Truman and the Maelstrom of History
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
hold of the American people with in-creasing intensity during recent years. Not just our talk but our behavior makes it clear that we have a compelling com-mitment to equality, and that leads to a...
...Their worlds were as wide apart as can be imagined...
...After the glamorous Roosevelt it was very hard to respect a simple man like Truman...
...True, a section of the American people re-mained skeptical of communist Russia, and some had even tempered their ex-pectations for the postwar period...
...Local self-government was invented so that each community could have its own preferred services and its own prefer.red regulations...
...Soon there would be a siz-able literature on the origins of the cold war, it would find enthusiastic accept-ance among college and university stu- dents throughout the country, and it would describe Snell and his aging colleagues as traditionalists, their historical opinions as received truths, and their conclusions as cold war rheto-ric...
...Charles S. ltyneman is a Distinguished Service professor of government at Indiana University...
...And it does not strike me as a flight of fancy to draw a nexus from his kind of wanton partisanship to the politics being inflicted upon America today by the New Left...
...The Soviets had not been very cooperative at Yalta and were even less cooperative at Potsdam...
...Some-what later, beginning in 1950, the administration would get what it deserv- ed for this tactic, at the hands of a senator who took a free : ;de on the anti- communist bandwagon...
...America has always been a land visited by men of enthusiasms...
...l The new historical views of the cold war were fascinating interpretations, and in seeking to understand how such a lit- erature could arise the inquiring observ- er noticed, first of all, the relative The Alternative April 1973...
...It came at a time in which resolutions and farsightedness were necessary to assure world peace and a measure of freedom for war-torn Europe...
...I do say that there is a mood hovering over the nation, a sentiment settling heavily upon great numbers of American people, which favors equality of condition and uniformity in the application of law...
...They would not sign treaties, repatriate pris- oners of war, or show any interest in relieving the devastated areas of Europe...
...Truman's policies saved much of the world from communist domination and left it with a bit more peace than might have been expected...
...Tru- man was a very fine president whose achievement is all the greater because of the predicament from which he start- ed...
...Truman was also responsible for the Point Four program, a kind of world-wide equivalent of the Marshall Plan...
...i Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View In this issue appears the first part of a two-part article examing the Cold War revisionists and Truman foreign policy...
...Respect and prestige are essen-tial if a man is to govern...
...Roosevelt had been weaving throughout the turbu- lent world...
...Before he could implement a policy of firmness for dealing with the rapacious commu-nists, another old enthusiasm rushed through the American people --the en-thusiasm for peacetime jubilation, then .9" normalcy...
...And he knew less of the mili- tary situation...
...And of course Roosevelt's misguided advisers now be-came Truman's advisers...
...Outside the government American poli- tical discourse was not much better in-formed...
...As if to demonstrate the validity of this democratic ideal, fate kicked Mr...
...His proposals were a dramatic departure from the past...
...As President he asserted himself as a con-fident leader determined to do his duty...
...It is hard to confect a dream more antithetical to the insular obsessions of the suspicious Russians...
...Truman's penchant for ripping arid snorting might have been the only way he could summon Americans to his gen- erally wise policies, but as with so many other things, it was not without cost...
...I am not talking about the need for the federal government to come into a state or community to make sure that a minority group gets the fair deal in public services which is denied to them by state or local public authori- ties...
...Not just our talk but our behavior makes it clear that we have a compelling com-mitment to equality, and that leads to a fixation on uniformity in the impact of government on individuals...
...Cooper is a graduate student at Harvard and the Editor of Counter...
...It seems to me to be a sound principle that some of the money stripped off of the wealthier communities of the state by...
...Under his leader- ship Germany was rescued from a "ciga- rette economy," and recovered rapidly...
...He replaced Byrnes with a very sound Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, and he followed Marshall's counsel...
...As 1945 faded into 1946, they became obdurate...
...It is important to grasp the political and intellectual problems that hobble a politician during such times...
...That they sought to keep Russian attention on the Ameri- can atomic monopoly, and largely for such a purpose advanced a system of international control of atomic weapons, the Baruch Plan, which was almost bound to fail...
