Harry S. Truman

Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, and grew up in Independence, a small town with Southern ways on the old trails to the West. Born with poor eyesight and kept by his mother from rough games, he became a passionate reader of history and a fine pianist who briefly considered a concert career. His eyesight ruled out West Point, and family money troubles ruled out college; after high school he worked in a newspaper mailroom, for a construction company, and as a bank clerk. From 1906 he spent most of a decade on the family farm near Grandview, which he did not enjoy. In 1910 he began courting Bess Wallace, a high school classmate; she turned down his proposal in 1911, but the romance continued.

In World War I, Captain Truman took over an artillery battery notorious for unruliness and turned it into a top-notch unit, leading it in the Vosges and the Meuse-Argonne. He married Bess in June 1919 and opened a men’s clothing store in Kansas City with his army friend Eddie Jacobson; it closed in 1922 during the postwar slump, leaving him nearly bankrupt, and he spent years paying off his share of the debts.

In 1922 Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s Democratic boss, backed Truman for county judge, an administrative post. As presiding judge from 1926 he rebuilt Jackson County’s roads and managed its finances in the early Depression, earning a reputation for honesty inside a corrupt machine. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934, he was a loyal New Dealer, and from 1941 his “Truman Committee” on wasteful defense spending made him a national figure. Roosevelt chose him as his running mate in 1944.

Sworn in on April 12, 1945, Truman later called his first year a “year of decisions.” He saw the war in Europe end, met Allied leaders at Potsdam, and approved dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9; Japan surrendered on August 14. As relations with the Soviet Union broke down, he built the policy of containment: the Truman Doctrine of 1947 pledged aid to Greece and Turkey against communism, the Marshall Plan revived Western Europe’s economies, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization created a military barrier. He recognized the new state of Israel in May 1948, and when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 he responded by waging an undeclared war.

At home he steered the economy from war to peace and defended the New Deal, raising the minimum wage and expanding Social Security. In 1948, after Southern senators threatened to filibuster his civil rights proposals, he used executive power instead: Executive Order 9981 ordered equal treatment in the armed forces, and he appointed the first African American federal judge. That November, campaigning relentlessly against the Republican Congress, he beat Thomas Dewey when almost no knowledgeable observer gave him a chance.

Truman was a plain-spoken partisan Democrat who described his wartime committee as protecting the “little man” from big business and big labor alike. He believed government should build on the New Deal, and that the United States had to lead the free world against Soviet expansion. Even before Pearl Harbor he had concluded, as he wrote to a Missouri voter, that “the only theory a thug understands is a gun and a bayonet.”

Truman rose through the Pendergast machine, and his 1934 Senate primary featured widespread ballot-box stuffing by supporters on both sides. His decision to use atomic bombs — which immediately killed upwards of 100,000 people, with perhaps twice that number dying later from radiation — remains intensely debated. Historians also fault him for accepting General Douglas MacArthur’s misjudgment of Chinese intentions in Korea, for responding too slowly and weakly to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade, and for a civil rights record that some call underwhelming. The Korean War and charges of corruption in his administration made him one of the most unpopular politicians in the country by the time he left office in January 1953.

Truman’s reputation began to recover soon after he returned home, as Americans came to see him as a feisty everyman from Middle America rather than a Washington partisan. Scholars credit his foreign policy above all: his approach to the Soviet Union guided American policy until the end of the Cold War, and his commitments to NATO, South Korea, and Israel remain pillars of U.S. policy. His order desegregating the military met considerable resistance, but by the end of the Korean War almost all of the military was integrated.