Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (20 page)

The fate of Truman's quest for a national system of health insurance clearly revealed the power of special interests. His proposal was fairly conservative, calling for care to be financed by a tax of 4 percent on the first $3,600 of personal income. General government revenue would assist many among the poor. A powerful medical lobby headed by the American Medical Association (AMA) attacked the plan as socialistic, and conservatives in Congress agreed. The plan never came close to passage.
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Instead, the AMA backed the so-called Hill-Burton bill, which Congress approved in 1946. It provided federal aid for hospital construction, thereby pleasing building company interests as well as medical leaders. Between 1946 and 1975 some $4 billion in federal funds supported this program, which ultimately helped to produce large excess in hospital beds. The Hill-Burton Act mainly benefited doctors, hospital administrators, and the rising network of medical insurers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
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Congress also gutted liberal versions of the employment bill. The final act, passed in 1946, deliberately omitted mention of a government commitment to "full" employment, as well as provisions mandating public spending to supplement private expenditures. Instead, it called for creation of a three-person Council of Economic Advisers, a Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and an annual presidential report on the state of the economy. The Employment Act represented a step in the direction of governmental responsibility for economic welfare, a principle that would have seemed almost revolutionary as recently as the 1920s. But it was a far more cautious and noncommittal step than many reformers had hoped for.
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Liberals were disappointed with Truman's handling of many of these issues. They were especially upset that he did not denounce the filibusterers against FEPC and that he acquiesced in the revisions to the full employment bill. Truman, indeed, focused on foreign affairs and did not fight very effectively for domestic programs on Capitol Hill. He also showed little interest in listening to "experts" on the economy. It was six months before he got around to appointing people to the Council of Economic Advisers, and he paid them relatively little attention thereafter.

No domestic issue of these years did Truman more damage than the highly contentious question of what to do about wartime restraints on prices, which had been supervised by the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Businessmen generally wanted controls lifted so that they could take full advantage of the huge surge in demand that was expected following the war. Free-market conservatives agreed, arguing that a less regulated world of supply and demand ought to be restored. Many liberals hotly dissented. Vast pent-up wartime savings, they said, would intensify demand beyond the capacity of businesses to supply, with runaway price increases and large corporate profits the result.

Truman mostly agreed with the liberals. Fearing inflation, he seemed to support the OPA. But John Snyder, a conservative aide who was supervising reconversion policies, temporarily lifted controls on supplies of building materials, stimulating large demand among builders seeking to engage in profitable commercial construction instead of residential building. Meanwhile, Reuther and other union leaders were demanding large wage increases. The insistence of these and other interests at the time would have pressured almost any chief executive, especially one so inexperienced. It surely confounded Truman, who was buffeted by events. OPA head Chester Bowles, an ardent liberal, complained to Truman in January, "The Government's stabilization policy is not what you have stated it to be, but is instead one of improvising on a day-to-day, case-by-case method, as one crisis leads to another—in short, . . . there is really no policy at all."
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More backing and filling on the issue followed until June 1946, when conservatives in Congress passed a bill that extended OPA beyond its statutory lifetime on June 30 but that stripped the agency of real authority. Barkley told Truman to approve it: "Harry, you've got to sign this bill. Whether you like it or not, it's the best bill we can get out of this Congress, and it's the only one you're going to get." Truman refused and vetoed the bill. Prices and rents, no longer controlled, shot up immediately. Steak went from fifty-five cents a pound to a dollar, butter from eighty cents a pound to a dollar. The
New York Daily News
carried a headline,
PRICES SOAR, BUYERS SORE, STEERS JUMP OVER THE MOON
.
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Three weeks later Congress passed another bill that restored the OPA, again with emasculated powers. This time Truman signed it, but everyone knew that it was too little and too late, for prices had soared, and the new controls were ineffective. Some wags branded the OPA as OCRAP, the Office for Cessation of Rationing and Priorities.
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When OPA tried to curb hikes in meat prices, farmers and ranchers refused to deliver their products to market. Consumers erupted in outrage, much of it aimed at the government. The
Washington Times-Herald
captured these feelings with a headline,
ONLY 87 MEATLESS DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS
. Truman was privately furious with the "reckless group of selfish men" who resisted controls. He prepared an angry speech, blasting the American people for sacrificing "the greatest government that was ever conceived for a piece of beef, for a slice of bacon." Businessmen and labor leaders, he added, greedily sought profit "from the blood and sacrifice of the brave men who bared their breasts to the bullets."
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The President, however, then thought better of making such incendiary statements. He surrendered to pressure in mid-October and removed the controls on meat. By the end of the year the OPA was dead.
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The issue of controls was but one of many domestic concerns that hurt Truman's relations with liberals in 1946. But shortages and controls affected people in especially personal ways, and Truman suffered badly from criticism during the acerbic election campaigns of 1946. Jokes reflected the popular mood. "Would you like a Truman beer? You know, the one with no head." "To err is Truman." Remembering FDR, people asked, "I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive." Republicans summed up their message in a widely used slogan, "Had Enough? Vote Republican." They swept to victory, taking control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930: 245 to 188 in the House and 51 to 45 in the Senate. So decisive was the repudiation of Truman's leadership that Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, a Democrat, suggested that Truman consult with the Republicans to name a new Secretary of State, resign, and let the new Secretary take over. (That was then the prescribed line of presidential succession.) Truman naturally ignored the unwelcome advice from "Halfbright," as he called him. But he could not hide the obvious: voters had repudiated his administration.

