Truman's Third Term

SHORTLY before Thanksgiving the Honorable Clinton Presba Anderson (D., N.M.) made public proclamation concerning the Honorable Harry S. Truman (D., Mo.) and the next Presidential campaign. “I think he’ll be the nominee and will be elected,” said Senator Anderson. But his did not say why, presumably on the theory that in the case of an incumbent it is up to the opposition to say why not.

The reasons why a President should not be reelected fall into three main categories: —

1. He has made errors so egregious that they have reacted disastrously upon the country.

2. There is available a demonstrably better man.

3. His political philosophy is offensive to the majority.

To demonstrate conclusively that Truman must not be re-elected, it is necessary to prove to the bulk of the American electorate that at least one of these reasons applies to the President. Here is the point that the press, the intelligentsia, and the Republican Party have fumbled consistently. For some inscrutable reason they have assumed that the electorate need only be told and it will act accordingly, without being convinced. This is not merely a false assumption, but one whose falsity has been demonstrated in nine elections, consecutive except for a single break in 1946. In 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, 1944, 1948, and 1949 the voters were told by Very Important Persons—the Republican Party unanimously, the press practically unanimously, and the intellectuals in large numbers — what to do, and except in 1946 they proceeded to do the opposite.

This may have been unintelligent on the part of the voters, but is it any more intelligent for Very Important Persons to continue to believe that they speak with authority when it has been proved nine times in ten elections that they have no authority? To a neutral bystander it would seem that the intelligent thing to do would be to begin to speak persuasively, rather than authoritatively.

No man ever spoke persuasively, however, unless it appeared that he knew what he was talking about. I submit that, to the average voter, it has not been apparent for seventeen years that the opposition knew what it was talking about. Once, in a moment of confusion and uncertainty—the year 1946, after Roosevelt’s death he assumed that the opposition did know whereof it spake; but the unhappy record of the Eightieth Congress convinced him that it didn’t, and his skepticism revived stronger than ever.

It is fairly plain, then, that the rational explanation of what happened in the last Presidential election, the so-called Miracle of 1948, is to be sought, not in the personality of the winner, but in the impossibility of all the losers, Messrs. Dewey, Wallace, and Thurmond.

A candidate is just as vital as the issues he presents. Occasionally he can, as the two Roosevelts did, make himself the issue, but as a rule the candidate who presents a dead issue is a dead candidate; his roars may lift the roof off Madison Square Garden, and his war dances may make Fred Astaire look like a petrified man, but for all that he is a dead candidate.

Copyright 1950, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

In the campaign of 1948 Mr. Truman discussed for the most part the record of the Eightieth Congress. Whether he discussed it wisely or unwisely may be debatable, but not the fact that he discussed it, nor the fact that it was the record of the Congress then in office. Hence it was indubitably a live issue and made Mr. Truman a live candidate.

Mr. Dewey devoted the major part of his time to calling for American unity, at home and abroad, and the preservation of the American economic system to which he attributed American prosperity. But as far as the average voter could see, America was already fairly united and moderately prosperous, so Mr. Dewey’s issues sounded like a rephrasing of Manifest Destiny and the Full Dinner Pail, the issues on which William McKinley beat W. J. Bryan fifty years ago.

Mr. Thurmond took his stand on States’ Rights, but he did not give that issue the interpretation put on it by F. D. Roosevelt — that is to say, fortyeight laboratories in which multiple social experiments may be carried on simultaneously — but the interpretation put on it by John C. Calhoun, the touch-me-not interpretation, which may not have died with Calhoun in 1850, but unqueslionably blew up at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Mr. Wallace’s issue was a Brave New World which may possibly hold the germ of the future, although to the average voter it looked rather more fantastic than Mr. Aldous Huxley’s creation. In any event, whatever the thing may be in the future, it has not come to birth as yet.

