David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  When several southern Democrats, meeting privately with the President, suggested all would turn out well if he “softened” his views, Truman, in a written reply, said his own forebears were Confederates and he came from a part of Missouri where “Jim Crowism” still prevailed.

  But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

  Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.

  On racial matters, Truman had not entirely outgrown his background. Old biases, old habits of speech continued, surfacing occasionally offstage, as some of his aides and Secret Service agents would later attest. Privately, he could still speak of “niggers,” as if that were the way one naturally referred to blacks. His own sister told Jonathan Daniels that Harry was no different than ever on the subject. Daniels, who had gone to Missouri to gather material for a biography of the President, recorded in his notes that as Mary Jane drove him south from Independence to Grandview one morning, she turned and said, “Harry is no more for nigger equality than any of us”—a statement Daniels, as a southerner, found reassuring.

  But Mary Jane, like others, failed to understand that Truman knew now, if they did not, that as President he could no longer sit idly by and do nothing in the face of glaring injustice. The findings of his Civil Rights Commission, in a landmark report entitled To Secure These Rights, had been a shocking revelation. When a friend from “out home” wrote to advise him to go easy on civil rights, appealing to Truman as a fellow southerner, Truman took time to answer privately and at length:

  The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves. I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.

  When a mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.

  On the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway when coal burning locomotives were used, the Negro firemen were the thing because it was a back-breaking job and a dirty one. As soon as they turned to oil as a fuel it became customary for people to take shots at Negro firemen and a number were murdered because it was thought that this was now a white-collar job and should go to a white man. I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve of it, as long as I am here…. I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause….

  The murder of four blacks by mob gunfire referred to in the letter had occurred in Monroe, Georgia, in July 1946. Two men and their wives were dragged from a car and gunned down so savagely their bodies were scarcely identifiable. One of the victims, Truman knew from the report of his Commission, had been a newly returned war veteran, and this, like the account of the men dumped from the truck in Mississippi, and of the young black sergeant, Isaac Woodward, who had been pulled from a bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, and brutally beaten and blinded by police, made an everlasting impression on Truman, moving him in a way no statistics ever would have.

  “The wonderful, wonderful development in those years,“ Clark Clifford would reflect long afterward, “was Harry Truman’s capacity to grow.”

  Of all the President’s aides and Cabinet officers no one had done more than Clifford to push for a strong stand on civil rights, as part of a larger effort to, in Clifford’s words, “strike for new high ground” whenever confronting the Republican Congress. And it was strategy based on close study, no less than moral conviction, for Clifford did nothing without careful preparation and planning. (On the golf course he was known as someone never to play behind, if it could be avoided, since he took so many practice swings before every shot.) A special, confidential report had been prepared on “The Politics of 1948,” a document of thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages prepared by a young Washington attorney and former Roosevelt aide named James A. Rowe, Jr., who had been talking with labor leaders, professional politicians, and newspaper people. It was a political forecast, with suggestions based, as Rowe stressed, solely on appraisal of “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Because Rowe was a law partner of Thomas Corcoran, the influential “Tommy the Cork,” whom Truman so disliked, Clifford decided not to tell Truman of Rowe’s part in the report, but to submit it as his own. And with some editing and added refinements by Clifford and George Elsey it was perceived as, if not exactly a blueprint for the Democrats in 1948, then a guide to navigation.

  That Rowe’s authorship was so brushed aside then and later distressed Rowe very little. Such was the nature of the system. “This is, as you know, a typical and acceptable White House staff technique,” he would write to a political scholar years later, “and one which I followed in the days when I was Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt.” Who got the credit was not the point. They were all there to serve the President. Roosevelt especially had preferred people working for him to be equipped with “a passion for anonymity.”

  In the Roosevelt and Truman years, George Elsey would remember, “staff was staff.”

  The Republican nominee, Rowe predicted, would be Dewey, and Dewey, a “resourceful,” “highly dangerous” candidate, would be more difficult to defeat than in 1944. To win, the Democrats had to carry the West and the farm vote. Labor would have to be “cajoled, flattered and educated,” not because labor might vote Republican, but because labor might “stay home” on election day. The liberals, on the other hand, had to be “fed” idealism. For while few in number, the liberals, like the manufacturers and financiers in the Republican ranks, were extremely influential: “The businessman has influence because he contributes money. The liberal exerts influence because he is articulate.”

