Reading David L. Roll's Ascent to Power:
How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World, I kept
thinking to myself: what would Harry Truman think if he were to read this book?
I suspect at a certain point in this work he'd rant that it's 'another one of
those pieces by an ivory tower egghead who thinks he can substitute his
judgment for the President." And there's a decent chance by the end (no
doubt fortified by the bourbon he might need to get through it) he would be
penning an obscene note to the author calling him the worst names possible in
the foulest language possible.
Now in the hypothetical scenario a wiser
head (I suspect Bess or Margaret) would convince him not to send it. After he
cooled down (as he usually did after a bit) he would acknowledge that the
author was far more fair to him then so many of his fellow academics,
particularly in comparison to 'That Man'
who chose him as Vice President and left him very much with a mess he
didn't have nearly the qualifications he handle. He would strut a little at the
favorable comparisons when it came to his plain speaking and how genuine he was
with staff, how difficult many of the decisions he made and how well they were
borne out by history and how groundbreaking he was in many ways. But in his
heart he would no doubt think and say quite frequently: "It's good for a
guy who never ran for office in his life but still thinks he could have made
better decisions with the same perfect hindsight we all have."
Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps.
But Roll is like every other good biographer when it comes to getting a
critical aspect of Harry Truman correctly: the man never suffered fools gladly.
And there are far too many times in what is otherwise a superior piece compared
to so many academic studies of these two Presidents – one of whom is revered as
a saint in most academic circles while the latter is just as frequently vilified
– where you can see the moralizing of the modern left-leaning aspects of the
academic overshadowing what should be the objective lens of the historian.
I need to give credit where it is due and
try to alleviate some of my problems. Roll has written three biographies of men
who were critical to different degrees to the presidencies of both FDR and
Truman: George Marshall, Harry Hopkins and Louis Johnson. And when he deals
with foreign policy he is on very firm ground and more importantly, balanced.
He makes it clear about the flaws when it
came to Roosevelt's misjudgment of Stalin in the first chapter of the book more
than prior historians. He makes it clear Truman was nowhere near prepared for
the job and that while he made some mistakes going forward he tried for far
longer than possible to maintain the vision of his deceased predecessor. He keeps
the moralizing about his decision to drop the atomic bomb to a minimum compared
to so many of his predecessors, gives him credit for his work in getting the
Marshall Plan into effect and how vital it was for the rebuilding of West
Germany and much of Western Europe. He credits him for helping rebuild Japan
into an economic force after World War II (something I was basically unaware of
as to the extent) and while there is some moralizing about the Middle East he
gives Truman credit for at least trying to dip his foot into the waters of Israel
and that there were things he did that deserve a light to be shined on.
The problem, however, is that this is the
first work Roll has ever done on the Presidency and how it relates to both
domestic policy as well as how politics works in general. And it is in these
sections overwhelmingly that the progressive bias of the author is far too
visible as well as a critical difference between both that bias and conservative
historians overall.
Looking at so many conservative histories
of this era and much of those that involve Democrats during the 20th
century their clearest belief is an underlying cynicism that whatever policy
any Democrat makes has nothing to do with social justice, economic or foreign
policy is done solely as something to convince the average voter to
blindly vote Democrat without thinking. This is a completely amoral and
pessimistic way to look the world and I would reject it – were it not for the
fact that at its core and particularly with FDR and Truman, there is a fair
amount of truth in it.
The policies that FDR argued for the New
Deal were so revolutionary - he was
accused of being a radical and a socialist during his 1932 campaign – that the
main reason much of it got passed was due to the Great Depression and his overwhelming
electoral majorities, particularly in the conservative South. He ran so far ahead of the Southern Democrats
in many of their states – in 1936 he got over 90 percent of the popular vote in
some Southern states – along with an increased amount of power in the Northern
and Western states that even though Southern Democrats opposed him they were
behind the voters. What FDR misjudged was that even in his landslide election
of 1936 was that the voters had not wanted him to go any further to the left.
