by A. J. Baime
The memo’s conclusions:
The Democratic Party was “in profound collapse . . . The blunt facts seem to be that the Party has been so long in power it is fat, tired, and even a bit senile.”
Although competition in the GOP was taut, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York would be the Republican nominee. “He will be a resourceful, intelligent and highly dangerous candidate.”
Henry Wallace was also highly dangerous to Truman. “There is something almost messianic in his belief today that he is the Indispensable Man.” Wallace’s campaign was “motivated by the Communist Party line.” The Communists “give him a disciplined hard-working organization and collect the money to run his campaign.” Not only would Wallace get the backing of Communists and far-left-wingers, he could even win the support of the Soviet Union, the document noted. From the Soviet point of view, Wallace could not win, but he could pull enough votes from Truman to ensure that the Republicans won. The Soviet Union had strong reasons for wanting the Democrats to lose, the Rowe-Clifford memo claimed:
Moscow is . . . convinced there is no longer any hope that the Truman administration will submit to the Russian program of world conquest and expansion [the memo read]. From the Communist long-range point of view, there is nothing to lose and much to gain if a Republican becomes the next President. The best way it can help achieve that result, and hasten the disintegration of the American economy, is to split the Independent and labor union vote between Truman and Wallace—and thus insure the Republican candidate’s election.
Would the Soviets support Wallace’s campaign? And if so, how?
To win in 1948, Truman had to court farmers (who traditionally voted Republican), laborers, Jews, and—perhaps most of all—black Americans. The story of the black vote in America was in one way rather simple. From the Civil War until the New Deal, blacks tended to vote Republican because of their devotion to Abraham Lincoln. In 1936, however, FDR won a majority of the African American vote (only 28 percent voted for the Republican candidate Alf Landon), and the Democrats had maintained strong black support since then.
Yet now it appeared that African Americans were veering back to the GOP. “The Negro bloc, which, certainly in Illinois and probably in New York and Ohio, does hold the balance of power, will go Republican,” the document read. Thomas Dewey had been relentlessly and successfully courting the black vote in New York, and even the conservative faction of the GOP had done the same, while the “Southern Senators of the Democratic Party,” the memo pointed out, were sure to make any real progress in any real civil liberties movement impossible under a Democratic administration.
Unless the administration were to make “a determined campaign to help the Negro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing—and capitalize politically on its efforts—the Negro vote is lost.”
If the Democrats made such “a determined campaign” to go after the black vote, the white Southern Democrats with their Jim Crow traditions would be incensed. Still, the document’s writers believed it was “inconceivable” that the South would “revolt” from the Democratic Party. Despite bitter resistance among Southern Democrats to Truman’s civil rights position, “the South can be considered safely Democratic.”
“The conflict between the President and the Congress will increase during the 1948 session.” With the current Republican-controlled Congress, Truman had no chance of pushing through any of his major plans, and thus he had no choice, the memo concluded, but to go all-out against his opposition Congress and engage in a political bare-fisted fight. “The strategy on the Taft-Hartley Bill—refusal to bargain with the Republicans and to accept any compromises—paid big political dividends. That strategy should be expanded in the next session to include all the domestic issues.”
The stakes had never been so high. “The future of this country and the future of the world are linked inextricably with his [Truman’s] reelection.”
The map was drawn, the plan in place. Now Truman had to put it into action.
“It was clearly apparent to all of us in the White House staff,” recalled adviser George Elsey, “certainly to the president himself, that the 1948 State of the Union message would be the opening gun.” As Elsey wrote in a memorandum at the time, Truman’s January 1948 State of the Union had to be “controversial as hell, must state the issues of the election, [and] must draw the line sharply between Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic Platform will stem from it, and the election will be fought on the issues it presents.” David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote in his diary a few days before Truman’s 1948 State of the Union speech, “This is the most important period in the history of the country . . . perhaps the most important in human history. So the message of the President will have extraordinary import.”
In the Capitol on January 7, Truman climbed the stairs to the rostrum and stared out at a hostile Eightieth Congress. Robert Taft sat in the third row beside the outspoken Truman critic, Republican senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan. The secretary of state, General Marshall, was in the first row. Truman began his speech in his familiar drone—a flat voice with a distinct inability for emotional impact—and he delivered a message he knew would infuriate half the room. He wanted to raise spending on all kinds of benefits: unemployment compensation, old-age benefits, benefits for the surviving families of fallen soldiers.
Central to the message was civil rights. The president called “the essential human rights of our citizens” democracy’s “first goal.”
