American Experiment (328 page)

A Washington tempest followed. Byrnes threatened to resign. Vandenberg said that the Republicans could “only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” Truman explained lamely that there had been a misunderstanding—he had only approved Wallace’s right to give the speech, not its contents. In a long face-to-face meeting Wallace told Truman that the people feared that American policy was leading to war, adding pointedly, “You, yourself, as Harry Truman really believed in my speech.” But Harry Truman the President made clear that he must keep unity in his cabinet and present a united front abroad. The President revealed his true feelings the next day in a memorandum about Wallace:

“He is a pacifist one hundred per cent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a ‘dreamer’ like that.… The Reds, phonies and the ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

“I am afraid,” he added, “that they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” These remarks were a measure of Truman’s tendency to strike out at his adversaries in crude personal terms and of the completeness of his break with the anti-cold war forces.

Eleanor Roosevelt followed the rupture with rising concern. She had worked with Wallace during the New Deal and respected his idealism and commitment; she had counseled Truman on how to get along with both Churchill and Stalin. In the United Nations she was experiencing firsthand Soviet suspicion and stubbornness. As Truman and Wallace spun away from each other, she was left isolated in the void between them. She believed Wallace was unwise to make speeches in Europe criticizing Administration policy; she was disturbed by the go-it-alone aspects of the Truman Doctrine and by the President’s failure to offer relief and rehabilitation in cooperation with the UN. While lauding Wallace’s commitment to world understanding, she also approved of the Marshall Plan and admired its author. As the Wallace forces moved toward establishing a third party, however, Eleanor Roosevelt knew where she would stand. She had always believed in working within the Democratic party.

Political leaders on all sides had long expected 1948 to be a “showdown year.” At long last the Republicans could battle someone other than Franklin Roosevelt. The Democrats could no longer depend on the electoral magician in the White House. The Wallace movement, soon to be
converted into the Progressive party, expected at least to hold a critical balance of power. Within each party too, rival leaderships hoped to establish their factional dominance. Conservative Republicans headed by Senator Taft planned to wrest their party away from men of the Willkie, Stimson, and Dewey stamp. The presidential Republicans, headed by aggressive young activists like Harold Stassen, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Dewey himself, labored to deny party leadership to the isolationists and to set the GOP on a steady course of moderation in domestic policy and of internationalism abroad. On the Democratic side, hawks and doves, as they would come to be called, fought for the soul of the Democracy, as did states’ righters against the Truman forces backing the social welfare and reformist programs of his Fair Deal.

In the center of the Democratic battlefield stood Harry Truman. Not for decades—certainly not since William Howard Taft had been beset by La Follette Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt Square Dealers in 1912—had a President seemed so isolated and deserted as Truman when he announced his candidacy early in March 1948. The Henry Wallace Progressives threatened to carve deeply into the “peace vote.” A number of labor leaders, personally furious with Truman after he had cold-shouldered them during a rash of postwar strikes, threatened to sit the election out. Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal, anticommunist group founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and a host of academics, politicos, and assorted old New Dealers, was sticking with the Democracy, but some of its leaders were working to draft the popular General Eisenhower as the Democratic standard-bearer. The Republicans appeared likely to renominate Dewey, who had his own lines into labor, liberal, and black enclaves.

Through it all Truman appeared his usual feisty self. He not only aroused antagonism—he seemed to solicit it. In the face of conservative opposition to his Fair Deal economic measures he inflamed southern Democrats even further with his sweeping civil rights message of February 1948. Based on the recommendations of a special presidential commission chaired by Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, the message called for a permanent federal commission on civil rights, a permanent fair employment practices commission, the outlawing of segregation in schools and transportation and other public facilities, and a federal antilynching law. Truman’s central strategy, however, was to stand on his Fair Deal extension of the New Deal—housing, welfare, labor and consumer protection, farm subsidies.

