He Just Dropped Into the Slot

He’s all right from his asshole out in every direction.

Railroad foreman about young seasonal worker Harry Truman in 1902

David McCullough spent a decade writing this masterwork of a biography. He was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize, bestseller status and recognized as an almost singular influence on the reconsideration of Truman’s legacy by modern historians. You could bludgeon someone with this thousand-plus-page behemoth. I didn’t know much at all about Harry Truman before I read the book. You get a feeling from reading it that McCullough realized this was the case for most Americans and thus he took up the mantle personally to inform the masses what they were missing. Not only did it not disappoint, it opened my eyes to one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.

“Which one is your favorite?” I get asked that question a lot. It’s a natural response when you tell people you’ve read a book on every American president. Over time, I really put some thought into it. Harry S. Truman, The Man From Missouri, is my guy. He was far from perfect both as a man and as a president. But the growth he displayed over the course of his lifetime showed, among other things, that bigotry is both taught and can be overcome. Truman was a principled man brimming with personal integrity. He had to make some of the most consequential decisions in world history after just three months on the job. And you can’t be the Head Librarian’s favorite president without an unabashed love of books. When Harry’s daughter Margaret was asked what her father’s version of heaven would be she responded, “Oh, to have a good comfortable chair, a good reading lamp, and lots of books around that he wanted to read.” 

Sitting in my own comfortable chair, I dug in. The entire first section of the book sets up what a roughneck, Southern-loving background the Missouri of his youth was. Frankly, Harry Truman grew up racist. A white boy in a slave state, his childhood heroes were Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee. His father was a dedicated partisan of the Democratic Party, then dominated by the until-very-recently-slave-holding South. Even as a young man he would write passively to his wife Bess passages like any man being as good as another “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” He was too poor to travel or attend college and he became a product of his environment. Luckily, change was on the way.

Getting out into the world would open Truman’s eyes and help cure his near-sightedness, at least metaphorically. Though he disliked guns and had never been in a fight, Truman volunteered for WWI citing it as “a job somebody had to do.” (At his boot camp in Oklahoma, the constant wind, surprisingly cold nights and baking heat of the day lead men to suggest they give Oklahoma to the Germans and call it even.) Truman was a natural leader of troops. His men took him seriously and morale was great because he was firm but treated them with respect with things like subtle improvements in the food and how he spoke to them, regardless of their backgrounds.

Years later, back home in hyperpartisan Missouri, Harry voted for a Republican; a vote that was anathema to the Truman legacy of Democratic patronage. Harry defended it because it was his brother in arms. Later still, when Truman sought office for himself he was courted by the KKK and knew their vote would be influential. He resisted at first, but ultimately entertained a meeting with a Klansman. He walked away ten minutes later when asked to promise never to hire Catholics; the faith of many of those same brothers from the battlefields.

Truman won that election (a county judgeship) without the support of the lynch mob and served for eight years. He graduated next to a much bigger office – that of U.S. Senator – with a broad coalition of voters. In his successful re-election campaign for the Senate in 1940 one of the key contributing factors was the black vote which, when not coercively denied the opportunity, generally swung Republican. He had a genuine connection with people. And he knew what it was like to struggle. He was becoming The Everyman From Missouri.

Truman’s racial lens would continue to dilate as he served the public. He became the first sitting president to visit Mexico, where he put a wreath on a monument of fallen soldiers. The people there loved him for it. He was almost assassinated by Puerto Rican nationalists, which was sadly ironic because he had done more for the island than anyone before him, assigning the first native as governor and favoring their right to determine their relationship with the US and extending Social Security to the people living there. He was the first president ever to make a speech to the NAACP, pledging his support to uphold civil rights; “And when I say all Americans – I mean all Americans.” He sought to back up that speech with a special message to Congress based on the findings of his own Civil Rights Commission which called for a Fair Employment Act, removal of the poll tax, federal anti-lynching laws [Ed. note: Again I exclaim, HOW WAS THIS NOT ALREADY A THING?!], ending discrimination in commercial travel and halting discrimination in the military immediately.

These were all things that developed gradually. There was no watershed moment that proved to the world he was fit to be President of the United States. As with most things in presidential history, Harry Truman was in the right place at the right time.  Given Franklin Roosevelt’s precarious state of health, the kingmakers knew that whomever they picked as Vice President in 1944 would likely be president very soon. Political operative Ed Flynn went through the entire Senate with FDR and later wrote of Truman, “His record as head of the Senate Committee…was excellent, his labor votes in the Senate were good; on the other hand he seemed to represent to some degree the conservatives in the party, he came from a border state, and he had never made any “racial” remarks. He just dropped into the slot.”

There you have it folks. A couple old white guys in a smoky back room decided the fate of the country by finding the most anodyne personality on the Senate seating chart. To say everyone in Washington was on board with this choice would be….. incorrect. Maybe laughably incorrect. People at the 1944 Democratic Convention where Truman would be formally nominated called him The Missouri Compromise.

Oh ye of little faith! Harry S. would deliver and then some. To wit, in his first State of the Union address after the war, he presented a 21-point program. Among the items in that State of the Union program were:

• Increased unemployment compensation
• Higher Minimum Wage
• Creation of a Fair Employment Practices Committee
• Tax reform
• Crop insurance
• National compulsory health insurance funded by payroll deductions (or in modern parlance, Medicare for All, baby!)
• Federal aid for housing to build a million new homes a year

Not to mention his defense record:

• Truman Committee – investigated corruption and overspending in defense contracts and efficiencies on military bases
  • found alarming shortages, bad planning, corruption, dirty private sector deals and mismanagement
  • his 50+ reports and 400+ hearings would lead to sweeping changes and corrective actions
  • some estimate his findings saved the government over $15 Billion (!)
  • (though, to be clear, this was while he was a Senator and boosted his chances for VP)
• Extension of the War Powers and Stabilization Act
• Implementation of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt a war-ravaged European continent
• Signed the National Security Act, which:
  • brought all military branches into a single Department of Defense
  • established the Air Force as its own branch
  • set up the National Security Council
  • formally authorized the CIA
• Delivered the Truman Doctrine to a joint session of Congress, aiming to curb Soviet influence on unstable nations
• Oversaw the Berlin Airlift, delivering thousands of tons of supplies to blockaded Germans after WWII
• Signed NATO into being

Gains in income, standard of living, education and housing were unparalleled in American history by the time Truman was winding down his term. Farm income as well as corporate income were at all time highs and unemployment all but gone. No insured banks had failed in almost 9 years. Social Security benefits had doubled, 8 million veterans had been educated in college and minimum wage increased. 

Everyone must have loved this guy, right? WRONG! Up for reelection in 1948, almost every news outlet in the country thought it would take a miracle plus a string of unimaginable blunders by his opponent for Truman to win. Talk about a tough crowd. No wonder Harry’s face was so lit when he held up that post-election newspaper.

I think it underscores a time-tested truth: It’s really damn hard to be president! Think of the choices the man had to make. Most people are just finishing their training 16 weeks into a new job. Harry Truman had to decide if he wanted to use the most destructive weapon ever created by humans to end a global war. Was saving the lives of future soldiers fighting an enemy who refused to surrender humane or was it mass murder of the Japanese? How would I have approached the decision? How would you?

What do we use to weigh the life of a leader? If you grow up racist and xenophobic but learn a better path and desegregate federal institutions and join the fight for civil rights, does it balance the scales? If a million people go on strike in the same year [1946] how do you get everyone back to work while appeasing them enough they don’t do it again? What if millions of Jews petition for statehood (“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?”) and you find yourself the primary arbiter of a holy land dispute that dates back millennia? What if the war drums against communism start to pound over Korea and Vietnam? These questions alone have filled books and I didn’t even get to them in this article! That’s how much was on Truman’s plate as he paced the Oval Office.

Harry Truman isn’t my favorite president because he did everything right. He didn’t. But he did the best he could with what he had. His understanding of leadership was one of ownership. He thought a president’s most important responsibility is making decisions: “That’s his job.” He made choices that continue to shape the course of world history and he never considered shying away from them. He faced hard truths head on. So the next time you disagree with someone and indignantly want to spout off in a social media-fueled rage, take a breath and think about how “Give ‘Em Hell” Harry Truman would have responded. “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”

Since Mr. McCullough’s book was so thoroughly filled with trivia and quotation gems, enjoy an extended post-script!

