Harry S. Truman Biography
The following biography
is from
Wikipedia.org
The
Free Encyclopedia.
Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 December 26,
1972) was the thirty-fourth Vice President (1945) and the thirty-third
President of the United States (19451953), succeeding to the office
upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Truman's presidency was eventful, seeing
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the end of World War II,
the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the beginning of the Cold War, the
desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, the formation of the United
Nations, the second red scare, the creation of the CIA, and most of the
Korean War. Truman was a folksy, unassuming president, and popularized
phrases such as "The buck stops here" and "If you can't stand the heat,
get out of the kitchen." He overcame the low expectations of many,
particularly in the shadow of his politically-dominant predecessor, and
although he decided not to run for re-election in 1952 due to low
approval ratings, he is now commonly rated among the near-great
Presidents by historians.
****
Early life
Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar,
Missouri, the eldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen
Young Truman. A brother, John Vivian (18861965), soon followed, along
with a sister, Mary Jane Truman (18891978). When Truman was six years
of age, his parents moved the family to Independence, Missouri, and it
was there that Truman would spend the bulk of his formative years. After
graduating from high school in 1901, Truman worked at a series of
clerical jobs and was a farmer 1906-1916. He was the last president not
to earn a college degree, although he studied for two years toward a law
degree at the Kansas City Law School (currently the University of
Missouri - Kansas City School of Law) in the early 1920s and was a
fellow classmate of future United States Supreme Court Justice Charles
Evans Whittaker.
With the onset of American participation in
World War I, Truman enlisted in the Missouri National Guard, was chosen
to be an officer, and then commanded a regimental battery in France. His
unit was Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, 60th Brigade, 35th
Division. At his physical his eyesight was 20/50 in the right eye and
20/40 in the left eye. He passed his physical, though, because he
secretly memorized the eye chart. Before heading to France, Harry was
sent for training at Fort Sill, near Lawton, Oklahoma. While at Ft. Sill
he was given the additional duty of running the camp canteen (to provide
candy, cigarettes, shoelaces, sodas, tobacco, writing paper, etc. to the
soldiers). This position would mean that nearly every soldier there
would come to know Lt. Truman, at least by sight, and his name. To help
run the canteen, Harry enlisted the help of his Jewish friend Sergeant
Edward Jacobson (Eddie), who had experience in a Kansas City clothing
store as a clerk. Another man he would meet at Ft. Sill, who would pay
dividends after the war, was Lt. James M. Pendergast, the nephew of
Thomas Joseph (T.J.) Pendergast, a Kansas City politician.
In France, Captain Truman's battery
performed very well under fire in the Vosges Mountains. Truman later
rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the National Guard and always
remained proud of his military background. Under his command the
artillery battery, Battery D, did not lose a single man. At the war's
conclusion, Truman returned to Independence and married his longtime
love interest, Bess Wallace, on 28 June 1919. The couple had one child,
Margaret (b. 24 February 1924). A month before the wedding, banking on
the success they had at Ft. Sill and overseas, the men's clothing store
of Truman & Jacobson opened at 104 West 12th St. in downtown Kansas
City. The store went bankrupt in 1922 after being very successful the
first couple of years, but then the bottom fell out of the grain market,
and lower prices for wheat and corn meant fewer sales of silk shirts.
What shirts and ties that they did manage to sell went mainly to former
members of the 129th. It was simple economics: in 1919 wheat went for
$2.15 a bushel, in 1922 it was 88 cents a bushel. Harry blamed the fall
in farm prices on the policies of the Republicans, and Secretary of the
Treasury Andrew Mellon in Washington, a factor that would influence his
decision to become a Democrat. Truman worked for years to pay off the
debts. He and Eddie Jacobson were friends for the rest of their lives,
and it was to Eddie he turned for advice on the Zionist issue.
Political career
In 1922, with the help of the Kansas City
Democratic machine led by boss Tom Pendergast, Truman was elected judge
of the County Court of Jackson County, Missouri an administrative, not
judicial, position. Although he was defeated for reelection in 1924, he
won back the office in 1926 and was reelected in 1930. Truman performed
his duties in this office diligently, and won personal acclaim for
several popular public works projects, including an extensive series of
fine roads for the growing use of the automobiles, building of a new
County Court building, and a series of 12 Madonna of the Trail monuments
to pioneer women dedicated across the country in 1928 and 1929.
Did Truman join the Ku Klux Klan? The
evidence suggests that in 1922 he gave a friend $10 for an initiation
fee but as soon as he learned more about the group he got his money
back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never
claimed membership. Indeed he strongly opposed the KKK on the stump, and
they strongly opposed him. Though Truman at times expressed anger
towards Jews in his diaries, his friend and business partner (Edward
Jacobson) was Jewish, and Truman later became one of the moving forces
behind the creation of the state of Israel.
In the 1934 election the Pendergast machine
selected him to run for Missouri's open Senate seat, and he ran as a New
Dealer in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once elected,
Truman supported the president on most issues and became a popular
member of the Senate "club," and was even voted as one of the ten
"best-dressed" senators.
Truman was always a keen observer of
foreign affairs. On June 23, 1941, a day after Nazi Germany attacked the
Soviet Union Senator Truman declared: "If we see that Germany is winning
we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help
Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I
don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of
them thinks anything of their pledged word." (The New York Times, June
24, 1941) This position contradicted Roosevelt's strong support for
Russia, and Truman dropped the issue. He first gained national
prominence in his second term when his preparedness committee (popularly
known as the "Truman Committee") investigated the scandal of military
wastefulness by exposing fraud and mismanagement. His advocacy of
common-sense cost-saving measures for the military gained him wide
respect, and he emerged as the choice of city bosses and, most
important, Roosevelt himself, for the vice presidential slot in 1944. He
was never close to Roosevelt; consequently, during the brief period of
his vice-presidency, he was not informed of top secret programs, the
most prominent of these being the atomic bomb. He had served less than 3
months as Vice President when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945,
elevating him to the presidency.
A famous story says that when Truman was
summoned to the White House on April 12, it was the now widowed First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who informed him that the president was dead.
Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which the
former First Lady replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you
are the one in trouble now."
Presidency 19451953
Policies
When Truman first took office, he was
initially preoccupied with foreign policy: the Allied conference in
Potsdam, the conclusion of the war in Europe, and then in August, with
the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Truman served nearly an entire term without a vice president. It was not
until Truman's second term, from 1949 to 1953, that he was joined by a
vice president Alben W. Barkley.
Realizing that the interests of the Soviet
Union were quickly becoming incompatible with the interests of the
United States government, Truman's administration articulated an
increasingly hard line against the Soviets. As a Wilsonian
internationalist, Truman initially strongly supported the creation of
the United Nations, and included former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on
the delegation to the U.N.'s first General Assembly in order to meet the
public desire for peace after the carnage of the Second World War.
Although he claimed no expertise on foreign matters, and the Republicans
controlled Congress, Truman was able to win bipartisan support for the
Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. To get Congress to spend on the
Marshall Plan, Truman used an ideological argument about averting
Communism to get the funding, saying that Communism flourishes in
deprived areas. He later admitted that he had exaggerated the threat of
Communism in the speech, stating that he had to "Scare the hell out of
Congress"
Following many years of Democratic
majorities in Congress and Democratic presidents, voter fatigue led to a
new Republican majority in the 1946 midterm elections, with the
Republicans picking up 55 seats in the House of Representatives and
several seats in the Senate. Although Truman cooperated closely with the
Republican leaders on foreign policy he fought them on domestic issues.
He failed to prevent tax cuts and removal of price controls. The power
of the labor unions was significantly curtailed by the Taft-Hartley Act
which was enacted by over-riding Truman's veto. The onset of the Korean
conflict in 1950 once again required an increase in taxes.
As he readied for the approaching 1948
election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal
tradition, advocating universal health insurance, and the repeal of the
Taft-Hartley Act in a broad legislative program that he called the "Fair
Deal." While it was widely expected that Truman would lose, he
campaigned furiously and managed to pull off one of the greatest upsets
in presidential election history by defeating Thomas E. Dewey and
earning a term in the White House in his own right.
