Harry S. Truman became President of the United States with the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945.Nobody in either party, not a professional politician, not a reporter, not even his own mother-in-law doubted that Tom Dewey would be the next president. The result of a Newsweek poll of fifty top political commentators nationwide who were asked to predict the outcome was Dewey 50, Truman 0.
Who was Truman? He was a child of Missouri. Born on May 8, 1884, in the town of Lamar, grew up in Independence, only ten miles east of Kansas City. As a child he used to devoure history books and literature, played the piano enthusiastically, and dreamed of becoming a great soldier.
Truman instead of attending a four-year college because of financial problems, worked on his family farm between 1906 and 1914. he wed in 1919 after romantic adventures with Virginia “Bess” Wallace and five years later had their first and only child, Mary Margaret.
In 1914, after his father’s death, Truman tried unsuccessfully to earn a living as an owner and operator of a small mining company and oil business, all the while remaining involved with the farm. In 1917, Truman’s National Guard unit shipped out to France as a part of the American Expeditionary Force fighting the world war. The soldiering life suited Truman, who turned his battery — which had a reputation for unruliness and ineffectiveness — into a top-notch unit.
How did he arrive to political scenes? He had arrived first in Washington in the 1930s as a senator notable mainly for his background in the notorious Pendergast machine of Kansas City. He was of Scotch-Irish descent, and like many of Scotch-Irish descent -he could be narrow, clannish, short-tempered and stubborn to a fault. But he could also be intensely loyal and courageous. Senator Truman supported the New Deal, although he proved only a marginally important legislator. He became a national figure during World War II when he chaired the “Truman Committee” investigating government defense spending. President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Truman as his running mate in the 1944 presidential campaign largely because the Missourian passed muster with Southern Democrats and party officials. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won a comfortable victory over its Republican opposition, though Truman would serve only eighty-two days as vice president. With the death of FDR on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third President of the United States.
How were his political condition and his problem that confronted?
During his nearly eight years in office, Truman confronted enormous challenges in both foreign and domestic affairs. Truman’s policies abroad, and especially toward the Soviet Union in the emerging Cold War, would become staples of American foreign policy for generations. At home, Truman protected and reinforced the New Deal reforms of his predecessor, guided the American economy from a war-time to a peace-time footing, and advanced the cause of African-American civil rights. Historians now rank Truman among the nation’s best Presidents.
Truman took office as World War II in Europe drew to a close. The German leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin only two weeks into Truman’s presidency and the allies declared victory in Europe on May 7, 1945. The war in the Pacific, however, was far from being over; most experts believed it might last another year and require an American invasion of Japan. The U.S. and British governments, though, had secretly begun to develop the world’s most deadly weapon — an atomic bomb. Upon its completion and successful testing in the summer of 1945, Truman approved its use against Japan. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force dropped atomic bombs on two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immediately killing upwards of 100,000 people (with perhaps twice that number dying from the aftereffects of radiation poisoning). Japanese emperor Hirohito agreed to surrender days later, bringing World War II to a close.
Truman faced unprecedented and defining challenges in international affairs during the first years of his presidency. American relations with the Soviet Union — nominal allies in the battle against Germany and Japan — began to deteriorate even before victory in World War II. Serious ideological differences — the United States supported democratic institutions and market principles, while Soviet leaders were totalitarian and ran a command economy — separated the two countries. But it was the diverging interest of the emerging superpowers in Europe and Asia which sharpened their differences.
In response to what it viewed as Soviet threats, the Truman administration constructed foreign policies to contain the Soviet Union’s political power and counter its military strength. By 1949, Soviet and American policies had divided Europe into a Soviet-controlled bloc in the east and an American-supported grouping in the west.That same year, a communist government sympathetic to the Soviet Union came to power in China, the world’s most populous nation. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which would last for over forty years, had begun.
