perches in the 21st Century.
Harry Truman was raised to be a virulent racist--it was something he had to work to overcome, it didn't come naturally to him--yet he desegregated the Armed Forces, and the Federal workforce, and he did it by Executive Order.
Addressing Truman's background, Gardner accurately depicts it as an unlikely preamble to his civil rights program. Truman was born and raised as a Missourian from a racist rural background, whose grandparents owned slaves and whose family still remembered their brutal treatment by Jayhawkers and Union soldiers during the Civil War. An anecdote from the book best illustrates this point. On June 29, 1947, President Truman stood before the Lincoln Memorial and delivered a courageous speech calling for immediate state and federal action in the area of civil rights. With unprecedented resolve, he demanded that all Americans be afforded equal treatment under the law. "When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans."[1] No American President before Truman had addressed the NAACP, and no President since Abraham Lincoln had made so forceful a demand for civil rights for all people. Yet, before delivering the speech, Truman wrote home to his sister, warning her that he would be quoting Lincoln and saying things their mother might not like. "But I believe in what I say, and I'm hopeful we may implement it."
Truman built on his historic speech before the NAACP by creating, through executive order, a blue-ribbon federal commission to investigate the recent civil rights violations and propose solutions. The product of the inquiry by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a 176-page report titled "To Secure these Rights," was the blueprint for most federal civil rights initiatives for the next thirty years. Again, Truman went beyond these actions. On February 2, 1948, he delivered to Congress the first presidential message on civil rights, presenting a comprehensive list of ten proposals based on "To Secure These Rights." Among Truman's proposals were strengthening already-existing institutions, such as making the Civil Rights Division to the Justice Department permanent; enacting federal legislation against lynching and the poll tax; settling claims of the interned Japanese-Americans; and prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation--a statutory proposal that would directly challenge the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
While Truman's omnibus civil rights bill languished in a Senate filled with powerful southern leaders and monolithic procedural roadblocks, he used other means at his disposal to salvage his civil rights program. On July 26, 1948, Truman signed Executive Orders 9980 and 9981: the first integrated the federal work force and the second integrated the United States Armed Forces. "With the stroke of the presidential pen" Truman brought about the most sweeping social change for African-Americans since the Civil War (p. 30). Remarkably, he took this step in a Presidential election year--one in which a survey of pollsters and journalists before the election had unanimously proclaimed Governor Thomas Dewey, Truman's Republican opponent, the victor. Further, as Gardner points out, Truman took each of these actions in the area of civil rights before the national civil rights movement had gained any steam.
...Gardner scants the racism that Harry Truman felt and expressed in his early life. Racial slurs can be found in many of his letters to his wife Bess. Although David McCullough describes this race prejudice, it is nowhere to be found in Gardner's book. Perhaps Gardner deemed this evidence irrelevant because it pre-dated Truman's political career. Further, such views might well be expected from a farmer in that time and place. More troubling is Gardner's disregard of Truman's brief flirtation with membership in the Ku Klux Klan during his first electoral campaign. In 1922, he was running for the position of eastern judge of Jackson County, a non-judicial, administrative office akin to a county commissioner. In a highly competitive primary in which two candidates already had Klan support, a political ally of Truman advised him to join as well--on the grounds that it was "good politics." The ten-dollar membership had been paid but upon learning the Klan was against Catholics, Truman backed out. He had commanded a predominantly Catholic artillery battery in France during the World War. Truman, thereafter, became an enemy of the Klan, having his life threatened by them on occasion.[4]
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6354
So, was he saint, or was he a sinner? Probably a little bit of both. What he was, was a product of his times. How he behaved was a step up from the paradigm of the day--he was a profile in courage. For whatever reasons, he did the right things.
= new reply since forum marked as read
