by Harry Truman
I’LL NEVER BE able to answer completely why it took us so long to become an economic power or a military power, and I don’t think anybody else can. I guess, as much as anything, it was because we had some selfish stinkers during the early periods in our country who felt that the economic program at home was something they ought to control, and in controlling it, they dealt only with the countries that could benefit them and didn’t need help themselves. It wasn’t decided on ideological grounds, or because, at least after a while, they didn’t want to get involved in anything outside our borders. It was strictly selfishness that made them interested only where they could get the most money. In South America, the development in those countries was very small and very light, and our fiscal trade for quite a while was pretty much confined to Brazil and on the basis of coffee. And then the United Fruit Company went into Central American countries for bananas and other tropical fruit that we could use, and that helped the development. But it took a long time for us to realize that the resources of those countries were just as great as the resources we have right here at home.
We also, of course, had a bunch of economic royalists who controlled much of the trade of the country and wanted to keep outside trade from coming in and giving them competition. In that line of thinking, too, it took them a long time to realize that, in order to maintain our status as a great commercial and world power, we had to carry on trade with the rest of the world. Cordell Hull, who was Roosevelt’s secretary of state from 1933 to 1944, the longest period of service of any secretary of state in our history, helped a lot in that direction, with his Reciprocal Trade Act in 1934, which increased our trade enormously with other countries by allowing us to reduce tariffs on their goods in return for reductions on ours, and with his work on our Good Neighbor Policy, which increased our help toward our immediate neighbors, and strengthened our friendship with them and the united stand of the Western Hemisphere against our enemies in World War II. Hull received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1945 and really helped us realize that equality is the only fair proposition - that what’s fair for one country should be fair for all others, whether they’re weaker nations or just as strong as we are. We finally made up our minds that the best way, the only way, to treat other nations is as equals, and we’ve been doing it ever since. And I hope we continue that policy even though there are still people around who would like to see it discontinued.
Wilson is the most outstanding example of a president who was guided by the lessons of history when he decided to try again to bring a group of nations together to work for peace in the same way that King Henry IV tried to do it in the seventeenth century. You can learn a lot by the study of history, and the politics in history is the most interesting study that’s available, unless you’re a nut on figures or something of that kind and want to go into mathematics, because the formation of governments in all parts of the world always shows you that things work only if people are treated fairly, and if they aren’t, you have rebellions and destruction. We’ve come to the point in the twentieth century where the whole world is only about a tenth as large as it was when Columbus set out and discovered America, and I think Wilson realized, more than any other man in our history up to that time, that all parts of our great world can be used for the welfare and benefit of all mankind if we want to do it. And when Wilson went to Europe after the First World War to join David Lloyd George, prime minister of England, Georges Clemenceau, premier of France, and Vittorio Orlando, premier of Italy, in attending the Paris Peace Conference and putting together the Treaty of Versailles, the first American president ever to go to Europe while still in office, he was able to get included in the treaty an agreement for the formation of the body he called the League of Nations. The League’s headquarters were set up in Geneva, and the new organization was empowered to deal with all matters “affecting the peace of the world,” including the use of military force and economic sanctions if absolutely necessary. The League would also be associated with several important related organizations such as the World Court, also known as the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the International Labor Organization.
But Wilson made a lot of political mistakes at the same time. He had less than two years to go in his second term in office, and the Republicans had gained control of both the Senate and the House in the 1918 elections, but Wilson didn’t include a single Republican in his American delegation. So when he returned to the United States, he found that many Republicans were objecting to the Treaty of Versailles in general and the League of Nations in particular, and so were some Democrats.
The Treaty of Versailles was in some ways a big territorial grab. France was given Alsace-Lorraine, formerly under German control; Great Britain and France took over all of the German colonies in Africa; Premier Orlando demanded a part of the Alps for Italy, even though the area included 200,000 German-speaking people, and when Wilson objected mildly to this, Orlando walked out in a huff; and Japan demanded the Shantung Peninsula in China, also formerly controlled by Germany. Wilson had made many public statements objecting to things like the Japanese takeover of the Shantung Peninsula, but in his eagerness to get the League of Nations going, he went along with them, feeling that the League would correct many of the problems.
But when he returned home, he found his popularity disappearing and he found himself attacked on all sides. Irish Americans didn’t like the provision in the Treaty that gave Great Britain, British-controlled Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa a vote apiece, feeling that that gave the British too strong control of the League. German Americans felt that the territorial transfers, the huge financial penalties levied against Germany, and the provision that prohibited Germany almost totally from retaining an army, navy, or air force were too harsh. People who were German-haters felt it was too mild. And others felt that the Shantung Peninsula should have been given back to China rather than to Japan. In general, a lot of people felt that Wilson had been pushed around in Europe and hadn’t been strong enough in protecting America’s position in the matter. And this feeling was strengthened when, in January 1919, a New York newspaper secured and published the text of some secret treaties between Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia which revealed that they’d plotted to divvy up German territories long before the war was over.
