Profiles in Character #31: Harry Truman Courts Political Suicide

“My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that. We’ve got to do something!” President Harry Truman told Walter White, leader of the NAACP in an Oval Office meeting on September 19, 1946.  Truman had just heard about the brutal lynching of several African Americans and the permanent blinding of Isaac Woodard, a returning black World War II soldier who was beaten mercilessly by white police after asking his surly Greyhound bus driver to stop so he could use a restroom. 

Truman had been shielded from the evidence of racial discrimination by his isolation in the halls of (white) power and by his upbringing. His grandparents had owned slaves, sided with the Confederacy, and Missouri in 1946 was a solidly segregated state.

An “accidental” president for less than 18 months since President Roosevelt’s death and heavily dependent on the solid Democratic and segregationist South if he sought the presidency in 1948, Truman could have done nothing.  But that’s not who he was.  Dean Acheson (later his Secretary of State) described him as “straight-forward, decisive, simple, entirely honest.”  Averell Harriman (soon to be his Secretary of Commerce) said he “showed the right kind of humility.”

The very next day, Truman asked his Attorney General to investigate the Woodard beating.  A local case was filed against the police chief who had confessed.  He was tried in South Carolina before an all-white jury with a white judge – and found innocent.  Truman could have stopped then, but one month later he issued Executive Order 9908 creating a President’s Committee on Civil Rights.  Its report, “To Secure These Rights,” issued in October 1947 was called by Walter White “the most courageous and specific document of its kind in American history.”

In launching the Committee, Truman was not done.  In April 1947, he accepted Walter White’s invitation to speak at the NAACP’s national convention, which no president had ever done.  “Send me a memorandum of the points you think I ought to emphasize in my speech,” he told White.

On June 29th, Truman delivered his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial:

“I should like to talk to you briefly about civil rights and human freedom.  It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens.  Recent evils in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights.  And when I say all Americans – I mean all Americans.”

“The only limit to an American’s achievement should be his ability, his industry, and his character… our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright.  There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry, or religion, or race, or color.”

Turning to White when he concluded, Truman remarked “I said what I did because I mean every word of it – and I’m going to prove that I do mean it.”

With the presidential election looming, on February 2, 1948 Truman asked Congress to create a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act, abolish the poll tax, end segregation in interstate travel and make lynching a federal crime.  South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond said “I am through with him.”  Truman insisted on a significant civil rights plank in the party’s platform at its mid-July convention.  Thurmond, asked why he objected so strongly since FDR included similar language in 1944 said: “Yeah, but that S.O.B. Truman really means it.”

Thurmond led a walkout of Southern Democrats who then formed the States Rights Party (“Dixiecrats”) and selected Thurmond as their presidential candidate.  Nevertheless, on July 26th, Truman issued Executive Order 9980 to create a fair employment practices system in federal hiring and Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the Armed Forces.

Facing not just Dixiecrats but a breakaway Progressive Party with former Vice-President Henry Wallace as its standard bearer, Truman’s chances seemed dim.  Every poll predicted Republican Thomas Dewey would be elected in a landslide.

Whether Truman shrewdly calculated he could pry enough black voters from their nearly century-long loyalty to the party of Lincoln or that most Southern Democrats would stick with him is hard to know.  What became clear on the morning of November 3, 1948 was that Truman had won the electoral vote by 303-189 over Dewey, with Thurmond winning only four Southern states (with 39 electoral votes).  Truman’s coattails also brought back Democratic control of both the House and Senate.

After FDR’s sudden death, most felt Truman was neither prepared for nor capable of being president.  Truman, with tears in his eyes, seemed to agree, telling Vermont Senator George Aiken “I am not big enough for this job.”  By facing his past, the nation’s history of slavery and segregation and the likelihood that standing up for the American promise would end his political career, Harry Truman showed that everyone underestimated his character and courage.

Photo Credit: National Archives-Truman Library