The end of World War II was followed by an uneasy transition from war to a peacetime economy. Though this was the first time the Soviets had been officially given information about the atomic bomb, Stalin was already aware of the bomb project—having learned about it through atomic espionage long before Truman did. To many in the general public, gambling and bourbon swilling, however low-key, were not quite presidential. Truman was a very hard worker, often to the point of exhaustion, which left him testy, easily annoyed, and on the verge of appearing unpresidential or petty. Roosevelt rarely contacted him, even to inform him of major decisions; the president and vice president met alone together only twice during their time in office. On April 10, 1945, Truman cast his only tie-breaking vote as president of the Senate, against a Robert A. Taft amendment that would have blocked the postwar delivery of Lend-Lease Act items contracted for during the war.
The final break came in 1947 when the Labour government in London could no longer afford to help Greece fight communism and asked Washington to assume responsibility for suppressing the Communist uprising there. Executive Order 9980, also in 1948, made it illegal to discriminate against persons applying for civil service positions based on race. In 1951, William M. Boyle, Truman's longtime friend and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was forced to resign after being charged with financial corruption. However, he pointed out that he wrote it as a loving father and not as the president.
Blair House and assassination attempt
Although the allowance became taxable later in his presidency, Truman never reported it on his tax return, and converted some of the funds to cash he kept in the White House safe and later in a safe deposit box in Kansas City. Beginning in 1949, the president was also granted a $50,000 (equivalent to $661,000 in 2024) expense allowance, which was initially tax-free, and did not have to be accounted for. His finances were transformed by his accession to the presidency, which carried with it a salary of $75,000 (equivalent to $1,310,000 in 2024), which was increased to $100,000 (equivalent to $1,322,000 in 2024) in 1949. The highly unpopular Truman was handily defeated by Kefauver; 18 days later the president formally announced he would not seek a second full term. At the time of the 1952 New Hampshire primary (March 11, 1952), no candidate had won Truman's backing. The latter clause did not apply to Truman's situation in 1952 because of a grandfather clause exempting the incumbent president.
Dropping atomic bombs on Japan
State and city party leaders strongly preferred Truman, and Roosevelt agreed. Outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman Frank C. Walker, incoming chairman Hannegan, party treasurer Edwin W. Pauley, Bronx party boss Ed Flynn, Chicago Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly, and lobbyist George E. Allen all wanted to keep Wallace off the ticket. Henry Wallace had served as Roosevelt's vice president for four years and was popular on the left, but he was viewed as too far to the left and too friendly to labor for some of Roosevelt's advisers.
- With army friend Edward Jacobson he opened a haberdashery, but the business failed in the severe recession of the early 1920s.
- In September 1940, during his Senate re-election campaign, Truman was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri; Truman said later that the Masonic election assured his victory in the general election.
- On July 1, 1996, Northeast Missouri State University became Truman State University—to mark its transformation from a teachers’ college to a highly selective liberal arts university and to honor the only Missourian to become president.
- In the spring of 1948, Truman’s public approval rating stood at 36 percent, and the president was nearly universally regarded as incapable of winning the general election.
- He wrote, “Bonds, land, and cash all come from savings of presidential salary and free expense account. It should keep you and Margaret comfortably.”
U.S. Presidents
Truman continued his own loyalty program for some time while believing the issue of communist espionage was overstated. It is unclear to what extent President Truman was briefed of the Venona intercepts, which discovered widespread evidence of Soviet espionage on the atom bomb project and afterward. Truman was reluctant to take a more radical stance, because he felt it could threaten civil liberties and add to a potential hysteria. Charges that Soviet agents had infiltrated the government were believed by 78 percent of the people in 1946 and became a major campaign issue for Eisenhower in 1952. He said an underground communist network had worked inside the U.S. government during the 1930s, of which Chambers had been a member, along with Alger Hiss, until recently a senior State Department official.
- The large crowds at Truman’s whistle-stop events were an important sign of a change in momentum in the campaign, but this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps.
- The Berlin Airlift was one of Truman’s great foreign policy successes; it significantly aided his election campaign in 1948.
- In a personal appeal to the nation, Truman crisscrossed the United States by train; his “whistle stop” speeches from the rear platform of the presidential car, Ferdinand Magellan, came to represent his campaign.
- At the same time, he felt political pressure to indicate a strong national security.
- Roosevelt rarely contacted him, even to inform him of major decisions; the president and vice president met alone together only twice during their time in office.
- This committee, which came to be called the Truman Committee, sought with considerable success to ensure that defense contractors delivered to the nation quality goods at fair prices.
- In 2004, international relations scholars Rachel Kleinfeld and Matthew Spence founded the Truman National Security Project.
At a glance: the Truman presidency
The entire national railroad system was shut down, immobilizing 24,000 freight trains and 175,000 passenger trains a day. When a national rail strike threatened in May 1946, Truman seized the railroads in an attempt to contain the issue, but two key railway unions struck anyway. In Roosevelt's final years, Congress began to reassert legislative power and Truman faced a congressional body where Republicans and conservative southern Democrats formed a powerful "conservative coalition" voting bloc. I decided that the bomb should be used to end the war quickly and save countless lives—Japanese as well as American. As President of the United States, I had the fateful responsibility of deciding whether or not to use this weapon for the first time. Some modern criticism has argued that the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary, given that conventional attacks or a demonstrative bombing of an uninhabited area might have forced Japan's surrender, and therefore assert that the attack constituted a crime of war.
From 1919 to 1922 he ran a men's clothing store in Kansas City with his wartime friend, Eddie Jacobson. American public feeling towards Truman grew steadily warmer with the passing years; as early as 1962, a poll of 75 historians conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. ranked Truman among the "near great" presidents. At the time of his death, Truman had been the oldest living president, a distinction he held from the time of Hoover's death in 1964. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum and gave the first two Medicare cards to Truman and his wife Bess to honor the former president's fight for government health care while in office. Skidmore added that the presidential papers legislation and the founding of his library "was the culmination of his interest in history. Together they constitute an enormous contribution to the United States—one of the greatest of any former president."
Truman was a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which established a formal peacetime military alliance with Canada and democratic European nations of the Western Bloc following World War II. The document was drafted by Paul Nitze, who consulted State and Defense officials and was formally approved by President Truman as the official national strategy after the war began in Korea. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at 22 percent according to Gallup polls, which is the all-time lowest approval mark for a sitting U.S. president, though it was matched by Richard Nixon in 1974. The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur was among the least politically popular decisions in presidential history. In the end, Truman held his progressive Midwestern base, won most of the Southern states despite the civil rights plank, and squeaked through with narrow victories in a few critical states, notably Ohio, California, and Illinois. In a personal appeal to the nation, Truman crisscrossed the United States by train; his "whistle stop" speeches from the rear platform of the presidential car, Ferdinand Magellan, came to represent his campaign.
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 … it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. The speech took place at the Lincoln Memorial during the NAACP convention and was carried nationally betory casino registration on radio. On June 29, 1947, Truman became the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Under his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Fair Employment Practices Committee was created to address racial discrimination in war-related work.
In February 1948, Truman delivered a formal message to Congress requesting adoption of his 10-point program to secure civil rights, including anti-lynching, voter rights, and elimination of segregation. We must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess. Truman wanted to keep the committee in place after the war was over, though his attempts at doing so were unsuccessful. By 1949, the Communists under Mao Zedong had won the civil war, the United States had a new enemy in Asia, and Truman came under fire from conservatives for "losing" China.