Professor Dave here, let’s learn about Harry Truman.
Harry S. Truman succeeded to office after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in the final
months of World War II. He ordered the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting
the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, he launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild
the economy of Western Europe, and he helped set up the United Nations, as well as NATO,
in order to counter the Soviet Communist threat throughout Eastern Europe.
He established the Truman Doctrine and through the UN, fought Communist North Koreans to
a stalemate in the Korean War. In domestic affairs, he was a moderate Democrat whose
liberal proposals were a continuation of the New Deal, but the Conservative-dominated Congress
blocked most of them. He used presidential authority to abolish segregation in the military
and put civil rights on the national political agenda.
Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, and spent most of his youth on his family’s 600-acre
farm near Independence. He served in combat in France during World War I as an artillery
officer with his National Guard unit. After the war, he briefly owned a haberdashery in
Kansas City, Missouri, and then joined the Democratic political machine of Tom Pendergast.
Truman was elected U.S. Senator in 1934 and gained national prominence as chairman of
the Truman Committee, which exposed waste, fraud, and corruption in Federal Government
wartime contracts. Vice President Henry Wallace was popular among Democratic voters, but he
was viewed as too far to the left and friendly to labor for some of the Democratic leaders,
who wanted Wallace replaced. Roosevelt told the party leaders that he would accept either
Truman or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. State party leaders preferred Truman,
and Roosevelt agreed. Truman’s well-received nomination was dubbed the “Second Missouri
Compromise”. In the 1944 election, the Democratic ticket achieved a 432-99 electoral vote victory
over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York and Truman was sworn in as vice president
on January 20th, 1945. Truman’s brief vice-presidency was relatively uneventful; Roosevelt rarely
contacted him, even on major decisions. The President and Vice President met alone together
only twice during their time in office. He was uninformed about major initiatives relating
to the war and the top-secret Manhattan Project, which was developing the world’s first atomic
bomb. Truman had been vice president for 82 days when Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945.
He received an urgent message to go immediately to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt
informed him that her husband had died due to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Truman asked
if there was anything that he could do for her, to which she replied, “Is there anything
we can do for you? You’re the one in trouble now!” When Truman met with reporters the
next day he famously remarked, “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t
know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened
yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Germany surrendered only a few weeks after Truman assumed the presidency, but the war
with Japan was expected to last at least another year. In August, the Japanese refused the
unconditional surrender the Allied forces demanded so Truman approved the use of atomic
bombs. His rationale was that by using such an overwhelming show of force, it would end
the war and spare the hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives that would
be lost in the planned Japanese invasion, a decision that remains controversial to this
day. Many condemn him for what was unquestionably an inhumane act of destruction, which caused
countless civilian deaths. Truman’s presidency marked a turning point in American foreign
affairs. It had emerged from World War II as the world’s leading power, and under
Truman it renounced its isolationist past to prevent what it saw as Communist aggression
in Europe and Asia. As Stalin began reneging on promises he’d made regarding free elections
in the Soviet occupied territories of Eastern Europe, the USSR came to be viewed as the
successor to Nazi Germany. In a speech condemning the Soviet occupation, Winston Churchill famously
proclaimed, “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.” This is typically
regarded as the opening volley of the Cold War.
American diplomat George F. Kennan, stationed in Moscow, sent a long telegram to Roosevelt
warning of Stalin’s designs, and his advice urging the United States and its allies to
contain the Soviet Union. That containment recommendation became the basis for American
foreign policy for much of the Cold War. When the Russians cut off access to West Berlin,
Truman oversaw the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, or NATO in 1949. This was a security pact between twelve countries intended
to offer mutual defense against Soviet threat. An attack on any of these nations would be
considered an attack against them all. As part of the Cold War strategy, Truman signed
the National Security Act of 1947. This merged the Department of War and the Department of
the Navy into the Department of Defense and created the U.S. Air Force. The act also established
the CIA, or Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and later, the
National Security Agency, or NSA.
In response to the Cold War threat, the nation descended into paranoia. The present national
security state and massive military-industrial complex is an outgrowth of this paranoia engendered
by the Cold War, and Truman later regretted the monster he’d created. In a Washington
Post editorial in 1963, Truman called for the abolishment of the CIA, writing: “For
some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original
assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.”
Although Truman rejected Churchill’s pleas to overthrow the socialist Iranian government
threatening to nationalize the British Petroleum oil company, the later Eisenhower Administration
would have no such qualms, and the CIA was used to overthrow the Mossadegh government
in 1953, as well as the Socialist Guatemalan government in 1954 that wanted to nationalize
the United Fruit Company, thus preventing the redistribution of wealth from corporations
to citizens. The CIA would later organize a coup in Chile under Richard Nixon, on behalf
of ITT, a large Nixon contributor.