At home, President Truman presided over the difficult transition from a war-time to a peace-time economy. During World War II, the American government had intervened in the nation’s economy to an unprecedented degree, controlling prices, wages, and production. Truman lobbied for a continuing government role in the immediate post-war economy and also for an expansive liberal agenda that built on the New Deal. Republicans and conservative Democrats attacked this strategy of the President mercilessly. An immediate postwar economy characterized by high inflation and consumer shortages further eroded Truman’s support and contributed to the Democrats losing control of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections. Newly empowered Republicans and conservative Democrats stymied Truman’s liberal proposals and began rolling back some New Deal gains, especially through the Taft-Hartley labor law moderately restricting union activity. Other important case was the election of 1948; he intelligently counterattacked with skill, fire, and wit and also took steps to energize his liberal Democratic base, especially blacks, unions, and urban dwellers, issuing executive orders that pushed forward the cause of African-American civil rights and vetoing (unsuccessfully) the Taft-Hartley bill.
Truman won the presidential nomination of a severely divided Democratic party in the summer of 1948 and faced New York’s Republican governor Thomas Dewey in the general election. Few expected him to win, but the President waged a vigorous campaign that excoriated Republicans in Congress as much as it attacked Dewey. Truman defeated Dewey in November 1948, capping one of the most stunning political comebacks in American history.
I should notice that he was already in foreign affairs providing his most effective leadership.
In 1947 as the Soviet Union pressured Turkey and, through guerrillas, threatened to take over Greece, he asked Congress to aid the two countries, enunciating the program that bears his name–the Truman Doctrine. The Marshall Plan, named for his Secretary of State, stimulated spectacular economic recovery in war-torn Western Europe.
When the Russians blockaded the western sectors of Berlin in 1948, Truman created a massive airlift to supply Berliners until the Russians backed down. Meanwhile, he was negotiating a military alliance to protect Western nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949.
In June 1950, when the Communist government of North Korea attacked South Korea, Truman conferred promptly with his military advisers. There was, he wrote, “complete, almost unspoken acceptance on the part of everyone that whatever had to be done to meet this aggression had to be done. There was no suggestion from anyone that either the United Nations or the United States could back away from it.”
A long, discouraging struggle ensued as U.N. forces held a line above the old boundary of South Korea. Truman kept the war a limited one, rather than risk a major conflict with China and perhaps Russia.
Deciding not to run again, he retired to Independence; at age 88, he died December 26, 1972, after a stubborn fight for life.
While opponents of Truman blame Truman because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombardment, evidences show that “at that time Truman did not understand at all what was involved”as he told the secretory of war, Mr Stimson”to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not the women and children”.
To put the issue into perspective, studying about Truman’s life, we come up with this conclusion that Truman’s legacy has become clearer and more impressive in the years since he left office. Most scholars admit that the President faced enormous challenges domestically, internationally, and politically. While he occasionally failed to measure accurately the nation’s political tenor and committed some significant policy blunders, Truman achieved notable successes. Domestically, he took important first steps in civil rights, protected many of the New Deal’s gains, and presided over an economy that would enjoy nearly two decades of unprecedented growth. In foreign affairs, the President and his advisers established many of the basic foundations of America foreign policy, especially in American-Soviet relations, that would guide the nation in the decades ahead. On the whole, Truman is currently celebrated by the public, politicians, and scholars alike.
References
1. Biography of Harry S.Truman, 29 March 2006; < www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/ht33.html>
2. President Truman-Harry S.Truman presidential Museum and library 28 March 2006; <www.trumanlibrary.org/>
3. Atomic Bomb: DecisionTruman Diary, July 25 1945, 29 March 2006 <www.dannen.com/decision/hst-jl25.html>
4. Leo Szilard, Interview: president Truman Did Not Understand, 29 March 2006 <www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html>
5. The American president: Harry Truman, 29 March 2006
<www.americanpresident.org/history/harrytruman/>
6. Atomic Bomb: Decision — Official Bombing Order, July 25, 1945, 29 March 2006
<www.dannen.com/decision/handy.html>
Hanie Gholami