Harry Truman’s ‘hard call’

by Stan Lowe, Chairman (retired), Wyoming Veterans’ Commission
Tuesday, January 29, 2008 1:23 PM MST

This week, we revisit “HARD CALL: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them,” by Sen. John McCain with Mark Salter, and draw upon the chapter titled “To Secure These Rights,” which recounts President Harry S. Truman’s “hard call” decision to help returning World War II black veterans and begin changing public attitudes regarding civil rights.

Little is remembered today of his highly controversial role in integrating the military services, banning discrimination in federal hiring, reviving the Fair Employment Practices Committee and proposing legislation to outlaw lynching.

Historians agree that Truman’s unwavering support of equal opportunities for blacks and dealing with discrimination required him to wage arguably the hardest fought battle for political survival in the 1948 election ever seen in this nation.

Why did he, grandson of slaveholders and son of Confederacy-sympathetic parents, do this in the face of strong urgings by friends at home and in Congress to “back off” to avoid endangering his political future?

Basically, he was a good and honest man of high integrity. Though he had accepted support in his early political career from the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City, he smashed it during his presidency, assisted by former Casperite H. Roe Bartle, whom he helped get elected mayor of Kansas City.

To black veterans who suffered outrageous atrocities in the South upon returning home from WWII, he was something else: their commander-in-chief, and he -n a former artillery captain in World War I -n took the responsibilities of his job very seriously.

A group of civil rights leaders told Truman about shocking acts of violence against black veterans.

“My God,” he responded. “I had no idea it was as terrible as this. We’ve got to do something!”

Later, he explained how his “very stomach turned over when (he) learned that negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks … and beaten.”

In other cases, they were murdered outright, and in one case, a veteran, his wife and in-laws were found riddled with 60 bullets.

Another decorated veteran was pronounced completely blind from beatings; yet another tortured to death with a blowtorch and meat cleaver.

Truman firmly resolved to act. He asked Congress to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) created by President Franklin Roosevelt and fund it.

On Oct. 27, 1947, the Committee on Civil Rights Truman established handed him its 178-page report, “To Secure These Rights.” It detailed many ways in which African Americans did not have the rights he insisted they should have.

On Feb. 2, 1948, he sent Congress 10 points from his committee’s recommendations, including an anti-lynching law, desegregation of interstate commerce transportation and protection of voters’ rights.

Later that year, Republicans nominated popular Tom Dewey of New York, Southern Democrats ran a “Dixiecrat” candidate, South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, to siphon off Southern Democrats’ votes, and the liberal wing, called “Progressives,” further split the party by running Henry Wallace. Seemingly, Truman’s political “goose was cooked.”

In his nomination acceptance speech, Truman sounded his campaign theme of the “Do Nothing Congress” and announced he was calling Congress into session right away to pass his civil rights legislation.

Soon afterward, he issued executive orders that integrated the military and the federal workforce.

An angry Congress rejected his bills two weeks after convening.

He launched a vigorous campaign, traveling 31,700 miles by train to deliver 356 speeches, mostly from the train’s rear platform.

As he campaigned, crowds grew larger, though at first only 6 percent had approved his civil rights proposals.

On election night, contrary to pollsters’ predictions that Dewey would triumph by a landslide, Truman won by a narrow margin. Thurmond carried four Southern states, Wallace none.

Truman appointed justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who began changing the court’s long-held, segregation-approving decisions.

This paved the way for its landmark equal education rights ruling two years after he left office and subsequent pro-minority determinations in civil rights cases.

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