HARRY S TRUMAN (1884-1972)

OVERVIEW

Born May 8, 1884, Lamar, MO

Died December 26, 1972 (aged 88), Kansas City, MO

Member of the Democratic Party

33rd President of the United States (April 12, 1945-January 20, 1953)

34th Vice President of the United States (January 20, 1945-April 12, 1945)

U.S. Senator from Missouri (January 3, 1935-January 17, 1945)

Presiding Judge of Jackson County, MO (January 10, 1927-January 3, 1935)

EARLY LIFE

Harry S Truman was born May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri (birthplace shown right); he was the oldest of three children.

His father, John Anderson Truman, was a farmer and mule trader.

Harry was named after his maternal uncle Harrison Young, even though his parents could not decide on a middle name; after more than a month, they agreed to just use the letter S as an homage to both his maternal grandfather Solomon Young and his paternal grandfather Anderson Shipp Truman.

Truman grew up on the family farm in Independence, Missouri.

He did not attend college, and is the most recent U.S. president with no college degree; after high school, he worked a number of jobs, first as a timekeeper for a railroad construction company, and then as a clerk and a bookkeeper at two different banks in Kansas City.

After five years, he resumed farming and joined the National Guard.

TRUMAN FAMILY FARM, INDEPENDENCE, MO

MILITARY CAREER

Truman volunteered for military service when the United States entered World War I in April, 1917.

Even though he was thirty-three and two years over the age limit for the draft and entitled to discharge as a farmer, he nevertheless assisted in organizing his National Guard battalion, which at last was ordered into service in the 129th Field Artillery.

Truman became a captain while in France and allocated Battery D, which was famous for being the most disorderly battery in the battalion.

Despite a mostly reluctant and uncertain character, Truman won the respect and veneration of his men and effectively led them through substantial fighting throughout the Meuse-Argonne campaign.

MEUSE-ARGONNE CAMPAIGN

EARLY INVOLVEMENT IN POLITICS

After the war, Truman returned to Missouri and married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace, in June 1919; in February 1924, they gave birth to a daughter, Mary Margaret.

In 1919, he made an incursion into business when he and an assistant set up a hat shop in Kansas City.

The business proved to be a failure at the start of the 1922 Great Depression, and Truman owed $20,000 to creditors.

He did not accept bankruptcy and urged on paying back all the money he borrowed, which took over fifteen years.

Around this time, he had an encounter with Democratic boss Thomas Pendergast, whose nephew James served with Truman during the war.

Pendergast gave Truman a position as a supervisor of highways; after a year, Pendergast selected Truman to run for one of three county-judge positions in Jackson County.

Truman was elected judge, which was an executive rather than a jurisdictive position, but he was defeated when he ran for reelection.

Truman ran again in 1926 and was elected as a presiding judge; he held this position until he ran for senator in 1934.

TRUMAN WITH THOMAS PENDERGAST

TRUMAN IS SWORN IN AS JUDGE OF JACKSON COUNTY, JANUARY 10, 1927

SENATOR, 1935-1945

Truman was elected to the United States Senate in 1934.

During his first term, he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was responsible for distributing tax money for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal projects, and the Interstate Commerce Committee, which supervised railroads, shipping, and interstate transport.

Together with Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Truman started investigating railroads; in 1940, he initiated legislation that enforced tighter federal regulation on the railroads, which helped him prove his standing as a man of honesty.

By the time Truman was up for reelection in 1940, Thomas Pendergast had been convicted of tax evasion and associated with voter deception, and many anticipated that Truman’s ties to Pendergast would lead to defeat.

However, Truman neither tried to conceal nor distort his relationship with Pendergast, and his reputation as a truthful and principled man helped him win reelection, although only barely.

During his second term, Truman chaired a special commission to investigate the National Defense Program to prevent war profiteering and wasteful spending in defense industries.

He gained public support and acknowledgement for his forthright reports and useful commendations, and he won the admiration of his associates and the public alike.

SENATOR TRUMAN WITH SENATOR WHEELER

PRESIDENCY, 1945-1953

When President Roosevelt had to find a running mate for the 1944 presidential election, he did not consider Vice President Henry A. Wallace an acceptable choice.

The majority of the high-ranking Democrats in Washington did not like Wallace; because it was clear that Roosevelt had only little chance of surviving his fourth term, the vice presidential pick was particularly important.

Truman’s popularity and his standing as a fiscally responsible man and a supporter of citizens’ rights made him the perfect choice.

Truman may have initially been hesitant to accept, but he campaigned enthusiastically once he was nominated.

In November 1944, the already popular Roosevelt won election to a fourth term with Truman on the ticket.

