Harry S. Truman

President of the United States (1945–1953)

• Born: May 8, 1884
• Birthplace: Lamar, Missouri
• Died: December 26, 1972
• Place of death: Kansas City, Missouri

Truman defended and institutionalized the New Deal reform program of Franklin D. Roosevelt and established the doctrine of containment that guided American policymakers in the Cold War era. Part of his legacy includes sanctioning the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, which ended World War II in the Pacific and placed the Soviet Union in a position of accommodation to US demands.

Early Life

Harry S. Truman, whose career enhanced Missouri’s reputation for producing tough and stubborn individuals, was born in the southwestern part of that state on May 8, 1884, but grew up in rural Jackson County, in and around Independence. His parents, John Anderson and Martha Ellen Truman, were prominent, well-connected citizens of the area, and Harry looked back on his childhood years as happy, secure ones. He was captivated by the world of books, however, which revealed to him that there was a bigger, more rewarding realm within his reach. Success in that realm could be attained, he believed, by strictly adhering to the work ethic taught by his parents and by developing his ability to manipulate people by learning what motivated and pleased them. His parents also taught him a Victorian set of moral absolutes, a tendency to see the world in black-and-white terms, that later influenced his decision making.

When he was graduated from high school in 1901, his father’s “entangled” finances prevented young Truman from completing college. He enrolled briefly at a business school but was forced to quit after only one semester. He held several unsatisfying jobs in the next few years and then farmed until 1917, when he served as a captain in the National Guard during World War I. After a small business firm he had opened in Kansas City failed in 1922, Truman, whose restless ambition had always left him with an edge of frustration, finally found the career that brought him fulfillment. He entered county politics with the backing of Thomas J. Pendergast, the “boss” of the Kansas City Democratic Party machine. He went on to serve as a county court judge for much of the 1920s.

In 1934, after great success in local politics, Truman, with Pendergast’s support, won election to the United States Senate. During his first term, he drafted notable transportation legislation, including the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938. He strongly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program and then gained national recognition during World War II as head of a committee investigating defense contracts and mobilization bottlenecks.

In 1944, a number of Democratic Party leaders plotted to remove liberal Henry A. Wallace as vice president. Truman surfaced as one of the few prominent individuals acceptable to these bosses and to all the wings of the party. Roosevelt and the convention concurred, and the ticket won the 1944 election.

Life’s Work

President Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, gave Truman an opportunity to join the heroes who had enlivened his bookish world. The public initially responded favorably to the plainspoken Missourian, and the honeymoon continued as World War II ended, with Germany surrendering on May 7, 1945, and Japan on August 14. The end of the war brought reconversion problems, however, that would have challenged a political magician such as Roosevelt. They overwhelmed Truman. While searching for a chimerical formula that would allow him to please business, labor, consumers, and citizens hungry for scarce meat, Truman stumbled from policy to policy, convincing people that he was a bewildered throttlebottom.

Amid this turmoil, the beleaguered president formulated his domestic program. Operating within the reform legacy of the New Deal, he revealed to Congress on September 6, 1945, what later became the Fair Deal . His legislative requests included legislation requiring the government to maintain full employment, improved unemployment compensation benefits and minimum wages, major housing reforms, assistance to small business, and continued farm price supports. Later additions to the Fair Deal slate included national compulsory health insurance, federal ownership of atomic energy resources and development, aid to education, and civil rights legislation for blacks. Congressional response was disappointing. It gave Truman the watered-down Employment Act and created the Atomic Energy Commission under civilian control. Through executive orders, Truman forbade discrimination against African Americans in the civil service and began to desegregate the armed forces. In his second term, Congress passed a housing act.

Perhaps his greatest reform contribution came when the Republicans won both houses of Congress in 1946 and set out to destroy much of the New Deal reform legacy. This allowed Truman to assume his most effective role: defender of the common man from the forces of reaction. He continued this role in the 1948 election and further protected the New Deal by his upset victory over Republican New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. No major New Deal program fell before the conservative onslaught, although the Taft-Hartley Act placed some restrictions on labor.

In foreign policy, Truman left a more perilous legacy. He reluctantly supported the 1947 United Nations decision to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, torn by desires to retain the support of his American Jewish constituency and to avoid military conflict in the Middle East. Nevertheless, by the following May, Israel had declared independence, and Truman's administration became the first to formally recognize the new state.

By 1947, the Cold War had started. Soviet leaders believed that since the birth of the communist government in 1917, Western capitalist nations had been intent on destroying it. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin intended to use his nation’s great military strength, which had destroyed German dictator Adolf Hitler’s armies, to build a buffer zone against these hostile Western powers. He hoped to work cooperatively with the West and cautiously refrained from meddling in areas the Western powers considered vital, but caution also compelled him to establish his nation’s own sphere of dominance in Eastern Europe.