Soon Truman was besieged on three fronts. The GOP duly nominated Dewey on a moderately liberal and internationalist platform, a band of solid Southerners bolted the Democratic convention and later nominated
Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President on the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” ticket, and a Progressive convention nominated Wallace. Truman’s whole instinct was to fight back, like the French general who cried, “My left flank is in ruins, my right flank is retreating, my center is caving in. Good! I shall attack.” By midsummer the voters were being treated to a four-cornered race reminiscent of 1912, as Truman crisscrossed the country in an exhausting “whistlestop” campaign by train, Wallace made his rustic, low-key appearances before hyperbolic crowds, Thurmond sought enough electoral votes to throw the presidential race into the House of Representatives, and Dewey tried to appear presidential in order to become presidential.

For a time, fortune scarcely favored the bold. At the Democratic convention Young Turks headed by Hubert Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, had pushed through a strengthened civil rights plank that threatened to alienate even more of the southern Democracy. Zigzagging across the country, the Truman campaign repeatedly ran out of money, requiring frenzied appeals to fat cats, usually to oil barons with ready cash. Toward the end of the campaign the election forecasts, including roundups by
The New York Times
and other periodicals, had Truman so far behind Dewey as to arouse despair in the President’s entourage. Shown a poll of “fifty political experts,” all of whom predicted a big Dewey win, Truman blinked, grinned, and said, “Oh, well, those damn fellows; they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.”

In the end, fortune did favor the bold. The Dixiecrat bolt backfired, as most southern Democrats stuck with Truman while northern blacks credited his timely civil rights position. Two or three million Republicans stayed home out of overconfidence, or so Dewey later complained. Wallace’s strength steadily ebbed as liberals and laborites feared to waste their ballots on a third-party ticket. They also suspected extensive communist influence over the campaign, and rightly so. Warned of this influence, Wallace was unwilling even to investigate, for fear that he would be guilty of the very red-baiting that he had warned Americans against. He felt far more pressed from the right. Bold enough to stay overnight in the homes of southern blacks, he would remember his campaign through the South as “one long succession of tomatoes and eggs.” The author of
The Century of the Common Man
later remarked that the “common man can be very, very barbarous.”

Dewey, seeking to soften memories of his blatant linking of the Democrats with communism in 1944, took the high road, lost his fighting edge, and embraced bipartisanship in foreign policy to the degree that he could not exploit Truman’s chief vulnerabilities. The President skillfully
employed FDR’s tactic of attacking the congressional rather than the presidential Republicans. He called Congress into special session, challenged the Republicans to pass the legislation demanded in their party platform, and hung the congressional failure to do so around Dewey’s neck.

Truman’s close but decisive victory was so unexpected as to be sensational. It quickly became the pride of historians prone to demonstrate the power of individual leadership against historical forces. People saw “a brave man,” in Richard Kirkendall’s words, “fighting almost alone against great odds,” and bringing off the greatest upset in American history. But Truman finally won by not fighting alone. With the help of Stalin’s aggressive blockade of land traffic between Berlin and West Germany, he played on the anticommunism latent in millions of Americans. He received Eleanor Roosevelt’s benediction and exploited the momentum and mythology of the Roosevelt heritage. He depended heavily on the Democratic party, which produced a set of congressional victories as significant as the presidential. He remobilized the economic voting groups of farmers, workers, and urban consumers bequeathed by Roosevelt.

The gutsy little man from Missouri had ridden these forces, even guided them, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Americans, recovering from their election-night shock, took this underdog—this winning underdog—to their bosom.

For the political leadership of the nation 1948 had indeed been a showdown. For Dewey, whose popular vote fell short of his 1944 total, it would be the end of the presidential road. Thurmond’s States’ Rights party, winning 1,169,000 popular votes and 38 electoral votes, fell far short of its electoral hopes in the South. The Wallace Progressives, garnering even fewer popular votes than the Dixiecrats and no electoral votes, learned once again the bias of American traditions and elections against third parties. Congressional Republican leaders, set up as a perfect target by the Democrats, lost their House and Senate majorities. And renowned political prophets suffered the derision of the winners and the wrath of the losers who castigated them for their sloppy polling techniques.