As Elmo Roper pointed out in an election in October 1936 only 35 percent of the
public thought that FDR's first reelection was essential to the good of the country.
The remaining 65 percent were either indifferent or negative too him. And even among that 35 percent, "people
in general did not expect him to lead the country very much further to the
left, nor did they want him too." Indeed 17 percent thought that if
his policies were to change they would become more conservative.
Its understandable that this part is not in
Roll's book: he's focused on the 1940s. What is notable that while there
is an extensive bibliography in Ascent to Power he doesn't use as a
resource David Pietrusza's 1948 which goes into great detail abut Harry
Truman's campaign for the Presidency and basically covers much of the same
material on Truman in this book. Considering how much of Roll's book deals with
the majority of contemporary sources and those written decades after the fact
this is a tell of the worst kind. Among its many virtues Pietruza basically
deals with objective reporting never letting his own bias or his personal views
illustrate his opinion of the figures involved, even though he clearly has the
same respect for Truman that Roll does. The critical difference is that
Pietruza focuses primarily on political histories and politics is the last thing
on Roll's mind when he wants to talk about the 1948 election.
I
would find this forgivable were it not for the fact there are many places where
he acknowledges the difference between the 1940s and the present day and yet still
seems to feel it necessary to come down on Truman for not doing the 'right
thing' even though there was no political gain to be made (and as Roll
acknowledged often came at a huge cost)and even though it was out of touch with
where the rest of America was at the time.
In Roll's mind feelings will always be more important than facts in some
cases and its off-putting in what should be a history.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this
comes with the talk of civil rights. Throughout the book Roll goes to great
pains to illustrate how far ahead of most politicians at the time and certainly
Southern Democrats Harry Truman was when it came to that issue. He acknowledges how just speaking about race
relations - a position that 80 percent
of Americans polled in 1947 were opposed to – was harmful to his political
cause. He acknowledges that much of Truman's civil rights agenda died in
Congress due to opposition from Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
He acknowledges that Truman's position, however timid it was by the standards
of even twenty years later, caused the
'Solid South' to break from the Democratic Party in the Dixiecrat revolt in
1948 and that it would eventually completely erode by today.
And yet despite that he seems
determined to make the argument that Truman should nevertheless have used the
power of the executive order to desegregate the federal government. In this he
takes on the position of so many modern progressives who truly believe that the
President can just press a button and do things, something that is at odds with
almost every other part of his research. The very real possibility that this
might have led to mass resignations within his own government as well as even
more backlash from Congress as a result that would have worked against it –
something that he accurately reports happened multiple times during his first
term and happened just as frequently in his second on other parts of his policy
– is set aside with the simple binary moral calculus that it was the morally
right thing to do. The fact that Truman did not hold views on race that Roll
respects also doesn't factor into the decision that he should have done it
regardless.
We see an even greater example of this kind
of political naivete in the otherwise superb recounting of Harry Truman's
famous 'non-political' tour of the west that officially launched his 1948
campaign. The twelve pages are superb, showing how Truman built momentum as he
went, how Senator Taft denounced it as a 'whistlestop tour' that quickly
backfired on him and helped Truman, how he spoke directly to the farmers with a
plain style of speaking, how he made superb speeches about foreign policy and
labor and how while Washington newspapers through cold water on it, some
reporters began to believe in Truman.
So why does Roll add that 'Truman failed to
mention civil rights at any time on his tour?" even though he says that
his audience was nearly "100 percent white?" Truman no doubt knew that there was nothing
to be gained making these speeches in territory that was heavily Republican in
places and certainly not the main issue for many of the people he was speaking
to. Furthermore, he had to be
politically savvy enough to know just how bad things were in regard to southern
support already and if he said anything too difficult on the subject it would
hurt his chances for the nomination which as Roll reports completely accurately
were far from guaranteed. Why doesn't he
mention it? Because he thinks his judgment his superior to Truman's in this
regard.
