President Harry Truman appointed Putnam director of the Economic Stabilization Administration (ESA). After the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. Congress enacted the Defense Production Act. Title IV of the Act gave the president the authority to impose wage and price controls in progressive steps. The ESA was established on September 9, 1950, when Truman issued Executive Order 10161, which established the ESA and charged it with coordinating and supervising wage and price controls. 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