He Sang of America and Shaped the Country's Conception of Itself - Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States (1945–1953). As President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third vice-president and the 34th vice president of the United States, he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his fourth term.

During World War I, Truman served as an artillery officer, making him the only president to have seen combat in World War I (his successor Eisenhower spent the war training tank crews in Pennsylvania). After the war he became part of the political machine of tom Pendergast and was elected a county commissioner in Missouri and eventually a democratic United States senator. After he gained national prominence as head of the wartime Truman committee, Truman replaced vice president Henry A. Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944.

Truman faced challenge after challenge in domestic affairs. The disorderly postwar reconversion of the economy of the United States was marked by severe shortages, numerous strikes, and the passage of the Taft–hartley Act over his veto. He confounded all predictions to win re-election in 1948, helped by his famous whistle stop tour of rural America. After his re-election he was able to pass only one of the proposals in his fair deal program. He used executive orders to begin desegregation of the military and to create loyalty checks which dismissed thousands of communist supporters from office, even though he strongly opposed mandatory loyalty oaths for governmental employees, a stance that led to charges that his administration was soft on communism. Truman's presidency was also eventful in foreign affairs, with the end of world war ii and his decision to use nuclear weapons against japan, the founding of the united nations, the marshall plan to rebuild europe, the Truman doctrine to contain communism, the beginning of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Chinese Civil War, and the Korean War. Corruption in Truman's administration, which was linked to certain members in the cabinet and senior white house staff, was a central issue in the 1952 presidential campaign and helped cause adlai stevenson, Truman's successor for the democratic nomination for president, to lose to republican dwight d. eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.

Truman, whose demeanor was very different from that of the patrician Roosevelt, was a folksy, unassuming president. He popularized such phrases as "the buck stops here" and "if you can't stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen." he overcame the low expectations of many political observers, who compared him unfavorably with his highly-regarded predecessor. at different times in his presidency, Truman earned both the lowest public approval ratings that had ever been recorded, and the highest to be recorded until 1991. Despite negative public opinion during his term in office, popular and scholarly assessments of his presidency became more positive after his retirement from politics and the publication of his memoirs. Truman's legendary upset victory in 1948 over Thomas E. Dewey is routinely invoked by underdog presidential candidates.

World War I

Truman in uniform ca. 1918 Truman enlisted in the Missouri Army National Guard in 1905, and served until 1911. At his physical in 1905, his eyesight had been an unacceptable 20/50 in the right eye and 20/40 in the left. Reportedly, he passed by secretly memorizing the eye chart.

With the onset of American participation in World War I, Truman rejoined the guard. Before going to France, he was sent to camp doniphan, near Lawton, Oklahoma for training. He ran the camp canteen with Edward Jacobson, who had experience in a Kansas City clothing store as a clerk. At ft. sill he also met Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, the nephew of Thomas Joseph (T.J.) Pendergast, a Kansas City politician. Both men were to have a profound influence on Truman's later life.

Truman was chosen to be an officer, and then battery commander in an artillery regiment in France. His unit was Battery D, 129th field artillery, 60th brigade, 35th infantry division, known for its discipline problems. During a sudden attack by the germans in the vosges mountains, the battery started to disperse; Truman ordered them back into position using profanities that he had "learned while working on the santa fe railroad." Shocked by the outburst, his men reassembled and followed him to safety. Under Captain Truman's command in France, the battery did not lose a single man. His battery also provided support for George S. Patton's tank brigade during the meuse-argonne offensive. On November 11, 1918 his artillery unit fired some of the last shots of World War I into German positions. The war was a transformative experience that brought out Truman's leadership qualities; he later rose to the rank of colonel in the army reserves, and his war record made possible his later political career in Missouri.

Jackson County judge

In 1922, with the help of the kansas city democratic machine led by boss Tom Pendergast, Truman was elected as a judge of the county court of the eastern district of Jackson County—an administrative, not judicial, position similar to county commissioners elsewhere.

