Truman, Harry S.

Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972), thirty‐third president of the United States.Born in the farm village of Lamar, Missouri, 120 miles south of Kansas City, to John A. and Martha Ellen Truman, the future president spent his earliest years on a succession of farms until 1890, when his family, including a sister and younger brother, moved to Independence. Graduating from high school in 1901, Truman worked in Kansas City banks until 1906 when he became a farmer on his grandmother's land near Grandview, Missouri. With America's entry into World War I in 1917, he enlisted in a field artillery regiment and saw action in France. Mustered out in 1919, he operated a haberdashery in Kansas City until 1922.

Truman's political career began with his 1922 election to a three‐person county court from the rural, eastern part of Jackson County, which included Independence. In effect he was a county commissioner, as the office generally was known in the Middle West. Defeated in 1924, he was elected presiding judge in 1926, a post he held for eight years. In this position he undertook to construct roads suitable for the automobile era. This led him to encounter the political boss of Kansas City, Thomas J. Pendergast. Truman cooperated in an arrangement whereby Pendergast supporters received county jobs, but the boss allowed Truman to manage the road program without graft.

Elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1934 with Pendergast support and tens of thousands of fraudulent votes in Kansas City, Truman at the outset was considered “the senator from Pendergast” and treated as such by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Gradually he made a name for himself as (so he put it) a workhorse and not a show horse; his fellow senators came to admire him. Reelected narrowly in 1940, after Pendergast's imprisonment for income‐tax evasion, Truman formed a committee to investigate wartime production. It proved so effective that he was chosen as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944, in place of the sitting vice president, Henry A. Wallace. He became president upon Roosevelt's death on 12 April 1945.

President Roosevelt had not been close to his vice president and had told him almost nothing about foreign relations. Yet as luck would have it, foreign affairs dominated Truman's presidency. The new president did know about the nuclear‐weapons program, although not in detail. His decision to authorize the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) was the most controversial of his presidency. His second major involvement in foreign relations was the series of measures—the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan (1947), the Berlin Blockade and Airlift (1948–1949), and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949)—by which the United States strengthened the nations of western Europe against the eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union. These measures, which included declarations of support for nations threatened by communism, economic aid, opposition to a Soviet takeover of the western sectors of Berlin, and a military alliance, strengthened the U.S. position in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union's successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949, Truman authorized a U.S. program to develop the hydrogen bomb.

Truman's third major action, intervention in the Korean War on 25 June, 1950 as part of a United Nations police action, forestalled North Korea's takeover of South Korea. The task proved unexpectedly difficult. When, after an initial retreat before the North Korean attack, the UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur went on the offensive, crossed the thirty‐eighth parallel, and penetrated far into North Korea, the troops of communist China in November 1950 attacked and nearly defeated MacArthur's overextended troops. The Chinese intervention created a military crisis, resolved early the next year by the U.S. Eighth Army under General Matthew B. Ridgway. When MacArthur pushed his own strategic proposals to the point of insubordination, Truman dismissed him in April 1951. After a long stalemate, a truce was signed in Korea in 1953, shortly after Truman left office.

On the domestic front, Truman managed reconversion of the economy after World War II, despite strikes and inflation. The new president gradually brought the cabinet departments and bureaucracy under his control—a lesson he had learned, albeit on a small scale, in county government. But the Cold War, especially the Korean War, bedeviled his domestic policy. In 1947, as Cold War alarms brought fears of domestic subversion, he initiated a loyalty‐review program to ferret out federal workers suspected of disloyalty. It turned up a minuscule number of employees who were alleged security risks.

A bright spot in an otherwise modest domestic record was his championing of civil rights for African Americans. When Congress refused to pass civil rights legislation, Truman did what he could by executive action. He created a Fair Employment Board within the U.S. Civil Service Commission and by a historic executive order of July 1948 established procedures for desegregating the military. The services dragged their feet, but the Korean War crisis sped the process of integration.

In the 1948 election, Truman's civil rights activism gave rise to a third party in the South, the States' Rights, or Dixiecrat, party. His electoral chances dimmed further with a challenge on the left from Henry A. Wallace's Progressive party of 1948. Nevertheless, confounding the experts, Truman and his running mate, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, won one of the great upset victories of American political history, narrowly defeating his Republican challenger, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey (1902–1971).

In 1949, Truman proposed to Congress the Fair Deal, a package of legislative reforms and civil rights proposals designed to continue and extend the New Deal. The Fair Deal got nowhere, and Truman's second term was beset by accusations of corruption, by the bloody conflict in Korea, and by the anticommunist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Truman hated McCarthy but did not give sufficient attention to the senator's name‐calling and accusations.

Stepping aside in 1952, Truman endorsed the Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, who lost heavily to the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Returning to Independence, Truman composed his memoirs, arranged construction of a presidential library, and participated in Democratic causes until ill health curtailed his activities in the mid‐1960s.

Truman's presidency has come to be seen as highly successful, principally in foreign policy, with domestic policy mostly a holding action. The low points were probably Truman's 1947 loyalty program and his failure to respond forcefully to Senator McCarthy's crusade. But the administration's successes abroad far outweighed the domestic failures. Often underrated in his own day, Truman has become one of the most admired holders of the presidency.
See also Anticommunism; Acheson, Dean; Containment; Democratic Party; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; House Committee on Un‐American Activities; Liberalism; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Harry S. Truman , Memoirs, 2 vols., 1955–1956.
David McCullough , Truman, 1992.
Robert H. Ferrell , Harry S. Truman, 1994.
Alonzo L. Hamby , Man of the People, 1995
Gary Donaldson , Truman Defeats Dewey, 1999.

Robert H. Ferrell