Great Facts & Quotes About Truman the Reader:

• Said he was never bored because he had “a house full of books.”
• Read the Bible through twice before he turned 12; read all of Shakespeare over time.
• “I don’t know anybody in the world that ever read as much or as constantly as he did. He was what you call a ‘book worm’.” – cousin Ethel Noland
• Mark Twain was his patron saint. One year he spent $25 (about $750 in today’s $!) of his own money on a 25-volume set of Twain’s works. 
• After an accident on the farm left him laid up: “It is almost a reconciliation to having my leg broken to contemplate the amount of reading I am going to do this summer. I am getting better fast and I am afraid I’ll get well so soon I won’t get to read enough.”
• When tasked to a new Interstate Commerce subcommittee in the Senate investigating railroad finances, he checked out more than 50 books from the Library of Congress on railroad management, history and the like. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here.” He was dismayed to find how few other members of Congress used the Library at all. 
• Received an honorary degree from Oxford, even though he never went to college. 
• Convinced Congress that all existing presidential papers should be put on microfilm. 
• Great love of his post-presidential life was his library, put on a site donated by the town of Independence, MO, only a mile from his house with Bess. 
  • Went there six and a half days a week for 9 years (longer than he was president)
  • LBJ came to the library to sign the Medicare bill in front of Truman since he had so championed it (July 30, 1965)

Quotes by and about Harry Truman

• “Three things ruin a man. Power, money, and women.” Telling a reporter, he went on, “I never wanted power. I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”
• “The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”
• One of his Secret Service men: “He never came on as being superior…He could talk to anyone! He could talk to the lowly peasant. He could talk to the King of England…He never got swellheaded-never got, you know, swagly.”
• “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.” 
• While sitting in the Oval Office: “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.”
• Writing to Bess about the ghosts he hears in the White House when alone, “The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth-I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable.”
• Walked almost two miles every morning. Diary broke down his diet when he was 67: “I eat no bread but one piece of toast at breakfast, no butter, no sugar, no sweets. Usually have fruit, one egg, a strip of bacon and a half glass of skimmed milk for breakfast; liver and bacon or sweet breads or ham or fish and spinach and another nonfattening vegetable for lunch with fruit for dessert. For dinner I have a fruit cup, steak, a couple of non-fattening vegetables and an ice, orange, pineapple or raspberry…So I maintain my waist line and can wear suits I bought in 1935!”
• Letter to his sister, “Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘ em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

Trivia

• The S doesn’t stand for anything. His parents, indecisive, left it just a letter so it could refer to either of his grandfathers, Solomon or Shipp. (Shout out to Ulysses S. Grant!) 
• He was a total SQUARE! Disliked drink, smoking, fad diets, new haircuts, pop culture, jazz, the roaring 20s; never learned to dance, play golf or tennis or bridge. 
• In a speech for Senate, mentioned that 90% of wealth was in the hands of 4% of the population. Sound familiar?
• Supposedly Truman successfully urged Congress to insert the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate into the line of succession before the Secretary of State because of his distrust of his own Secretary, James Byrnes.
• When Truman ran for U.S. Senate in 1934 he spent $12,000 to beat his primary opponent by a whisker, but only $785 in the general election to win in a landslide over his Republican challenger.  
• 1946 midterms – Republicans CRUSHED, taking both houses for the first time since the Depression and a majority of state governorships, including Dewey in NY. Even Truman’s hand picked House candidate for Kansas City lost. 
  • However, this revived Truman to be his own man and run things his way. 
  • This Congress brought in Rep. Richard Nixon, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Senator Joe McCarthy and Rep. John F. Kennedy. 
• Second term inaugural was first inaugural address to be broadcast on TV.
• Re-election in 1948
  • Went on a huge Whistle-Stop Campaign, traveling 21,928 miles, nearly as far as the voyage of Magellan. 
  • Had all his press releases translated and put into foreign language newspapers across the country, which no one had done until then. At around 35 million people, 25% of the population and 11 million eligible voters, this constituency was substantial. 

Follow-up Reading

• Harry S. Truman: A Life by Robert Ferrell
• Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace
• Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman by Alonzo Hamby