Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (23 page)

Pollsters and pundits, however, paid little attention to the popular enthusiasm that Truman's travels were generating. They continued to believe that Truman would lose. The Elmo Roper polling service predicted on September 9 that Dewey would get 44.3 percent of the then decided vote to Truman's 31.4 percent, Wallace's 3.6 percent, and Thurmond's 4.4 percent. Roper added that he would continue polling but would not report the results "unless something really interesting happens. My silence on this point can be construed as an indication that Mr. Dewey is still so clearly ahead that we might just as well listen to his inaugural."
⁶⁰
A month later
Newsweek
polled fifty top political journalists, all of whom picked Dewey as the winner. The final polls showed Dewey winning by 52.2 to 37.1 percent (Roper), 49.5 to 44.5 percent (Gallup), and 49.9 to 44.8 percent (Crosby). Reinhold Niebuhr spoke for many lukewarm Truman supporters in early November: "We wish Mr. Dewey well without too much enthusiasm and look to Mr. Truman's defeat without too much regret."
⁶¹

On election eve the experts were still sure that Dewey would win, no one more so than Colonel Robert McCormick, the ultra-conservative publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, perhaps the most influential newspaper in the Midwest. On the first of its eleven election-night editions the
Trib
bannered,
DEWEY WINS ON BASIS OF FIRST TALLY
. By 10:00
P.M.
it decided to pull out all the stops:
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
. An early election-eve edition of the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
carried a cartoon depicting a jubilant elephant and a doleful donkey. Only in the next edition was there a fast retouch: the elephant was now startled, the donkey joyous.
⁶²

When the results became clear on the morning after the election, most Democrats were indeed joyous. Truman received 24,179,345 votes to Dewey's 21,991,291. This was 49.6 percent of the popular vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent. Thurmond got 1,176,125 popular votes and Wallace 1,157,326. Thereafter the Progressive party disappeared, and Wallace ceased to be a force in American politics. Norman Thomas, running for the last time as the Socialist candidate, received 139,572 votes. His weakness, too, exposed the pitiful state of the political Left in America. Truman, carrying twenty-eight states to Dewey's sixteen, won 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189. Thurmond's four states brought him 39 electoral college votes. No other candidate broke into the electoral college in 1948.

It was a highly satisfying triumph for Truman and for the Democratic party, which regained control of Congress. Among the liberal newcomers was Humphrey of Minnesota. The comedian Fred Allen chortled, "Truman is the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk." Entraining to Washington from Missouri, the President gleefully posed for photographers while he held up the
Chicago Tribune
headline. When he arrived at Union Station, a huge crowd cheered him, and the
Washington Post
displayed a big sign:
MR. PRESIDENT, WE ARE READY TO EAT CROW WHENEVER YOU WANT TO SERVE IT
. Dewey had already gone to New York's Grand Central Station to board a train for Albany. He smiled wanly but declined to wave for photographers.
⁶³

The Democrats had reason to chortle, but it was also clear that Truman had not won by much. The election was the closest since 1916. Truman ran behind his ticket in many key states and failed to draw a surge to the polls: voter turnout, at 53 percent of the registered electorate, was the lowest since 1924. With fewer than 50 percent of the votes he was a minority President without a strong mandate for his second term. Except for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Truman failed to carry the normally Democratic strongholds of the industrial Northeast. Wallace, strongest in New York City, may have cost Truman New York State, and he probably hurt him in Maryland, New Jersey, and Michigan. Truman won three other key states, Ohio, California, and Illinois, by margins of 7,107, 17,865, and 33,612 respectively. If Dewey had taken these very closely contested states, he would have carried the electoral college.

The fact remained, however, that Truman did win. Why remains debatable, for all sorts of reasons can be adduced in explanation. Among these, all agree, were Truman's courageous campaign and Dewey's lethargic one. The candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond may actually have helped Truman, by reminding voters that the President, no extremist of Left or Right, stood steadfast against the Russians and solidly in the center of moderate-to-liberal opinion in the United States. As election day approached and Wallace and Thurmond voters—normally Democratic—realized their candidates had no chance of winning, many swallowed their doubts and chose Truman over Dewey and the GOP.

Most analyses of the 1948 election stress above all, as Rowe and Clifford had, the importance of the Democratic coalition. Here, as in so many other ways, the shadow of Roosevelt loomed over the political landscape. Truman carried the thirteen largest cities, doing especially well in the poorest and working-class wards. Like Roosevelt, Truman also had success in the border states and in the West, carrying every state west of the Plains save Oregon. Again like Roosevelt, Truman was particularly popular among Catholics, Jews, and African-American voters. Blacks were stronger for Truman in some cities than they had been for FDR in 1944. They greatly helped Truman in the key states of Illinois, Ohio, and California.

