Word: hartleys
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...President, unhorsed in the Senate battle over civil rights, came a cropper again, this time in the fight in the House to overthrow the Taft-Hartley Act. Harried from every side, his congressional forces were trapped between a softened version of the Taft-Hartley Act and the Administration's moderately toughened version of the Wagner...
...Speaker Sam Rayburn made one last effort to break the impasse. Knowing that the Administration's bill was a lost cause, he and his aides had cooked up five compromises which they hoped would attract votes. The provisions, with a few minor changes, were lifted from the Taft-Hartley Act itself. The most important of them was the one giving the President authority to use the weapon of injunction in national-emergency strikes...
...Truman added. Labor leaders also gagged at the idea of accepting the hated injunction. Nevertheless, they quietly passed the word to their friends in Congress to support Sam's substitute. They were even ready to accept the injunction if they could get rid of most of the Taft-Hartley Act. That is, the majority of them were. John Lewis, who had had to pay through the nose for defying injunctions, was dead set against any compromise...
Speaker Rayburn had relinquished the chair and was prowling around the House, perching here & there, nervous and anxious. Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to defend the softened version of the Taft-Hartley Act (the Wood bill), which was backed by the Republican-Southern coalition. Then Rayburn's compromise package was introduced. Sam himself stepped out on the floor. Eloquently, somewhat defensively, he appealed for votes for his measure: "Let us not have one sector of Americans known as labor . . . believe that we would press down upon their brow a crown of thorns...
...best hopes for a new labor bill now rest with the Congressional committees which must frame new bills: The Democratic majorities have one more chance to compromise intelligently. If the Taft-Hartley Law remains in effect, many small inequities will continue--not to mention big ones like the closed shop ban. The National Labor Relations Board will have to continue operating under a law parts of which both labor and management have attacked violently; it will be forced to go on throwing out the cases of unions whose officers object to non-communist affidavits or the required finance reports...