Truman was poorly suited to deal with the complexities of this situation. He had never been much interested in foreign affairs, and he held a black-and-white view of the world. He quickly came to two conclusions on which he based policy toward the Soviet Union: that Soviet leaders were breaking all of their wartime agreements, making future negotiations senseless, and that the only thing the Russians understood was force. Once committed to these propositions, he ignored all evidence to the contrary. He believed that he could use American military and economic power to coerce the Soviets into compliance with Washington’s demands. The test explosion of the first atomic bomb in July 1945 and use of the weapon against a collapsing Japan on August 6 and August 9 added to his confidence. He later claimed that his actions saved lives by eliminating the necessity of invading the Japanese mainland. The highest American military leaders believed that the bombing was unnecessary, however, especially since the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan, which took place on August 8, would, they believed, shock Japan into surrender. Truman dropped the bombs to force Japan to surrender and to intimidate the Soviet Union into accommodation with the United States.

By acting on the assumption that Russians only understood force, Truman convinced Stalin that the West was still intent on the Soviet Union’s destruction. When Moscow countered what it viewed as a threat by, for example, tightening its control over Poland and other Eastern European nations, it confirmed Washington’s belief that the Soviet Union intended world conquest. The cycle of suspicion and fear spiraled toward the Cold War, with each side taking defensive actions that appeared to be offensive threats to the other.

In 1947, Truman initialed the containment policy that became the fundamental American Cold War strategy. Abandoning serious negotiation, the United States moved to encircle the Soviet bloc, hoping such pressure would cause it to change, to mellow, internally. Over the next few years, one containment action followed another: the Truman Doctrine that promised support for free people facing totalitarian pressures, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Truman’s decisions to fight the Korean War, to finance the French war in Vietnam, to rearm the United States and its Western European allies, and to incorporate West Germany and Japan into the anti-Soviet bloc further raised the containment barrier.

Domestic and foreign problems increasingly merged during Truman’s second term, and together they unraveled the popularity he had gained during his 1948 election campaign. China had long been torn by civil war, and in 1949 it “fell” to Mao Zedong’s Communists. Republican fury made Truman vulnerable to the bizarre charge of being soft on communism and indifferent to the growing fear of internal subversion. In 1946, Truman himself had initiated a loyalty program designed to eliminate communists from government and had fed fear of subversion by using extreme anticommunist rhetoric crafted to build public support for containment. Red hysteria, led by demagogues such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, surged in 1950. Although Truman had been partly responsible for McCarthyism, it turned on his administration and undermined his ability to govern.

Truman confronted what he regarded as the greatest challenge of his presidency on June 24, 1950, when the army of North Korea swept across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea, an American ally. Truman interpreted this as a Soviet-directed attack on the West, a test of Western resolve. He ordered General Douglas MacArthur, commander of American forces in the Far East, to dispatch American troops to Korea. In September 1950, MacArthur’s forces, operating under the authority of the United Nations, first halted and then pushed the North Koreans back in disarray.

As the North Koreans retreated, Truman faced another major decision. Should he push them back across the thirty-eighth parallel and then halt, content with achieving the original war aim, or should the forces of the United Nations cross the parallel, destroy the North Korean army, and unify Korea? He chose the latter course, and MacArthur drove north toward the Chinese border. In November 1950, after American leaders ignored China’s clear warnings, 300,000 Chinese “volunteers” intervened, shattering the offensive and forcing the longest retreat in United States history. In 1951, the battlefront stabilized near the thirty-eighth parallel, but peace did not come until 1953, during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency.

By early 1951, public support for the Korean War had eroded. Then, on April 11, 1951, after a number of public disagreements with MacArthur, Truman recalled the general, who was perhaps the American people’s most admired military hero. This action, during an increasingly unpopular war, coupled with the growing force of McCarthyite attacks on the administration, almost destroyed Truman’s ability to govern. He had already decided not to run for reelection in 1952 and supported Adlai E. Stevenson for the nomination. Republican candidate Eisenhower, promising to clean up the “mess in Washington,” easily defeated Stevenson.

Significance

On January 20, 1953, Truman returned to Independence, Missouri, where he lived until his death on December 26, 1972. In retirement, Truman had the satisfaction of seeing many of his Fair Deal proposals take effect, including Social Security and housing expansion, government health care programs, and civil rights legislation. Truman also watched his popularity rise to folk-hero status among the general public. Scholars concurred with this evaluation. In 1981, American historians ranked him as the nation’s eighth greatest president, and one prominent Truman biographer predicted that he would take his place behind Abraham Lincoln as America’s second most beloved president.

These admiring historians believed Truman’s greatness rested on his foreign policy. Under his leadership, the United States committed itself to playing a continuing role in international affairs. His administration devised the containment strategy, which served as the foreign policy foundation for his successors in office, and established barriers, such as NATO, against the inundation of the “Free World” by aggressive communism.

Other historians, however, questioned the wisdom of his policy. The Vietnam War compelled many scholars to reexamine the American past generally, and they often focused on the Cold War period specifically. These revisionists believed that either through an arrogant attempt to impose the American system on the world or through ignorance of Soviet desires and needs and overreaction to Stalin’s cautious policy, the United States provoked the Cold War and initiated the dangerous tension that imperiled civilization. Many revisionists concluded that under Truman the United States began to build a national security state that led it to meddle in the affairs of other nations, while civil liberties eroded at home. This globalism diverted resources to military adventures, while American cities decayed and social problems mounted.

Thus, while many of the tumultuous conflicts that dominated the newspaper front pages during the Truman years later seemed petty and were largely forgotten, the man from Independence remained even after his death the center of controversy revolving around issues central to modern history.

Bibliography

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