Two groups in the Democratic coalition were probably of special importance to the Democrats in 1948. One was organized labor, which except for Lewis's United Mine Workers was pro-Truman. Labor, to be sure, was hardly all-powerful: Truman even lost Michigan, stronghold of the UAW. But labor organizers worked hard for Truman and against Wallace, often Red-baiting him. The Political Action Committee of the CIO effectively registered union members and got them to the polls. Although the AFL issued no formal endorsement, it created Labor's League for Political Action, which printed and distributed reams of literature critical of the GOP and of the Taft-Hartley "slave labor" Act. The AFL had never before been so active in American politics.
⁶⁴

The other group were commercial farmers. While Dewey and Warren were largely ignoring the rural areas, Truman made some eighty speeches in farm states during the campaign. Again and again he rapped the Republican Congress for its apparent indifference to farm prices, which thanks to bumper crops sagged in the late summer of 1948. Truman excoriated Congress for cutting off the authority of the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) to acquire additional storage space for crop surpluses. This action prevented many farmers from storing their excess until such time as market prices might improve and from receiving additional CCC loans to tide them over. Truman's assault on the Congress was demagogic, for the storage issue had been non-controversial when it was decided early in the summer. But he correctly read the fear and frustration of many farmers in the fall. In November he carried three states that Dewey had won in 1944, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
⁶⁵

Truman succeeded, finally, because the majority of Americans were better off in 1948 than they had been in earlier years. The postwar boom—in cars, household appliances, suburbanization, education, real wages—was gathering steam. Memories of the Great Depression were slowly fading, and millions of people were moving hopefully up the ladder to new positions in life. This is not to say that bread alone moves votes—it does not. But political incumbents are blamed for recessions and praised for progress. It was Truman's good fortune, for he had little to do with what was happening to the economy, to be President in relatively good times. As the incumbent in a society of rising expectations he was carried back into office.

A
DMIRERS OF
T
RUMAN
contend that he was not only a bold campaigner but also a savior of liberalism and the New Deal. The events of his first term lend a little credibility to this view. He fought back against the conservative coalition in Congress, especially after 1946, and headed a triumphant Democratic victory in 1948. But Truman's role in these events should not be exaggerated, for he was slow to find his way before 1947, often insecure, and far less decisive than legend has it. Polls demonstrate that he was never very popular personally.

Much more important in preserving the New Deal were political forces established before Truman took office. By 1945 most Americans had accepted Rooseveltian programs such as Social Security. Only a small minority of reactionaries thought of tearing down the rudimentary welfare state that FDR had set up in the 1930s. The Roosevelt years had also revolutionized political allegiances by creating the Democratic electoral coalition. This, too, was solid enough to survive as a central fact of American politics after the 1940s. Truman would have had to bungle badly to lose its support in 1948.

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated. Presidents of course can take executive actions, especially in foreign affairs, that have dramatic effects. But only sometimes, for many snags—bureaucratic inertia, the capriciousness of public opinion, partisan opposition, interest group pressures, Congress—hem in presidential designs. In domestic policies the hemming-in is ordinarily tight indeed, as it was during Truman's first term. A decent, moderately liberal man, Truman labored to prevent the unraveling of the political design that Roosevelt and the New Deal had stitched together. In this modest holding action he largely succeeded.

7
Red Scares Abroad and at Home

The radical social activist Michael Harrington once commented that "1948 was the last year of the thirties." He meant specifically that labor unrest and class-consciousness abated amid rising prosperity after 1948. So did chances for substantial extension of the New Deal. The political Left, already weak, reeled under sustained assaults. In place of reform activity, Cold War fears rose to the center of American society, politics, and foreign policy in 1949 and early 1950, generating a Red Scare that soured a little the otherwise optimistic, "can-do" mood of American life until 1954.

T
RUMAN DID NOT KNOW
how strong the Red Scare was to be when he returned seriously to the political fray in January 1949. Buoyed by the election, he hoped that the new Democratic Congress—54 to 42 in the Senate and 263 to 171 in the House—would support a wide range of domestic programs that he christened as the Fair Deal in his State of the Union address. Two weeks later he was inaugurated on a brilliantly clear day that seemed dazzling with promise. The first full-scale inaugural since the war, it was also the first to be seen on television. An estimated 10 million people as far west as St. Louis—where the television coaxial cable then terminated—watched the ceremonies. Millions more heard them on radio. At age sixty-four Truman seemed to brim with vitality and optimism.
¹

