Harry S. Truman

Based on Wikipedia: Harry S. Truman

The Accidental President Who Shaped the Modern World

On April 12, 1945, Harry Truman had been Vice President of the United States for exactly eighty-two days. He was summoned to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt placed her hand on his shoulder and said, "Harry, the President is dead."

Truman's response became famous: "Is there anything I can do for you?" Eleanor shook her head. "Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now."

She was right. Franklin Roosevelt had told his new vice president almost nothing about the war's secret operations. Only after taking the oath of office did Truman learn about the Manhattan Project—the massive, clandestine effort to build an atomic bomb. Within four months, he would authorize the only use of nuclear weapons in human history.

A Name Without a Name

Harry S. Truman's middle initial doesn't stand for anything. The "S" honors both his grandfathers—Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young—without choosing between them. This was a common practice in the American South at the time, a diplomatic solution that Truman's parents employed at his birth in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884.

The ambiguity of that initial would later spark one of history's most trivial debates: should it be followed by a period? Truman himself used the period inconsistently. The Government Printing Office style guide eventually ruled that periods follow all initials in names, regardless of what they represent. But the initial S, standing for nothing and everything, seems fitting for a man who would later have to make decisions that pleased no one completely.

His family moved frequently during his early years—from Lamar to a farm near Harrisonville, then to Belton, and finally to his grandparents' six-hundred-acre spread in Grandview. When Harry was six, his parents settled in Independence, Missouri, specifically so he could attend Sunday school at the Presbyterian church.

Independence would shape him profoundly. It was there that he developed his lifelong loves: reading, history, and music.

The Piano and the Poor Eyesight

Young Harry discovered piano at age seven and threw himself into it with remarkable discipline. He rose at five in the morning to practice before school, studying twice a week with Mrs. E.C. White, a respected Kansas City teacher. By fifteen, he had become quite skilled—talented enough that some encouraged him to pursue music professionally.

But his eyesight created problems. Truman was severely nearsighted, with vision so poor in his left eye that it exceeded the standard for legal blindness. When he first tried to join the Missouri National Guard in 1905, he failed the eye examination: 20/50 in his right eye, 20/400 in his left. He solved this the way many determined young men of his era did—he memorized the eye chart and passed on his second attempt.

This same poor eyesight kept him from attending West Point, which would have provided a free college education. It's worth pausing on this fact: the man who would become Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in history was originally deemed too visually impaired for military service.

Truman is the only president since William McKinley, elected in 1896, who never earned a college degree. After high school, he spent a year at Spalding's Commercial College in Kansas City studying bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing. He took night classes toward a law degree in the 1920s but dropped out after losing a local election. He later applied for a law license while serving as president in 1947 but changed his mind before completing the application. The Missouri Supreme Court eventually issued him a posthumous honorary law license in 1996.

Failed Businessman, Future President

Before politics, Truman tried his hand at several business ventures. None succeeded.

He worked briefly in the mailroom of The Kansas City Star. He spent time as a timekeeper for railroad construction crews, which required sleeping in workers' camps along the rail lines. He clerked at a bank with his brother Vivian. He invested in a lead and zinc mine in Oklahoma. He speculated in Kansas City real estate. He bought land and leased the oil drilling rights to prospectors.

These ventures occasionally produced income but never lasting success. The pattern of financial struggle would follow Truman for decades. He proposed marriage to Bess Wallace in 1911, but she turned him down. Truman believed it was because he lacked money, and he resolved not to propose again until he could offer her a better life than farming could provide.

Bess later told him something different: she hadn't planned to marry anyone, but if she ever did, it would be him. They married in 1919, after the war, and remained together until his death fifty-three years later.

The Great War and the Making of a Leader

When the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, Truman was thirty-three years old and running his family's farm. He could have avoided service—he was past prime military age and his eyesight alone should have disqualified him. Instead, he rejoined the Missouri National Guard and successfully recruited new soldiers, earning an election as their first lieutenant.

At Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, Truman ran the canteen with Edward Jacobson, a clothing store clerk he knew from Kansas City. Military canteens funded by unit members almost always lost money. Truman and Jacobson's operation turned a profit, returning each soldier's initial two-dollar investment plus ten thousand dollars in dividends over six months. This was, finally, a business success—though it belonged to the Army rather than to Truman personally.

The camp also introduced him to Lieutenant James M. Pendergast, nephew of Tom Pendergast, the political boss who controlled Kansas City. This connection would reshape Truman's entire future.

By mid-1918, about one million American soldiers were fighting in France. Truman, promoted to captain, took command of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. Battery D had a reputation for discipline problems. Previous commanders had failed to control the men.

Truman's approach was direct. He made his corporals and sergeants personally accountable for discipline, promising to support them if they performed well and demote them to private if they didn't. The men initially tried to intimidate him into quitting. He didn't quit.

During a sudden German night attack in the Vosges Mountains, Truman's soldiers panicked and began to flee. What happened next became legendary within the battery. Truman, the mild-mannered piano player from Missouri, unleashed a torrent of profanity so shocking that his men stopped in their tracks. They had never heard him speak that way. They obeyed immediately and returned to their positions.

The soldiers later called it "The Battle of Who Run."

The Decision That Saved Lives and Brought a Reprimand

On September 27, 1918, during the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive, Truman spotted something through his binoculars: a German artillery battery deploying across a river. The enemy guns were positioning themselves to fire on the 28th Division—not Truman's 35th Division.

His orders were explicit. He was only authorized to engage targets threatening the 35th Division. Attacking the German battery would violate his direct instructions.

Truman waited. He watched the Germans walk their horses away from their guns, ensuring they couldn't quickly relocate. Then he ordered his men to fire.

The attack destroyed the German battery. Truman's regimental commander, Colonel Karl D. Klemm, was furious. He dressed Truman down and threatened a court-martial for disobeying orders. But the court-martial never happened. Truman had saved American lives, and everyone knew it.

His battery later provided support for George S. Patton's tank brigade and fired some of the last American shots of the war on November 11, 1918. Under Truman's command in France, Battery D did not lose a single man. When they returned to the United States, his soldiers presented him with a large loving cup to thank him for bringing them all home alive.

From Haberdasher to Senator

After the war, Truman and his old canteen partner Edward Jacobson opened a men's clothing store in Kansas City. A haberdashery, in the language of the time—a shop selling men's furnishings like shirts, ties, and hats.

The business failed during the recession of 1921-1922. Truman refused to declare bankruptcy, instead spending years paying off the debts. This choice—to honor obligations even when the law offered an easy exit—became central to his self-image and later political identity.

The Pendergast connection he'd made during the war now proved valuable. In 1922, with the support of the Pendergast political machine, Truman won election as a judge of Jackson County. This wasn't a judicial position in the modern sense—county judges in Missouri handled administrative matters like roads and public buildings, similar to county commissioners in other states.

Truman lost his reelection bid in 1924, then won the position of presiding judge in 1926. He served until 1934, overseeing a major road-building program that came in under budget—an unusual achievement in an era of machine politics and routine corruption.

In 1934, again with Pendergast backing, Truman won election to the United States Senate. He was fifty years old. Some dismissed him as the Pendergast machine's errand boy, a puppet sent to Washington to vote as Kansas City's boss directed.

They were partially right and substantially wrong.

The Truman Committee

By 1940, Truman had won reelection to the Senate and established himself as a competent but unremarkable legislator. Then World War II began transforming the American economy, and Truman found his calling.

He noticed that military contracts were being awarded wastefully, with massive cost overruns and inefficiency. In 1941, he convinced the Senate to create a special committee to investigate—the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, quickly dubbed the Truman Committee.

Over the next three years, the committee held hundreds of hearings and saved the federal government an estimated fifteen billion dollars—roughly two hundred and fifty billion in today's money. Truman conducted the investigations with scrupulous fairness, refusing to turn them into partisan attacks. He criticized both military brass and private contractors, both Republicans and Democrats, whenever the evidence warranted.

