“Down the line, since [Truman] voted in the Senate in 1935 for U.S. participation in the World Court, his positions on foreign relations and international policy have been consistently on the side of FDR and for the fight against fascism.”
“Few Americans have more Bibles than Harry S Truman (he has ‘about 50’) and few quote from them with greater facility… The President seldom misses a chance to stress that only as the U.S. has faith in God can it face the future with confidence.”
President Harry Truman (1884 – 1972) Came to the presidency following the death of FDR on April 12, 1945. He said of the post, “I wasn’t briefed for the job, I had to learn it from the ground up”; by 1947, he was no longer “Roosevelt’s stand-in, reading from a New Deal script” – he was his own man and this was becoming clearer and clearer to his critics in Washington. This article, by Frank Gervasi (1908 – 1990), covers Truman’s earliest years in the White House, and his handling of some of the hotest potatoes that landed in his lap.
What was the Truman Doctrine?
The left-of-center New York daily PM examined the liberal Bonafide’s of President Harry Truman and they liked what they saw.
It seems like a tough nut to swallow, but 12 years before President Obama was even born – U.S. President Harry S. Truman plugged the idea of ‘wealth distribution’ as a portion of a piece of proposed legislation that has come to be known as the “the Fair Deal”. The president’s scheme was introduced to the nation in his 1949 State of the Union address, it was composed of “21 points” and the element that is discussed in the attached article involving distribution of income was called the Brannan Plan – for it was U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan (1903 – 1992) who was its advocate. Secretary Brannan wanted the government to establish a guaranteed income for farmers, while allowing the market forces to determine the prices of agricultural products.
PM war correspondent Victor Bernstein filed this story three weeks before VE-Day concerning a 180-mile forced march that was the lot of assorted Allied prisoner of war in Germany. Numerous interviews with the survivors of the march revealed that the Nazis lording over as many as 4,000 POWs choosing to brutalize the U.S. prisoners in much the same way they abused Poles and Soviets. British POWs seemed not to attract their ire.
“The Japanese are making frenzied and costly attempts at Okinawa to stem our advance toward the home islands, but their efforts appear no more successful than they were in the Philippines and Iwo Jima.”
“A German plane dropped a flare. Then the inevitable stick bombs followed and the Savoy [Hotel] trembled. I looked and winced. Two large fires were reaching up into the night. This dwarfed any Blitz I have ever seen. Still both incendiaries and high-explosives screamed down. The night was filled with noise – all of it frightening noise. And above the planes still roared. It was so light that the balloons could be seen clearly. Now and then there would come the rattle of machine gun fire, hardly heard over the crackling of fires and the noise of the bombs. But it told us that the night fighters were up there.”
“A German plane dropped a flare. Then the inevitable stick bombs followed and the Savoy [Hotel] trembled. I looked and winced. Two large fires were reaching up into the night. This dwarfed any Blitz I have ever seen. Still both incendiaries and high-explosives screamed down. The night was filled with noise – all of it frightening noise. And above the planes still roared. It was so light that the balloons could be seen clearly. Now and then there would come the rattle of machine gun fire, hardly heard over the crackling of fires and the noise of the bombs. But it told us that the night fighters were up there.”
“A German plane dropped a flare. Then the inevitable stick bombs followed and the Savoy [Hotel] trembled. I looked and winced. Two large fires were reaching up into the night. This dwarfed any Blitz I have ever seen. Still both incendiaries and high-explosives screamed down. The night was filled with noise – all of it frightening noise. And above the planes still roared. It was so light that the balloons could be seen clearly. Now and then there would come the rattle of machine gun fire, hardly heard over the crackling of fires and the noise of the bombs. But it told us that the night fighters were up there.”
Admiral Marc Mitscher (1887 – 1947), U.S.N., remarked in the attached article that Kamikaze attacks may be a menace, but only ten percent of them manage to get through.
Here is a book review from the mid-war period covering The American by historian James Truslow Adams (1878 – 1949). Adams attempts to tackle the age old question as to why Americans are different from everyone else. The reviewer quotes the observations of Crèvecoeur, among others, before delving into the meat of Adams study.
It is our wish to successfully give utterance to the true feelings from each era that we are able to represent on this website; for this reason, we posted the attached column by Max Lerner (1902 – 1992), in which he expresses his excitement as to how great it was to be alive in one of the Allied nations at the time of Hitler’s demise.
“The two big fascist leaders in whose shadow our whole generation has lived – Mussolini and Hitler – are now lying dead amidst the ruins of their empires, one following the other in the space of a few days…We are not only the anvil. We are the hammer. To know that is to grow in stature in a great time.”
“Flags of two new kinds are flying in the city – white flags displayed by the panic-stricken populace, and the first Soviet flags that, Reuters says, are hoisted over what tall buildings are left within the captured districts. Three Soviet guards carried a blood-soaked banner 2000 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin. Pravda says the soldiers kneeled and kissed the flag and then raised it over a ruined building.”
After touring thousands of miles with a German press-pass throughout Nazi-occupied Russia, American journalist Hugo Speck (1905 – 1970) gave a thorough picture of the violence visited upon that land by both Armies:
“German-occupied Russia is in rags and ruins; huge sweeps of European Soviet territory have been systematically destroyed, partly by the Russians themselves and partly by the devastation of Stukas, panzers, guns and fire…”
Blaming it all on an “early winter”, Hitler ordered the volks on the home front to give their furs, woolens and long underwear to the German Army on the Eastern Front.
“The aspiration to be the first to meet the Red Army is aired all the way up and down the line, from division generals to the boys in the foxholes. And if the Yanks had their way, they’d hit the first road east and keep helling it eastward till they hit the vodka. As one soldier from an armored division put it:”
“‘This is what the hell we’ve been pushing across Europe for and I don’t want to lose the pie when I practically have it in my mouth.'”
Written in a prose style reminiscent of an owner’s manual, these pages spell out the 1923 tailoring rules for men’s formalwear:
“Essentially traditionalist in matter of men’s clothes, London is never more
conservative than in dress clothes, and the changes from year to year are of the slightest… However, one still sees far more dinner jackets (ie. “tuxedos“) in restaurants than of yore, when black tie and short coat were for the home circle and the club alone, but in society, whether for small dance, ball, dinner or theatre party, the white tie is the rule.”
