Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Robert Shogan

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780700619115, 9780700619115
• eBook ISBN: 9780700623600
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When Harry Truman was rescued from political obscurity to become Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate, black Americans were deeply troubled. Many believed that Truman, born and raised in former slave-holding Missouri, was a step back on civil rights from Henry Wallace, the liberal incumbent vice president. But by the end of his own presidency, black newspaper publishers cited Truman for having “awakened the conscience of America and given new strength to our democracy by his courageous efforts on behalf of freedom and equality.”

In this first full-scale account of Truman’s evolving views on civil rights, Robert Shogan recounts how Truman outgrew the bigotry of his Jackson County upbringing to become the first president since Lincoln to attempt to redress the nation’s long history of injustice toward its black citizens—and in the process transformed the course of race relations in America. Shogan vividly demonstrates the full significance of the 33rd president’s contributions to that transformation. He ordered the integration of the armed forces and threw the weight of the Justice Department behind the long struggle against segregation in housing and education. And he used the platform of his presidency to relentlessly trumpet the cause of equal rights for those least favored Americans, even making an unprecedented address to the NAACP.

Going beyond other accounts of Truman, Shogan points out the political and personal factors that motivated the president and weighs the potential political costs and benefits of his civil rights actions. Shogan also explains Truman’s shift away from his formative racial prejudices by shedding light on the forces that shaped his character and leadership qualities. These included his political tutelage under “Boss Tom” Pendergast, which taught him the value of black voters, and the influence of populism, which fostered his support for underdogs such as black Americans.

Illuminating how Truman became the first president to make racial injustice a political priority—and the first to denounce segregation as well as discrimination—Shogan’s book opens a new and provocative window on the struggle for civil rights in America.

1

THE PRESIDENT’S DILEMMA

The last thing Harry Truman needed was another problem. It was December 1946 and Truman’s first two years in the White House were drawing to an end—and, many believed, for all practical purposes, so was his presidency. Not since Herbert Hoover’s futile stewardship in the depths of the Great Depression had any president stood as low in the regard of his fellow citizens as the nation’s thirty-third chief executive.

The evidence of this dismal state of affairs was abundant, most significantly on Capitol Hill. There the Republican Party, only a minority presence since Hoover’s downfall, had suddenly established overwhelming control. That takeover had been accomplished in the November 1946 congressional elections when voters, fed up with Truman’s handling of the myriad economic disruptions that had followed World War II, had taken revenge on Truman’s Democrats.

But now the president had to confront a challenge that in significance and complexity transcended anything else on the domestic horizon. This was race—the conflict between the growing demands of black Americans for economic and political equity and the fears and anxieties of the white majority. “An American Dilemma,” the Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal had called the contradiction between the democratic creed and the suppression of black citizens. Now it was Truman’s dilemma.

The conundrum was as old as the country. But the long-festering resentment of blacks had been dramatically escalated by the war. It was not hard to see why. The fundamental rationale for the war as a crusade against racism and injustice abroad created a glaring contradiction with the inequities imposed on black Americans, particularly in the South, in nearly every aspect of their lives. More tangible were the broader horizons the war opened for blacks, as their mobility elevated their economic and political circumstances. For blacks, the war generated a new zeitgeist, dark with discontent, bright with hope, and red-hot with anger. “This war is crucial for the future of the Negro and the Negro problem is crucial in the war,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944. “There is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro’s status in America as a result of this war.”

All this would have made it hard for any chief executive to win the trust of his black fellow citizens. For Missourian Truman, the task was made that much harder because of his birth into a family of slaveholders and Confederate sympathizers. The resentment aroused by this heritage was made apparent when the announcement of Truman’s selection as vice president in 1944 led to charges of betrayal from blacks against the leaders of the party that had become their new political home.

If blacks were suspicious of Truman, he had also yet to win the confidence of many whites. In the nation’s capital, fairly or not, many of his fellow Democrats blamed their debacle in the midterm elections on Truman’s inept stewardship. Indeed, with the Republican-controlled Congress in a position to stifle any of Truman’s initiatives, a senator in Truman’s own party, Arkansas’s J. William Fulbright, proposed that Truman resign after first appointing a Republican secretary of state. Then, according to current laws of succession, with the vice presidency vacant, the nation’s designated chief diplomat would move up to become chief executive. That would avoid a partisan stalemate between the branches of government, Fulbright, a former law professor and Rhodes scholar, explained. Truman did not have to think very long before rejecting that idea, while privately referring to its author as “Senator Halfbright.”