We see the most critical difference in a
long section where he writes four pages about three prominent African-Americans
who he considers essential to helping Truman carry California due to minority
outreach. He argues passionate that these three people never made it into any
previous book about Harry Truman and while this is true and it may very well
have turned the corner, I find just as telling that he chooses to deal with
something far more important: the Dixiecrats.
Roll essentially argues that Thurmond's
States Rights Party was something that Truman and the Democrats wrote off in
the fall campaign. This is a blatant falsehood. Truman was determined to hold
as much of the South as possible, particularly Texas. Texas at the time had 23 electoral
votes (only 2 fewer than California) and if the Dixiecrats carried it or took
enough votes away from Truman that the Republicans carried it they could very
much throw the election into the House of Representatives. Governor Beauford
Jester notably chose not to attend the
Dixiecrat convention on July 2nd and used his considerable influence
to make sure that Thurmond was not ranked as the Democratic nominee for
President or to keep Truman off the ballot altogether (as would be the case for
states like Alabama and Mississippi. Jester is mentioned in Roll's book but
only in a September 26th speech which he attends with Sam Rayburn
and John Nance Garner, two notable Texas politicians. Even then it is done to
point out the anti-civil rights position of the men on the podium with him and
how Henry Wallace chose to recount it for the high ground.
By and large the South was solidly behind
Truman mainly because states like North Carolina and Georgia believed in party
unity and thought Dewey's liberal policies on civil rights (Roll leaves out how
Dewey put more civil rights policies into action as Governor of New York then
Truman did as President) caused them to pick Truman. He also glosses over that
many thought Alben Barkley's selection as Vice President would help strengthen
Truman's position in states such as Kentucky and Tennessee which they did.
In his autopsy of the election Roll finds
it 'curious' that Truman chose to give more credit to labor and the farm vote
for his election rather than African-American votes. He tries to gloss it over that
he did this because 'he believed labor and farmers would be more useful allies
than African-Americans in the coming four years."
That Roll chooses to dismiss the power of
both labor and the farm movement as a moral bad as opposed to African-American
votes belies his own writing. He states that there were only two African
American representatives in Congress in 1948 Adam Clayton Powell and William Levi
Dawson. By contrast labor and farm had immense influence on politicians in both
parties and across the country. Truman was doing was most politicians must do:
consider the present rather than the future.
And this brings us to one of the strangest
facts of Rise to Power. This is a book about two of the greatest
Presidents in history and that a large part of their success was due to the way
they understood politics at every level. Yet throughout 446 pages aside from
FDR and Truman he doesn't mention a lot of the representatives and senators at
the time and the few critical ones he does are in odd ways.
Sam Rayburn and Joe Martin, both Speakers
of the House and invaluable to getting much of the legislation passed for
Truman are mentioned only eleven times, only in terms of leadership
conferences. Alben Barkley, senate majority leader for both FDR and Truman is
only mention six times with most of them coming when Truman named Vice President.
JFK is mentioned only in his decision to affirm the veto of Taft-Hartley while
LBJ is only mentioned to uphold it.
The only Senators of note mentioned are
Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. Vandenberg is mentioned as an ally to Truman
during his foreign policy and Taft is mention in regard to being his primary
force of opposition in the Senate. He gives a favorable impression to the
former, no doubt because without his approval Truman would have gotten nowhere,
but never how Vandenberg helped get so much of his policy through Congress over
the opposition of Republicans like Taft. I have little regard for Robert Taft
as a senator, to be sure, but in Roll's book he comes across as the villain of
the piece.
But he also has little use for the liberals
of the time. He famously mentions Hubert Humphrey's speech at the 1948
Democratic convention but in large party it has to be because he 'admonished
his own party…for advocating for a mild civil rights platform." That he
argues its passage let to the South defecting goes against the actual electoral
results in which the South overall held. 100 of Truman's 303 electoral votes
came from the South but critically this doesn't appear in the electoral
results.