On January 20, 1945, Truman took the oath of office as the thirty-fourth Vice President of the United States.

But he would only serve eighty-two days; on April 12, 1945, Roosevelt died of a massive stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Truman was sworn in as the thirty-third President of the United States.

TRUMAN’S SWEARING-IN CEREMONY FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, APRIL 12, 1945

PRESIDENCY, 1945-1953 – CONT.

With no earlier experience in foreign affairs, Truman was thrown into the role of Commander-in-chief and tasked with ending a world war.

In the first six months of his term, Truman announced the Germans’ surrender, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—ending World War II—and signed the charter that created the United Nations.

PREAMBLE TO THE UN CHARTER

AFTER THE WAR

Despite these early achievements, Truman’s diplomatic situation was affected by post-war challenges.

While the Soviet Union may have been a key ally of the United States during the war, relations rapidly worsened when it became clear that the Soviets wanted to remain in control of Eastern European states that were supposed to hold free elections after the end of the war; this, along with the omission of the Soviets from the rebuilding of Asia, started what would be known as the Cold War, a period of political and military tension between the United States and its capitalist allies and the Soviet Union and its communist allies.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1948

In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans won both houses of Congress; this was understood as a judgment of Truman’s policies, and polls suggested that victory for Truman in the Presidential Election of 1948 was practically unlikely.

Victory for the liberal Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, seemed so sure that the Chicago Daily Tribune famously printed the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” even before many polling locations disclosed their results.

The final result was a surprising win for Truman in a fairly close election: Truman won 49.5 percent of the vote, compared with Dewey’s 45.1 percent; this was one of the biggest upsets in the history of U.S. elections.

CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE HEADLINE, NOVEMBER 3, 1948

THE KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953

Truman announced his domestic policy initiative, the “Fair Deal” program, in his 1949 State of the Union address.

Modeling this initiative off Roosevelt’s New Deal, it comprised universal health care, an increase in the minimum wage, more funding for education, and a pledge of equal rights under the law for all citizens.

This program met with mixed success.

In 1948, racial discrimination was outlawed in federal government hiring practices, the military was desegregated, and the minimum wage went up.

National health insurance was ignored, as was more money for education.

In June 1950, the Korean War erupted, and Truman quickly sent troops to the conflict.

He believed that the North Korean invasion of South Korea was a challenge from the Soviets, and that, if left abandoned, it could intensify to a third world war and to further communist aggression; following a short-lived upsurge of public support for his decision, disapproval mounted.

THE KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953

Truman originally supported a rollback plan and encouraged General Douglas MacArthur to open the 38th parallel, and brought forces into North Korea to take control of the government.

But when China sent 300,000 troops to help North Korea, Truman changed his strategy.

He returned to the containment strategy, and focused on defending the independence of South Korea instead of defeating communism in the north.

MacArthur openly disagreed; for Truman, this was disobedience and a confrontation to his authority, and he discharged MacArthur in April 1951.

MacArthur was a popular general, and Truman’s already-low approval ratings plunged further.

STEEL STRIKES

Truman’s challenges did not apply only to international affairs.

On the domestic front, he struggled to deal with a labor dispute between the United Steel Workers of America and the major steel mills.

The union demanded a wage increase, but the mill owners did not permit it except on the condition that the government allowed them to increase the expenses of their consumer goods, which had been restricted by the Wage Stabilization Board.

Because his efforts to broker an agreement were not successful and he was hesitant to raise the Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed despite his veto in 1947 and would have allowed him to seek a restriction that kept the union from striking, Truman took control of the steel mills in the name of the government.

The steel companies responded by filing a lawsuit against the government, and the case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer (sometimes known as "The Steel Seizure Case") went before the Supreme Court.

The Court ruled in favor of the steel mills, and pressured Secretary of Commerce Charles W. Sawyer (right) to give the mills back to the owners.

Truman's handling of this dispute further damaged his reputation with the American people.

POST-PRESIDENCY

In March 1952, Truman announced that he would not run for a second full term.

He endorsed Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, who ran as the Democratic candidate, though Stevenson kept himself distant from the president because of the president’s poor approval ratings.

Truman left office on January 20, 1953; he was succeeded by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

After he departed from the White House, Truman returned to Independence, Missouri, where he wrote his memoirs, supervised the construction of his presidential library, and took long walks.

He died at the age of eighty-eight on December 26, 1972.

His wife Bess lived for another decade; she died at the age of ninety-seven on October 18, 1982.

The Trumans are buried in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

TRUMAN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.biography.com/people/harry-s-truman-9511121

Other sites First Speech to Congress (April 16, 1945): http://

millercenter.org/president/truman/speeches/speech-3339

Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947): http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp

Inaugural address (January 20, 1949): http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13282