Truman

Chapter 13 examines Truman’s decision to run for president in 1948. His political views remained uncompromisingly liberal as his January 1948 congressional speech indicated. He supported civil rights: from calling for a law against lynching to suggesting that Japanese Americans interned during World War II should get restitution. In private, however, Truman continued using racial slurs to refer to Blacks, which McCullough explains as “[o]ld biases, old habits of speech” (706). Other domestic issues ranged from housing to inflation.

In foreign policy, relations with the Soviet Union remained tense. Some believed that the Cold War made good politics because citizens would rally behind their president (709). American anti-Communism in international relations also affected domestic politics. This period was the start of Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare.” At times, the progressive platform within the Democratic Party was not unlike a less radical version of communist ideas, which sought economic justice through democratic evolution rather than violent revolution. Henry Wallace, for example, called for the nationalization of some industries, for US nuclear weapons to be handed to the United Nations, and for a reconstruction program for the Soviet Union.

The call to use Palestine—then a British-controlled territory through a United Nations mandate—to establish a Jewish state was one of the central issues linking domestic and foreign policy.