Seventy-four years ago, on April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman went on national radio and television to announce that he had issued Executive Order 10340, authorizing the US government to seize the nation’s steel mills. Eighteen months earlier, China had entered the Korean War, UN forces there were being sorely tested, but a nationwide steel strike had been called. The EO was issued just 90 minutes before the strike was to go into effect.
Shortly thereafter, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company sued to block the seizure. Their attorneys argued before the Supreme Court on May 12-13, 1952 that the Constitution did not grant such broad powers to the President nor had Congress delegated such powers to the President. In less than three weeks, the Court ruled 6-3 against the President’ order.
The ruling was a serious blow to the Truman administration. It made the nationwide steel strike a reality and put in jeopardy the war effort. Three quarters of a century later, that ruling remains a landmark case regarding Presidential powers.
In the face of the ruling, President Truman complied. Period. He complied. He did not rail against the Court. He did not accuse them of disloyalty. He did not call out the six Justices who ruled against his administration. He did not angrily enumerate ways he would work around Congress to get what he wanted. He complied. He took seriously his oath to the Constitution, and he accepted the Court’s role in our Constitutional Democracy.
As Justice Robert Jackson deftly put it in his concurring opinion: “The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to doubt that they were creating their new Executive in his image.”
Yet President Trump continues to govern in the image of a George III: treating the US government as one of the colonies in his empire. He strides the world with abandon, from Greenland to Venezuela and now to Iran, spewing ignorant bombast, ridiculing those who disagree with him, and issuing orders that kill and maim.
Justice Jackson’s words are especially profound regarding Presidential power because, only 6 years prior to writing this opinion, he had served as the chief prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, Germany--the trials of the defeated Nazi government leaders for crimes against humanity. Few persons in the world were more keenly aware of the carnage that could be wrought when a nation turns over its government to a single person, in that case, Adolph Hitler.
Speaking of der Fuhrer, I watched Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator last week. Released in October 1940, it was Chaplin’s first all-talkie film and his most successful film financially. In the film Chaplin uses parody as a skilled surgeon might use a scalpel to eviscerate Hitler’s fascism and antisemitism.
At the very end of the film, through a series of comedic impersonations and mistaken identities, Chaplin is mistaken for Adenoid Hynkel (the film’s Hitler character) and thrown into a huge rally where Hynkel is scheduled to make a major address. Once there, Chaplin the actor becomes Chaplin the ordinary citizen devoted to democracy, and the audience of Hynkel’s devoted followers becomes you and me, watching the film.
“In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. . . . but we have lost [our] way. . . . We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
Trump has brought us a life of violence. Start with the attack on the Capitol, January 6, 2021. You saw the videos! You also saw the ICE-thugs in Minneapolis: masked, anonymous officers dragging people out of their cars and out of their homes, ignoring their Constitutional rights of due process and probable cause. Finally we have Trump’s extra-judicial killings of over one hundred crewmen in small boats in the Caribbean, his military invasion of Venezuela with its “collateral damage” of civilian deaths and now, just last week, his bombing of civilian and military sites in Iran. The President of Peace starts a war! Kindness and gentleness are not in his wheelhouse. Neither is democracy.
So resist our current wannabe king! Yes! But more than that, give us--as Chaplin pleads-- humanity and kindness and gentleness. These are the virtues required to nourish the soil from which American democracy can again grow.