The United States has always had a deep concern for human rights. Religious freedom, free speech, and freedom of thought are cherished realities in our land. Any denial of human rights is a denial of the basic beliefs of democracy and of our regard for the worth of each individual. Today, however, some of our citizens are still denied equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement, and for the expression of their views at the polls. Most serious of all, some are denied equal protection under laws. Whether discrimination is based on race, or creed, or color, or land of origin, it is utterly contrary to American ideals of democracy.
On seven occasions during his address, Truman paused in the expectation of applause, only to be met by deafening silence. Not even his own party, nor any of his close friends, offered any indication of support. One reporter present described “almost a half an hour of complete silence . . . Not even in the days of awful Congressional hostility to President Herbert Hoover . . . was there any such embarrassing reaction.” When Truman’s speech was over, his motorcade took him back to the White House. In the Oval Office, he pulled bottles of scotch and bourbon from a desk drawer and, with staffers gathered around his desk, toasted to “success in ’48!”
But the response was devastating. In his GOP rebuttal, Senator Taft referred to Truman as “Santa Claus” for his spending policies, with “a rich present for every special group in the United States.”
Truman doubled down. Soon rumors of another major speech began to spread through Washington. The impetus for this speech came from Truman adviser George Elsey, who argued that the president and the Democrats should push even further on civil rights. Elsey and others contributed to the speech, and Truman completed it with a few editorial markings. When staffers read the draft, they had mixed emotions.
“[Political adviser Charlie] Murphy and [press secretary Charlie] Ross were nervous,” recalled Elsey. “They predicted a political firestorm from southern Democrats. Truman agreed with their forecast but was undeterred . . . It was time to lay it on the line in bold, clear terms. Thus, the landmark February 2, 1948, message to the Congress on civil rights.”
Truman released the message to Congress via his press office, less than a month after his State of the Union and before he had made any official mention of a 1948 candidacy. The address read in part:
The founders of the United States proclaimed to the world the American belief that all men are created equal, and that governments are instituted to sec
ure the inalienable rights with which all men are endowed. In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, they eloquently expressed the aspirations of all mankind for equality and freedom.
Truman called for a ten-point plan that included passage of federal laws against lynching, a Fair Employment Practice Commission to prevent discrimination in the workplace, and laws protecting the right of minorities to vote, in all states, in every election.
As predicted, Truman’s February 2 civil rights message blew the proverbial roof off governors’ mansions in states across the South.
* * *
On February 7, a conference of southern-state governors drew large crowds and cameras to the small town of Wakulla Springs, Florida. A parade of white men and women clutching Confederate flags marched into a speaking hall. The hall’s air grew heated as, one after the other, governors demanded action against Truman’s civil rights proposals.
“We have been betrayed by the leadership of the Democratic Party,” roared Governor Benjamin Travis Laney of Arkansas. “If these [laws] are to be imposed upon us, I for one would rather they come from a Republican than from the party for which I have given my allegiance.”
Governor James Folsom of Alabama demanded that candidates pledge to uphold traditions of “white supremacy” at the Democratic National Convention.
The man emerging as the leader of this group was Strom Thurmond, the forty-five-year-old war hero who had been elected governor of South Carolina in 1946. Thurmond spoke with a heavy southern accent as he promised to lead a delegation to Washington to fight Truman’s civil rights promises “in the strongest possible language.” He could sum up his message in a sentence: “We may as well have a showdown once and for all.”
Four days after Wakulla Springs, some four thousand rowdy politicians and their supporters gathered in Jackson, Mississippi, emitting rebel yells, waving Confederate flags, and adopting a resolution charging that Truman’s civil rights plan “intrudes into the sacred rights of the state.” On that same day, South Carolina’s General Assembly adopted its own anti-Truman resolution, calling the civil rights proposals “un-American.” Soon after, Alabama did the same. Then Virginia. Then Mississippi, where political leaders issued a resolution calling upon “all true white Jeffersonian Democrats” to stage a “fight to the last ditch” against Truman and his civil rights proposals.
Weeks earlier, Truman had read in the Rowe-Clifford memo that it was “inconceivable” Southern Democrats would “revolt.” “The South can be considered safely Democratic,” the document claimed. The assumption was wrong. A historic southern revolt was on.
On February 19 Truman appeared at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, addressing some twelve hundred people at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, an annual fund-raiser for the Democratic Party in honor of the party’s two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson—the namesake of Truman’s own Jackson County, Missouri. A table directly in front of the speaker’s platform remained empty; Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina and his wife had bought tickets for the event but refused to attend because the Mayflower was not a segregated hotel and Mrs. Johnston was concerned that “she might be seated next to a Negro.”
The move was a publicity stunt aimed at wounding Truman. It worked.