In 1922, Truman gave a friend $10 for an initiation fee for the Ku Klux Klan but later asked to get his money back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never claimed membership. Though Truman at times expressed anger towards Jews in his diaries, his business partner and close friend Edward Jacobson was Jewish. Truman's attitudes toward blacks were typical of white missourians of his era, and were expressed in his casual use of terms like "nigger". years later, another measure of his racial attitudes would come to the forefront: tales of the abuse, violence, and persecution suffered by many African-American veterans upon their return from World War II infuriated Truman, and were a major factor in his decision to issue executive order 9981, in July 1948, to back civil rights initiatives and desegregate the armed forces.

He was not reelected in 1924, but in 1926 was elected the presiding judge for the court, and was reelected in 1930. In 1930 Truman coordinated the "Ten Year Plan", which transformed Jackson County and the Kansas City skyline with new public works projects, including an extensive series of roads, construction of a new wight and wight-designed county court building, and the dedication of a series of 12 Madonna of the trail monuments honoring pioneer women.

In 1933 Truman was named Missouri's director for the federal re-employment program (part of the civil works administration) at the request of Postmaster General James A. Farley as payback to Pendergast for delivering the Kansas City vote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. The appointment confirmed Pendergast's control over federal patronage jobs in Missouri and marked the zenith of his power. It was also to create a relationship between Truman and Harry Hopkins and assure avid Truman support for the new deal.

Presidency 1945–1953

Truman had been vice president for only 82 days when President Roosevelt died, April 12, 1945. He had had very little meaningful communication with roosevelt about world affairs or domestic politics after being sworn in as vice president, and was completely uninformed about major initiatives relating to the successful prosecution of the war—including, notably, the top secret manhattan project, which was about to test the world's first atomic bomb.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman said to reporters:

"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." A few days after his swearing in, he wrote to his wife, Bess: "it won't be long until I can sit back and study the whole picture and… There'll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not anymore worry."However, the simplicity he had predicted would prove elusive.

Upon assuming the presidency, Truman asked all the members of FDR's cabinet to remain in place, told them that he was open to their advice, and laid down a central principle of his administration: he would be the one making decisions, and they were to support him. Just a few weeks after he assumed office, on his 61st birthday, the allies achieved victory in Europe.

Truman was much more difficult for the secret service to protect than the wheel chair–bound Roosevelt had been. The secret service had been protecting Roosevelt for over 12 years. Because he was wheel chair–bound most of the time, if he needed to go anywhere, his secret service agents would push him at their own speed. Truman had no such restrictions and was an avid walker, regularly taking walks around Washington.

Strikes and economic upheaval

President Harry Truman with "the buck stops here" sign on his deskthe end of World War II was followed in the United States by uneasy and contentious conversion back to a peacetime economy. The president was faced with a sudden renewal of labor-management conflicts that had lain dormant during the war years, severe shortages in housing and consumer products, and widespread dissatisfaction with inflation, which at one point hit six percent in a single month. In this polarized environment, there was a wave of destabilizing strikes in major industries, and Truman's response to them was generally seen as ineffective. In the spring of 1946, a national railway strike, unprecedented in the nation's history, brought virtually all passenger and freight lines to a standstill for over a month. When the railway workers turned down a proposed settlement, Truman seized control of the railways and threatened to draft striking workers into the armed forces. While delivering a speech before congress requesting authority for this plan, Truman received word that the strike had been settled on his terms. He announced this development to congress on the spot and received a tumultuous ovation that was replayed for weeks on newsreels. Although the resolution of the crippling railway strike made for stirring political theater, it actually cost Truman politically: his proposed solution was seen by many as high-handed; and labor voters, already wary of Truman's handling of workers' issues, were deeply alienated.