...De-termined that individuals living side by side as well as far apart who are caught up in competition for something of value shall enjoy equal protection of the law, we leap to the conclusion that Americans living anywhere within the national boundaries must be sub~cted to identi-cal law...
...Most Americans wanted to "'get out of" Asia and Europe...
...He is editor of the "American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy" series, and has written --among many books --Peace in Their Time (1952),Amer-ican Diplomacy and the Great De-pression (i957), and American Diplo-macy (1959...
...Sober-minded leaders were The Alternative April 1973 making very few intelligent statements on foreign policy...
...In dealing with them Truman showed little restraint or magnanimity...
...point...
...In the early 1960s a well-known student of American history, the late John L. Snell, published an article in the Amer-can Hisorical Review in which he dealt with several books on the origins of the cold war, and after criticizing two of them severely he issued a call for his- torians to turn their attention to that part of the recent past and write about it in the best traditions of their discipline...
...What I have in mind when I warn against an exaggerated affection for uni- form application of laws is a supposition that the surest way to prevent injustice is to have one government govern every- body...
...He said, "Do your duty and history will do you justice...
...Paul H. Weaver is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University and the Associate Editor of The Public Interest...
...History is not a very neat story...
...That the American government under Truman's direction had tried to oust the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, giv- ing little or no attention to Russia's secu- rity needs in an area close to Soviet bor- ders...
...They dreamed of a postwar world characterized by self-determination under the irenic suzerainty of some sort of international government, welded together by interna- tional trade...
...Little could he have imagined that in the next years some very able young historians just out of graduate school together with a young student of English literature, a disillusioned foreign service officer, a linguist, and a few other indi- viduals would take the views which Snell and his contemporaries had advanced about American-Russian relations in 1945 and thereafter and stand them on their heads...
...Ac-cording to this ideal, any American citi- zen can become president, and working within the scheme of the American Con- stitution he should be able to do tolerably well...
...enthusiasm for world trade, international organization, and self-deter- mination for all nations...
...His integrity was un-shakable...
...The precipitous American withdrawal and disarmament encouraged Soviet ex-pansion...
...In July, 1945, he went to Potsdam and tried to fill FDR's position between the two remaining giants of the Grand Alliance, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin...
...At times during his presidency he was an appal-lingly unpopular man...
...He ended Japanese hostilities by ordering use of the atomic bomb...
...First the ministry of the interior would come under Red domination...
...If it becomes evident that the only way a black man can be assured of the right to vote in Mississippi is for federal agents to register voters and sit at the polls on election day --if that is the only way they can be assured the right to vote--then I agree that local regisR. Emmett Tyrrell, jr...
...Many politicians sniffed at the thought that Truman would do more than fill out FDR's term...
...Truman had hardly had a word with President Roose- velt in the few months he had been in the administration...
...During the reign of Franklin Roosevelt...
...What I deplore is the supposition that national rules and regulations must cover, say, the growing of tobacco in order to escape the disadvantage some-one might suffer if the rules governing measurement of tobacco fields in Kentucky differ a little bit from the rules governing measurement of tobacco fields across the state line in North Carolina...
...Before he died, he said something to his daughter that should renew our faith in that democratic ideal, for though it was right in an uncompli-cated way, it also had a touch of the numinous to it...
...The Second World War was drawing to a close, leaving half the civilized world heaped in a shambles...
...The Truman Doctrine inspired the aaministratlon to sponsor the Marshall Plan, a program worthy in itself but which had the unfor- tunate effect of dividing Europe...
...The situation was desperate...
...And if the great swarm of regulators bring all parts of the nation to the same level of public service, who will run a-head of the rest and set models for the less imaginative communities to imitate...
...But what he lacked in formal intel- lectual training he more than made up for in character...
...The issue now before the Supreme Court relating to the financing of public edu-cation invites ins~)ection in this con-nection...
...By now Truman was gaining a realistic perception of Russian inten-tions, but his realism was not shared by many of his fellow citizens...
...Even General Eisen-hower was given to vacant statements like "Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States...
