Man of the People: A Life of Harry S Truman
It is the last Sunday of the month which means it’s time for the next president book, making this weeks book of the week, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S Truman by Alonzo L. Hamby.
Harry S Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri to John and Martha Truman. He was the second born but first surviving child and would be joined by younger brother John Vivian and sister Mary Jane. Truman is named for his mothers brother Harrison and the S does not actually stand for anything, it was kind of put in as a generic nod to both grandfathers, paternal grandfather Anderson Shipp Truman and maternal grandfather Solomon Young.
Truman was a true native son of Missouri, he was born and raised there, lived there all his life until he left for Washington DC and returned there after he left the presidency. He was quite young when he was diagnosed as having very weak eyesight and was prescribed glasses, which he wore for the remainder of his life.
The Truman’s tried to make a living as farmers and his father experienced some success initially, although eventually he would end up in debt. Truman went through school locally and only completed one or two years at a local college, never graduating, but completing a book keeping course which landed him a job at a bank. He did quite well as a banker, advocating for himself and earning promotions and pay raises. However, he did not want to be a banker, and eventually left to help out at the family farm.
When WWI hit, he volunteered with the MO Reserves and did fight in the trenches, seeing action, and was in charge of Battery D….I forget specific reserve unit. But Battery D was essentially the reserves problem unit, and he got them to follow his lead, which actually says something about the man as a leader. Actually tells you more about him as a leader than a lot of what the author danced around. For those of you with math skills, or without I because I’m about to tell you, he was 33 when he entered the war.
After he returned from the war, he opted not to enlist in the regular army and resigned his commission with the reserves, returning to private sector, where he opened a haberdashery in MO. Now, this was not necessarily a bad idea, when he’d been in the reserves he had operated a small cantina which was the only successful cantina in the reserves in MO. However, his cantina in the reserves was largely successful because he didn’t really have much competition. The haberdashery was not successful because he had lots of competition, at a time when the economy was booming.
Eventually he and his partner shut the business down, and while his partner would file bankruptcy to get out from under the debt, Truman never did. He kicked the debt can down the road as long as he could, eventually getting out from underneath when his brother Vivian would purchase the bank notes from the creditors and retire the debt.
He did marry his childhood sweetheart and longtime girlfriend Bess Wallace in 1919, they had had a long courtship mostly due to Bess’s mother did not want to be without her daughter. Bess had had other suitors, but basically none of them had the staying power to outlast Mama Wallace, and it’s largely due to Truman’s willingness to share Bess, rather than move her across the country, that mama Wallace eventually gave her blessing. The couple would have one daughter, Margaret, born February 17, 1924, when both Bess and Harry were 39.
After his business failed, Truman went into local politics and would more or less be a politician for the rest of his life. I think he had like four years in between losing an election as county judge and reentering politics where he focused on working his mother’s farm.
Politics in Missouri were dirty business, I’m sure the Republicans had their own machine, but the focus of this book being Truman, the author went into some detail about the Democratic machine, specifically under boss Tom Pendergast. Truman met Pendergast through his nephew, Joseph, who had served with Truman in the war. Pendergast was impressed and started to support Truman in his races.
Now, Pendergast was unquestionably dirty and would eventually serve jail time for some of that dirt, but there does not seem to be any historical indication that Truman was dirty too. His political life actually tends to be pretty clean and the only thing he’s “guilty” of is throwing jobs to his friends and family, which is no more than any other politician has done since the country started.
After serving locally and actually doing quite well, overseeing expansion of roads and doing everything he could to balance the local budget, Truman was put forward as a candidate for US Senator in 1934. And after winning he did well as a senator, he was liked across party lines, got along with almost everyone. And that is actually one of Truman’s true strengths, he was a genuinely likeable guy.
While Senator, he actually managed to make a name for himself and bring himself to national attention by overseeing DoD expenses during the early part of WWII, specifically with an eye towards cutting out waste and making the ramp up more efficient. And it was this combination of likeability and efficiency that made him the Democrats choice for running mate to FDR in 1944.
Through all of this, Bess was not thrilled. She did her duty, showing up for functions when asked to, but mostly she preferred to be in MO with her friends and family. And then April 12, 1945, he was given notice that he was immediately needed at the White House and when he arrived, Eleanor advised him that Roosevelt had died, and Truman needed to take the oath of office.
For the first two weeks he kept Roosevelt’s cabinet in place while dealing with the immediate emergency of transition and the funeral of Roosevelt, but before long he began replacing cabinet members with his own picks. Which is totally fine, he needs people he can work with, and some of his picks were genuinely inspired, like when he had General George Marshall, who was initially his army chief of staff, take over the position of Secretary of State in January of 1947.
The first couple of months were taken up with closing out WWII, which was easily done in Europe as Hitler kindly offed himself about two weeks after Roosevelt passed, although the two events are definitely not related: Russian troops were in Berlin and Hitler did not want to be captured alive, precipitating his demise by self-inflicted gunshot wound.
So European victory is assured, and Truman traveled to Potsdam, a section of Berlin, to meet with Churchill and Stalin. The meeting with Churchill was truncated as Churchill lost his own re-election as Prime minister and was replaced mid-conference with Prime-minister Clement Atlee. Truman initially liked Stalin, which feelings of goodwill would rapidly fade in the post war years as Stalin’s true character revealed itself with the Berlin barricade.
While at Potsdam, Truman received word of the first successful atomic test in New Mexico. He was quite pleased and advised Stalin of the successful test. Stalin acted like this was no big deal.
So all of that was in July. Truman I think attempted to negotiate an end to the war with Japan, but following heavy losses on both sides at I think it was Okinawa, Truman concluded the Japanese would not stop fighting, and authorized the dropping of the first bomb at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The results were….well awful, obviously. And Truman gave the Japanese a few days to surrender before dropping the second bomb on Nagasaki. This got the surrender, but only just. The emperor was willing and able to surrender, but his military leaders did not want him to. It’s only because Emperor Hirohito got his planned speech recorded and to radio stations ahead of a planned coup by military leaders that the surrender went through, and the war was officially over. Another inspired choice was leaving General Douglas MacArthur as basically governor of Japan, and MacArthur left Hirohito with his dignity and issued directives through Hirohito….like I guess when MacArthur left, the Japanese were sad.
So now Truman is president of a post war America, and things are looking good. He’s trying to figure out what social programs he wans to back and how to navigate America’s place in the new world. And he hits on three points which actually lay the groundwork for the Cold War and basically change the course of world politics.
First, he supported the creation of Israel and the partitioning of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. That pretty much speaks for itself, we are and have been seeing the fallout of this support since Israel’s founding on May 14, 1948. Wherever you stand on the Israel/Palestine divide, if you want to know more, I highly recommend the Martyr Made podcast on the Palestinian conflict, I will include a link in the description.
Next is the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine pledges American support “for democracies against authoritarian threats.” This is basically what every politician has pointed to as justification for everything from the Korean War, to early Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam….this became the policy on which the global war on Terrorism would be based, and why America has been trying for the last seventy years to establish democracies wherever we establish military bases. Democracy through force. You gotta love it. Stalin, was not so thrilled with this plan.
And finally, in conjunction with the Truman Doctrine, Secretary of State Marshall proposed the Marshall Plan, aka the European Recovery Program, which was created to provide American aid to Europe following WWII. This plan was proposed, approved, and implemented basically to ensure Soviet style communism did not spread across Europe as it recovered. Additionally, Truman brought in former president Hoover to assist with food programs for Europe, which Hoover gladly did, stepping back into his role as savior of the masses and organizing food drops for Europe.
Now, I don’t think Truman was necessarily wrong for these plans. We’ve seen how devastating communism is when implemented, and Europe unquestionably needed assistance as the people were starving and Stalin began rolling troops westward to annex various countries that would become the Soviet satellite states behind the iron curtain. Truman saw the possibility of another war immediately, and his having alerted Stalin to the presence of atomic weapons and then immediately demonstrated the power of those weapons….Truman actually drew a pretty good line in the sand, and then precluded Europe from ASKING Stalin for assistance by offering it first.
But this definitely set the stage for the Cold War, and led to the Korean War. And Vietnam. It led to the Berlin wall and the Cuban missile crises.
When 1948 rolled around, Truman was basically the only option for the Democrats. Not because he had led brilliantly, he kind of hadn’t. They just didn’t have any other options. The Republicans of course ran Thomas E Dewey and he really did seem the likeliest to win. But here’s the thing. Truman WAS genuinely likeable. And on campaign, he made a pretty good impression overall on the American people, and was more or less a centrist on policy. He actually lost the deep south as he had put forth several policies on civil rights which the Southern Democrats disapproved of. But he still won, and his civil rights recommendations gained no traction.
