Harry S. Truman

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Harry S. Truman, (1884-1972) a politician from Missouri, was the Democratic president of the United States, 1945-1953.

Early career

Truman was born on a farm near Lamar, in western Missouri, and grew up on a farm near Independence, Missouri.[1] His grandparents had been Confederate sympathizers who had been rounded up by the Union army in the Civil War. After graduating from high school in Independence, with good skills in history and music, he decided against college and became a bank clerk in Kansas City. Always a joiner, he was active in the Missouri National Guard. From 1906 to 1917 he managed his father's 600-acre (243-hectare) farm at Grandview, Mo. During World War I his National Guard regiment was mobilized in 1917, he entered the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, sailing for France in 1917 as a lieutenant. Truman was soon promoted to captain in Battery D, 129 Field Artillery Battalion, 35th Division, A.E.F., and returned to the United States a major in 1919, having participated in combat operations at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne offensive. He married Elizabeth Virginia Wallace on June 28, 1919; they had one daughter, Margaret, who married a New York Times editor. With an army buddy he invested his savings in a Kansas City haberdashery, but this venture was a failure.

Pendergast machine

Discouraged by his lack of business success and without funds, Truman sought the help of friends. His farm background, his war record, his Masonic connections, his Baptist Church affiliations, and his genial personality recommended him to Thomas J. Pendergast, the political boss of Kansas City and much of western Missouri. Pendergast controlled the Irish Catholic vote and used Truman to reach out to Protestants and veterans. He made Truman the overseer of highways for Jackson County In 1922 he was elected a county judge; needing some legal knowledge Truman studied nights for two years at Kansas City Law School. In 1924 he was defeated for reelection, but in 1926 he was returned to office as presiding judge of the court, the duties of which also involved administrative supervision of many county expenditures, including $60 million for public works. He almost joined the Ku Klux Klan, but withdrew his application when realizing his Irish Catholic allies bitterly opposed the group; Truman then campaigned against the Klan. In 1934 Pendergast enabled Truman's election United States Senator on the Democratic ticket. His first term in office was passive, except for a failed effort to prevent the renomination of Maurice Milligan for U.S. District Attorney for the Western District of Missouri; Milligan had obtained the conviction of 35 Pendergast "ward leaders" for vote frauds. Reelected after a terrific battle in 1940, Truman emerged as the energetic and forthright chairman of the Senate committee investigating fraud and inefficiency in war contracts. Generally Truman supported the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and won widespread party favor for his attacks on business malfeasance in war production. He forced changes in the aircraft and ship construction programs, and worked well with other border state Democrats, especially Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the Majority Leader.

Agriculture

Truman won the farm vote in 1948 by charging the GOP shoved "a pitchfork in the farmer's back", but was unable to get new farm programs passed. His second secretary of agriculture, Charles F. Brannan promoted the Brannan Plan, intended to bring widespread changes to farm policy. Brannan proposed to replace market price supports with direct income payments to farmers. His plan set ceilings on the amount a farmer could receive and limited the program to farmers who did not exceed a set production mark. The Brannan Plan was supposed to foster the "family-sized farm" while providing affordable food for consumers. While Brannan could count on support from the left, especially the National Farmers Union (which was small), labor unions (which were powerful), and consumer groups (which were weak), he was opposed by leading farm economists and the national Farm Bureau (which was large) and the national Chamber of Commerce (representing business). The head of the Farm Bureau decried the plan as intrusive, a form of "creeping socialism," and expensive. The Farm Bureau, dominated by conservatives, resisted any curbs on full agricultural production. A bloc of Midwestern Republican and southern Democratic congressmen opposed replacing market mechanisms with outright government payments to farmers and setting limits on supports to individual farms. The Brannan Plan went nowhere and instead, the conservative farm bloc passed the Agricultural Act of 1949 with high price supports.[2]

Religion

Truman, a Southern Baptist, sought religious allies in the Cold War. He tried to unite the world's religions in a spiritual crusade against communism, sending his personal representative to Pope Pius XII to coordinate not only with the Vatican but also with the heads of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Greek Orthodox churches. "If I can mobilize the people who believe in a moral world against the Bolshevik materialists," Truman wrote in 1947, "we can win this fight." Since the Roman Catholic Church was his strongest religious ally in the moral battle against international communism, Truman put Rome first in his global strategy, even trying to confer formal diplomatic recognition on the Vatican. At home, he received solid support from Catholics, who were a major element of the New Deal Coalition, but overwhelming resistance from Protestants, especially Southern Baptists who rejected anything "popish." Truman's political-diplomatic effort to formalize a public, faith-driven, ecumenical international campaign failed.[3]


Evaluations

Truman's reputation has gone from very low when he left office, to high after 1990. He is now widely considered to have been a tough-minded, decisive, and effective leader who ably guided the nation through the perilous waters of the early Cold War and whose policy of containment essentially laid the foundations for American "victory" in that prolonged conflict in 1989. For many historians, the down-to-earth Midwesterner now merits consideration as one of the greatest American presidents. In recent years presidential aspirants of both parties have claimed Truman as their own, especially if their election chances seem as hopeless as Truman's did in 1948. His reputation has been bolstered by scholarly biographies by Ferrell (1994), Hamby (1995), and especially McCullough's Pulitzer prize-winning popular biography (1992). The in-depth analysis by Leffler (1992), cautiously praised the Truman administration's essential wisdom in handling a myriad of problems.

A strong negative dissent comes from Offner (2002) who argues that Truman was a "parochial nationalist" whose "uncritical belief in the superiority of American values and political-economic interests," conviction that "the Soviet Union and Communism were the root cause of international strife," and "inability to comprehend Asian politics and nationalism" intensified the postwar conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, precipitated the division of Europe, and set Sino-American relations on a path of long-term animosity. Rather than being a great statesman who carefully weighed various policy alternatives, Offner asserts that Truman's myopia "created a rigid framework in which the United States waged long-term, extremely costly global cold war". As his title suggests, the Cold War was at best a Pyrrhic victory for the United States.[4]

Further reading

See also

  1. ↑ His middle initial, S, does not stand for anything, but was allegedly chosen because his parents could not decide whether to name him for his grandfather Shippe or for his grandfather Solomon.
  2. ↑ See Dean (2006)
  3. ↑ Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, "True Believers" Wilson Quarterly 2006 30(2): 40-44, 46-48. Issn: 0363-3276 Fulltext: Ebsco
  4. ↑ Quotes from Offner (2002) p. xii
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