United Nations, Marshall Plan and the Cold War

As a wilsonian internationalist, Truman strongly supported the creation of the united nations, and included former first lady eleanor roosevelt on the delegation to the U.N.'s first general assembly in order to meet the public desire for peace after the carnage of World War II. faced with communist abandonment of commitments to democracy made at the potsdam conference, and with communist advances in Iran, Greece (leading to the Greek Civil War) and in Turkey that suggested a hunger for global domination, Truman and his foreign policy advisors concluded that the interests of the soviet union were quickly becoming incompatible with those of the united states. The Truman administration articulated an increasingly hard line against the Soviets.

Although he claimed no personal expertise on foreign matters, and although the opposition republicans controlled the United States Congress, Truman was able to win bipartisan support for both the Truman doctrine, which formalised a policy of containment, and the Marshall Plan, which aimed to help rebuild postwar europe.to get congress to spend the vast sums necessary to restart the moribund european economy, Truman used an ideological argument, arguing forcefully that communism flourishes in economically deprived areas. His goal was to "scare the hell out of congress." as part of the U.S. Cold War Strategy, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and reorganized military forces by merging the department of war and the department of the navy into the national military establishment (later the department of defense) and creating the U.S. air force. The act also created the CIA and the national Security Council.

Second term (1949–1953)

Truman's inauguration was the first ever televised nationally." his second term was grueling, in large measure because of foreign policy challenges connected directly or indirectly to his policy of containment. For instance, he quickly had to come to terms with the end of the American nuclear monopoly. With information provided by its espionage networks in the united states, the soviet union's atomic bomb project progressed much faster than had been expected and they exploded their first bomb on august 29, 1949. On January 7, 1953, Truman announced the detonation of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb.

Civil rights

Further information: president's committee on civil rights

A 1947 report by the Truman administration titled to secure these rights presented a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms. In February 1948, the president submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a storm of criticism from southern democrats in the run up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying: "my forebears were confederates... But my very stomach turned over when I had learned that negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten." In retirement however, Truman was less progressive on the issue. He described the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches as silly, stating that the marches would not "accomplish a darned thing".

Instead of addressing civil rights on a case by case need, Truman wanted to address civil rights on a national level. Truman made three executive orders that eventually became a structure for future civil rights legislation. The first executive order, executive order 9981 in 1948, created a committee on equality of treatment and opportunity to make report on racial policies in the armed services. The executive order did not specifically address or even mention racial segregation, as Truman "wanted to give the least offence to voters who supported segregation." Nonetheless; it was a milestone on a long road to desegregation of the armed forces. Under the pressure of manpower shortages during the Korean War, army units became racially integrated.

The second, also in 1948, made it illegal to discriminate against persons applying for civil service positions based on race. The third executive order, in 1951, established Committee on Government Contract Compliance (CGCC). This committee ensured that defense contractors to the armed forces could not discriminate against a person on account of race.

Later life and death

In 1956, Truman took a trip to Europe with his wife, and was a sensation. In Britain he received an honorary degree in civic law from Oxford University, an event that moved him to tears. He met with his friend Winston Churchill for the last time, and on returning to the U.S., he gave his full support to Adlai Stevenson's second bid for the white house, although he had initially favored Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York for the nomination.

Upon turning 80, Truman was feted in Washington and asked to address the United States senate, as part of a new rule that allowed former presidents to be granted privilege of the floor. Truman was so emotionally overcome by the honor and by his reception that he was barely able to deliver his speech. He also campaigned for senatorial candidates. A bad fall in the bathroom of his home in late 1964 severely limited his physical capabilities, and he was unable to maintain his daily presence at his presidential library. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare Bill at the Truman Library and gave the first two medicare cards to Truman and his wife Bess to honor his fight for government health care as president.

On December 5, 1972, he was admitted to Kansas City's research hospital and medical center with lung congestion from pneumonia. He subsequently developed multiple organ failure and died at 7:50 a.m. on December 26 at the age of 88. Bess Truman died nearly ten years later, on October 18, 1982. He and Bess are buried at the Truman Library in independence, Missouri. Bess Truman opted for a simple private service at the library for her husband because of her advanced age and frail health, though a state funeral in Washington had been planned. Foreign dignitaries, instead, attended a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral a week later.