  The black vote was crucial. “A theory of many professional politicians,” Rowe reported, “is that the northern Negro vote today holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a block but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” Unless the administration made a determined campaign to help the Negro, Rowe insisted, the Negro vote was already lost.

  No candidate since 1876, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916, had won the presidency without carrying New York, and crucial to New York, along with the black vote, was the Jewish vote, concentrated in New York City. But unless the Palestine issue was “boldly and favorably handled” by the administration, the Jewish vote was certain to go to the “alert” Dewey, or to Henry Wallace.

  Housing and high prices would be the chief domestic issue. The foreign policy issue, of course, would be American relations with the Soviet Union, and, according to Rowe, there was “considerable political advantage” to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. The Cold War made good election year politics.

  In times of crises the American citizen tends to back up his President. And on the issue of policy toward Russia, President Truman is comparatively invulnerable to attack because of his brilliant appointment of General Marshall, who has convinced the public that as Secretary of State he is nonpartisan and above politics.

  In a flank attack tied up with foreign policy, the Republicans are trying to identify the Administration with domestic Communists. The President adroitly stole their thunder by initiating his own Government employee loyalty investigation proce
dure and the more frank Republicans admit it. But their efforts will intensify as the election approaches….

  Leadership in the Democratic Party was moribund or worse. It had been so long in power that it was “fat, tired and even a bit senile.” The old boss-run machines were a shambles.

  The President appeared to be liked by the American people. “They know that he is a sincere and humble man and, in the cliché often heard, that he is a man ‘trying to do his best.’ ” The problem was the people saw him still as fundamentally a politician, and the politician as such did not hold first place in the ranks of American heroes. The “public picture” of the President, unfortunately, was “not sufficiently varied.” The people wanted more in a chief executive. To resolve the problem, Rowe suggested that Truman be seen less in the company of politicians and more often with such interesting people as famous scientists and best-selling authors. Further, the President should divest himself as rapidly as possible of any remnants of the “Missouri gang.” Rowe (and subsequently Clifford in the final version of the report) proposed that Truman invite Albeit Einstein to lunch at the White House, that Truman, as a matter of routine, be seen and photographed with not less than two interesting, admirable, nonpolitical figures per week.

  Most important of all, the President must be seen more by the people. He must get away from Washington, travel the country.

  Since he is President he cannot be politically active until after the July convention…. So a President who is also a candidate must resort to subterfuges—for he cannot sit silent. He must be in the limelight. He must…resort to the kind of trip which Roosevelt made famous in the 1940 campaign—the “inspection tour.” No matter how much the opposition press pointed out the political overtones of those trips, the people paid little attention because what they saw was the Head of State performing his duties.

  In several respects the report was decidedly mistaken. There was the assumption, for example, that Truman would agree to an idea like inviting Einstein to lunch. Truman had no patience with such public relations gimmickry. It would be synthetic and out of character and he wouldn’t do it, he told Clifford. Nor was he about to cashier Harry Vaughan or Wallace Graham in order to enhance his standing in the public eye. But more striking was Rowe’s mistaken confidence that the solid South would remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It was, he said, inconceivable that any policies initiated by the administration, no matter how liberal, could so alienate the South it would revolt in an election year. “As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored.”

  Since the Republicans controlled Congress, and since the southern Democrats who went along with the Republicans time and again were not about to change their attitudes, there was no reason to try to placate either faction.

  “We were telling the President,” Rowe later recalled, “ ‘You can’t get anything done up there on the Hill, so, in effect, you want to send all the legislation you can up there and then give them hell for not doing anything about it….’ ”

  How much real influence the memorandum had on Truman is impossible to measure. Probably it was relatively little, certainly less than later claimed. According to Rowe—who was told by James Webb—Truman kept it in the bottom drawer of his desk and read it “every once in a while.” But others would insist the memorandum made little if any impression on Truman, since he already knew most of the best that was in it. “To a politician of Harry Truman’s experience and resourcefulness,” remembered Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, “the ‘famous political memorandum’ would have been a primer.” And in any event Truman would be running the campaign his own way, according to his own ideas, his own political instincts.

