Happily we still live in a country where a private citizen may look a President in the eye and tell him he was wrong, but actually it is not the President of the United States to whom I make answer.

It is Harry S. Truman, the man, who last night so far transgressed his oath of office, so far abused the power which is temporarily his, that he must now stand and take it.

I shall not let my deep respect for the office which he holds stop me from denouncing his shocking distortions of fact. Nor shall I permit the honor of his title to blind the American people from the enormity of what he has done.

He has seized the steel plants of the nation, the private property of one million people, most of whom now hear the sound of my voice. This he has j done without the slightest shadow of legal right. No law passed by the Congress gave him this power. He knows this and speaks of general authority conferred upon him by the Constitution.

But I say, my friends, that the Constitution was adopted by our forefathers to prevent tyranny, not to create it. When he asked the Congress for power to seize private property they said no. They gave him instead the Taft-Hartley Act which he now spurns and the power which they denied him he now has seized.

For whom has he done this? Let no American be misled. This evil deed, without precedent in American history, discharges a political debt to the C.I.O. [Committee for Industrial Organization]. Phil Murray [president of the United Steel workers of America] now gives Harry S. Truman a receipt marked "paid in full."...

And heartsick as many Americans were last night at what their President said, they were pained also at what he did not say. He was purporting to tell the facts, yet he withheld from the public one significant fact. He made no mention of the closed shop. He dealt with money but omitted principle....

Has liberty sunk so low in Harry Truman's scale of values that he no longer thinks it worth mentioning? Or should he in all candor have taken the opportunity last night, talking as he was to every fireside in America, to make clear whether or not he had seized the steel plants in order to compel workers to join a union against their will?. . .

This is America at the crossroads. To the housewife this means that the whole giddy spiral of inflation starts again. To freedom loving people it means the closed shop and compulsory unionism. To the business man it is the threat of nationalization. A sad chapter has been written in American | history, which must be erased.

source: From a radio and television broadcast by Clarence Randall, April 9, 1952. Excerpts from text used with permission of Mary Randall Gilkey.