The Presidency and the Promotion of Domestic Crisis: John Kennedy's Management of the 1962 Steel Crisis
Journal article by Denise M. Bostdorff, O'Rourk Danie J.; Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, 1997
Journal Article Excerpt
The presidency and the promotion of domestic crisis: John Kennedy's management of the 1962 steel crisis. by Denise M. Bostdorff , O'Rourk Danie J. In March 1962, the United Steelworkers of America reached an early labor settlement with the U.S. steel industry. The contract included no increase in wage rates, but provided fringe benefit improvements that amounted to an increase of 10 cents an hour or 2.5 percent.(1) President John Kennedy was particularly pleased, for his administration had played a major role in the negotiations. Publicly and privately, Kennedy had advocated an "early labor settlement consistent with price stability in steel" as a means to avoid inflation and to encourage economic growth.(2) The new labor contract indicated that the president's call for wage restraint on the part of the union and corresponding price restraint on the part of the steel industry would be heeded. Unfortunately for Kennedy, success was short-lived. On April 10, at 5:45 p.m., Roger Blough of U.S. Steel came to the Oval Office and handed the president a four-page announcement that the company already had delivered to the media. The press release stated that U.S. Steel would, effective the following day at noon, raise the price of steel by $6.00 per ton.(3) Kennedy was furious, for the price increase not only placed his economic program in jeopardy, but also posed a threat to his leadership. At the president's behest, the United Steelworkers had agreed to a modest settlement and, by the time of Blough's announcement, already had signed contracts with the major steel corporations and hence legally committed themselves.(4) To make matters worse, U.S. Steel's announcement of a price increase was immediately followed by similar announcements from other steel companies.(5) In the days that followed, Kennedy used the bully pulpit of the presidency to escalate a steel price increase into a crisis that threatened the freedom and security of all Americans. Public pressure built until Friday, April 13, when Bethlehem Steel was the first to roll back prices; U.S. Steel quickly followed.(6) In this article, we treat Kennedy's management of the steel crisis as an exemplar of domestic crisis promotion, whereby presidents explicitly advance a claim of crisis or implicitly treat a domestic issue as a crisis through their public rhetoric. The word "crisis" defines an issue as especially threatening, which focuses public attention on a problem. Unlike the term "war," crisis implies a short-term issue of urgency, a conflict that will be resolved fairly quickly and with limited sacrifice.(7) In April 1962, Kennedy's public statements escalated the steel controversy into a crisis; he made it known, through word and symbolic deeds, that his administration would not stand for the steel companies' behavior. Although Kennedy had little or no legal authority to force a price rescission, his crisis promotion allowed him to obtain one nonetheless. We believe our examination of the steel crisis as domestic crisis promotion is useful for two basic reasons. First, numerous communication studies of presidential crisis rhetoric exist, but almost all of these deal with foreign policy issues.(8) In contrast, only a handful of scholars have examined domestic crises. Although these studies have been most insightful, their focus has been on something other than the characteristics of domestic crisis rhetoric. For example, David Zarefsky examined Johnson's value appeals during the summer riots of 1964-68, while Dan Hahn concentrated on the sermonic qualities of Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech.(9) In two studies--one authored by Steven Goldzwig and George Dionisopoulos, and another by Theodore Windt--scholars traced Kennedy's shift from passive support to public advocacy of civil rights, whereas a third study by John Murphy analyzed how the president sought to defuse the civil rights issue, rather than promote it as a crisis.(10) Amor Kiewe's 1994 edited work, The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric, includes four fine case studies of domestic crisis, but these authors, too, have goals other than discerning the characteristics of domestic crisis discourse.(11) Only Windt's 1990 analysis of Kennedy and the steel crisis has postulated that a particular president's arguments might be representative of a genre that Windt called domestic crisis rhetoric.(12) The focus of our study attends to an aspect of presidential discourse that has often been overlooked.Second, our choice of Kennedy and the steel crisis as an exemplar of domestic crisis promotion is most fitting given the standards that Kennedy set for the presidents that followed. As Samuel Kernell points out in Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, presidents today are more likely to "go public" or to ... |
End of free preview...
To continue reading this publication, you must have a Questia Subscription.
Try Us Today! Click Here
Questia provides the world's largest online library of scholarly books and journal articles, with integrated footnote and bibliography tools, highlighting, note taking and book marking. With a Questia subscription, you'll have access to the full text of more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Already a subscriber? Login:
Sponsored Links
Free Newsletter
Get helpful how-to's, writing tips, search strategies, quizzes & more!
Search the Library
