Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,971

This is the grave of Harry Truman.

We don’t really need a regular bio of Truman. It would take too long anyway. So let me make just a few points here on issues I’d like to address a bit.

First, I’d like to address Truman’s Ku Klux Klan period. This always plagued his image and for good reason. Looking a bit more at it does help us to understand just how pervasive it was at the time. The second KKK was sort of like first term MAGA (second term is much, much worse as we are experiencing). In other words, it was a place for middle class small town people to vent their insecurities and hates while basically engaging in fraternal organizations based around it and creating an identity of us vs. them that also helped a lot in business opportunities. Buddy Garrity Republicans basically, to use the parlance of our times. That really seems to be how Truman approached it. He was a small town guy but not that small of a town, since Independence was just outside Kansas City. He joined because it was what an economically upwardly mobile small town Democrat did in the 1920s. But Truman was already connected to the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City and when it was suggested to him that to be a good Klansman, one had to not hire Catholics, he seems to have balked. I guess that’s good for him. But you know, Truman also loved using racial slurs, certainly as much as LBJ did. It was part of what it meant to be white for so many whites in this era. Hell, Eugene Debs loved racist jokes and told them his whole life. What can you say.

Second, it’s worth noting how utterly indifferent Franklin Delano Roosevelt about who is VP would be in 1944, even though the man was about to die. You’d have thought he would want to bring along a successor, but no, that doesn’t seem to have even crossed his mind much. Truman got the position because Henry Wallace was no longer tenable to party regulars and at least he wasn’t an open segregationist as John Nance Garner had been. FDR basically said that Truman was acceptable to him and told party leaders he would be OK with either Truman or William O. Douglas, which would have been interesting had he become president. But it’s not like Roosevelt told Truman anything, like we are developing an atomic bomb or anything like that.

Third, Truman did not trust just about anyone associated with FDR. So when he became president, he basically purged the Cabinet and put in his own guys, who often were of a lesser ability. Truman was a party hack and he often governed like that. He was also a real sensitive guy who held a lot of grudges, so he wanted to screw over anyone he thought had ever been against him, which meant much of the Democratic Party and most leading American journalists. I was recently corrected on Truman having any part in the decision on dropping the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki; largely I was surprised to realize just how little say the president would have in such a matter.

And yet, Truman was a pretty good president. Few would have admitted this at the time. His popularity was low throughout his time in the White House. Much of this had to do with him not being FDR, much of it had to do with people being tried of Democrats in power, and quite a bit had to do with the onset of the Cold War, which Truman got a lot of unsurprising but unjust blame for, as if he had the ability to prop up the rotten and corrupt Chiang Kai-Shek (and Madam Chiang!) forever. Truman most certainly did not handle foreign policy with a lot of nuance. Like a lot of American presidents, he really didn’t know much about the rest of the world. I don’t think there’s really any way around the Cold War–but FDR certainly had the ability to manage Stalin in a way that Truman did not. But probably not much would have changed even if Truman actually had preexisting competency here. The other thing to note about foreign policy is Korea and he took a lot of heat for that and it cost Democrats in 1952, though Eisenhower was probably unbeatable either way. But it not’s as if Eisenhower had any way out either. It really did take Americans a long time to get used to what the new kind of warfare would be like. And maybe they never did.

I also have to note that Truman is overrated on labor issues. He’s often cited as good on labor becasue he vetoed Taft-Hartley. This is true, but it’s only because he thought T-H went way too far. He was happy to sign some anti-union legislation. Also, for everyone who called Joe Biden a unionbuster for using the Railway Labor Act to stop the rail strike in 2022–and note that this law was written by railroad brotherhood representatives to work in exactly this way–when rail workers struck during the Korean War, Truman asked Congress for a bill that would allow him to break their strike by rounding them all up and sending them to the frontlines of the Korean War. So, uh…….not good! That doesn’t mean he was horrible on labor issues generally. He wasn’t. He was alright most of the time. But he had a streak of real bad tendencies sometimes when he got pissed off. And a sensitive guy like Truman did get pissed a lot.

Truman of course deserves a ton of credit for desegregating the military, starting a real Democratic Party commitment to civil rights that FDR simply did not have. Truman was disgusted with the attack on Isaac Woodard, a Black soldier returning home in uniform to South Carolina who was beaten and blinded by scumbag racists. When the police chief who allowed it to happen was acquitted, Truman decided to act and desegregated the entire military in 1948. An election year too, not the politically expedient call and which helped lead to Strom Thurmond’s States Rights Party challenge. For a guy with his background, it was an impressive commitment and really is one of the two big precursors of the late 40s, along with the desegregation of baseball, that announced new possibilities for equality. This could have easily cost Truman the election, which of course he was supposed to lose to Thomas Dewey and famously did not thanks to his excellent campaigning, as well as the poor and flawed polling of the era that probably misrepresented the situation anyway.

Finally, Paul’s research on Truman making bogus claims about being poor to juice the government to giving him and future presidents a bunch of post-presidency money is gold. In fact, Paul’s research is now cited on Truman’s Wikipedia page about the lies of the president’s retirement. Before Paul published this, he chatted with me about it. I had absolutely no idea any of this had happened. I think I started cackling at the joy of taking a shot at the lies of the past. And as it turns out, by 1959, Truman owned part of the Los Angeles Rams, all while talking poverty. He wasn’t a machine man for nothing, by God!

Harry Truman is buried at the Harry Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri. This was recently redone with the most modern museum techniques and it’s quite good. There are even video games about the Cold War to play in it. Unlike the utterly yawn-inducing Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush Libraries, this is actually worth visiting as a museum.

If you would like this series to visit other presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. In fact, there are only two left that I have not covered in this insane series! Jimmy Carter is in Plains, Georgia and Ronald Reagan is in Simi Valley, California. Previous posts are archived here and here.