Governing Crisis: Emergency Coordination, Conflict, and the Boundaries of American Economic Governance

Bradley Castiglia, University of Michigan

This paper examines the 1952 steel strike and Truman’s failed attempt to nationalize the American steel industry as a critical moment defining the boundaries of American economic governance and the institutional responsibility for stabilizing industrial production in moments of crisis. Although typically addressed as a constitutional dispute over presidential authority, the episode also exposed a conflict between two distinct repertoires of state action—one forged through successive wartime mobilization, authorizing centralized coordination of strategic production via the executive branch, and the other, institutionalized through New Deal and postwar labor legislation, structuring domestic industrial conflict around collective bargaining and corporatist procedure. When negotiations between the United Steelworkers and major steel firms collapsed in early 1952 amid the Korean War, defense officials interpreted the strike as a threat to military readiness requiring immediate state intervention. Industry leaders, union officials, and the courts, however, continued to view the dispute as an ordinary bargaining impasse governed by federal labor statute. The crisis thus turned on competing efforts to classify the situation and determine which governance repertoire should apply. The Supreme Court’s decision in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer rejected the use of emergency powers by the executive in the domestic industrial sphere. In doing so, the Court helped stabilize a dual architecture of economic governance that paired discretionary executive authority in foreign crises with procedural regulation of domestic labor relations. By treating the steel seizure episode as a constitutive moment in the redefinition of regulatory capacity and jurisdictional responsibility within the American state, specifically over which institutions are authorized to manage economic crises, this paper shows how the Supreme Court’s uneasy resolution of this governance conflict reshaped long-term trajectories of state capacity and industrial regulation, structuring the constraints under which policymakers later confronted the steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 55. Warfare, Welfare States, and State-Corporation Relations