  As things developed, the boycotting of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner by Senator Johnston was only a mild preview of southern outrage. Fifty-two southern Democrats in Congress pledged themselves to fight any civil rights program in the Democratic platform and, by implication, any Democratic candidate for President who advocated such heinous liberal ideas. There were threats of a white southern march on Washington and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, speaking for a committee of southern governors, pledged to defend white supremacy and warned the leadership of the Democratic Party that the South was no longer “in the bag.” The Mississippi Democratic Committee said it would withdraw from the national convention unless “anti-Southern laws” were rejected.

  Truman took all this very calmly. Then, on March 8, without fanfare, Senator J. Howard McGrath, Bob Hannegan’s replacement as national chairman, announced formally that the President was in the fight for reelection, adding also that the President’s position on civil rights remained unchanged.

  Immediately Alabama’s Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, two of the South’s most liberal voices in Congress and old friends of Harry Truman, called on him to withdraw and said they would give him no support at the convention. Clearly, a southern rebellion of major proportions was under way.

  Troubles of an entirely different nature were besetting Truman, meantime, some minor, even trivial, yet conspicuous and time-consuming just the same.

  A huge stir of disapproval and ridicule—editorial indignation, jokes, cartoons—had erupted when he announced a plan to add a new balcony to the South Portico of the White House, extending from his upstairs Oval Study, so that he and his family could enjoy some outside “breathing space” with a degree of privacy. It would mean the first major change in the mansion since the time of Andrew Jackson, when the North Portico was added.

  The balcony project was Truman’s own idea and to his extreme annoyance, it met with instant disapproval from the Fine Arts Commission, as well as a large part of the press. He was called “Back Porch Harry” and accused of meddling with a structure that not only didn’t belong to him, but that he was not likely to be occupying much longer. Republicans were delighted, as the “Truman Balcony” became an overnight sensation. Truman, his temper up, stood his ground, arguing that Jefferson himself had used just such upstairs galleries or balconies in his columned buildings at the University of Virginia. (The Washington Star expressed gratitude that the President had never seen the Taj Mahal or the old Moulmein Pagoda, or he might have had even more outrageous notions.) The balcony would make the White House “look right,” Truman insisted. It would do away with the need for the unsightly awnings used in summer to shade the mansion’s downstairs rooms on the south side. “The awnings you will remember were attached about halfway up the beautiful columns and looked always as if they’d caught all the grime and dirt in town,” he wrote to his sister. “Had to be renewed every year [at a cost of $780] and cost $2,000 a year in upkeep. In eight years the portico will be paid for in awning cost and the White House from the south will look as it should.” On his morning walks, when approaching the White House from the south side, he hated the sight of the dirty awnings and the way they “put the beautiful columns out of proportion.” He would go ahead with his balcony. And that was that.

  To compound his concerns over the old house, he was informed discreetly by Head Usher Howell Crim that the whole second floor was in imminent danger of falling down. After close examination, an engineer told Truman the ceiling in the State Dining Room was staying in place largely from “force of habit.”

  Charlie Ross was in a fury because Harry Vaughan insisted on making his own announcements to the press. The soft-spoken, thoughtful press secretary and the Falstaffian military aide had come to dislike one another more and more. Ross was “terrifically upset,” warning there had to be a showdown; “it had to be either Vaughan or himself,” recorded Eben Ayers.

  Wallace Graham, the President’s physician, was accused of gambling in grain futures at the very time the President had denounced commodity speculation as a contributing cause of inflation, and the implications were that Graham had benefited from inside information. Though at first Graham insisted he had “lost his socks” in the market, he eventu
ally admitted to having made a profit of $6,000 on an investment of $5,700. Nonetheless he, like Harry Vaughan, remained on duty at the White House, and the more the press deplored their presence, the more Truman dug in his heels.

  “You can guard yourself against the wiles of your enemies,” Ross observed ruefully to Ayers, “but not the stupidity of your friends.”

  Henry Wallace, meantime, was crusading up and down the country and drawing huge crowds. His followers included ardent young liberals, working people, blacks, and, conspicuously, members of the American Communist Party. Attacking the Democrats and Republicans alike for their internal “rot,” Wallace proposed turning America’s atomic weapons over to the United Nations, and called for a massive reconstruction program for the Soviet Union to be financed by the United States. He repudiated the Marshall Plan as a marshal plan. He talked of nationalizing the country’s coal mines and railroads. Truman’s political strategists worried that the effect of the Wallace movement on Democratic loyalties could do more damage than defections in the South.