civil rights legislation
• Congress rejected most of his proposed Fair Deal legislation, he vetoed 250 congressional bills and Congress overrode twelve of his vetoes
• Congress felt presidential power had increased dangerously under Roosevelt and sought to regain the initiative


  Congress, tired of expensive New Deal-style policies, resented Truman seeking even more power than Roosevelt when there was no national emergency
• In 1952, the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since 1928
• Liberal Democrats criticised Truman's failure to get reforming legislation passed


  Conservative Southern Democrats considered Truman too liberal on unions and civil rights
• Truman obtained some legislative successes, including: the Full Employment Act (1946), Social Security was extended to 10 million more Americans (1950), the minimum wage was raised to $0.75 per hour (1950), the Housing Act (1949) promised 810,000 federally subsidised public housing units for low-income Americans (156,000 were built by 1953)