From the beginning, however, the President had troubles with Congress. The Fair Deal was a long and liberal laundry list: repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, a more progressive tax system, a seventy-five-cent minimum wage (it was then forty cents), agricultural reform, resource development and public power, broadening of Social Security, national medical insurance, federal aid to education, civil rights, and expansion of federal housing programs.
²
By the end of the 1949–50 congressional sessions Truman partially achieved three of these goals: public housing, a hike in the minimum wage, and expansion of Social Security.
³
Otherwise the coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats continued to dominate. At the start of the session, the Senate stymied liberal efforts to make cloture (cutting off of debate) possible by a simple majority instead of two-thirds. Congress's action killed chances for civil rights legislation, which barely simmered on congressional back burners until the late 1950s. Special interest groups helped defeat the other programs. Congress refused to repeal Taft-Hartley, to pass a farm reform program, or to approve federal aid to education. National health insurance continued to be strongly opposed by the American Medical Association and failed to pass; that, too, faded as a visible legislative issue until the late 1950s.

The fate of efforts for agricultural reform illustrated the constellation of forces, especially well-organized interest groups, that stymied much of the President's Fair Deal. The reform took the name of the Brannan Plan, named after Truman's liberal Agriculture Secretary, Charles Brannan. He sought to scrap the costly system of production controls, government price supports, and benefit payments that had been enacted during the 1930s. In its stead, Brannan proposed, farmers raising perishable crops would be encouraged to produce as much as the market would bear—an effort that was expected to increase supply and drive down prices for consumers. In return, the government would compensate these farmers with direct income payments, up to maximums per producer. With these maximums he expected to limit the amount of benefits that would go to big producers and to attract the support of smaller "family farmers." Brannan's larger goal was political: to cement the Democratic alliance between small farmers, urban workers, and consumers that had appeared to be developing in the 1948 election.

A determined coalition of interests, however, opposed the plan. It included the majority of Republicans, who resisted Brannan's ill-con- cealed political objectives; the Farm Bureau Federation, which represented the large growers; and many farmers, food processors, and middlemen, who feared the imposition of new and possibly complicated controls and who predicted that the costs of the plan would bankrupt the government. Some urban Democrats, too, were cool to a program that proposed to direct federal money at rural areas. A number of southern Democrats, worried that the plan would end up reducing government subsidies for cotton, also joined the anti-Brannan coalition. All these opponents defeated the plan in the House in 1949. While it appeared to have some chance in the Senate, the outbreak of the Korean War shunted it aside in 1950. It then died, leaving the old system in place. Thereafter, as in the past, powerful interests remained firmly in control of America's agricultural system.
⁴

Truman fared a little better in his quest for anti-Communist foreign policies. In July 1949 the Senate overwhelmingly (82 to 13) ratified American participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The pact committed the twelve signatories to treat an attack on one as an attack upon all.
⁵
This was a historic commitment for the United States, which since 1778 had refused to join military alliances in time of peace. When Cold War tensions increased in 1950, Truman sought to develop the military potential of the pact. After a "great debate" in early 1951, American troops were assigned in April to NATO forces in Europe, where they remained for decades.
⁶

Truman's foreign and military policies otherwise ran up against formidable pressures. One such policy was Point Four, so named because it was the fourth point in his 1949 inaugural address. It called on Congress to appropriate funds for American technical assistance to so-called underdeveloped nations. Truman occasionally entertained vast, idealistic notions of transforming the Euphrates, Yangtze, and Danube valleys into models of the American TVA. But he added Point Four at the last minute and had done little to explain his goals to the State Department. Dean Rusk, charged with helping to coordinate the program, later complained that "we in the State Department had to scurry around and find out what the dickens he was talking about and then put arms and legs on his ideas."
⁷
This was hard to do, in part because many conservatives and business leaders were cool to Point Four. Such a program would spend taxpayers' money; technical aid might assist potential competitors. Finally approved in May 1950, Point Four was poorly funded and sputtered along as a small and insignificant addition to overseas lending oriented mainly to Cold War concerns.
⁸

Truman's military programs in 1949–50 provoked further controversy, most of it within his administration. When Forrestal was forced to step down as head of Defense in early 1949, Truman replaced him with Louis Johnson, a loyal fund-raiser during the whistle-stop campaigning in 1948. Johnson was blunt, blustery, and highly ambitious, and he aroused a storm when he canceled the "supercarrier" that the navy was counting on as its key weapon of the future. Top naval officers dared insubordination by openly resisting Johnson and by opposing air force development of the B-36 bomber. The interservice brawling became ugly. General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sided with the air force and called navy leaders "fancy dans" who refused to play on a team "unless they can call the signals." A compromise was finally reached in 1950, but the fighting exposed the divisions that still plagued the military establishment and revealed the inability of the Defense Secretary to discipline the Pentagon.
⁹