Truman's Fair Deal program was not well
received and only one of its major bills was enacted. A few months later
the nation's attention was focused solidly on foreign policy once again
with the "fall of China" to Mao Zedong's Communists. The incident would
prove to be catastrophic for the administration, because it signaled the
end of the Democrats' ability to manage the early Cold War in the eyes
of the American public. Within a year of Nationalist China's collapse,
Alger Hiss was accused of being a Communist agent and war had broken out
between South Korea and North Korea. In 1950 Republican Senator Joseph
McCarthy publicly accused the State Department of being riddled with
Communists. The Hiss case damaged the Truman White House and Senator
McCarthy initially commanded broad public support, but events at home
took a backseat to the war in Korea where Douglas MacArthur had won the
imagination of the American people. Following the Chinese intervention
in early November 1950, MacArthur advised Truman to "Nuke China". When
Truman disagreed with him, MacArthur publicly aired his views, and the
president responded by relieving him of command.
In June 1950, President Truman issued the
following statement and ordered the Seventh Fleet of the United States
Navy into the Strait of Formosa to prevent any conflict between the
Republic of China and the PRC.
"The attack upon Korea makes it plain
beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion
to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.
It has defied the orders of the Security Council of the United Nations
issued to preserve international peace and security. In these
circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a
direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States
forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area.
"Accordingly I have ordered the 7th Fleet
to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action I am
calling upon the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea
operations against the mainland. The 7th Fleet will see that this is
done. The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the
restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan,
or consideration by the United Nations."
Truman's dispute with MacArthur was a
deeply unpopular action that seriously wounded Truman's credibility with
the American people, though his actions are now widely viewed as
warranted. His unpopularity grew even more pronounced as the military
situation in Korea became increasingly stalemated. Realizing that his
electoral chances were slim after losing a primary to Estes Kefauver,
Truman withdrew his candidacy for the election of 1952. After the
election on January 7, 1953, Truman announced the development of the
hydrogen bomb.
Unlike other presidents, Truman lived in
the White House very little during his term in office. Structural
analysis of the building early in his term had shown the White House to
be in danger of imminent collapse, partly due to problems with the walls
and foundation that dated back to the burning of the building by the
British during the War of 1812. While the White House was systematically
dismantled to the foundations and rebuilt a project that also added
what is now known as the "Truman Balcony" to the curved portico of the
White House Truman was moved to Blair House nearby, which became his
"White House."
On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican
nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to
assassinate Truman at Blair House. White House policeman Private Leslie
Coffelt was killed, and several other law enforcement officers were
seriously wounded in the shoot-out, which lasted approximately 40
seconds. Prior to succumbing to his wounds, Coffelt killed Torresola
with a single shot to the head. Truman witnessed this event from the
window of his bedroom on the second floor of the Blair-Lee House.
Collazo was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death in 1952.
Truman later commuted his sentence to life in prison.
In response, Truman allowed for a genuinely
democratic plebiscite in Puerto Rico to determine the status of its
relationship to the United States. Truman also spent time on Little
Torch Key in the Florida Keys during the White House reconstruction.
Israel
Truman, who had been a supporter of the
Zionist movement as early as 1939, was a key figure in the establishment
of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1946, an Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry recommended the gradual establishment of two states in
Palestine, with neither Jews nor Arabs dominating. However, there was
little public support for the two-state proposal, and Britain was under
pressure to withdraw from Palestine quickly due to attacks on British
forces by armed Zionist groups. At the urging of the British, a special
U.N. committee recommended the immediate partitioning of Palestine into
two states, and with Truman's support, it was approved by the General
Assembly in 1947. The British announced that they would leave Palestine
by May 15, 1948, and the Arab League Council nations began moving troops
to Palestine's borders. There was significant disagreement between
Truman and the State Department about how to handle the situation, and
meanwhile, tensions were rising between the U.S. and Soviet Union. In
the end, Truman, amid controversy both at home and abroad, recognized
the State of Israel 11 minutes after it declared itself a nation.