...What democracy and freedom meant to Truman must have been incomprehensible to a tyrant like Stalin, so given to paranoia and treachery...
...There are few presidents in this cen- tury who have matched his performance and none of his successors is comparable --though Mr...
...C. Bascom Slemp is the chief Wash- ington correspondent of The Alterna-tive...
...The en-thusiasms whistling through America at this time were not very intelligent or useful to a man in Truman's awesome position...
...he is also the Literary Editor of The Alternative...
...Then chaos, and finally Red dominance...
...We can only speculate about how many of their difficulties were born of guile.and how many were born of the insurmountable misunderstandings of two men cultured in two diametrically opposed polltical philosophies...
...If all the communities of the nation must be brought to the same quality of service, how would you guarantee that result except by a mass of ever-changing regulations of nation-wide application enforced by a number of ever-enlarging federal bureaucracies...
...He knew little about the intricate diplomacy Mr...
...During his first administration a policy of pru- dent containment was outlined and given definition in the Truman Doctrine, which made it "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resist-ing attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...
...Constant and unrestrained political struggles within a democracy must have a corrosive effect on the social fabric...
...anymore...
...Robert H. Ferrell is a pro-fessor of American Diplomatic His-tory at Indiana University...
...Churchill soon was describing Europe as "a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate...
...Roosevelt was a magisterial leader, con-sidered to be one of the greatest in American history...
...Stalin intended that this cordon be as thick as possible...
...If this is a good rule for education, then it seems to me to b~ a good rule for health services, care for the aged and the crippled, and a good many other services we expect government to provide...
...Nixon still might make the grade...
...I speak of Harry S. Truman, an authentic image of the American democratic ideal, an ideal still celebrated in the American heartland, and an ideal which holds that everyone counts --even a commoner from the remote state of Missouri...
...Those who attempt to plot it according to some preordained ideological theory write bad history...
...Not many people knew what the Russians were up to and few appreciated tile difficulty of ending a world war...
...Joyee Goldberg is a graduate student in history at Indiana University and Assistant Managing Editor of The Alternative...
...The assurance of elementa- ry justice is not what I am talking about when I say we have an over-developed attachment to uniformity in the appli-cation of law...
...Truman's condition, their fractured confidence would have been all the more shattered...
...Trumatt and the Maelstrom of History At no time are complex historical events more neatly comprehensible than during a reign of ideology, and today in America, ideology is clearly in the ascendant...
...Truman answered Russia's North Korean epigones with an American army and United Nations support...
...To the contrary, their interest was in reparations...
...His weakness for partisanship was per- haps unavoidable, but it did flaw his ser- vice to his country...
...The glory of the American federal system has been its provision that the people of each state should live under their own code of laws...
...To make ideological claims about Truman's intentions is foolish...
...When two years later aggressive communism struck at the opposite corner of the world...
...Perhaps the political problems of his presidency prevented the mastery of events that might have marked a less partisan administration...
...Steadily the war ended...
...When Truman was sud-denly made President, he actually knew nothing of the revolutionary new bomb being hatched in the desert of New Mexico...
...It is true that during this period the forces of free- dom suffered setbacks in China, and the Russian presence in Eastern Europe was not dented...
...But if the.Russians thought they could panic or daunt him, they had misper-ceived him, for with typical resolve he ordered the U.S...
...Life magazine proclaimed Lenin "perhaps the greatest man of modern times," and jabbered on that "the Russians are one hell of a people...
...I recognize the necessity of calling national authority into action when any lesser political jurisdiction withholds elementary justice from any part of the population...
...So he had many of the attributes of a great leader as well as many of the endearing qualities of a first-rate char- acter...
...Then allegations of impro- priety would be directed at the other branches of government...
...Many of the ravaged nations were with-out the essentials of life and were inca-pable of providing them...
...By reforming the German currency and seeking to revive the prostrate nation Truman triggered the most belligerent Russian threat yet, the Berlin Blockade...
...the President, the revisionists believe, pro-bably had this divisive effect in mind from the outset, as in his memoirs he described the Truman Doctrine and Mar- shall Plan as being two halves of the same walnut...
...in other circles it is more ambiguously described as revi-sionist...
...Just })efore the Pots-dam meetings America perfected the atomic bomb, and Truman had to decide how to go about prudently informing Stalin of it and of its significance to the war...
...Yet these were the ideas of the leaderless adminis- tration when Truman became the thirty- third American president...
...Consider the ideas about the origins of the cold war that were being proposed in the early 1970s -- what a difference from the views of a decade before...
...Two bombs were dropped and the Japanese sued for peace...
...After balan-cing the costs and benefits of using America's terrible new weapon, Truman chose to end the war quickly...
...At this time FDR had been making vague commitments, and his policies may have been in a state of flux...
...the outbreak of that conflict, they believed, was at least in part attributable to the policies of the United States...
...Whatever it is called, it always manages to round the ragged edges off history's complicated events...
...In some c~rcles it goes under the rubric New Left...
...With such enthusiasms loose in the land, with imperious politi- cians' and advisers of the Roosevelt ad- ministrations often contemptuous, Tru-man, the only American president in this century without a college education, tried to guide America through the last months of World War II and into the postwar era...
...It was not until 1946 and 1947 that Americans became sufficiently aware of Russian truculence to support a sensible policy against it...
...The only way to guarantee that one rule of law will extend over the whole nation is for Congress to enact the legislation, for a monolithic bu-reaucracy to enforce it, and for a nation- al Supreme Court to review and revise the variant interpretations of each statute...
...Robert H. Ferrell He was a truly unpretentious presi-dent...
...That is pre- cisely what it has attempted to do with the cold war...
...Had they realized the depth of Mr...
...All the while, through a series of careful moves, the administra- tion was creating a new state in Europe, West Germany, for the purpose of en-listing German industry and eventually a German army to protect the free world against world communism...
...And then there was this new enthusiasm at home, an enthusiasm for ambrosia...
...Air Force to transport supplies into the city, and he began mar- shalling what was to become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...It was a re-enactment of the frivolous period following World War T. A chorus went up to "bring the boys home...
...If the judges conclude that the equalizing of services is mandated by the Constitution, inherent in the laws' equal protection requirement, how can the judges escape concludinz that the quality of essential services in poverty- ridden West Virginia must be brought up to the level of the same public services in the far wealthier states of Ohio and Pennsylvania...
...He had idealism enough, and his resources of common sense served him well --especially when so many ,~e his advisers were panting through the White House full of the most foolish enthu-siasms...
...He intended to be elected in 1948 and he manifested his seriousness by launch...
...HIS Memoirs abound with spiteful references to opponents...
...The Russians thought only of security, They desired to ring their vast nation with a cordon sca~itaire, protecting them from any future foreign invasions, and Mr...
...Somehow Truman managed...
...Truman made some minor and expected errors, and his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, was callow and in other ways unacceptable...
...Through it all Truman had to contend at home with the men of en- thusiasms: enthusiasm for our noble Russian allies, who were not very genial Contributors Philip C. Brooks has recently retired as the Director of the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and as Secretary of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute...David Brudnoy is an associate professor of history at Merrimack College, national affairs commentator on WGBH-TV in Boston, and an associate of The Alternative...
...It was a time of pother...
...It l is a mood and a sentiment which, if it persists and dominates our political phi- losophy, will negate any hope you or I may have of returning government of the American people back to the states and the communities where the people live...
...He was idolized for his dramatic accomplishments, his break with the past, his powerful personality, and his fabulous entourage...
...He was President of the American Political Science Associa-tion in 1961-62, and he is the author of several books, including The Supreme Court on Trial (1963), and Popular Government in America (1968...
...President for the past twelve years, America had under-gone one of the most profound changes in domestic policy in its history...
...But ~ao American president is given a magic wand, and even without considering his foreign policy failures, or his difficult domestic political circum- stances, Truman's accomplishments in international affairs seem breath taking...
...During all of this time Truman was trapped in the ambiguous grasp of past commitments and policies made by his predecessor...
...tration and election officials will have to move over and let the federal officers take charge...
...Many Roose-velt advisers suspected Truman's com-petence...
...At any rate his propensity for loose administration and procrastination would have left American foreign policy in somewhat of a mess even if his pre- mises had been well-founded and congru- ent with Russian strategic interests, which they were not...
...Meanwhile Roose-velt and his advisers implacably pursued a policy of unconditional surrender in the field and high-minded idealism at the diplomatic table...
...Meanwhile the United States government used every economic weapon at hand, such as cutting off lend lease to the USSR, reneging on the repa- rations agreements concluded at the end of the war, and refusing to consider seri- ously the pressing Russian need for a postwar loan...
...ing new policies that were singular and intelligent...
...taxation ought to be in- vested in the improvement of education in the poorer communities of the state...
...I do not predict that the Supreme Court will immediately project us upon this course of all plains and no mountains, all lock step and no pace setting...
...And his predicament was aggravated by the fact that most of Roosevelt's ad- visers had been positing their diplomacy with the Russians on notions that were utterIy incompatible with Soviet designs...
...They began challenging him almost immediately...
...I think that redress of local injustice by the national government is impera- tive...
...All were unreal- istic notions...
...During this time the average man from Independence, Mis-souri had his arms full trying to run the government...
...It initially cost four hundred mil- lion dollars, and was a bold demard~e...
...Military appropriations were slashed, and Americans either showed no interest in their world responsibilities or maundered on delusively about the United Nations...
...Then early in 1946 the Americans seized upon an admitted Sov- iet slowness to get out of northern Iran and virtually forced the Russians out, in a public confrontation at the United Nations...
...The next year, 1947, marked a rapid development of American-Russ- ian antagonism, for President Truman intervened in the Greek civil war with the Truman Doctrine, and in order to gain support scared hell out of the country, to use a phrase attributed to Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg...
...He was brave, prudent, disci- plined, and deliberate in making deci- sions...
...The Alternative April 1973 Aid to Greece and Turkey was only a precursor to the Marshall Plan which funded the resurrection of modern Europe and cost $13,348,800,000...
...But the more educated and influential Americans remained enthusiastic about Russia's willingness to promote the ideals of the Atlantic Charter...
...Imagine what less real- istic persons were saying...
...Enunciated on March 12, 1947, it direct- ed economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, lest they fall into communist hands...
...In its haste it has sheared off a great deal of the glory that a tough little man earned for himself and his naive countrymen right after the conclu- sion of the Second World War...
...Roger Rosenblatt is an assistant pro- fessor of English and the director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University...
...Though Americans in 1939 had indica- ted in opinion polls that if forced to choose between fascism and communism they would prefer the former, by 1942 they had reversed their positions, and influential elements of the American press were actually leading cheers for the Soviet way of life...
...Now it has...
...who) to a remarkable degree ...look like Americans, dress like Amer- icans and think like Americans...
...He sweated away earnestly and energetically...
...In reviewing his foreign policy achieve- ment, one cannot help but note the mark of his strong character...
...When he died so suddenly and mysteriously on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, a shocked nation found it hard to envision the puny figure of Vice-President Harry S. Tru- man as inheriting Roosevelt's magnifi-cent position...
...Truman into the presidency at one of the most inopportune times imaginable...
...This is hardly to blame Truman for the vagaries of the New Left, but to suggest that politics must have some influence on civility...
...so-called revisionist historians were writ- ing tlaat President Franklin D. Roose- velt's subtle treatment of the Soviet Union had been reversed by his successor Harry S. Truman who saw foreign affairs as a checker game instead of the chess game it really was...
...Perhaps because of his unpretentious origins he did not worry much about popularity, but rather worried about performing his duty to his country and to his God, for he was a religious man...
...In Eastern Europe the democracies drifted imperceptibly into communist tyranny...
...That to get the attention of the Rus- sians the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese...
...In the midst of the meeting the British snatched Churchill from his side and Truman was left with Attlee to confront the serpentine Soviet dictator...
...By the early 1970s the revisionists had begun to turn to American postwar policies in the Far East, and were re-examining the origins of the Korean War...
Vol. 6 • April 1973 • No. 7