The fire and smoke emanating from these battles partially obscured a continuing reality: American military defense remained unbalanced. Under General Curtis LeMay, a tough, hard-driving Cold Warrior who took over the Strategic Air Command in late 1948, America's long-range bombing potential gradually acquired some efficiency. Nuclear tests in 1948–49 also encouraged planners: for the first time they could look ahead to quantity production of nuclear bombs that could be handled safely. But even that was a few years ahead.
¹⁰
And fiscal considerations helped keep overall military expenditures in check. The defense budget in 1949–50 was around $13 billion, less than half the amount requested by the services. Low appropriations especially demoralized the army, whose strength had sunk to a low of 591,000 men by the time the Korean War broke out in June 1950. Given America's grand expectations of leading the so-called Free World, the modest size of its military establishment was ironic. Acheson had earlier put his finger on these contradictions when he said that postwar American foreign policy could be summed up in three sentences: "1. Bring the boys home; 2. Don't be Santa Claus; 3. Don't be pushed around."
¹¹

A
S IN
1947,
WHEN THE
B
RITISH
decided they could no longer assure the security of Greece or Turkey, two events abroad in late summer and early fall of 1949 had momentous effects in the United States. These were the intelligence in late August that the Soviets had successfully exploded an atomic bomb, and the collapse of the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kaishek that culminated on October 1 in the creation of the Communistic People's Republic of China. These developments drove many people in the administration to reconsider their reliance on economic aid and to think about substantially greater militarization of the Cold War. The events also unleashed a gathering spate of criticism from anti-Communist groups in the United States who blamed Truman for having done too little too late. Some saw spies under the tables of state. A Red Scare, already an undercurrent in American life, rose ominously in 1949–50, ultimately diverting national politics—and much else—throughout the next four years.

If top administration leaders had spoken more frankly about what they knew about Soviet science, the explosion in the USSR would not have come as a big surprise. They recognized that the Russians understood the basic science involved, and military leaders were aware that Stalin had given nuclear development very high priority. Moreover, the Soviet achievement did not change very much in the short run. The Pentagon recognized that the USSR still lacked the long-range bombers necessary to wage an air attack on the United States and that Soviet air defenses—to say nothing of the Soviet economy—were weak. Still, when Truman informed the American people in September, many were deeply alarmed. The cover of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
, which until then had displayed a clock with the minute hand pointing to eight minutes before twelve, the hour of doom, now moved the hand to 11:57.
¹²
Many other Americans simply refused to believe that the Communists—whose system was surely technologically inferior—could have managed the feat by themselves: spies must have done it for them.

Within the administration the news reinforced the hand of advocates who were demanding the strengthening of American armed forces. After all, Stalin still seemed tyrannical and unyielding. He had promoted the coup in Czechoslovakia and threatened West Berlin. Who could tell what he would do when he had the planes to deliver the Bomb? Kennan, who then headed the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, had been opposing major militarization of containment and had been calling on the administration to step up negotiations with the Soviets. He also recommended thinking about the reunification and demilitarization of Germany, as a way of reducing a major source of Cold War tensions in central Europe. News of the Soviet bomb destroyed his hopes, and he resigned, discouraged and defeated, at the end of the year.
¹³
Henceforth America's European policy moved rapidly toward the militarization of NATO, the rearming of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), which joined NATO in 1955, and American acceptance of the apparently permanent division of Germany and Europe.

The victory of Mao Tse-tung in China should have been even less surprising. Since the end of World War II his Communist forces had steadily beaten back the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, who ultimately fled to the island of Taiwan, where he imposed a harsh rule on the natives. Well before 1949 many Americans close to the scene had been disgusted by Chiang, a corrupt and increasingly unpopular leader with his own people. General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, America's chief military adviser in China during World War II, had complained at the time that the Nationalists were more interested in battling the Communists than the Japanese. In coded messages he had referred contemptuously to Chiang as "the Peanut."
¹⁴
In 1945–46 Truman had hoped that America could help end the civil war and sent Marshall to China as an emissary. There was no stopping the fighting, however, and Truman lost all faith in Chiang. They were "all thieves, every last one of them," he said privately of the Nationalists in 1948.
¹⁵

By then Truman recognized that the hatreds dividing Chiang and Mao were implacable and that the United States could not save the venal Nationalist regime.
¹⁶
Acheson, who replaced Marshall as Secretary of State in Truman's second term, issued a government White Paper in August 1949 that asserted this pessimistic perspective in no uncertain terms. "The unfortunate but inescapable fact," the paper said, "is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed the result. . . . It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this government tried to influence but could not."
¹⁷