So — considering candidacies, not personalities — the voter seemed to be presented with a choice among William McKinley, John C. Calhoun, a philosophy still in the embryonic stage, and the Successor to Roosevelt. The Successor ran against two corpses and a foetus. He won; and if there is any miracle in that, then, as Whitman remarked, “a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

More than that, a year later he was still winning. In 1949 Truman did with success what Roosevelt had his fingers burned in trying — he intervened in two state elections. In New York he announced that he wanted Lehman, and Lehman went in. In New Jersey he indicated clearly that he did not want Wene, and Wene went out. Wene was a theoretical Democrat, but Mr. Truman has had too much experience with theoretical Democrats from the South and West to desire another of that type. If Mr. Truman scores again in 1950, he will go into the second half of his administration with such a terrific advantage that Senator Anderson’s rash prophecy may begin to look like a mere truism.

2

YET the most pontifical editorial writers in the country, the most eloquent Republican orators in the country, and the ull rasophisticated sophisticates all assure us, in tones now becoming a trifle shrill, that the three fatal objections to re-electing a President are all valid as against Mr. Truman. They tell us that he has made disastrous errors, that far better men are available, and that his political philosophy is poisonously un-American.

That is what they say; but their saving it affords no assurance that these people know a political objection when they see one. They are too certain of the correctness of their own views to imagine that any other view exists; and some of them would march from political catastrophe to political calamity for another seventeen years rather than even examine their postulates.

But there is another point of view. It is that of the man who is not a millionaire publisher, nor a Republican Stalwart, nor a subtle doctor, but a mere citizen with a living to make. The assertion that Truman’s errors have been disastrous to the country, he doesn’t understand. The country is here, isn’t it? It is at technical peace, isn’t it? It is relatively prosperous, isn’t it ? Then where is the disaster?

This kind of voter regards with no emotion all the omens that alarm the more sophisticated. Consider, for example, three that have been widely discussed as unmistakable signs of a disintegrating economy: the disappearance of venture capital, deficit financing, and the impossibility of making those large accumulations that furnish large donations to endow universities, hospitals, and the like.

It is very hard indeed to convince the ordinary man that venture capital has been driven from a market in which General Motors can make profits of 502 millions in nine months, in which Steel’s earnings ranged from 24 to 48 per cent during the four quarters of 1948, and in which the most tremendous building boom in history is now raging. Capital that will not venture into that market would not venture into Mohammed’s paradise, he feels. Nor has the plain voter any clear idea of the differences between venture capital today and thirty years ago.

Deficit financing we have because (a) we have fought two vast wars in one generation; (b) we are armed to the teeth against a third; (c) the Eightieth Congress reduced taxes against Truman’s urgent advice, and the Eighty-first would not reimpose them at his request. The Eightieth Congress was frankly Republican, and the Eighty-first was loaded with pseudo-Democrats who voted Republican in the pinches.

The impossibility of accumulating large fortunes seems to the impecunious observer less an accomplished fact than a goal to be sought. It seems to him that certain people, especially in steel, oil, and aircraft, have managed to get together rather impressive wads quite recently; and he has seen no almshouses crowded with Du Ponts and Rockefellers, or even with Raskobs and Firestones. If a man blessed with normal eyesight has strolled through the swank shopping district of any large American city, he simply will not believe that great wealth no longer exists in America.

Therefore it is safe to say that the arguments about venture capital, deficit financing, and the dissipation of wealth are not political obstacles in the way of Mr. Truman. Huge numbers of voters do not believe the first at all, do not believe that Truman is responsible for the second, and only wish the third were true. In all probability that line of argument hasn’t cost him a vote.

Next on the list of reasons for not re-electing a President is the availability of a better man. Mr. Truman’s opponents have charged him not only with errors based on policy, but also with errors arising from his own temperament. Since all men are imperfect, this should be an effective attack; but it has not been effective against Mr. Truman, and one reason is that his opponents, instead of emphasizing the things in the record that people dislike, have usually emphasized things that they like, thereby making the opposition, not Mr. Truman, look ridiculous.

