Dead President #33: Harry S Truman Traditional Cache
Hidden : 1/4/2010
Difficulty:
2 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: small (small)

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Geocache Description:




This cache is part of Fugglestone’s Hall of Dead Presidents (GC1W1AP) series. I chose Harry S Truman because he was president when I was born, because he exceeded almost everyone’s expectations by growing into his job, and set the stage for a strong, peaceful and prosperous Western Europe.


Harry Truman was our last president who did not attend college, a man who had failed more than once, but who ultimately became one of the most successful presidents of the 20th Century.

Family
Born into a Missouri farming family in 1884, Truman was named Harry after his mother’s brother Harrison Young. His middle initial honors his grandfathers jointly, Solomon Young and Anderson Shippe Truman. The S is not an abbreviation. Later, opponents would call him Harry “S for nothing” Truman. From childhood he was interested in history, reading, and music. He got up at five to play the piano before farm chores. He graduated from Independence (MO) High School in 1901.

Military
He served in the Missouri National Guard from 1905-1911. In the Great War, he returned to military service, rising to the rank of captain, and commanding Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 60th Brigade, 35th Infantry Division. Previously hidden talent for leadership bloomed during the war years.
Initial Failure
He became a haberdasher, a trade shared by such diverse men as Capt. James Cook, Daniel Defoe, and Johnny Carson, but his business failed in 1921. He was still paying off his debts in 1934 when he first ran for the Senate.
Early Politics
He had made the acquaintance of the Pendergast family, who ran politics in Jackson County, MO, during WWI. This connection helped him to win election to a county judgeship in 1922. This job was more administrative than judicial. He rose in prominence and responsibility within the Pendergast machine, which was essential in Missouri politics, but would prove a liability later. After FDR’s election, he was assigned to head a project under one of the alphabet soup relief efforts to get people back to work and the economy going again. Through this job, he became acquainted with FDR aide Harry Hopkins and an ardent New Deal supporter. Indirectly, it resulted in his becoming president.
Senator Truman
He was elected to the Senate in 1934 with Pendergast’s reluctant support. Despite his tepid approval, Truman was regarded as the Senator from Pendergast and was viewed as vaguely corrupt. He spoke his mind freely and often, an aberration for a first-term Senator, especially in the thirties, and mostly against the greed, manipulations, and power of the big-money men on Wall Street. When Pendergast, who had not bothered to pay his taxes for years, went to jail in 1937, the honest, law-abiding, and tax-paying Truman was untouched by the scandal. Truman came to national—and presidential—attention with his chairmanship of the preparedness committee during WWII. It became known as the Truman Committee and was credited with saving over $15 billion (and that’s 1940’s dollars) in common-sense cost-saving measures for the military and their suppliers. This work first put him on the cover of Time magazine.
Vice-President Truman
A powerful group of Democrats, concerned about the President’s failing health, were determined to replace Henry Wallace as Vice President for the 1944 election. They believed that Wallace was too liberal and, perhaps, too friendly to our ally, the USSR. Eleanor Roosevelt was Wallace’s chief defender. The incoming and outgoing party chairmen, party treasurer, and several powerful lobbyists were more persuasive, though, and worked out a deal whereby Harry S Truman became the candidate for the office that his predecessor, John Nance Garner, had characterized as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” (The quotation was bowdlerized to “warm spit” when it appeared in newspapers, but think about it—Garner was from Texas and is invariably characterized as “peppery.” Which one do you think he said?) Of course, Roosevelt had lived through the two terms during which Garner was vice president, so his experience of the office was somewhat different from Truman’s. Truman was playing poker with some of his Senate cronies when urgently summoned to the White House on April 12, 1945. He realized exactly why he had been called. It is said that he asked Eleanor Roosevelt what he could do for her. She responded, "Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now!" (Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman). She had a point. He had been vice president for only 82 days, hadn’t been briefed on much of anything, including the Manhattan Project, the results of which would soon be his to use, and he still had a war to win.
The Buck Stops Here—President Truman
Truman, like all presidents, has an official portrait, but there are two images of him that really capture the man for me.

One is the one at the right, showing him behind his desk in the Oval Office with the famous sign reading; “the buck stops here,” a reference to the then current expression of passing the buck, meaning roughly, not taking responsibility or not making a decision and then accepting the consequences thereof. Harry was also famous for the saying, “If they can’t stand the heat, they should stay out of the kitchen.” He could stand criticism, which was fortunate because there were plenty of Americans and others willing to give it to him. He is still severely criticized for using the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a debate that is beyond the scope of this cache. During his term of office, he was condemned for the quagmire that was the Korean Conflict, the integration of the armed forces, and for the firing of General of the Army Douglas McArthur. (He really had it coming in this cacher’s humble opinion. He wanted to use nuclear weapons along the North Korea-China border and he didn’t much care what the President thought about it. Truman was rightfully concerned that such an action would have led to all out war with China instead of a fight with a limited number of Chinese “volunteers” assisting their North Korean allies.) He seemed to welcome all the criticism as coming with the job—except when a music critic took a swipe at a performance by his daughter, Margaret. That led to a tempest in a teapot.
Accomplishments as president
• World War Two ended with the surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945, eight days after the first use of a nuclear weapon against people, at Hiroshima and five days after the devastation of Nagasaki. • Easing the way from wartime to peacetime economy was not simple. Pent up demand and massive dislocation led to widespread strikes and rapid inflation. Truman dealt decisively with a 1946 national railway strike by seizing the railways and threatening to draft the workers into the military. The strike ended on terms he suggested. • The Truman Doctrine was a formalization of the realization that our former ally, the Soviet Union, had foreign policy goals that were completely incompatible with our own. Facing the threats of Communist takeovers in Greece and Turkey, Truman built bipartisan support for a policy of containment—no further intrusions. Strengthening NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was an important element of the Truman Doctrine—and the reason that Turkey and Greece have long been members though their North Atlantic frontage is limited. • The Marshall Plan rebuilt western European economies. Truman’s argument to wrest vast sums of money required from Congress was that Communism thrives in impoverished areas and that spending money now to help Europe would protect American interests far into the future. • Integration of the armed services. Can you really imagine a segregated Navy in which Filipinos can serve only as mess boys in the Ward Room? Or an army in which African-American fighting units are led by white officers? Today the armed services are a model of equal opportunity employment. We have Harry S Truman to thank for that. • The recognition of Israel. Truman overruled his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, supporting the formation of a Jewish homeland. He saw to it that the US recognized Israel early—eleven minutes after it declared itself a nation on May 14, 1948. • The Berlin Airlift. When the USSR denied the United States, Britain, and France road access to their sectors of Berlin through East Germany in June of 1948, the military’s advice was to send a heavily armed resupply column right down the autobahn with instructions to defend itself. Truman believed that this would be tantamount to war and chose instead to undertake a massive airlift, flying in everything that Berliners needed—even coal. The Soviets backed down after nearly a year. In November of 1948, Truman’s re-election chances were probably helped by his leading the heroic effort to keep West Berliners from being starved into submission by the Communists.

• Re-election. This is the other image that really captures Truman for me. Look at his delight as he revels in the error published as a banner headline by the Chicago Daily Tribune. Truman was accustomed to being counted out—assumed to be a loser—and he had showed them before. Supporters shouted, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” And he did. He was widely expected to lose. His integration of the armed forces had led to the splitting of the Democratic Party. The splinter party, the States Rights Democratic Party (aka the Dixiecrats) led by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—remember him?—took four states: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It also won one electoral vote in Tennessee. Truman took 28 states to Dewey’s 16. The electoral vote was 303 to 189 to 39. He didn’t need those Dixiecrats after all.
Personal note: My grandmother never forgave Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats for bolting the party in 1948. She may have been the only Democrat in Jericho for most of her life. She had been the only one in her family, but she worked on me, probably from birth, so for a while there were two.
• The Truman balcony (second story of the South Portico) was added in 1948.

