In U.S. history, many of the most drastic incursions on private property rights have sprung from the conjunction of a threatened work stoppage, owing to a union-management dispute, and the government's desire to expedite a war-production program. Such a conjunction underlay the government's nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph lines, and the Smith & Wesson Company during World War I and the railroads, the coal mines, the midwest trucking operators, and many other companies during World War II. The conjunction occurred again during the Korean War, but on that occasion the government failed in its attempt to seize the steel industry.
During the Korean War, the government imposed controls of raw materials, production, shipping, credit, wages, and prices. When the wage-price controls created a collective-bargaining impasse in the steel industry, threatening a nationwide strike, President Harry S Truman ordered the Secretary of Commerce on April 8, 1952, to seize and operate most of the country's steel mills for the ostensible purpose of maintaining production of critical munitions.
Owners of the seized properties obtained a court injunction against the seizure, and an appeal of that injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court gave rise to one of the “great cases” in constitutional law, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer.1 Although the Court found the president's actions to be unconstitutional, its decision did not signify a triumph of private rights or a significant check on the government's exercise of de facto emergency powers.
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