Three instances of this mistake come to mind at once. There was the affair oi the mission to Moscow of Chief Justice Vinson, shortly before the election of 1948; there is the constant criticism of the caliber of some of the President’s familiar friends; and there is the scandalous row among the armed forces. Truman’s foes have played these up enthusiastically on the theory that they are damaging; but so far they seem to have done no damage at all.

These foes have not, or cannot, pul themselves in the place of the average man in considering such things. Take, for example, the Vinson mission and look at it, not as a diplomatist sees it, but as a farmer, or a filling station proprietor, or a carpenter might be expected to see it. In the first place, Vinson wasn’t sent. As soon as Secretary Marshall pointed out the objections the President dropped the idea, and it was only because somebody bet raved a confidence that the hostile press heard of the incident. But as for thinking of sending him, what was wrong with that? The average man believes that the President should consider any project, however fantastic, that may prevent the cold war from turning hot. If it involves sending the Chief Justice abroad, what of it? Send Vinson, send anybody, send the ashman, send Gorgeous Gussie the tennis player, if it appears that he or she has the faintest chance of bringing home the bacon. That charge backfired in Mr. Truman’s favor.

Then there is the charge that the President has a taste for low company that has reduced the intellectual tone of the White House to a deplorable level. At first, this had some effect. People remembered the days of the Ohio Gang, when the White House was infested with such characters as Forbes, Miller, Jess Smith, and Gaston B. Means; and they had no taste for a repeat performance. But even the Truman friends whom the Senate rejected, Pauley and Walgren, couldn’t be put in that class; and it soon developed that the five-percenters were not friends of the President, but merely sellers of gold bricks to supposedly smart businessmen. General Vaughan, to be sure, has a genius for making the Administration ridiculous, but there is no evidence that he ever stole anything.

For the rest, suppose Truman has filled the place with Missouri artillerymen, rather than with saints and sages—is that a crime? Not in the eyes of people who would themselves far rather spend an evening playing poker with honest cannoneers than in improving conversation on a loftier plane.

Finally, there is the shocking squabble in the armed forces and the ruthless way that Truman’s agents put it down. They handled the Navy roughly. Then the President himself slammed the Air Force by holding out a huge amount of money it had wangled from Congress. No other President in recent years has been so tough with admirals and generals.

But anyone who thinks that this will cause enlisted men to burst into tears simply doesn’t know enlisted men and their opinion of the high brass. The majority of the voters are former, actual, or potential enlisted men, so they easily survive the shock of seeing an admiral or general bawled out. Indeed, they cherish a marked admiration for a man with guts enough to do it.

More than that, there is in our people a deep and sound distrust of military men in general. It was when her army and navy escaped from the control of the civilian government that Japan started on the road to ruin. It was uncontrollable Prussian militarism that wrecked imperial Germany. It was the Grande Armée, obeying no orders but those of Napoleon, that brought down revolutionary France. It was the Janissaries that converted Turkey into the Sick Man of Europe. It was the Praetorian Guard that put the Roman Empire up at auction. If Toynbee is right, the escape of the military from civilian control has littered history with wrecks of nations all the way back to Assyria.

Well, then, the recent spectacular demonstration that the man in the business suit is still boss in Washington may have worked injustice upon some officers, but it certainly hasn’t ruined the man in the business suit politically. On the contrary, it has given millions of people renewed confidence in the survival of the republic. The President may have been right, or he may have been wrong, but what he did does not prove that he is incapable of exercising the office of Commander-in-Chief. In short, the evidence the opposition has offered to prove Mr. Truman’s incapacity has not proved it.

There is still a third reason for dismissing an occupant of the White House: namely, that although he may be skilled in statecraft, and personally acceptable, he is not a fit person for the office if his political philosophy is offensive to the majority.