Lots of people hated it at the time, averring that it destroyed the classic lines of the White House. Today it is hard to imagine the White House without it. Soon after it was installed, part of the building collapsed and the president’s own bedroom and bathroom were declared unsafe for habitation. In fact, only the Truman balcony was judged structurally sound. The entire interior was demolished and reconstructed, a massive project that wasn’t completed until March of 1952.

Here is an interior shot of the work in progress. So pacing the floors where Lincoln and the Roosevelts pondered great decisions isn’t quite possible for President Obama, is it? The Trumans lived at Blair House, across the street, for the duration of the tear-out-and-start-over renovaton. This wasn’t an entirely lucky arrangement for him. In 1950, two Puerto Rican separatists attempted to assassinate him as he crossed Pennsylvania Avenue to work in the Oval Office. (It’s in the West Wing, which is newer and wasn’t affected by the reconstruction.) He was much more difficult for the Secret Service to protect than FDR had been because he was much given to taking long walks around the city for exercise. He believed that you ought to walk as if you had somewhere you had to get somewhere. Sacajawaner and I often refer to this habit of his when one of us feels that we are lollygagging on a walk. “What would Harry do?” “He’d walk as if he were just a little late for a meeting. Let’s go!”
Failures
The Fair Deal Truman was unable to pass most of the progressive legislation that meant the most to him, particularly a national health insurance plan like those being adopted in the nations of Europe—the very countries that we were helping out of the devastating aftermath of WWII. Republicans took the majority in both houses in 1946 and blocked action on this initiative. The same fate awaited the Civil Rights Act, except that Southern Democrats were against it. Strengthening of laws favoring labor unions, another component of the Fair Deal, Truman’s version of the New Deal, also fell victim to the changing politics of Congress. It was only on international issues, especially national security that Truman could find common ground with the Republicans. Loss of Public Approval—The Korean Conflict As the Korean War ground on and on with no clear victory, Truman’s popularity eroded. By the time he left office, he had the lowest job approval numbers of any president. He bottomed out at 22%, two points lower than Nixon’s when he resigned the Presidency in disgrace. We Americans don’t much like presidents who don’t win wars.
How we see Truman now
Only in retrospect did historians and ordinary citizens begin to appreciate what a fine, if accidental, president Harry S Truman had turned out to be. In many ways, he was far more than a caretaker president—one who simply finished out a great president’s term. He was a visionary. He saw that we could not go on pretending that the color of people’s skin made a fundamental difference in what they could do for their country. He imagined the military setting an example for equal opportunity throughout society. He failed in his attempt to give African-Americans fair access to the ballot box, work that would be carried on by John Kennedy and completed by Lyndon Johnson, but he saw the need to hold more truly to the promises that America makes to all her people in its founding documents and the Pledge of Allegiance. He saw that it was fundamentally unfair to have health care for some citizens, but not for others simply because they were poor or elderly. He was able to see that we needed fairness in working conditions, but would not tolerate chaos that brought the economy to a standstill. Johnson’s Great Society included the first step toward this dream of Truman’s also.

In 1965, LBJ signed the Medicare Bill into law at the Truman Library and gave the first two Medicare cards to Harry and Bess Truman in recognition of Harry’s work for national health insurance when he was president. Truman strikes me—and many Americans—as the ultimate straight shooter, the honest man who called as he saw them, and worked like fury to make the world safer and better.

Here is his official White House portrait. I think it misses some essential things about him: his plainness, his vinegar, and his energy. He looks a little too dignified, too proper, and too staid. After all, this is the little guy from the very middle of the country who couldn’t see for beans and failed in his first business, but, given the chance, stepped into the place of the most famous and influential president of the 20th Century, “gave ‘em hell,” and reshaped the nation for the better. Even that balcony looks pretty good now that we’ve gotten used to it!

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