His next four years were basically a downslide into unpopularity. Everything he did got negative reviews from everyone, certainly culminating in his removal of MacArthur from command during the Korean War. Now, I don’t know enough about the Korean War to have an opinion on if he was right or wrong in that call. The author believes he was correct in his assessment and removal. The people of the United States at that time believed he was wrong.
During his time in the White House, McCarthyism rose to power. It’s good to note that Truman was not a fan of McCarthyism and never supported it, believing that speech and actions are two very different things and that free thought was still allowed in the United States, as well as free speech. One of the other unquestionably good things he did was retain control of the nuclear weapons programs, never releasing them to the military. This is a solid choice and I believe it remains so to this day, that the President is the only one allowed to press that button. And that’s largely because he knew how devastating these weapons are, killing women and children more than military men. Atomic/nuclear weapons are designed to kill indiscriminately, and Truman knew that. So the weight of those deaths were with him always. But I think while he regretted the deaths, he never regretted making the decision as this ended the war quickly, with no more American loss of life.
1952, he made the announcement that he would not seek a second term for himself. He’d served nearly eight full years as in, since Roosevelt died only three months into his fourth term, and Bess, while she did her duty as First Lady, really did not like Washington. He briefly considered standing for Senate again, which if he’d done so would have made him only the third former president to return to politics directly, the first being John Quincy Adam who served as Congressman from 1830 to his death in 1848, and the second being Andrew Johnson, who served as senator in 1875 until his death later that year. But, he believed Bess had supported his career enough, and opted to retire mostly gracefully.
He initially supported Eisenhower as a candidate, but that was when no one knew Eisenhower’s political party. Once Eisenhower came out as a Republican, Truman, who had put Eisenhower in charge of NATO forces, kind of felt betrayed and chilled towards Eisenhower. Truman initially wanted to support Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, but Stevenson kind of demurred so Truman instead offered to support his own VP, Alban Barkley. But Barkley couldn’t get the support of the unions or other Democratic leaders, and when Stevenson opened the 1952 Democratic convention to wild cheers and impromptu calls for his own nomination, Stevenson quietly phoned Truman and asked if it was too late for his support.
Truman of course granted it, then was very irritated when Stevenson basically ignored all of his advice and his offer of assistance from tried and true politicos, of course losing to Eisenhower who became the 24th president of the United States.
Truman retired to MO, gave public speeches, oversaw the building of the Truman presidential library in Independence, MO, traveled to Europe where he was treated as a hero…which was his due, he authorized Marshall Plan and ensured Europe was able to recover from the war without fear of Stalinism wiping out what was left of the continent after Hitler’s bombs stopped.
And he died in hospital following multiple organ failures after a bought with pneumonia on December 26, 1972. He is actually buried on the grounds of his library, with Bess, who died about ten years later, buried next to him.
From this book, you get the sense that Truman was all too human. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s likely that he won his own presidential run based on that humanity and the very real recognition that if this sort of salt of the earth man could make it to the White house…not a rich man, not a rich mans son, not a lawyer, not even a college graduate, just an everyman…then ANYONE could. Like he, more than most of our other presidents, embodied the American Dream. But you also get the sense that he sort of just Forrest Gump-ed his way through life, finding himself in these ever more responsible positions, based on who he knew and his inherent friendliness towards those around him. Because he WAS likeable and able to talk with people on a one on one basis.
And while he was wildly unpopular as his time in the White House ended, in the intervening decades his presidency is remembered fondly as good times, and according to Hamby, he is consistently ranked in the top 8 presidents. I’m not sure if I rank him quite that high, but he’s not near the bottom either. I kind of need to go through my list and make sure it’s updated.
Overall, this book was…ok. Like I feel there’s quite a bit of the general background flavor that didn’t need to be there. Like pages and pages of the corruption of the Pendergast machine, only to have a few lines that Truman wasn’t involved in any of that. It leaves the sense like maybe he was….we just haven’t found the smoking gun to prove it. And really, if there’s no indication of his involvement, then the pages and pages of Pendergast could have been summed up as “despite well-known corruption in Missouri Democrats, especially the Pendergast machine, there is no indication Truman was ever a part of that corruption, and he was known to be honest.” That line basically cuts out 50 pages.
But it was an overall solid biography and worth a read if your looking for information on our 33rd president, Harry S. Truman.