In his first public statement after the election, Truman adopted a more dignified tone. He pledged to be guided by “a simple formula: to do in all cases without regard to political considerations what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people.” But that high-minded stance did not alter the judgment many had made on him. The president’s words, Time commented caustically, “were like a wistful echo: this was in effect what Harry Truman had said when he first undertook the office that had proved too much for him.” The New York Times’ Cabell Philips was even blunter, describing the prevailing attitude of Democrats toward Truman as “simple despair and futility.” Though they liked the man, “most seem to think that he has done the best he could, but that his best simply was not good enough.”

Such harsh judgments in part probably reflected the fact that no one in Washington had intended Harry Truman to be president of the United States in the first place—least of all Truman himself. Indeed, he had not much wanted even to be vice president. But extraordinary circumstances overshadowed his preferences. The major reason was that the incumbent president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, probably the most successful American politician of the modern era, was regarded by party leaders who had seen him at close hand as perilously near to meeting his maker. This gave Roosevelt’s choice of a running mate as he sought a fourth term in 1944 farreaching significance.

The easiest answer might have seemed to be to stick with the incumbent vice president, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa, who had made himself in his four years in office the hero of the party’s liberals. But that ideological bent, along with Wallace’s chilly personality, stirred irritation and anxiety among most party leaders, not to mention the reports of peculiar letters written years before to a White Russian mystic that almost forced him off the ticket in 1940.

The ultimate choice of Wallace’s successor would be Roosevelt’s. But the Skipper, as intimates referred to him, characteristically delayed his decision, meanwhile boosting the hopes of various aspirants for the office. When he finally made up his mind to pick a Missouri senator to whom he had always been a distant figure, Truman was among the last to know, and the most surprised. There was nothing for Truman to do but accept his fate. Just as he had loyally supported the president during his ten years in the Senate, Truman dutifully pitched in during the fall campaign, stumping around the country, while the ailing Roosevelt mostly stayed on the sidelines. That formula was enough to win a fourth term for FDR and to elevate his running mate into the vice presidency. Five months later, FDR was dead and Truman was president.

Not surprisingly, Truman was overwhelmed at first, so much so that he asked White House reporters to pray for him. But Harry Truman, at age sixty-two, had been in politics for nearly all his adult life. He had been a poll watcher and precinct captain on the winning side and also for losing causes. He had been town postmaster and had quit in disgust because the pay was not worth the trouble. Serving as county road supervisor, he found that the position arguably carried more prestige than dogcatcher—but not by much. The voters made him a county district judge, then threw him out after one term. Back he came two years later to the same bench, but this time as presiding judge.

Eight years later, the voters of his state had sent him to Washington as a U.S. senator. Yet after six years of diligent service, he was held in such low regard that leaders in his own party, including FDR himself, assumed his forthcoming political demise without much lament. Truman stunned them all by winning a second term, during which he so distinguished himself that the same party leaders who had written him off now wrote his name onto the national ticket as FDR’s understudy. These years had seen crises and challenges beyond counting. Truman had always met the moment, one way or another, although not always gracefully or successfully. But whatever the problem was, he had put it behind him and moved on.

Succeeding to the presidency in the middle of a global conflict of course presented him with a task that surpassed anything he had previously faced. At first, as he oversaw the final days of victory over Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs that crushed the Japanese empire, his modesty and matter-of-fact manner struck just the right note. Americans, trying to recover from the passing of the captain who had seemed in his person to embody the office of chief executive, seemed willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a new leader who appeared vigorous, decisive, and, after the first frisson of self-doubt, sure of purpose. He was, many people concluded, a decidedly ordinary man, but some found a virtue in that. “His regard for the common run of people, including himself, is probably greater than that of many who speak in their name,” observed the Nation. His approval rating soared close to 90 percent in the polls.

But anxiety over postwar problems soon ended that political honeymoon. The abundance of jobs during the war had not erased the bitter memories of the Depression. For many Americans, the joy over peace and victory was mixed with fear of a return to the grim days when it appeared the economic bottom had fallen out. There seemed to be sound reason for this anxiety. At war’s end in 1945, the civilian labor force had reached a record level of more than 53 million. Some 12 million more Americans were still under arms, with the vast majority of them anticipating a swift return to civilian life. No wonder government planners foresaw eight million unemployed, while labor experts predicted the figure would be even higher—up to 18 million. But the fears of depression, like the early reports of Mark Twain’s death, turned out to be greatly exaggerated. In Truman’s entire first term, unemployment never exceeded 4 percent, the level that economists came to consider full employment.

