THE ECONOMY: Behind the Fog

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The United Steelworkers' President David J. McDonald strode into the elevator of Washington's Sheraton-Carlton Hotel one day last week and growled: "I can tell you one man who isn't going to be President."

"Who's that?" asked a reporter who was in the elevator.

"Adlai Stevenson," replied McDonald.

What had Democrat Stevenson done to offend? He had aggrieved Democrat McDonald by speaking out forthrightly on the steel strike that had dragged on for 116 days until interrupted by a Taft-Hartley injunction, and that threatens to erupt again when the So-day injunction runs out in late January.

Public Disgust. The steel strike, said Adlai Stevenson in a speech to the Institute of Life Insurance in Manhattan, marks "the end of an era. Everybody is agreed that this cannot happen again, that the public interest is the paramount interest, and that irresponsible private power is an intolerable danger to our beleaguered society." To keep it from happening again, Stevenson proposed that Congress arm the President with an arsenal of new antistrike weapons, ranging from boards empowered to make settlement recommendations (present law bars Taft-Hartley boards of inquiry from offering recommendations) to compulsory arbitration if the two sides proved unwilling to "exercise responsibility consonant with their power."

Conservative Columnist David Lawrence, no admirer of Adlai Stevenson, called the proposal "the most significant utterance this year on labor issues by any political figure." Stevenson, said Lawrence, had voiced the U.S. public's deep disgust at the "irresponsible use of economic power." But despite public disgust, despite President Eisenhower's stern admonition before he departed for Asia that "America needs a settlement now," despite the danger than an aroused public might prod Congress into passing drastic antistrike legislation, Dave McDonald and the steel industry's negotiator, Conrad Cooper, broke off negotiations at midweek in another display of stubborn disregard for the public interest. McDonald airily demanded that the steel industry return to company-by-company bargaining (the big steel companies set up an industry bargaining committee in 1956), a demand that nobody took very seriously.

In the Red. Stubbornness and irresponsibility on both sides have blurred the issues in the U.S.'s most momentous labor-management clash since the 1930s, and the Eisenhower Administration has contributed to the blurring. Within itself, the Administration is divided on the steel strike. Labor Secretary James Mitchell favors a settlement on almost any terms, played a behind-scenes role in California Steelmaker Edgar Kaiser's defection from steel's solid front to make a separate settlement (TIME, Nov. 9). Opposed to Mitchell are White House economic counselors led by Presidential Adviser Raymond Saulnier, who insist that the U.S. public has a stake in seeing to it that the settlement terms are non-inflationary.*Largely because of this split, the Administration has failed to explain clearly enough what the strike is about.