For the longer run, however, the 1948 election was less dramatic. In the lexicon of political scientists, it was a “maintaining election,” reflecting persisting party loyalties and stable group attachments. The excitement of a four-cornered battle had not brought out a big vote. In many respects the 1948 election was a fifth presidential victory for FDR and the New Deal. For most Americans, voting Democratic had become a habit.

Yet in a far more momentous way 1948 was a different kind of maintaining election—an election that sustained the Truman Administration in its Fair Deal posture but above all in its anticommunism. It seemed likely that Truman’s loyalty program and his increasingly hard line toward Moscow had blunted Republican charges of “soft on communism” and helped turn Dewey against the weapon he had used in 1944. Even more, the election ratified the sphere-of-interest strategy on which the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and other Administration foreign policies were grounded. The Administration’s unofficial protectorate over Greece and Turkey, its insistence on holding West Berlin through a resourceful air-supply program—along with its reluctance to interfere in the Soviet sphere—suggested that the war-torn world of the early 1940s was settling down into some kind of Great Power stability based on mutual containment.

Maintaining that stability, however, would call for the most exacting statecraft on all sides; it would call for clear perceptions of nations’ interests, dependable estimates of the military potential and intentions of rival powers, sophisticated political intelligence about the interplay of national interests within and among rival blocs, realistic estimates of strategic possibilities and impossibilities, skillful national leadership and tenacious diplomacy. The historic balances of power of past centuries had depended on the statecraft of military and political leaders possessing such Bismarckian qualities. But the sphere-of-interest, balance-of-power way of stabilizing international relationships—especially difficult for democracies to manage—was always hostage to one powerful force: change. Alterations in the actual military and economic power of rival and friendly nations, combined with misperceptions of popular attitudes and the intentions of leaders, all in a context of fear and hostility, could—and often did—bring the trembling mobiles of the balance of power crashing down.

The years 1948 and 1949 bristled with events full of potential for arousing fear and hostility, misperceptions and miscalculations, among the Great Powers. The mysterious, awesome might of the atomic weapon was proving a source more of fear than of security among nations. Evidence of atomic espionage by Soviet spies struck fear in American hearts that the Russians would steal the “secret” of the bomb. The Soviets, knowing that Washington would never permit international controls that would give Moscow that secret, worked feverishly on their own bomb. Despite scientists’ advice that Moscow would not be slow to develop an atomic weapon, many Administration officials confidently assumed that they would continue to hold this trump card. Then in September 1949 came the dread news: winds blowing high over North America were carrying radiation
from a Soviet atomic test. A few months later Truman announced that the United States would begin to develop the hydrogen bomb—potentially many times more destructive than the A-bomb.

Germany was another crisis point. The standoff following the Soviet blockade and the Western airlift left heightened fears and hostility on each side, in turn drawing the divided Germans into the East-West spheres of interest. This balance-of-power tendency might have stabilized the situation, save that a divided Berlin remained a tempting and vulnerable island in eastern Germany. Officials on each side, moreover, now feared that the adversary would seek to draw all of Germany into its own embrace. Step by fearful step, the two camps lost the opportunity, limited in any event, to shape a unified and disarmed Germany.

But the most profound change—perhaps the most significant transformation of the mid-twentieth century—was threatening the balance of power on the other side of the globe. The civil war in China had accelerated, despite patient efforts by General Marshall to mediate the conflict. By the end of 1947 Mao Tse-tung’s communist armies had won control of Manchuria and by the end of 1948 most of northern China; during 1949 it became clear that soon they would drive Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces off the Chinese mainland. Chiang’s withdrawal to Taiwan created one more outpost—a counterpart to Berlin—that could be protected against invasion only by Western power. And it left fear and anger among Americans who cherished their country’s historic involvement and sympathy with China—most recently with Chiang and Madame Chiang’s Republican China, which they imagined could be guided toward Western-style democracy.