The Truman Committee made him nationally famous. Time magazine put him on its cover. When Roosevelt needed a new vice presidential candidate for his fourth term in 1944—his current vice president, Henry Wallace, had become too controversial—Truman emerged as the compromise choice. He was acceptable to labor unions, Southern Democrats, and party bosses alike.

Roosevelt barely knew him. They had met only a handful of times. Truman had no idea what he was inheriting.

Eighty-Two Days

Truman was sworn in as vice president on January 20, 1945. Roosevelt was visibly unwell—photographs from the inauguration show a gaunt, exhausted man who looked far older than his sixty-three years. But the president shared nothing of substance with his new understudy.

They met only twice during Truman's brief vice presidency. Roosevelt was often away—at Yalta negotiating with Churchill and Stalin, then at Warm Springs, Georgia, trying to recover his strength. Truman was kept in the dark about the most consequential secret of the war.

Then Roosevelt died on April 12, and Truman was summoned to the White House.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson pulled him aside shortly after the swearing-in and mentioned, cryptically, a project involving a new weapon of enormous destructive power. Over the following days, Truman learned the full scope of the Manhattan Project: the billions of dollars spent, the secret cities built, the race against Germany to harness nuclear fission.

Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945—Truman's sixty-first birthday. But Japan fought on. Military planners estimated that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost hundreds of thousands of American casualties and potentially millions of Japanese lives.

On July 16, the first nuclear device was successfully tested in New Mexico. Truman, attending the Potsdam Conference in Germany, received word that the weapon worked. He now had a choice that no human being had ever faced before.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb called "Little Boy" destroyed Hiroshima. Three days later, "Fat Man" destroyed Nagasaki. The combined death toll exceeded two hundred thousand people, with many more dying in subsequent years from radiation-related illnesses.

Japan surrendered on August 15.

Truman publicly expressed no regret for the decision. He maintained for the rest of his life that the bombs saved more lives than they took by ending the war without an invasion. Historians continue to debate this calculus—whether Japan would have surrendered without the bombs, whether a demonstration on an uninhabited target might have sufficed, whether the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war mattered more than the bombs themselves.

What remains undisputed is that Truman made the decision and owned it completely. He did not hide behind advisors or claim he had no choice. He decided, and he never publicly wavered.

The Cold War Begins

Within two years of Japan's surrender, the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had collapsed into mutual suspicion and hostility. This confrontation—the Cold War—would dominate American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Truman's response was comprehensive and consequential.

In 1947, he announced the Truman Doctrine, pledging American support for countries resisting communist expansion. The immediate context was Greece and Turkey, both under pressure from Soviet-backed forces, but the principle extended far beyond those two nations. The United States would actively work to contain communism wherever it threatened to spread.

The same year, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a massive aid program to rebuild war-devastated Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, channeled roughly thirteen billion dollars—over one hundred fifty billion in today's money—to Western European economies between 1948 and 1952. The program helped prevent economic collapse that might have made communism attractive, while binding Western Europe economically and politically to the United States.

In 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, cutting off road and rail access to the portions of the city controlled by the Western allies. The city, located deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany, faced starvation. Truman rejected both abandoning Berlin and forcing the blockade militarily. Instead, he ordered an airlift.

For nearly a year, American and British planes flew food, fuel, and supplies into Berlin—at the peak, one plane landing every thirty seconds. The Soviets eventually lifted the blockade, having demonstrated their hostility but failed to dislodge the West from Berlin.

In 1949, Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This mutual defense pact bound the United States, Canada, and Western European nations together, with an attack on any member considered an attack on all. It was the first peacetime military alliance in American history, a dramatic break from the isolationism that had characterized American foreign policy before World War II.

Truman staunchly denounced isolationism. The United States, he believed, could not retreat from the world without inviting another global catastrophe.

The 1948 Election: Dewey Defeats Truman

By 1948, almost no one expected Truman to win reelection.