And its worth noting one of the few political
battles he talks about is the battle for the Displaced Persons Act of 1949 . He
excoriates Chapman Revercomb, an anti-Semite and anti-immigration Republican
Senator for West Virginia for being the primary obstacle for that acts passage.
By extension he argues that Robert Taft was an anti-Semite and conspiracy
theorist as well though he doesn't state so directly. When it reaches the
Senate in 1949 it comes under the heading of Pat McCarran who he thinks was
even worse even though he was a Democrat.
McCarran was so conservative that he was
once asks why he didn't defect to being a Republican. He answered: "I can
do more good by staying in the Democratic Party and watching the lunatic fringe
– the Roosevelt crowd." McCarran
was one of the worst men to ever serve in the Senate during the 21st
century but like most conservatives he had a better understand of politics then
the left does. In a sense it is the
reverse of LBJ's famous dictum: "he could do more harm pissing inside the
tent that pissing outside it".
And its worth noting there's one more thing
that Roll looks at Truman's stump speeches in which he called Republicans
"gluttons of privilege, a return of Wall Street economic dictatorship,"
and how they had stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back. Roll acknowledges that
'in 1948 it would have been fair to label his farm speech and some of his others
and fiery oratory emanating from a demagogue' – a statement that is preceded by
"Today his extreme rhetoric and unsupported assertions would probably pass
for normal campaign talk." Three guesses as to who he's referring too. And
the fact that Truman is using the same kind of phrasing that criticizes Wall
Street Republicans makes it clear just how harsh this was."
Pietruza doesn't modify it one bit. He
quotes Richard Norton Smith:
"Truman talked about Republican
bloodsuckers on Wall Street who are going to stick a pitchfork in the back of
every farmer. At one point he cleverly likened Dewey with his little mustache
to Hitler and the forces of fascism."
There's all the fact it was a strategy born
out of weakness as another historian says: "This was a strategy borne out
of weakness…because he felt he had very little left to lose. Losers break the
rules. There's no point in obeying them because if you obey the unwritten rules
of civility, you're going to lose anyway. So why not just do what you
can?"
The problem was this did have consequences
and many of them were of Truman's own making. Ignored in Roll's book is how as
part of Truman's reopening Congress for 'Turnip Da' HUAC reopened hearings that
would lead to Whitaker Chambers testifying before Congress about Alger
Hiss which would lead to the prominence
of first term Congressman Richard Nixon. As a result of Truman's harsh
demagoguery during the 1948 campaign while the Democrats did gain control of
Congress those Republicans who were left now had a real axe to grind. As a
result minority leader Bob Taft would be more than fine with the demagoguery of
freshman Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and the soon to be freshman Senator Nixon.
It’s worth noting that Roll ends his book
just after Truman is sworn in for the second time and refers to his second term
with the euphemism: "It was destined to be a troubled four years."
Perhaps he doesn't want to point out how much of the problems Truman brought
about on his own head as a result of his behavior – or indeed that so much of
the campaign demagoguery that was to follow would become part of the Republican
playbook starting with Richard Nixon and continuing to this day. Truman
despised Richard Nixon for many reasons – all of them justifiable – but perhaps
that was a part of him who knew that Nixon was just as much a politician as he
was, that he knew just how to rouse a crowd with the same rhetoric and that hie
played an indirect but critical role in his rise to power.
Looking at how Roll interprets political
events I can't help but be reminded that his style reminds one of Dewey who
famously ran his entire campaign as if politics were beneath him, barely worth
talking about while campaigning for President. Harry Truman was a great
president, for all his flaws, because he understood politics the way the best
Presidents and all elected officials must by necessity to have long and
successful careers. Truman understood that power comes from the people and that
politics is about building coalitions and without the vote you are
powerless. For all his appreciation and
admiration for Harry Truman, it's telling that Roll is either unwilling or
unable to grasp that simple fact in Ascent to Power – something that the
Man From Missouri would not hesitate to give Roll hell for.
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