Here Wilson made his next big political mistake. Some extremists were totally against the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but others, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican who headed the Foreign Relations Committee, were more moderate and were prepared to back Wilson if he’d agree to try to get some improvements in the Treaty when he returned to Paris for a second go-round. But Wilson turned stubborn and insisted that the Treaty be left alone, when, in fact, he agreed that there were serious flaws in the Treaty, and he could easily and with a clear conscience have gone along with the people who were ready to help him. The result was that a group of senators issued a “round-robin letter” denouncing Wilson and the League of Nations.
In September 1919, back in the United States, Wilson went off on a speaking tour to sell the idea of the League of Nations to the American people, a difficult and exhausting trip in which he traveled 8,000 miles in three weeks and spoke in twenty-nine cities. It was too much for him, and on September 25, in Pueblo, Colorado, as I mentioned earlier in this book, he collapsed from exhaustion and went back to Washington. And a week later, on October 2, he had that stroke which paralyzed his left side and kept him in a wheelchair or in bed for the remaining four and a half years of his life.
On March 19, 1920, the Senate voted down acceptance of both the Treaty and the League of Nations; the necessary two-thirds majority missed by eight votes. The United States never joined the League of Nations, and in the next presidential election, with James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt running on a platform that supported the League of Nations, they were, as you know, whipped soundly by that fellow Warren G. Harding. You know how I feel about Harding.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, once said about him, “Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” I think she was being entirely too kind.
The League of Nations limped along, of course, under the control of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Bulgaria and Austria joined the League in 1920, Hungary in 1922, Turkey in 1932, and Russia in 1934. Germany joined in 1926 and left again in 1933, when Hitler was starting to strengthen in power. But without the presence of the United States, the League of Nations was weak and grew weaker and weaker, and by 1940, the League Secretariat in Geneva was nothing more than a skeleton staff. After the war, in 1946, it collapsed completely, and its Palais des Nations and other holdings were turned over to the United Nations.
Our failure to participate wasn’t the only reason for the collapse of the League of Nations, of course, but I believe that some of the things that failed in the League of Nations could have been worked out and settled if the United States had been there as a strong voice speaking for the free governments of the world. The European powers that made up the League of Nations almost entirely weren’t all that much concerned with things that didn’t affect Europe, and Japan really didn’t take much interest in it because Japan was on the road to doing what she did in the Second World War. But the outside influence of an objective viewpoint from the Western Hemisphere, I think, would have been a tremendous help to the survival of the League of Nations.
I’ve always thought that World War II might have been avoided if we’d joined the League of Nations, that the very fact that we were not in the League of Nations, the greatest free government, then and now, in the history of the world - our standing to one side - is one of the causes of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and brought on the Second World War. But that’s history now. Hundreds of years passed between the time of King Henry IV and the time of Woodrow Wilson, and when Wilson’s dream was thrown out the window, it took another World War before another president was in charge who understood the history and the background of the world and what makes the world tick, and he set up the United Nations on the same basis as the League of Nations. Franklin Roosevelt believed, and I believe, that our main hope for the future lies in that organization.
Roosevelt profited by Wilson’s mistakes in this way: When it came time to bring the Second World War to a conclusion, he had the advice of all the sections of opinion in the United States. He had what we named bipartisan foreign policy, which included the two great parties of the United States. They were both represented in a major way, and of course, Wilson just didn’t do that.
And now that we have the United Nations, I truly feel that it will succeed if we just give it enough of a chance. I feel this, even though, obviously, each nation thinks mostly, and a nation or two entirely, of its own concerns. That attitude isn’t very hard to understand, and it isn’t so terrible when you stop to think about it. Every member of every nation ought to be proud of his country and spend his time trying to make it the best one on earth. It’s no different in this country; there’s an esprit de corps that starts in just about every village, every county, every city, and every state. Every citizen of the United States is proud of his state and thinks it’s better than any other state in the union, but that doesn’t mean that we go to war because we have the same free communications and the same commercial opportunities in every state. And one day, perhaps, we can come to the same conclusion about the world, and if we do, the patriotism toward your home country need never leave you. It can’t leave you; it’s born in you. It’s competition without shooting each other that we’re after. That’s what we want.
I don’t know how long it’s all going to take. There’s a selfish streak in all of us that we have to overcome in order to accomplish the things that we have to achieve. We have to make some sacrifices even to make our own good government work. It’s going to take a lot of people who understand the situations around the world, and they’re hard to find. And though the United States ought to be the leader in the whole program, it may not be because we’ve lost some of the respect the other people of the world once had for us. There was a time when all the free world had the utmost confidence in the government of the United States as an honest, fair government that didn’t want to cause anybody any trouble, that wanted to help everybody. We’ve lost some of that standing now, and I hope we can get it back.
But there shouldn’t be any permanent barrier to the success of the United Nations because of color or language or other differences. I think there are some 1,100 or 1,200 languages and dialects around the world, and it would be wonderful if we had a universal language that everybody could understand because there wouldn’t be so much misunderstanding, but I guess that’ll never happen. So we’ve got to work to accept the fact that we’re all the same despite some outward and minor differences and should be treated with equal fairness. It will take plenty of time, and there’ll be plenty of frustrations and plenty of temptations to throw up our hands and give up, but we’ve got to keep reminding ourselves that it’s something that won’t come easily or quickly. And Americans, in particular, have got to keep reminding ourselves that the United Nations is still very young and will remain very young for quite a while, and that our own Constitution had to go through a great many difficulties for over eighty years before we finally settled down. And then we had to fight among ourselves for four more years before we made up our minds that we really wanted it to work.
Just about all the fighting in the world is caused by the lack of enough to eat and enough to wear and the lack of a good place to live, but if atomic energy is used the way it ought to be, it can save the whole world from fighting each other to get what’s necessary for people to have. It can do unbelievable good for the world, truly a world of good, if people can be persuaded to get along by looking at examples of the times they didn’t get along and were wiped out and destroyed because they couldn’t get along. The same thing can happen now, except this time it will wipe out the whole population of the world if we go to war with this atomic energy, which we turned loose.
I was the president who made the decision to unleash that terrible power, of course, and it was a difficult and dreadful decision to have to make. Some people have the mistaken impression that I made it on my own and in haste and almost on impulse, but it was nothing like that at all.
If I live to be 100 years old, I’ll never forget the day that I was first told about the atomic bomb. It was about 7:30 p.m. on the evening of April 12, 1945, just hours after Franklin Roosevelt had died at 3:35 p.m., and no more than half an hour after I was sworn in as president at 7:09 p.m. Henry L. Stimson, who was Roosevelt’s secretary of war and then mine, took me aside and reminded me that Roosevelt had authorized the development of a sort of superbomb and that that bomb was almost ready. I was still stunned by Roosevelt’s death and by the fact that I was now president, and I didn’t think much more about it at the time. But then, on April 26, Stimson asked for a meeting in my office, at which he was joined by Major General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the operation that was developing the bomb, the Manhattan Project. The meeting was so secret that Groves came into the White House by the back door. And at the meeting, Stimson handed me a memorandum that said, “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb which could destroy a whole city.”
Stimson said very gravely that he didn’t know whether we could or should use the bomb because he was afraid that it was so powerful that it could end up destroying the whole world. I felt the same fear as he and Groves continued to talk about it, and when I read Groves’ twenty-four-page report. The report said that the first bomb would probably be ready by July and have the strength of about 500 tons of TNT, and even more frighteningly, it went on to say that a second bomb would probably be ready by August and have the strength of as much as 1,200 tons of TNT. We weren’t aware then that that was just the tip of the iceberg. That second bomb turned out to hav
e the power of 20,000 tons of TNT, and the hydrogen bomb that eventually followed it had the explosive power of 20 million tons of TNT.
Stimson’s memo suggested the formation of a committee to assist me in deciding whether or not to use the bomb on Japan, and I agreed completely. The committee, which we called the Interim Committee, was formed at once and consisted of Stimson as chairman, James F. Byrnes, who later became my secretary of state, as my representative on the committee, James B. Conant, who was the president of Harvard, Karl T. Compton, who was the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Vannevar Bush, who was the head of our Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Interim Committee in turn called in, for advice and information, the scientists who developed the bomb: Arthur H. Compton, who was Karl Compton’s brother, Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Then, on May 8, my sixty-first birthday, the Germans surrendered, and I had to remind our country that the war was only half over, that we still had to face the war with Japan. The winning of that war, we all knew, might even be more difficult to accomplish, because the Japanese were self-proclaimed fanatic warriors who made it all too clear that they preferred death to defeat in battle. Just a month before, after our soldiers and Marines landed on Okinawa, the Japanese lost 100,000 men out of the 120,000 in their garrison, and yet, though they were defeated without any question in the world, thousands more Japanese soldiers fell on their own grenades and died rather than surrender.