The Democratic Party was splitting apart. Southern Democrats, furious over Truman's civil rights proposals, formed the States' Rights Democratic Party—the Dixiecrats—and nominated South Carolina's Strom Thurmond for president. Progressive Democrats, unhappy with Truman's hard line toward the Soviet Union, broke away to support Henry Wallace's new Progressive Party.

The Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, was the popular governor of New York who had nearly defeated Roosevelt four years earlier. Polls showed him leading comfortably. Newsweek surveyed fifty political experts; all fifty predicted Dewey would win.

Truman refused to accept defeat. He embarked on a grueling whistlestop campaign, traveling over thirty thousand miles by train and delivering hundreds of speeches. He attacked the "do-nothing" Republican Congress with populist fury, defending the New Deal programs that Republicans wanted to roll back.

"Give 'em hell, Harry!" supporters shouted at his rallies.

"I just tell the truth," Truman replied, "and they think it's hell."

On election night, the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press early with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." The photograph of Truman holding up that newspaper, grinning triumphantly, became one of the most famous images in American political history.

Truman won with 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. The Dixiecrats carried four Southern states, and Wallace won none. The experts had been completely wrong.

Korea

On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The invasion caught American intelligence by surprise—they had expected pressure on Berlin, not an attack in Asia.

Truman responded decisively and controversially. Without asking Congress for a declaration of war, he ordered American forces to defend South Korea under the authority of a United Nations resolution. He called it a "police action," not a war, a semantic distinction that many found unconvincing as American casualties mounted.

The initial months went badly. North Korean forces pushed the defenders into a small perimeter around the southern port of Pusan. Then General Douglas MacArthur executed a brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon, behind enemy lines, that reversed the war's momentum. UN forces drove northward, approaching the Chinese border.

China intervened in late November 1950, sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Yalu River. The UN forces were pushed back in brutal winter fighting. The war settled into a bloody stalemate near the original dividing line.

MacArthur publicly criticized Truman's strategy, advocating for expanding the war to attack China directly—potentially using nuclear weapons. Truman's policy was to contain the conflict, not risk a third world war. When MacArthur continued his public criticism, Truman fired him.

The decision was constitutionally correct—the president is commander in chief, and a general who publicly defies presidential policy must go. But MacArthur returned home to a hero's welcome. He addressed a joint session of Congress. Polls showed overwhelming public support for the general over the president.

Truman's approval ratings collapsed to 22 percent—lower than Nixon's during Watergate. The Korean War continued without resolution until after Truman left office. An armistice was signed in July 1953, establishing essentially the same border that had existed before the invasion. American casualties totaled over thirty-six thousand dead.

Civil Rights

Harry Truman grew up in a segregated society and absorbed its prejudices. Early letters reveal the casual racism common among white Missourians of his generation. His own family had owned slaves before the Civil War.

But Truman changed. The reasons are debated—personal evolution, political calculation, genuine moral growth, or some combination. What matters is what he did.

In 1946, Truman created the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which produced a groundbreaking report documenting discrimination and recommending federal action. In 1948, he became the first president to address the NAACP—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—standing before the Lincoln Memorial and declaring that all Americans deserved equal rights regardless of race.

He proposed comprehensive civil rights legislation to Congress. Congress, dominated by a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, refused to act. So Truman acted alone.

Executive Order 9980 prohibited discrimination in federal employment. Executive Order 9981 desegregated the United States Armed Forces. These orders, issued in 1948, represented the most significant federal civil rights actions since Reconstruction.

Military desegregation happened gradually—some commanders resisted, bureaucratic inertia was formidable—but it happened. By the Korean War, integrated units were fighting together. The military became, paradoxically, one of the most integrated institutions in American society.

The Fair Deal and Domestic Frustrations

Truman proposed an ambitious domestic agenda he called the Fair Deal. He wanted national health insurance, federal aid to education, expansion of Social Security, public housing programs, and a higher minimum wage. He envisioned extending and expanding the New Deal that Roosevelt had built.

Congress blocked most of it. The conservative coalition that had frustrated Roosevelt's later domestic initiatives proved equally resistant to Truman. National health insurance went nowhere. Federal aid to education failed. Civil rights legislation died in committee.