Nine tenths of the opposition to Mr. Truman is actually based on this objection; but that it is a valid objection is not apparent. Mr. Truman’s political philosophy is expressed in the Fair Deal, which is a sort of extrapolation of the New Deal, which, in turn, was advocacy of the welfare state as contrasted with the umpire state. That a preference for the welfare state over the umpire state is offensive to the majority of American voters is certainly not indicated by the trend of events in recent years; hence to cite it as a reason for predicting Mr. Truman’s defeat is foolish.

Here, again, the opposition has consistently refused to admit the existence of any point of view other than its own. Its own point of view is that the welfare state is simply a mask for Socialism. But there is another theory — to wit, that the welfare state is, in fact, a modern adaptation of the political philosophy of Alexander Hamilton as expressed in his advocacy of what he called Internal Improvements, which the New Deal translated into the TVA, the CCC, rural electrification, soil conservation, flood control, and a dozen other schemes for preserving and enlarging the patrimony of the nation; and an adaptation of Thomas Jefferson’s theory that government is simply tin instrument by which the people seek to effect their safety and happiness. Refusal to recognize this point of view has led to such absurdities as the insinuation in the late New York campaign that a Wall Street banker, Lehman, was tainted with Communism. When a party is reduced to such straits that it feels compelled to charge that denizens of Wail Street are Soviet sympathizers, its intellectual bankruptcy becomes pitifully apparent, and even a Truman can defeat it with ridiculous ease.

Obviously, none of this proves that the President’s statecraft has been irreproachable, or that his temperament is ideally suited to his great office. No effort is being made here to prove anything of the sort.

Mr. Truman has, in fact, laid himself wide open to attack on half a dozen occasions; but on none of these occasions were His foes in position to deliver an all-out assault on the gap in the defenses. For instance, when he cut off the Lend-Lease program with an abruptness that was inadvisable and later proved very expensive, the opposition couldn’t say much, because it never had been solidly in favor of Lend-Lease. Again, when he partially succumbed to post-war hysteria and ordered the preposterous “loyally purge,” the opposition was hamstrung because a large part of it had been more hysterical than Truman ever was. The most grievous of all his errors was enunciation of the Truman Doctrine that involved us in the Greek adventure and might have brought on far worse evils had it not been partially retrieved by the Marshall Plan; but only Henry Wallace was in position to criticize the Truman Doctrine effectively, and he chose to waste his ammunition on the invulnerable Marshall Plan.

In short, Mr. Truman has enjoyed almost complete immunity from opposition based on appreciation of historical reality and a shrewd estimate of the mind and character of this nation. His political success to date is, therefore, not proof of the excellence of his statecraft, but only of the blindness of his opponents; and he will be in grave danger only when they recover their vision. For he is not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but merely of certain omissions, and omissions are hard to use effectively in a campaign.

In 1945 the moral hegemony of the world was within his grasp, but it has slipped from his fingers. In 1945 liberal opinion in this country was marshaled, integrated, and effective; it is splintered now. If Truman had known how to discipline mutinous labor leaders as he has disciplined admirals and generals, he would be invincible; as it is, he is vulnerable, yet everyone knows it is not for lack of will, but lack of strength. He is no James Buchanan, but history may write him down as another James Monroe, who also, you remember, was a terrific political success simply for lack of effective opposition. Truman too has survived, not because he has knocked the opposition cold, but because it has fallen flat on its face.

The President is clearly its superior in one respect. With all his faults, he has at least realized that this is the twentieth century, in which the politics of the nineteenth, not to mention the eighteenth, is obsolete. He has not by any means met all the problems of the day with conspicuous success, but it is certainly those problems that he has set himself to solve, and not the ones that bothered Lord Palmerston and Daniel Webster. Maybe he is not too good — but think of the others! If he has been astonishingly successful to date — and ask Dewey if he hasn’t! — perhaps the mystery may be illumined, not by what Hitler loved to call “ the leadership principle,” but by the far older maxim unoculus inter caeces, the incontestable truth that in the realm of the blind a one-eyed man is king.