Civil rights
After a hiatus that had lasted since
Reconstruction, the Truman administration marked the federal
government's first steps in many years in the area of civil rights. A
particularly savage 1946 lynching of two young black men and two young
black women near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, focused
attention on civil rights, and was one factor behind the issuing of a
1947 report by the Truman administration titled To Secure These Rights,
which advocated, among other civil rights reforms, making lynching a
federal crime. In 1948, the President submitted a civil rights agenda to
Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to
issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This
provoked a firestorm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the time
leading up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to
compromise, saying "My forbears were Confederates... But my very stomach
turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas,
were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten." In the
same year, he issued Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the U.S.
Armed Services following World War II. Truman took considerable
political risk in backing civil rights, and was very concerned that the
loss of Dixiecrat support might destroy the Democratic Party. At the
1948 nominating convention, a sharp address given by Hubert H. Humphrey,
Jr., then the mayor of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota and candidate
for the United States Senate seat then held by Joseph H. Ball, convinced
the party to adopt a strong civil rights plank, which was wholeheartedly
adopted by Truman.
Major legislation signed
Project Paperclip - September, 1946
National Security Act - July 26, 1947
Truman Doctrine - March 12, 1947
Marshall Plan/European Recovery Plan
Important executive orders
Executive Order 9981
Administration and Cabinet
(All of the cabinet members when Truman
became president in 1945 had been serving under Roosevelt previously.)
OFFICE NAME TERM
President Harry S. Truman 19451953
Vice President None 19451949
Alben W. Barkley 19491953
State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. 1945
James F. Byrnes 19451947
George C. Marshall 19471949
Dean G. Acheson 19491953
Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. 1945
Fred M. Vinson 19451946
John W. Snyder 19461953
War Henry L. Stimson 1945
Robert P. Patterson 19451947
Kenneth C. Royall 1947
Defense James V. Forrestal 19471949
Louis A. Johnson 19491950
George C. Marshall 19501951
Robert A. Lovett 19511953
Attorney General Francis Biddle 1945
Tom C. Clark 19451949
J. Howard McGrath 19491952
James P. McGranery 19521953
Postmaster General Frank C. Walker 1945
Robert E. Hannegan 19451947
Jesse M. Donaldson 19471953
Navy James V. Forrestal 19451947
Interior Harold L. Ickes 19451946
Julius A. Krug 19461949
Oscar L. Chapman 19491953
Agriculture Claude R. Wickard 1945
Clinton P. Anderson 19451948
Charles F. Brannan 19481953
Commerce Henry A. Wallace 19451946
W. Averell Harriman 19461948
Charles W. Sawyer 19481953
Labor Frances Perkins 1945
Lewis B. Schwellenbach 19451948
Maurice J. Tobin 19481953
Supreme Court appointments
Truman appointed the following Justices to
the Supreme Court of the United States:
Harold Hitz Burton - 1945
Fred M. Vinson - Chief Justice - 1946
Tom Campbell Clark - 1949
Sherman Minton - 1949
Post-presidency
In 1951, the U.S. ratified the 22nd
Amendment, disqualifying presidents from running for a third term (or a
second term, if they had served more than two years of another's term).
The text of the amendment specifically excluded Truman from its
provisions. However, Truman withdrew his candidacy for the election of
1952 after losing the New Hampshire primary to Estes Kefauver. Truman
had always maintained privately that he would not run for reelection in
1952. At the time of the New Hampshire primary, no candidate had
elicited Truman's backing. Without a front-runner, and with no
announcement that he would not run for reelection having been made,
Truman's name was placed on the ballot. (In New Hampshire, interested
individuals can nominate a person to be entered in the primary ballot
without his or her consent.) By March 1952, Truman had announced his
decision not to run, and pressure on Gov. Adlai Stevenson (D-Ill.) to
run for the Democratic nomination increased.