In drumming up support for his ambitious Marshall Plan to rebuild war-devastated Europe, Truman
may have unintentionally caused some of the anti-Communist paranoia. Many Republicans
were opposed to the massive, multi-billion dollar package, and in order to win their
support, Truman had to present the program as a form of national security, a barricade
against the Soviet menace. Senator Arthur Vandenberg even told Truman to demagogue on
this issue, saying: “Scare the hell out of the American people”. His plan worked
but inadvertently unleashed a “Red Scare”, a cultural hysteria that Communists were lurking
everywhere. The Marshall Plan was one product of what came to be codified as the Truman
Doctrine, the idea of aggressively countering Soviet threat with economic and even military
power if necessary. This dominated American foreign policy until the collapse of the USSR
in the 90s. But there were troubling domestic side effects, like the Communist witch-hunts
of Joseph McCarthy.
As the election of 1948 neared, Truman had become quite unpopular due to his handling
of the Cold War and a railroad strike the previous year. The Republicans had returned
to power in the House in 1946 for the first time since 1930, and they blocked much of
his legislation. Moreover, he faced a mutiny by the Southern “Dixiecrats” over his
actions on Civil Rights, and his renomination at the 1948 Democratic Convention was no sure
thing. The Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, walked out and Thurmond ran for President
as a third party candidate, while former Vice President Henry Wallace revolted on the left,
and became the nominee of the Progressive Party. Truman and Vice Presidential pick,
Alben Barkley, faced with a three-way split among the Democrats, were given little chance
in the upcoming election to beat the popular GOP nominee, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey.
Truman embarked on an ambitious “whistle stop campaign,” criss-crossing the county
by train, railing against the obstruction of the Republicans and promising a new suite
of policies, dubbed the Fair Deal, to succeed and extend FDR’s “New Deal”. “Give
‘em hell, Harry” became the unofficial motto as Truman would stop in a town, appear
on the caboose and give a rousing speech denouncing the Republicans, then roll down the tracks
to another town and repeat the performance. Yet, the mainstream press was so certain he
would lose that the Chicago Tribune printed its infamous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”
before the votes had even been fully counted. Truman’s victory remains the most stunning
comeback in American political history.
Truman’s second term would be almost as dramatic as his first. A new wave of anti-Communist
hysteria gripped America when Mao Zedong’s Communists took over China and the Russians
detonated their first nuclear weapon, both in 1949. When communist North Korea invaded
South Korea in 1950, Truman sought United Nations approval for UN forces to fight the
Korean aggression. After initial successes in Korea, the Communist Chinese intervened
and threw the UN forces back, resulting in a stalemate throughout the final years of
Truman’s presidency. General Douglas MacArthur, legendary hero of World War II, advocated
attacking Chinese supply bases, which Truman rejected, concerned that further escalation
of the war might lead to open conflict with the Soviet Union, which was using North Korea
as a proxy, supplying weapons and jets. MacArthur then went behind Truman’s back and promoted
his plan to Republican House leader Joseph Martin, who leaked it to the press. Furious,
Truman fired MacArthur from his commands. MacArthur’s dismissal was among the least
popular decisions in presidential history and Truman’s approval plummeted. As he faced
calls for his impeachment, MacArthur returned home to a hero’s welcome, and addressed
a joint session of Congress, a speech that the President called “a bunch of damn bullshit.”
Truman’s approval rating fell to 22% in 1952, which was, until George W. Bush in 2008,
the all-time lowest approval mark for an active American president. Years later, Truman defended
his action by stating, “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the
President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was,
but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them
would be in jail.”
On domestic issues, Truman’s “Fair Deal” programs such as a National Health Insurance
plan faced opposition from a Congress dominated by Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats,
who also opposed Truman’s Civil Rights policies. However, his administration was able to successfully
guide the American economy through the post-war economic challenges. Truman maintained that
civil rights were a moral priority, and in 1948 he submitted the first comprehensive
civil rights legislation, also issuing executive orders to start racial integration in the
military and federal agencies. Allegations of corruption by certain cabinet
members and senior White House staff became a central campaign issue in the 1952 presidential
election, and dissuaded the unpopular Truman from seeking another term. Yet not long after
leaving office, historians began re-evaluating Truman. He is often ranked in the top 10 presidents,
and scholars celebrate his decisiveness in times of great international upheaval, his
dedication to continuing Roosevelt’s New Deal, and his commitment to civil rights.