Thanks to the GI bill, the last great beneficence of the New Deal, tens of thousands of ex-GIs headed for college campuses instead of factory gates. Just as important, pent-up wartime demand kept cash registers jingling and assembly lines rolling, when manufacturers could find the materials for production.

And therein lay the rub, or part of it. The scarcity of goods fed what turned out to be the true economic demon of the early postwar era—not depression but inflation. The shortages of materials and products was made even more frustrating by the hard cash that Americans had accumulated during the war when new autos, appliances, and other consumer goods were nonexistent. That naturally drove up prices. Added pressure came from wages, which had been tightly suppressed during the war while, as union members knew only too well, management salaries had soared. All across the board, big unions demanded what amounted to on average a 30 percent raise. Management, still in most cases having to contend with government ceilings on prices, resisted. The inevitable result, which Truman tried desperately to forestall, was a wave of strikes that disrupted the return to market of the goods consumers wanted, soured the public mood, and made Truman seem over his head in the Oval Office.

In fact, as Truman’s months in the Oval Office piled up, so did the criticism. “To err is Truman,” a stinger attributed to Republican senator Robert Taft’s wife, Martha, was repeated time and again among the political set in Washington, and elsewhere too. As the initial glow that had bathed his presidency faded, it became clear that in addition to the economic and foreign policy difficulties Truman faced, there was a problem he could do little about. Many Americans could not forgive him for not being FDR.

The contrast started with physical appearance. Roosevelt’s leonine head and chiseled features, together with his patrician manner, epitomized elegance and grace. Truman’s square-cut Midwestern face, thicklensed glasses, and nondescript bearing brought to mind a shopkeeper, which it was remembered he had been, and a failed one at that. For Truman, oratory was probably the most devastating point of comparison. FDR’s mellifluous tones and meticulous timing had helped rouse a nation to overcome the Depression and defeat the Axis powers. Truman’s thin, rasping monotone tended to set his auditors to drowsing off.

Meanwhile, in his efforts to ease mounting discontent on all sides, Truman found himself yielding to pressure. In October 1945, he eased controls on wages, going on the radio to support substantially higher wages through collective bargaining but warning against inflation. Unions must be reasonable in their demands, Truman urged.

Good luck on that. Pushing for fatter paychecks, unions struck the auto and steel industries. Both walkouts were ultimately settled, but only after hikes in wages and prices that damaged Truman’s efforts to stabilize the economy, not to mention his prestige.

Difficulties extended beyond industry to farming. Fearful of a postwar agriculture surplus that would devastate farmers much as they had suffered in 1929, FDR’s advisers had adjusted production controls to limit output. They succeeded too well. By the spring of 1945, meat, sugar, and other commodities had vanished from grocery stores. Black markets in these goods flourished, adding to the nation’s dissatisfaction with its president. No wonder, as Truman addressed Washington journalists and their prominent guests at the annual Gridiron Dinner, he declared, “Sherman was wrong. I’m telling you I find peace is hell.”

His most urgent problem was the mustering out of the vast military forces the nation had called to the colors. As the clamor “to bring the boys home” grew louder, Truman announced that more than two million soldiers would be back with their families by Christmas. But there was a potential downside to these homecomings. Truman himself told a press conference that the process really amounted to “disintegration” of the nation’s military. Truman’s concern went beyond the boost in unemployment that the influx of veterans into the job market might produce. His worries had far more to do with the palpable rise in tensions in relations with the country’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union. In response to this danger, Truman proposed a program for universal military training that would require all men from eighteen to twenty to take a year of military training. But Congress was more preoccupied with getting World War II soldiers back to civilian life, and Truman’s plan died in the hearing rooms of Capitol Hill.

The new year of 1946 brought no relief of the headaches for the president and his fellow Americans. Overseas, increased Soviet intransigence in dealing with the contours of postwar Europe heightened edginess about the danger of communist subversion within the United States. At home, the seemingly unending labor trouble boiled over with a nationwide railway strike. Truman seized the railroads, and in a melodramatic speech to a joint session of Congress, he asked for power to draft the workers. The strike collapsed and no one was drafted. But Congress was still so indignant at unions that it passed the toughest antilabor bill enacted since the Democrats came to power in 1932—so tough that Truman vetoed it. Congress passed it over his veto. Liberals declared that with his overwrought appearance on Capitol Hill, Truman had killed his chances of being elected in 1948, and David Dubinsky, the powerful president of the Garment Workers Union, called for a labor-based third party.