Truman made the most of his
post-presidential years, making speeches and writing his memoirs after
he left Washington. He returned home to take up residence at his
mother-in-law's house in Independence, Missouri. His predecessor,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, had organized his own presidential library, but
legislation to enable future presidents to do something similar still
remained to be enacted. Truman worked to garner private donations to
build a presidential library which he then donated to the federal
government, which would then maintain it, a practice adopted by all his
successors.
Former members of Congress and the federal
courts received a federal retirement package, and it was President
Truman who ensured that servants of the other branches of government
received similar privileges. Truman decided that he did not wish to be
on any corporate payroll, which reflected his view that to take
advantage of such a benefit would diminish the integrity of the nation's
highest office. It cannot be said, however, that he foreswore all
attempts to "cash in" after leaving office, as he received the
then-record sum of $600,000 as an advance on the publication of his
memoirs. Despite this windfall, Truman had small means for his early
post-presidential years because he had not chosen to extend federal
retirement benefits to the presidency itself. In 1958, the Congress
passed the Former Presidents Act, offering a $25,000 yearly pension to
each former president, primarily due to Truman's financial status. The
one other living President at the time, Herbert Hoover, also took the
pension though he did not need the money, reportedly to not embarass
Truman.
In 1956, Truman took a trip to Europe with
his wife, and was a universal sensation. In Britain he received an
honorary degree in Civic Law from Oxford University. He met with his
friend Winston Churchill for the last time, and on returning to the
U.S., he gave his full support to Adlai Stevenson's second bid for the
White House, although he had initially favored Gov. W. Averell Harriman
(D-NY) for the nomination.
Upon turning eighty, Truman was feted in
Washington and asked to address the United States Senate. He was so
emotionally overcome by his reception that he was unable to deliver his
speech. He also campaigned for senatorial candidates. A bad fall in the
bathroom of his home in 1964 severely limited his physical capabilities,
and he was unable to maintain his daily presence at his presidential
library. On December 5, 1972, he was admitted to Kansas City's Research
Hospital and Medical Center with lung congestion from pneumonia. He
subsequently developed multiple organ failure, and died at 7:50 a.m. on
December 26 at the age of 88. He and Bess are buried at the Truman
Library.
As Vietnam and in later years Watergate
wrenched at the heart of the nation, Truman's reputation steadily rose,
and even the band Chicago wrote a song about the nation's former
president. Truman's longtime home (19191972), the Wallace House at 219
North Delaware Street in Independence, Missouri, and his grandfather's
farm nearby, are maintained as the Harry S. Truman National Historic
Site. The headquarters building of the State Department in Washington,
D.C., was named the Harry S. Truman Building in his honor during the
Clinton Administration.
Truman's middle initial
Truman did not have a middle name, but only
a middle initial. It was a common practice in southern states, including
Missouri, to use initials rather than names. Truman said the initial was
a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp(e)
Truman and Solomon Young. He once joked that the S was a name, not an
initial, and it should not have a period, but official documents and his
presidential library all use a period. Furthermore, the Harry S. Truman
Library has numerous examples of the signature written at various times
throughout Truman's lifetime where his own use of a period after the "S"
is very obvious.
Memorials
USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) is a Nimitz-class
supercarrier of the United States Navy. The keel was laid by Newport
News Shipbuilding November 29, 1993, and the warship was christened
September 7, 1996. The ship is currently based at Norfolk, Virginia.
Truman Sports Complex
****
The
above biography has been copied in part or in whole
from an article on
Wikipedia.org
"The Free Encyclopedia." It has been modified under
the NGU Free Document License Section 5 in the
following manner: (1) All links within the article
have been removed, including text links such as
"[#]"; (2) The "[Edit]" text and link have been
removed [if you would like to update the article,
you may do so from the original page]; (3) the table
of Contents links and text have been removed; and
(4) all of the sections of the original article have
not been copied. All of the above text is available
under the terms of the GNU Free Document License.
URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman
Date Article Copied:
March 17, 2006
We
will try to replace this article with an original
biography in the near future, but we hope this will
be of help to our visitors in the mean time.
For
additions & corrections,
Click Here |