Some programs did pass—Social Security was expanded, the minimum wage was raised, public housing was funded. But the Fair Deal largely remained a vision rather than an achievement.

Meanwhile, postwar economic disruptions created headaches. Wartime price controls were lifted, and inflation surged. Labor unions, their strike activity suppressed during the war, now demanded better wages and working conditions. A wave of strikes in 1946 affected steel, automobiles, coal mining, and railroads.

Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the Army—an extreme measure that even his supporters found troubling. Congress, responding to public frustration with strikes, passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, restricting union activities. Truman vetoed it, calling it a "slave labor bill." Congress overrode his veto.

Corruption and Decline

By the early 1950s, investigations had revealed corruption in parts of the Truman administration. Officials in the Bureau of Internal Revenue had accepted bribes. Friends of the president had profited improperly from government connections. The scandals never directly implicated Truman himself, but they tarnished his administration's reputation.

The corruption issue, combined with the Korean War stalemate and the McCarthyism-fueled anxiety about communist infiltration, destroyed Truman's political standing. By early 1952, his approval rating had fallen to levels that made reelection unthinkable.

Truman was technically eligible to run again—the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms had exempted the sitting president when it was ratified in 1951. But he chose not to. He announced in March 1952 that he would not seek another term.

The Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, lost decisively to Dwight Eisenhower. Republicans won control of Congress. The Truman era was over.

Retirement and Reputation

Truman returned to Independence, Missouri, to the house where Bess had grown up and where they had lived since their marriage. For years, the story circulated that his retirement was financially difficult—that the former president had to struggle to make ends meet without a pension. Congress even established a pension for former presidents, supposedly in response to Truman's hardship.

The story was heartwarming but incomplete. Evidence eventually emerged that Truman had accumulated considerable wealth, some of it during his presidency. His financial situation was more comfortable than the legend suggested.

He spent his retirement years building the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence—one of the first presidential libraries in the modern sense—and writing his memoirs. He remained active in Democratic politics, endorsing candidates and occasionally criticizing those he found wanting.

When Truman left office in 1953, his reputation was at its lowest point. The Korean War, the corruption scandals, the McCarthy-era accusations of being "soft on communism"—all had combined to make him deeply unpopular.

Then something interesting happened.

As years passed and passions cooled, historians began reassessing Truman's presidency. The containment policy that had seemed aggressive came to appear prudent as alternatives—nuclear war or appeasement—looked worse in retrospect. The Marshall Plan clearly succeeded in rebuilding Europe. NATO proved durable. The decision to fire MacArthur, so controversial at the time, came to be seen as a crucial affirmation of civilian control over the military.

Truman's reputation rose steadily. Scholars began ranking him among the near-great presidents. The qualities that had seemed like limitations—his lack of pretension, his blunt speech, his middle-American ordinariness—came to appear as virtues.

He died on December 26, 1972, at eighty-eight years old. Bess outlived him by nearly a decade, dying in 1982 at ninety-seven.

The Buck Stops Here

A sign on Truman's desk in the Oval Office read: "The buck stops here."

The phrase captured something essential about how Truman understood the presidency. Decisions could be delegated upward but not responsibility. The president had to decide, and the president had to own the consequences.

Truman made decisions that killed hundreds of thousands of people and saved millions of others—though which decisions did which remains debated. He made decisions that shaped the world we still live in: the architecture of Cold War alliances, the precedent of limited war, the beginning of federal action on civil rights, the pattern of American global engagement.

He was, in many ways, an ordinary man—a failed businessman from Missouri who never went to college and couldn't see well enough to serve in the Army without cheating on the eye exam. He became president by accident, was expected to fail, and left office in disgrace.

History's verdict has been kinder than his contemporaries'.

The haberdasher from Independence turned out to be exactly what the moment required: someone willing to decide, willing to accept responsibility, and willing to be unpopular when he believed he was right. The buck stopped with Harry Truman, and he never pretended otherwise.