Really Cool Stuff about Harry S Truman
1. Harry didn’t have a middle name because the “S” never stood for anything.
2. In 1947, Truman signed the National Defense Act which did away with the cabinet positions of Army and Navy and replaced them with a Secretary of Defense. This act also created the Joint Chiefs and the Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to keep the United States from becoming completely militarized.
3. The steelworker’s strike in 1946 was the largest in history. “When 800,000 steelworkers walked off the job in mid-January—the biggest work stoppage in the country’s history—and automobile workers, glassmakers, telephone operators, electric utilities employees, and numerous other industrial laborers struck in protest against inadequate wages, fringe benefits, and working conditions, Truman had no effective response other than please to both sides to consider the broader needs of the nation” (p. 39).
4. With the backing of the United States, the UN, on November 29, 1947, voted on a partition plan to create the nation of Israel.
5. Truman was the first president since Lincoln to face the growing civil rights issues. “On February 2, Truman fulfilled his promise by asking Congress to enact comprehensive civil rights legislation. It was an unprecedented presidential request. He urged an antilynching law; expanded protection for the right to vote and elimination in particular of poll taxes that denied blacks access to polls in seven southern states; a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission; and an end to racial discrimination on interstate transportation facilities. He also promised to issue executive orders ending segregation in the federal government and in the armed services” (p. 71).
6. The election of 1948 was a famous one, primarily because due to picture of Truman holding aloft the newspaper proclaiming that the other guy had won. The
amazing thing was not the fact that Truman won but the fact that everyone believed he wouldn’t. How did this happen? “In October, the polls, the newspapers, the political pundits and leaders in both parties gave Truman little chance of winning…To almost everyone’s amazement on Election Day, Truman defeated Dewey by more than two million popular votes, winning twenty-eight states to Dewey’s sixteen and Thurmond’s four, decisively beating Dewey in the Electoral College by a 303 to 189 margin. Embarrassed pollsters explained their miscalculation by saying that they stopped polling too soon or failed to track shifts in voter sentiment in the last days of the campaign, when a seismic shift had occurred” (p. 82-83).7. In 1950, Truman gave the go-ahead to develop the hydrogen bomb.
8. Two Puerto Ricans tried to assassinate Truman on November 1, 1950. “They managed to kill one guard and wounded two others, but one of the would-be assassins was killed and the other captured before they could break into the house and shoot Truman, who was taking an afternoon nap in a upstairs bedroom” (p. 111). Why would they want to kill Truman? “They wished to call the world’s attention to a demand for Puerto Rico’s independence from US control, which had existed since the Spanish-American War in 1898” (p. 110). The lone assassin was sentenced to death but Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison. He was eventually pardoned by Carter in 1981.
9. It was during Truman’s administration that the 22nd amendment was passed and ratified. It stated “that presidents could no longer be elected to more than two terms” (p. 131.)
I can’t say that I really enjoyed this book on Truman. One problem was, and this is hardly the author’s fault, the fact that the author clearly didn’t care for Truman and so I found myself not caring for Truman either. Boo. Like I mentioned earlier, Truman is my mom’s favorite president and all I read about in this book were the mistakes he made and the problems that he caused. Of all the presidents, I almost want to read another bio of this one so that I can get a clearer picture of this guy.
It also didn’t help that Dallek did not give a complete picture of who Truman was. Most of these biographies from the American Presidents Series do a great job, in an extremely limited space, of showing the entire lives of the presidents. However, I felt like Dallek was only concerned with Truman’s presidential period and thus gave his early life short-shrift. Truman’s pre-presidential life was stuffed into the first chapter in a few pages only and so it was impossible to get some sense of who this guy really was and what was interesting and different about him. And trust me—you hear all about, in gory detail, the corruption, the foreign and domestic issues and everything else that plagued Truman’s administration. The lack of detail about Truman’s private life extends all the way to the last page when Dallek merely says that Truman died with no reason why. I actually had to wiki it in an effort to sate my curiosity.
In spite of Dallek’s heavy-handling of Truman, glimpses of his character manage to filter through. I could tell that Truman, for all his bumbling political issues, was a straight-shooter for the most part and had a wide…um…variety of verbal expressions to convey his moods. Here’s a good example: “He [Truman] believed justice required an effective response to the plight of the Jews but he resented the unrelenting pressure of the White House from Jewish Americans for help in transporting hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine, where they could settle in a new homeland. ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’ he said at a cabinet meeting, venting his frustration” (p. 64). On another funny note, I enjoyed the term “To err is Truman” (p. 36).
For some reason, I’m personally disappointed in Truman’s presidential blunders. His background of small-time politician, haberdasher and farmer was hardly adequate preparation for dealing with the final end of the greatest war to that point, post-war domestic woes (including labor, civil rights, inflation issues), de-mobilization on a massive scale, foreign problems with the Soviet Union, China, Korea, etc., a tremendous Red Scare, the arms race, and all the little things. I’m more than a little amazed that we made it through those crazy years after WWII and just by writing this out, my admiration for Truman rose just a little more.
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