On the Monday after the Mayflower banquet, Strom Thurmond led a special committee of southern governors to Washington to meet in the offices of Senator J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island, who was just taking over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The governors of Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas were led into McGrath’s office at 2:30 p.m., followed by what the Democratic National Committee publicist Jack Redding recalled as “battalions of the press.” The governors all took seats, with the exception of Thurmond, who proceeded to pace furiously, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“Will you now,” Thurmond said, “at a time when national unity is so vital to the solution of the problem of peace in the world, use your influence as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to have the highly controversial civil-rights legislation, which tends to divide our people, withdrawn from consideration by Congress?”
McGrath answered in one syllable: “No.”
Thurmond—a former lawyer—continued to fire questions, as if the senator was on the witness stand. But McGrath repeatedly answered no. Thurmond refused to relent. Chewing on a fat cigar, McGrath laid it on the line: “There’ll be no compromise.”
* * *
Just as some American politicos had feared could happen, the Soviets began to foment global political chaos right as the American election season got underway.
On February 25 Soviet-backed forces took control of Czechoslovakia in a bloodless coup d’état. The Czech coup, Truman said in a speech to Congress shortly after, “has sent a shock throughout the civilized world.” The coup appeared to be in response to the Marshall Plan. Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk had publicly entertained the idea of accepting Marshall Plan dollars from the United States. The Soviets reacted. Communists took control of the country and, days later, Masaryk jumped—or was pushed—to his death from a third-story window.
Czechoslovakia was now firmly in the Kremlin’s grasp, and American officials were forced to ask themselves: If the Soviets could take control of Czechoslovakia so easily, without a shot fired, which country was next?
Ten days after the Czech coup, General Lucius Clay—the man in charge of the American-occupied sector of Germany—wrote a memorandum to S. J. Chamberlin, director of army intelligence. The mood in Berlin, Clay wrote, had suddenly darkened. After the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis, the four Allied powers in Europe—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France—had taken control of Germany, and Germany had been carved into four occupation zones, one zone for each of these Allied powers. From the American point of view, reunification and a rebirth of Germany as a democratic nation was the ultimate goal. The United States was now learning that this goal was not shared by the Soviets, who controlled the eastern portion of Germany. The idea that the Soviets would ever willfully relinquish control of their German territory was a chimera, and so the Americans, French, and British had begun to coordinate their own zones into one unified state (soon to become West Germany), and were about to issue a new currency—the deutsche mark.
Berlin lay entirely within the Soviet zone—like an island in a Soviet sea—and the city was also partitioned into four occupation zones. In order for Americans to move people and supplies from the American-occupied sector of Germany into the American sector of Berlin, trains had to travel through Soviet-occupied territory and through Soviet checkpoints. The Soviet- and American-occupied sectors of Berlin bordered each other, putting the United States and USSR nose to nose in one of the most strategically important metropolises in Europe.
“For many months,” General Clay wrote on March 5, “based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.”
The Soviets made no effort to hide their anger over the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In a speech before the United Nations, Andrey Vyshinsky—the fierce Stalin loyalist and Soviet state attorney—attacked the American policies, calling the United States a “warmonger” that was using the atomic bomb as an intimidation tactic. Now the Soviets appeared to be making a move to take control of Berlin, to drive the United States out of the city. On March 25 the Soviets issued orders to restrict train traffic from the American sector into west Berlin. Truman was so unnerved, he wrote the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt: “It is the most serious situation we have faced since 1939. I shall face it with everything I have.”
The reaction from the Truman administration was firm and swift. The president arranged to make his first Cold War address. On March 17, in the Capitol, Truman del
ivered a fighting speech in favor of the Marshall Plan. All over the country and abroad, people sat by their radios and heard, for the first time, the American president name the Soviet Union as an enemy of peace.
Since the close of hostilities, the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe. It is this ruthless course of action, and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations of Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today . . . Now pressure is being brought to bear on Finland, to the hazard of the entire Scandinavian peninsula. Greece is under direct military attack from rebels actively supported by her Communist dominated neighbors. In Italy, a determined and aggressive effort is being made by a Communist minority to take control of that country. The methods vary, but the pattern is all too clear.
Two weeks later, on March 31, the US House of Representatives passed the European Recovery Program—the Marshall Plan—with a roll call of 329 to 74 (sixty-one of the seventy-four voting against were Republicans), authorizing $6.205 billion in foreign aid to countries that would use it to rebuild their infrastructures and resist Soviet infiltration. Again, the Kremlin reacted. On the same day the House passed the Marshall Plan, General Clay in Berlin cabled his boss, General Omar Bradley, the US Army’s chief of staff in Washington, informing him of a Soviet announcement that all US military and civilian trains moving from the American sector of Germany into the city of Berlin would have to submit to inspections by Soviet military.