Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Shogan

Author:Robert Shogan [Shogan, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Civil Rights, American Government, Executive Branch
ISBN: 9780700619115
Google: wTvHNAEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2013-01-15T04:10:14+00:00

8

RUNNING FROM BEHIND

Despite all the gloom and doom surrounding his prospects, Truman was eager to get started taking out after the Republicans, and he decided not to wait until the nomination was actually his. Weeks before the Democratic convention in June 1948, he seized upon a long-standing invitation to receive an honorary degree from UCLA and set out for the West Coast, stumping all the way. The two-week train trip took him across eighteen states, allowing for major addresses in five key cities and more than threescore off-the-cuff rear platform talks. He not only got an early start, but also tested a new informal stump delivery instead of the stiff and dreary monotone that had been his trademark. Also, he could pass the bill for all of this to the federal treasury, instead of the impecunious Democratic Party.

Truman had begun this election year talking about civil rights and his legislative proposals, and the Southern reaction had made that issue a dominant feature of the political landscape. However, one revealing aspect of his first campaign trip, unofficial as it was, was how little he now had to say on that subject. On his June cross-country journey, he touched on civil rights only once, at the start of the trip and then only indirectly, touting its importance as a weapon against the spread of communism at home. The context was the alarm being spread about the need for the government to battle the Red menace in the cities and countryside of America. Truman told a Swedish American heritage group that the way to prevent communism from gaining a foothold was not by restricting political activity, but “rather by providing more and better democracy.” Slum housing, substandard wages, denial of the right to vote, inadequate health care, widespread unemployment—each of these hardships amounted to “an invitation to communism,” the president said. Calling for the nation to remedy such inequities, Truman declared, “We believe in human freedom and human equality and it is that belief which makes us strong today.” Though Truman did not mention race or even use the term civil rights, at least one respected black journalist was eager to interpret the speech to make the point blacks wanted the president to be making. “If apprehensive Negroes feared, or Southern revolt Democrats hoped that the man would back track from civil rights advocacy, their fears of the former were needless, and the hopes of the latter have gone with the wind,” wrote Stanley Roberts of the Pittsburgh Courier, who cited significant numbers of blacks in Truman’s audience.

But Truman had a broader agenda for this trip, and for the rest of his campaign. He was laying out a blueprint for his election, and as it would turn out, with a few notable exceptions, civil rights would be little more than a footnote on his agenda. He did not retreat from his positions; in fact, he would launch new initiatives from the Oval Office. However, out on the hustings, he apparently concluded that bringing up the subject would benefit neither his candidacy nor the cause itself.

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