As the 1946 elections approached, it seemed as if Truman’s circumstances could hardly have been worse. Ever since he had been sworn in as president and had begun to think about his own reelection prospects, Truman had realized that the key to his chances was to hold together the great coalition that FDR had molded during his course of the presidency. It was an unlikely combination: Southern whites, small farmers, urban minorities, and the burgeoning labor movement whose growth Roosevelt had helped foster. The needs of the Depression and the unifying patriotic spirit during the war and his own dexterity had enabled Roosevelt to maintain support from these disparate groups. But war’s end and the economic disarray stemming from conversion to peace created new pressures that generated conflict rather than harmony. Now that the Depression had been banished, the South’s natural conservatism reasserted itself. Dixie’s leaders turned against the New Deal economic reforms and the enlarged role for government that came with those policies.

Elsewhere in the country, Truman’s response to the epidemic of strikes made liberals question his adherence to the pro-labor principles that had been a cornerstone of FDR’s programs and his electoral success. Even more important to many liberals was what they regarded as Truman’s overly harsh response to the Soviet Union. In February 1947, he proclaimed what came to be called the Truman Doctrine, pledging U.S. support for Greece and Turkey and other nations threatened by communism. The hard edge of that stance was broadened somewhat a few months later, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a cooperative international effort to help European economies recover from the ravages of World War II. Still, liberals worried that U.S. commitment to help abroad could turn the cold war that had broken out between the United States and the Soviet Union hot.

As their discontent intensified, liberals increasingly turned to Henry Agard Wallace, FDR’s former vice president, as their chief spokesman. Though privately resentful when FDR jettisoned him in 1944, Wallace publicly took that setback with good grace, and Roosevelt named him secretary of commerce at the start of his fourth term. The appointment placated Wallace’s disappointed supporters and provided a forum that he could use to promote his beliefs, particularly on relations with the Soviet Union.

Given Wallace’s stature on the left and the divergence of his views from Truman’s foreign policy, an explosion was bound to happen. It finally took place during the preliminaries to the 1946 congressional elections, when Truman unaccountably approved an advance copy of a Wallace campaign speech that directly clashed with the tough line just laid down by Secretary of State James Byrnes. With world capitals in an uproar, Truman demanded Wallace’s resignation in a letter so intemperate that when Wallace complied, he offered to return the letter, a courtesy Truman accepted. “He was so nice about it I almost backed out,” Truman wrote home, describing Wallace as “the most peculiar fellow I’d ever met,” a sentiment that may well have been mutual.

Many anticipated that Wallace’s departure would lead to his running for president on an independent ticket. Meanwhile, his ouster not only strained Truman’s relations with Democratic liberals over foreign policy, but also rubbed salt into another, even more sensitive political sore spot. This was the uneasy relationship of border-state–bred Harry Truman with millions of increasingly frustrated black Americans. Just as comparisons with FDR inevitably hurt Truman, so did the contrast with Wallace, particularly among blacks. In May 1946, a few months before Wallace’s ouster from the cabinet, a poll by the Negro Digest showed that 91 percent of black voters favored Wallace for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1948. But Wallace aside, Truman—or, for that matter, any American president—was headed for trouble on race. The cynicism of black Americans had inevitably mounted over the years as a result of a system infused with hypocrisy and designed to shut them out.

Duplicity began with the birth of the nation and the drafting of the Constitution. Nearly half the convention delegates were slave owners, so it was no wonder that they demanded and won a provision granting them what they wanted, the so-called three-fifths compromise. Even though Southern states denied slaves any rights, they were allowed to count them toward their representation in Congress on the basis of each slave equaling three-fifths of a free white citizen. The slaves were not even mentioned as such but were instead referred to in the language of the nation’s founding charter only as “other persons.”

Things did not improve for a long while. Lincoln and emancipat...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1. The President’s Dilemma
• 2. Facing the Century
• 3. The Boss’s Apprentice
• 4. Back from the Dead
• 5. Road to the Top
• 6. The Turning Point
• 7. More Than a Dream
• 8. Running from Behind
• 9. The Upset
• 10. Freedom to Serve
• 11. Friends of the Court
• 12. Legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover