Roger Putnam

Roger Lowell Putnam (December 19, 1893 – November 24, 1972) was an American politician and businessman. A member of the prominent Lowell family of Boston, he served as mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1937 until 1943, and as director of the Economic Stabilization Administration from 1951 until 1952. During his short tenure in federal office, the nation's steelworkers struck, leading United States President Harry S. Truman to seize the nation's steel mills.

For 40 years, Putnam was also the sole trustee of the Lowell Observatory. During that time, he purchased three new telescopes for the observatory and was instrumental in pushing Lowell astronomers to search for Percival Lowell's theoretical "Planet X", which led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

Early life and education Roger Lowell Putnam was born on December 19, 1893, in Boston. He was the son of William Lowell Putnam II, a notable and wealthy Boston lawyer. The Putnams were members of the Boston Brahmins, a group of families which claimed descent from the founders of Boston. On his mother's side, Percival Lowell (the noted astronomer) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (president of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933) were his uncles and the cigar-smoking poet Amy Lowell was his aunt.

Putnam graduated from the Noble and Greenough School in Boston, and then attended Harvard University. He became acquainted with Leverett Saltonstall while at Harvard, joined the Hasty Pudding Club and the Fly Club, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in mathematics in 1915.

He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1916 and undertook graduate studies in mechanical engineering. After the United States entered World War I in 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served on the and was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade.

After leaving military service, Putnam married the former Caroline Jenkins on October 9, 1919. The couple had six children: Caroline, Roger Jr., William, Anna, Mary, and Michael.

Putnam brought Perkins's telescope to the Arizona observatory as well. The Observatory's existing telescope had cracked in 1964 while staff attempted to update its optical system. The Perkins mirror did not stay at Lowell for long, returning to Perkins' control in 1969. The Lowell Observatory retained the mount, however. Hall won Putnam's approval to rebuild the mount as a telescope, and a new, improved Zerodur mirror built and installed (it is still called the "Perkins telescope", however). In 1965, NASA agreed to build the Planetary Research Center at Lowell to house the rapidly growing project.

Roger Putnam retired as trustee of the Lowell Observatory in 1967. His youngest son, the classicist Dr. Michael C. J. Putnam, succeeded him. In 1946 he ran for lieutenant governor, but lost the Democratic nomination to Paul A. Dever.

Federal service President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Putnam as deputy director of the Office of Contract Settlement of 1944. Established by the Contract Settlement Act (58 Stat. 651; July 1, 1944) and part of the Office of War Mobilization, Putnam helped settle claims arising from terminated war contracts during World War II. Putnam served in that capacity until the office was abolished by executive order 9809 on December 12, 1946. After Congress amended the Defense Production Act in July 1951 to permit looser price controls, ESA Administrator Eric Johnston quit in frustration six weeks later. Putnam was named his replacement in November after Truman's first choices for the office refused to take the job.

The steel seizure crisis

Putnam faced an immediate crisis as head of the ESA. The collective bargaining agreement between the United Steelworkers of America and the nation's major steel manufacturers was to expire on December 31, 1951. Yet few negotiations had taken place. Steelmakers refused to grant any wage increase without a guarantee that the Office of Price Stability (OPS), a subdivision of the ESA, would grant a price increase to match. The union, however, was pushing the Wage Stabilization Board (WSB), another ESA agency, to grant the workers a significantly higher wage. President Truman and Putnam were convinced that the key to taming inflation was to break the price/wage spiral in which higher wages pushed prices higher, only to induce workers to seek even higher wages to overcome the inflation in prices.

Putnam worked feverishly for six weeks to settle the steel talks. He ordered his subordinates at OPS and WSB to meet with the union and manufacturers and to call meetings of both sides. He also coordinated settlement efforts with Cyrus S. Ching, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, but the talks failed. Putnam then urged President Truman to personally intervene in the steel crisis and use his influence with union leaders, which he did on New Year's Eve. Philip Murray, president of the Steelworkers, subsequently postponed the strike for 45 days beginning January 3, 1952.

The steel crisis issue was now out of Putnam's hands. In Executive Order 10233, President Truman had expanded the WSB's powers in April 1951. To ease the threat of strikes and make the board's wage stabilization efforts easier, the board was now authorized to make recommendations on economic and non-economic issues in collective bargaining disputes, a power it had previously lacked. The board could not, however, force parties in a labor dispute to accept its findings. When making recommendations, the board was authorized to report only to the president, bypassing Putnam and his superior, Charles Edward Wilson, administrator of the Office of Defense Mobilization (of which ESA was a part). As one incentive to get the union to postpone the strike, Truman agreed to let the WSB investigate the labor dispute and invoke the direct presidential reporting provisions of E.O. 10233.

The issues involved in the steel wage case were so complex that the board extended its deadline for issuing a decision by 30 days. The union also agreed to put off its strike until the board acted. During this time, Putnam met repeatedly with White House staff to keep them abreast of developments at the board and price negotiations between OPS and steel manufacturers.

An angry Congress began investigating the Truman administration's wage and price stabilization program. Putnam engaged in a public war of words with Wilson after Wilson testified that authority to hear labor disputes should be taken away from ESA, WSB and other stabilization agencies.

On June 2, 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) that the president lacked the authority as commander-in-chief to seize the steel mills. The union struck the next day. The strike lasted 53 days. Although Putnam was involved in presidential efforts to resolve the dispute, Truman's personal aides were primarily responsible for intervening in the strike. The steelmakers and the union reached a tentative agreement on July 24, 1952, after Truman threatened to use his powers under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 to draft the steelworkers and turn the steel mills into military installations. After just a few hours of negotiations, the parties settled on essentially the same terms offered by the WSB four months earlier.

Putnam was outraged by the steel manufacturers' behavior during the steel crisis. He felt the steelmakers had held "a loaded gun poised at the Government's head" and that the employers' publicly stated reasons for forcing the union on strike were "hollow" and pretentious.

Some day, I hope we shall know the real motives behind the mysterious conduct of the steel industry in this tragic incident. Some day, perhaps we will know why this strike was dragged out for 53 days only to be settled on substantially the same wage and price terms which the companies could have had nearly four months ago.

Remaining tenure at ESA The steelworkers' strike made Putnam work much harder to maintain the Truman administration's wage and price stabilization program. Putnam was forced to give aluminum workers a 21.4 cents an hour wage increase just days later in order to avoid a strike. But he later imposed new wage restrictions on nine large classes of small businesses and strict limitations on the kind of Christmas gifts employers could give to workers in order to avoid a spike in inflation.

Congress stripped the WSB of its labor dispute adjudication powers in the wake of the steel seizure crisis. Putnam struggled to keep union representatives on the new board, and to find industry representatives willing to serve. He succeeded in fully staffing the board, but the wage stabilization program continued to disintegrate.

A revolving door at the top of the ESA and its key agencies worsened the situation. Nathan Feinsinger, the chairman of the WSB, resigned in July 1952. Putnam appointed Archibald Cox as his replacement in August. Ellis Arnall resigned in early August, and Putnam appointed Tighe Woods, chairman of the federal rent stabilization agency, as his successor.

A second labor wage dispute crisis hit in October 1952. Bituminous coal miners organized by the United Mine Workers of America had negotiated a wage increase of $1.90 per hour but no increase in fringe benefits (as other unions had). Without union knowledge, the coal operators submitted the agreement for approval to the reconstituted Wage Stabilization Board. Mine union president John L. Lewis, angered by the lack of respect, refused to participate in the WSB's hearings despite Cox's pleas for union input. Reluctantly, on October 18 the board cut the wage increase by 40 cents. Angry union coal miners engaged in a nationwide wildcat strike the next day. With the presidential election just weeks away, Lewis asked Putnam to take personal control of the coal miners' case on October 24, and Putnam did so on October 25. The strike ended. Putnam deferred action until after the election. When Lewis balked at further delay, Putnam threatened to rule against the union. Although Putnam, Cox and other stabilization and mobilization officials all eventually endorsed the lower pay award, Truman reversed the WSB on December 3. Cox and industry representatives on the WSB resigned in protest. The decision led to the collapse of the Wage Stabilization Board, and it quickly became clear that neither President Truman nor President-elect Dwight Eisenhower would seek to retain national wage and price controls.

The coal pay dispute and the increasingly untenable position of the administration's wage and price control program led Putnam to resign as ESA administrator on November 6, 1952. Truman named DiSalle his successor until Eisenhower named a permanent replacement or Congress failed to renew the Defense Production Act. During his last months in office, Putnam continually defended the wage and price control program as necessary for the national welfare while conceding that neither Congress nor the next president (whether Truman or Eisenhower) would be likely to retain it.

Later life After leaving federal service, Putnam returned to his position as chairman of Package Machinery. In 1953, Putnam became president of WWLP, Springfield's first television station. WRLP-TV, WWLP's sister station, took its call letters from Putnam's name. Late in life, Putnam also served on the board of the Third National Bank of Hampden County and the board of the Van Norman Machine Tool Company (now part of the Kwik-Way corporation). Putnam also received honorary degrees from Boston College (1949), Saint Anselm College (1952), and the University of Massachusetts Lowell (1970). Alumni House, the home of the Boston College Alumni Association, was renamed in 1967 in honor of Putnam, a benefactor of the college.