L
ITTLE THAT HAPPENED
in the next few months promised to improve the President's political prospects. In late December sympathizers of Wallace announced the formation of Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which outlined an ambitious progressive domestic agenda and called for worldwide disarmament and immediate destruction of all nuclear weapons. This was the Soviet position. It was obvious that PCA hoped to run Wallace against Truman in 1948, an effort that seemed certain to divide the Democratic vote and likely to throw the election to the Republicans.

Liberals countered a week later by creating the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Like the PCA, the ADA favored progressive domestic legislation, but it distanced itself far from the Soviet Union: "We reject any association with Communists or sympathizers with communism in the United States as completely as we reject any association with Fascists or their sympathizers." Among the founders of the ADA were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., CIO unionist David Dubinsky, the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the young liberal mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey. The ADA became a vociferous and well-organized pressure group for liberal causes in the 1940s and 1950s. But many of its members openly disdained Truman. The President had little reason to rejoice in its creation at the time.
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The new 80th Congress gave Truman even less cause to feel confident. Its members included a few Democratic newcomers who later achieved fame, among them young Congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. But the feisty "Class of 1946" featured a cast of conservative Republicans. Among the new GOP senators were John Bricker of Ohio, who had run as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1944, and the then little-known Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the new Republican congressmen was Richard Nixon of California. Like others in his party, he demanded that the administration root out leftists in the United States and get tough against the Soviet Union overseas.

More influential in the 80th Congress was an older and generally conservative generation of Republican leaders. In the House they included Martin of Massachusetts and a band of midwesterners led by Charles Halleck of Indiana and Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois. These Republicans sided with business interests on most domestic issues; many also resisted foreign policy initiatives such as the Marshall Plan. In the Senate the towering Republican figure was Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft was the son of former President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft. He had finished first in his class at Yale and at Harvard Law School, apprenticed as a regular Republican politician in his native city of Cincinnati, and entered the Senate in 1939. Partisan and hard-working, he had risen quickly and challenged boldly but unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940.

Then and later Taft opposed significant American commitments in Europe. This attitude had hurt him in his race for the GOP presidential nomination in 1940 and placed him at odds with the Truman administration. But he mainly deferred to Vandenberg, his Republican colleague, on such issues. He focused instead on domestic matters, where his towering self-assurance helped to give him extraordinary influence in the Senate. No conservative of his generation evoked more admiration. Critics, Truman among them, responded by painting him as a reactionary. Taft, they charged, "had the best eighteenth-century mind in the Senate."
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Taft was slightly less conservative than his liberal critics thought: by 1949 he supported liberal bills to increase funds for public housing and federal aid to education. But in 1947 he stood solidly on the right concerning the major issues of the day, notably labor legislation and tax policy. He was also an adamant partisan, so much so that he became known as "Mr. Republican." In 1946 he had led GOP forces in the fight against OPA, and in 1947 he drove to passage the Taft-Hartley Act, a hotly debated tax cut that especially benefited the wealthy, and other measures that he championed as ways of limiting the influence of Big Government. Taft acted because he detested the liberalism of Roosevelt and Truman. He also hoped to get the GOP presidential nomination. Under his highly partisan leadership the Republican 80th Congress expected to discredit the President.

In doing so the Republicans underestimated Truman, who counter-attacked vigorously after his party's decisive defeat in the 1946 elections. It was then, in mid-November and early December, that he faced down John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers. This triumph greatly enlivened him and intensified his zest for political combat. A few months later he acted decisively in foreign policy as well, announcing the Truman Doctrine. Throughout the angry, partisan struggles of early 1947 he showed much more zest for battle than he had in 1945 and 1946.

Nothing did more for Truman's standing among liberals than his ringing veto message condemning the Taft-Hartley bill in June. "T.R.B.," columnist for the
New Republic
, was delighted: "Let's come right out and say it, we thought Truman's labor veto thrilling." James Wechsler, a leading liberal journalist, added, "Mr. Truman has reached the crucial fork in the road and turned unmistakably to the left."
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Within the month Truman twice vetoed the Republican tax bills. Although Congress overruled his veto of Taft-Hartley, Truman had shown his fighting spirit. It carried him much more confidently into his battle for re-election in 1948.

C
LARK
C
LIFFORD, A NATIVE
of St. Louis, had worked as a lawyer before serving in the navy during the war. He entered the Truman administration in 1945 as a junior naval aide. He was handsome, polished, and politically shrewd. His views on the issues—resist the Soviets, promote liberal domestic legislation—accorded with Truman's. By 1947 he was serving officially as Truman's special counsel and unofficially as his most powerful and trusted adviser on matters relating to politics and domestic policy. He stayed in this important role until returning to law practice in February 1950.

In November 1947 Clifford, James Rowe, and other White House aides turned over a forty-three-page memorandum to Truman. It laid out carefully what the President must do if he hoped to win the election of 1948. It was in many ways the most revealing source of Democratic electoral strategy for the forthcoming presidential campaign.

The memorandum was hardly infallible. It blithely took for granted the loyalty of the so-called Solid South: "As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy, it can be safely ignored." But the memo was otherwise sound in emphasizing the central fact of American political life since the rise of the New Deal: the potential electoral strength of the Democratic coalition. If Truman could attract the major interest groups in that coalition—blue-collar workers, black people, Jews, other ethnic groups, farmers, and poor people generally—he could triumph in 1948, just as FDR had done in the four presidential elections since 1932. This meant that the President must continue to resist the Russians. It especially meant that he must confront the Republican Congress, with the expectation not of getting laws but of winning the election: