Executive Orders Done Right: The Imperfect President We Never Talk About
Harry Truman was no hero, but he did take principled action through executive orders. Other presidents might learn.
In 1948, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the military. Then he issued Executive Order 9980, which banned racial discrimination in federal hiring.
Almost 75 years later, I was contacted by a friend representing the Truman Library Institute, the non-profit supporter of The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. Would I be interested in creating something around the 75th anniversary of these executive orders? I jumped at the chance.
Why was I so eager? Since my years as a Political Science undergrad, I had been interested in the American Presidency. To be more specific, obsessed with the growth of the office, the prestige of its occupant - the birth of what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called the Imperial Presidency.
Basically, a lot of my intellectual curiosity had been focused on how the presidency got so powerful, and how different presidents had used that power.
The idea of covering Truman offered insight into the post-progressive era of the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR. While some of them had been, as Wilson implored, “to be as big a man as he can”, Harry Truman wasn’t like this. His ascension to the presidency was unexpected; FDR’s death thrust him into the oval office unprepared. Nonetheless, Truman wielded the office’s powers.
And one of the ways he did this was through executive orders. As much of our discourse in recent weeks has been funneled through President Trump’s use of executive orders, this feels like the right time to dust off this exploration of Truman’s EOs on desegregation and racial discrimination. What insights can they offer us today?
As it turns out, saying yes to the Truman project satisfied more than my curiosity. That July, there was a big celebration in Washington, D.C., and I was invited. I was given a White House Press Pool Badge, and enjoyed a perfect seat for President Biden’s keynote address (Biden is a big Harry Truman fan).
I was also privileged to interview:
Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Duke University, Adriane Lenzt-Smith
A.J. Baime, New York Times Bestselling Author
Clifton Truman Daniel, honorary Chairman of the Truman Library Association and eldest grandson of Harry Truman
(You’ll find snippets of the interviews in the story below)
I’m proud of the work I did, and I provide it to you now as a long read here on Substack. If you’d like to see the full project in video form, I’ll add it at the bottom.
Intro
I’ll just cut straight to it. President Harry S. Truman grew up in Missouri, a slave state. His grandparents were slave owners. In David McCullough’s lengthy biography of Truman, he references aides and secret service agents who heard the president use the ‘N-word’ quote, “as if that were the way one naturally referred to blacks.” (3,558) Truman’s own sister assured a biographer in colorful language that the president was not in favor of racial equality.
And yet as president, Truman took action that advanced civil rights - some action, to use a modern phrase, was ‘virtue signally’. For example in 1946, he created the ‘President’s Committee on Civil Rights’ which proposed policy measures. He was the first president to address a civil rights organization, the NAACP, saying to them in 1947 that it was time to quote “guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens.” Committees, speeches, very nice.
But Truman also took concrete and direct action. On July 26, 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the United States military. And he issued Executive Order 9980, which banned racial discrimination in federal hiring. And he did those things as a Democrat at a time when the Democratic party was splitting over the issue of civil rights. In fact, southern democrats would split the ticket in the 1948 presidential election because they saw Truman as too supportive of Civil Rights.
And so president Harry Truman ends up fitting in this pattern that I see with many American presidents. The founding generation, to use insufficient broad brush strokes, were willing to compromise on slavery and civil rights to create the United States and keep it together. In the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence, there was a complaint about the King of England’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. But it was cut because, well, because the American founding is full of moral compromises. Compromises that led Frederick Douglass in a famous 1852 speech to say “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn..”
Abraham Lincoln came into American politics a generation later. He believed the founders had an arrangement that slavery would exist in the Union, but not expand to new states, and would be gradually eliminated. Slavery was to be tolerated where it already existed, but to not expand.
So Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery was clear. But Lincoln’s position on slavery itself was not as clear cut. In fact, Lincoln at first resisted leaving the Whig Party for the newly founded Republican Party for the exact reason that they appeared to be a radical party of opposition to slavery, of full abolition, perhaps even equality between the races. And Abraham Lincoln did not publicly support equality between the races: quote “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” On another day, quote “I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people.”
So Abraham Lincoln, the president whom the public often credits with the abolition of slavery and the foundations of the civil rights movement, was not a racially progressive man, at least publicly. But he did do concrete things for racial justice.
That’s the pattern I’m identifying here. American history contains presidents with problematic views on race that nonetheless advanced race relations and racial justice. Sure, we get the worst of the worst with someone like Woodrow Wilson showing Birth of a Nation, a KKK film, at the White House in 1915, but in general American presidents fall in a gray area.
We can jump around in time more: In 1941, FDR created the Fair Employment Practices Committee through Executive Order 8802, but he never acted to desegregate the military or to advance civil rights legislation. John F. Kennedy: rode the civil rights fence in the 1960 presidential election, then opposed the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. told America about his dream - Kennedy did eventually publicly advocate civil rights; LBJ, the president under whom the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law - LBJ called an earlier 1957 Civil Rights bill that he helped passed the ‘N-word’ Bill. He helped pass it and that’s what he called it! (7)
This is just a thing in life, I suppose. People who say bad things can do good things. People who say good things can do bad things, so on and so forth. Politics contains no heroes.
Harry Truman, like the founders, like Lincoln, like FDR, like so many presidents, was no hero. But Truman did take that concrete principled action at personal political risk: in 1948, he signed Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the military. And he issued Executive Order 9980, which banned racial discrimination in federal hiring.
We often overemphasize desegregation as the be all end all with civil rights, but whatever. These executive orders were good things.
But I wanted to know more. Given Truman’s less-than-perfect views, something perfectly in line with many American leaders, I had to ask: why? Why did he say some of the right things to the NAACP? Why did he form his presidential committee on civil rights? Why did he sign these executive orders? Did he cynically believe it was in his interest? Or did his views evolve genuinely through life experience?
And if you stay with me to the end of this quest, we’re gonna poke at the narrative we’ve built, because that’s important to do sometimes too.
Luckily, I’ve gotten some help to figure out this puzzle. I decided to go on a little quest to talk to a relative of Truman, a New York Times bestselling author of two books on President Truman, and a Duke University historian. I wanted to get the inside scoop from the people who would know best.
Early Life
Harry S. Truman was born in 1884 in Lamar, Missouri. His agrarian family moved several times when he was a boy, landing eventually in Independence. The “S” in Harry S. Truman didn’t stand for anything, Truman claimed; rather, the “S” represented Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman, Harry’s grandfathers (3;4)
20 years before Harry Truman was born, Missouri was a place of mixed sympathy during the American Civil War. Missouri did not leave the Union in 1861, but Missourians joined both the Union and Confederate Armies. Truman’s parents came from slave-owning backgrounds, and his parents’ sympathies were with the south, sympathies that were embittered through confederate defeat in 1865, embitterment that lasted into Harry Truman’s childhood beginning two decades later.
A.J. Baime: “The Trumans thought of themselves as rebel democrats.”
(A.J. Baime is a New York Times Bestselling author of two books on President Truman)
A.J. Baime:
The reason the Trumans identified as ‘Rebel Democrats’ is because they were the rebels during the Civil War, opposed to the Union championed by Abraham Lincoln. “And Margaret Truman used this phrase, ‘Rebel Democrats don’t become rebel democrats, they’re born that way.’ - so in the blood was this ideology, but also identity…And that’s why years later when Harry Truman becomes President of the United States, he invites his mom to stay at the White House, and she refuses to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom because of that, because they were Rebel Democrats”
Simply stated: Truman had every potential to apply racial prejudice from his upbringing to policy, to be a Woodrow Wilson kind of guy showing racist films in the White House. Did he?
Presidency ‘45-47
Truman once said of becoming president, “it scares the hell out of me.” (1,12). But with FDR’s death on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman was thrust into the presidency at a critical moment of World War II, now the commander in chief of the armed forces in which he had served in World War I.
Clifton Truman Daniel: “Grandpa did not know why he was being called to the White House.”
(Clifton Truman Daniel is the honorary Chairman of the Truman Library Association and eldest grandson of Harry Truman)
Clifton Truman Daniel:
“And he got the call to go to the White House immediately, and as he walked in it was Eleanor Roosevelt who told him, ‘Harry, the President is dead.’ And the first thing out of my grandfather’s mouth was, ‘What can we do for you?’ And she very – her line was great. She said, “No I think the question is, ‘what can we do for you?’ cause you’re the one who’s in trouble now. And he was always said that a million people were better qualified to do the job. He felt like the sun, the moon and all the planets had fallen on him at that point. So he told the press, and he asked the press to pray for him at that point.”
Old problems remained. For our story, the segregation of the armed forces, and the treatment of black veterans when they returned to the United States. 1 million African Americans joined the armed forces in World War II, subject to the bombs and bullets of the enemy, and the discrimination of white officers (13). This article authored by Rutgers professor Steven F. Lawson has numerous examples of the racial violence experienced by black veterans and their families after returning from the war.
The most clear-cut and infamous story is that of Sergeant Isaac Woodard, who was washing himself up during a break on a greyhound bus ride. The Greyhound driver thought Woodward was being too slow, so called the police. The police arrived, confronted Woodard, beat him, and thrust a billy club in his eyes, leaving him blind for the rest of his life. Woodard was still wearing his Army uniform at the time.
Clifton Truman Daniel:
“The seminal incident is the treatment of Sergeant Isaac Woodard, coming home from World War II having risked life and limb for this country. He asked the driver, the white driver if he had time to use the restroom. And the driver insulted him, talked down to him, called him names. And Woodard came back and said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that. I’m a man, just like you.’ Well at the next stop the driver alerted the sheriff, a guy named Lynwood Shull. And Shull and a couple of his deputies dragged Woodard off the bus and beat him blind over the next 24 hours. My grandfather was appalled at that behavior.”
Richard Gergel’s book Unexampled Courage, suggests the treatment of Woodard led to the racial awakening of President Harry Truman, to resist his ‘Rebel Democrat’ roots and take a stand or two on civil rights. A.J. raised the same during our interview, referring to another of his books, “White Lies”: “What led Harry Truman to start to like see civil rights as this priority, was it that moment you just described to me, or did it start a little earlier?”
A.J. Baime:
“I can give you an exact moment. An exact moment, and I can back it up with evidence…When Walter White of the NAACP sat with Truman and told Truman this story, Truman was so shocked that as he have the account he said, ‘I had no idea it was this bad. We’ve got to do something.’ And the reason I think that that’s sort of a light switch moment for the president is: the very next day, he writes a memorandum to John Clark of Texas, who is his Attorney General. And in there he spells out, ‘these are the things happening in this country, this in unacceptable. We need an investigation. We need things to change. To me, that’s really the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, right there, in terms of mainstream power.”
Indignant over Sargeant Woodard’s treatment and other stories he received from Walter White of the NAACP, Truman took his first steps as president on civil rights. On December 5, 1946, he signed Executive Order 9808, which established the first-ever President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Admittedly, it was a ‘paper’ (an executive order) demanding another paper (a committee report) which might lead to more paper (bills and laws) which might eventually lead to real action. We’ll get to real action. But what’s interesting about this 1946 Executive Order, to me, is that the pretext for this commission, the indignancy of Truman to what he learned of the treatment of black veterans and their communities - the pretext became the real text. surrounding lofty language is a word that appears several times: fear. Fear, fear, freedom from fear. The Executive Order is asking for policy recommendations and President Truman’s commission is going to produce policy recommendations, but the basis of the writing is one of someone who’s seen something emotive, violence. It’s weird to see that come through a bureaucratic document: quote “individuals -- sometimes ex-servicemen, even women -- have been killed, maimed, or intimidated,” by local law enforcement. Years later when President Kennedy saw George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, he was moved towards civil rights. When President Lyndon Johnson saw Bloody Sunday, he pushed civil rights. Before JFK or LBJ was Truman, who saw and started moving.
And just full disclosure, I’m leaning on McCulloughs research here to quote Truman here. Context found on page 588:
“...my very stomach turned over when I learned that negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten…Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.” (3,588)
“Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri…” There’s the switch, as A.J. put it. Truman knew he had to act.
But before we move right along with this story, I did want to poke at it just a little bit. Because we have this conversion story of Truman. He heard about Isaac Woodard. He decided it was time to act. Should we take that conversion at face value? I posed that question to Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Duke University, Adriane Lenzt-Smith.
William C. Fox: I was wondering if you had a take on - should we take his for lack of a better term conversion at face value? For example, there’s a quote that gets floated around, “I had no idea it was this bad.” And my thought was like, ‘how?’ That’s maybe a little unfair though because of course there are things in my life, there are injustices in the world that I don’t recognize until I recognize them. There are lightswitch moments in life - it’s not completely unrealistic. But how do you see Truman’s journey here?”
Professor Adriane Lenzt-Smith:
“Taking things at face value, I always go back to the wisdom of the historian Barbara Fields who said, you know, you should always take slaveholders seriously but not literally. Right that people have their stories, they tell them until they believe them - that on some level for him sure, that is the conversion narrative that he held on to, that other people have picked up. Very rarely are things total conversions. And so, he had no idea it was this bad. He had no idea - like what the badness meant. Things come to people when they come to people no matter what’s happening around them. I think most people are better and worse than the things they say and do. And that, I’m not sure that Truman was fully converted. I’m sure he was still walking around dropping N-bombs like willy nilly - that’s part of who he was, that’s part of what he grew up with. But that he understood the difference between being Truman the person and Truman the President. They have different responsibilities. And then on some level, I’d say African Americans, but people living in America, because improving democracy makes things better for everybody. It matters less what Truman said or even what he thought on the inside than what he did.”
I feel like I have an answer to one of the questions of my quest. When did Truman’s views start to evolve on civil rights? But I was still curious about exactly what he did, its impact. And an X factor.
The President’s Committee on Civil Rights published its report, “To Secure These Rights,” in 1947, and among calls for fairer employment and housing laws, better voter protections and protection against involuntary servitude, came a call for an abatement of violence, an abatement of fear through prosecution of lynching and police brutality.
Spoiler: Congress wasn’t going to legislate on these things. But before the committee had issued its full report, president Truman was already making his next moves.
On June 29 1947, Truman gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial flanked by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Truman had drafted as US Representative to the brand new United Nations. Repeatedly while working as Chair to draft the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor had been pestered by the Soviet representative: how dare the US try to dictate to the world about universal rights and dignity when brutal racial injustices were prevalent in the US? The criticism was a classic Soviet ‘whataboutism’, but of course the US did contain difficult racial injustice.
Perhaps Eleanor wished for President Truman to right some of these obvious wrongs when she joined him at the Lincoln Memorial. There, Truman set the stage for his direct civil right action. Truman called, with major radio broadcasters listening, for basic racial justice: for jobs, education and healthcare, but specifically also, rights to participate in the ballot and receive fair trial in the American justice system, two of the most topical issues for black Americans at that moment. He added, “when I say ‘all’ Americans — I mean all Americans.”
Oh and by the way, to underline the serious nature, the speech was at the Lincoln Memorial was in front of members of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Truman was the first president to give a speech to the NAACP.
Elections in 1948
But these proposals were dead on arrival. The President’s own party was split on civil rights, and it was an election year.
But President Truman was willing to face the southern wing of his party which aggressively opposed civil rights legislation. Truman doubled down on February 2, 1948, issuing a message to Congress calling for legislation to address lynching, employment and voting rights - it’s prescient politics. “The” Voting Rights Act we all know so well passed in ‘65 under Lyndon Johnson; it took some lobbying and witnessing for President Kennedy to get on board with civil rights before his assassination in ‘63. So here’s Truman 17 years before the political will existed asking congress directly for it. quote:
“We cannot be satisfied until all our people have equal opportunities for jobs, for homes, for education, for health, and for political expression, and…equal protection under the law.”
As Truman doubled down, it was clear a southern Democratic revolt was brewing. 1948 was an election year, and the democratic nominating convention took place in Philadelphia. A plank on civil rights was narrowly accepted into the Democratic Party platform, so Southern Democrats left - some literally left the convention, like delegations from Mississippi and Alabama, a larger chunk gathered after the Democratic Convention and nominate their own candidate, Strom Thurmond, to run as a so-called ‘Dixiecrat’, a ‘states rights’ southern Democrat.
The lines were drawn, and here’s also where I’d like to put down a marker. Harry Truman didn’t have to make civil rights a big fight within his party. In fact, Southern Democrats prior to the nomination floor fight expected with enough noise they could get the president to back down. Why split the Democratic ticket and advantage the Republicans when silence on civil rights could vastly improve the difficult electoral math? Faced with similar calculus, John F. Kennedy kept his cards close to his chest on civil rights during the 1960 presidential election, for example. Harry Truman did not, and in my opinion - academic hat off - I think that speaks to his principles. He later wrote that if civil rights results:
“in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause.” (1,286).
So Truman stood his ground. The Democratic Party split, and the Republican Party ticket under Thomas E. Dewey was widely considered the easy frontrunner to be the next president of the United States. Truman had made his stance in civil rights known and had already faced consequences for it, but he had another couple things to do even before ballots were cast in November 1948, things that constitute the pretext for this here video. Congress wouldn’t act on civil rights, especially before an election, so Truman acted on his own.
The idea for the executive order desegregating the military came from a summer 1948 meeting between President Truman and Oscar Ewing. AJ deals with it in his book. The idea, according to Ewing, was that Truman needed to carry the civil rights momentum from the Democratic Convention, and quote “steer the black vote to the democratic party for years to come.” (1,178) Why wait?
A.J. Baime:
“He had come out campaigning for civil rights, this was on our platform, this was gonna happen. And I think his advisors came to him and said, you know, look, you’ve come this far, you gotta go all the way. There’s no point in stopping now. Let’s go all the way and let’s do something big.”
That big ‘something’ would be two executive orders, delivered in July 1948 - two executive orders signed the same day. The first was Executive Order 9980, which handled employment practices in the federal government. It banned racial discrimination in federal hiring. The second was Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the United States military, quote, “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
So Truman had taken action, and he was unapologetic. Just before ballots were to be cast in the general election, he gave a speech in Harlem in front of a majority black audience, admitting that he knew his actions on civil rights might be divisive, quote, “It is easy to talk of unity. But it is the work that is done for unity that really counts.” He knew there might be a political price to pay.
A.J. Baime:
“What he is referring to specifically when he uses that word unity: Tom Dewey ran this campaign in 1948 thinking that as long as he didn’t say - make any major mistakes he couldn’t lose…And so Dewey the Republican nominee for President spends his entire campaign in 1948 delivering these sort of verbose, floral speeches about this concept of unity. So when Truman says that he’s making fun of Dewey.”
Truman went on to defeat Dewey, the largest political upset of the 20th century, maybe all of American history. As it turns out, part of that victory might be traced back to civil rights. Despite Jim Crow, the number of registered black voters was rising in the south. Truman won big with black voters, and did so in a couple states important for his election victory, Ohio and Illinois.
I did want to talk a little bit about the politics of the situation. I asked A.J. Baime a little bit about it too, because Truman did take, it seems to me it’s fair to say, real personal political risk by advocating the form of civil rights that he did.
A.J. Baime:
“So the political calculus, I mean, it was a risk, but it was also a risk, I understand, where he couldn’t know initially like how it was going to play out. The Supreme Court had struck down the white primary in 1944 with the decision Smith vs. Allwright, which meant there could have been more political black participation in the South. Also the ‘Great Migration’ had created vigorous black voting blocks in the North. They’d started to go for the Democrats, so the sort of you know, farewell to the party of Lincoln narrative where blacks start voting for Democrats in national elections in larger numbers in ‘36. But there’s still loads of black Republicans because some people don’t believe in the permanence of sincerity of this conversion of the Democrats to the cause of civil rights. So if Truman wants to make a play for them, want to make a grab for them, like if Truman wanted to be in the mix then moving forward on the issue of civil rights made a certain kind of sense.”
It’s a satisfying resolution: he took a stand, shattered his party over principle, and still came out ahead.
Fake Conclusion
Truman had, said his White House Counsel Clark Clifford, quote “capacity to grow,” (3,589) The same Truman who once wrote, “I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”
The man who wrote that, was raised with racial prejudice, and said plenty more prejudiced things - also grew and made a positive change. Perhaps it’s too lofty and pretentious to mention, but I’m reminded of Walt Whitman’s words, “I am large, I contain multitudes." Truman was a man of contradiction, of humble origin, who had every precondition necessary to be as problematic a Democratic President as Woodrow Wilson on race. Truman was a man given prejudice in his childhood, kept some in adulthood, but overcame, pursued principle when actually handed power - when told, ‘don’t just quip your thoughts on other races in letters’; do something.
And that’s a rarity. So many become worse when handed power. Think of your average politician; does politics make them better? More principled? Not often. Truman knew this too. I bumped into this quote while reading AJ’s book. Truman once wrote, “Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man,” (1,50). Yeah. But on the issue of race, especially when it left the written word and entered the realm of policy, politics did not ruin Harry S. Truman.
Real Conclusion
That was my conclusion, but I found it so unsatisfying - not because it’s wrong. Through my quest I did seek out cynical political calculations on the part of Truman, and I found evidence of him saying a few unsavory things, sure. But I’ve read a bunch and talked to a few folks who would know, and it seems like Truman fits this narrative pretty well: a man of humble origins who overcame his upbringing and did some of the right things when given power.
But my discomfort isn’t about President Truman. It’s about the model of change. ‘Great man does X. Things change for the better. Next great man comes, another improvement.’ Let me explain myself.
First, the idea that the arch of history bends towards justice is bunk in my eyes. That every generation struggles and overcomes and leave the world better is fairytale.
The more important point is the model of change, the top-down approach. In this case, our story focused on President Truman, and that’s partly because of the big anniversary, and it’s partly because it’s an easy story to tell. Persons with power sees the light and makes a change. It’s a narrative you’ve heard from me here with Truman, with JFK, with LBJ - it could also be used with Eisenhower, Lincoln, on and on.
I visited Valley Forge where General George Washington kept the Continental Army for a decisive winter of training during the Revolutionary War. The book store was full of tomes with this sort of narrative. David McCullough’s Washington biography was there, and I referenced his Truman biography lots in this video. I didn’t memorize the book selection at Valley Forge, but I saw things like Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, or Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I’m confident Jon Meacham’s Battle for our Better Angels was there. And I probably walked past something from Doris Kearns Goodwin on Teddy Roosevelt. I know these books because I’ve read them, and to be clear I’m not commenting on their value as researched books. I’m honing in on the picture they paint.
So let me doodle some now with my brush, admittedly broad strokes. These books tend to present a top-down model. Strong leader seizes the moment; we ain’t perfect; our country ain’t perfect; but garsh darnit, we try. And over the timeline you’ll see more imperfect people just doin their best, and that’s the story we gotta push because that’s who we are, as Americans.
It seems superficial, but I think a lot of pop history, especially American pop history falls into this trap. Hell, I fell in it for this Truman video. Change is top down.
It’s not always wrong; power can make change. But it’s missing something; it’s not enough. I had two professors, one in undergrad and one in grad school. Professor A was old-school, on the verge of retirement as a military historian. His class on American post civil war history was an explication of presidency after presidency. First, we have President Ulysses S. Grant. He did X. One two skip a few, we had Chester A. Arthur and he did Y. And don’t forget Grover Cleveland - did you know he did Z? As if society is just waiting around with bated breath for people in power to sign papers and change the world.
Now professor B, who gave a class on the 60’s in my last year of grad school. He always started with culture, writers, even music. The 60’s weren’t defined by LBJ’s Great Society; LBJ’s legislation was born of the radicalism of the culture, the change happening all around. The people on the Edmund Pettis Bridge beaten in Selma knew he was watching; they had been agitating him for a long time to take action, just like they had agitated his predecessor. Then LBJ saw Bloody Sunday and seized the moment. That’s one sentence and everything that comes before it is a paragraph. But it doesn’t stop there. Those ‘below’ LBJ were influenced by those around them; the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee argued and read more radical thought and lived the deep south and jammed to 60’s music with countercultural lyrics, and then after everything bubbled in a pot for a few decades we got the soup, the Civil Rights Act of ‘64. This perspective flips the script, LBJ is almost a passenger. Change is made from the bottom up, from ordinary people, culture, activists, and then…eventually hits the top, the President in this case. History is a far more interesting experience if you flip the snowglobe occasionally and see what floats down. It can be a more truthful pursuit too.
So here we are with Truman. I’m not thrilled I told you the top-down version - the one where a man of humble origins overcomes and makes positive change. It’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete. I asked some of the people I interviewed for help with this little narrative crisis I was having.
William C. Fox to Adriane Lenzt-Smith:
“And I finished my video. And I finished writing the script. And I realized like…I written this before. I’ve read books, like from David Mccullough, from Gordon Wood, from Jon Meacham, from Doris Kearns Goodwin, where, we have this top-down view of history where person comes, imperfect person comes, they do the right thing, the arch of history bends towards justice. Then the next person comes, and the same story plays out: with LBJ, with JFK, with whatever, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Truman. Am I thinking about this the wrong way, by thinking that the story really needs to start somewhere else - not in Truman’s childhood in Missouri - Truman is the last piece of the puzzle that comes in much later - that there is a whole series of events, this cultural bubbling, this pot stirring, that one day eventually gets us an executive order, and that realy, Truman is a sidekick in that story rather than the protagonist.”
Prof Lenzt-Smith:
“Yeah, I mean, there always like, a tension between talking about the social and the political history and the way, and culture, and the way that all of these drive action, drive agency. Right, so the question that you asked, ‘why does Truman do that?’ Right. The really fascinating stuff is not: Truman signed an executive order. It’s: what was happening, not just in the country but in the world that made this a thing that Truman saw it was necessary to do. Who pushed him, or what kind of experiences pushed him? How did he learn to think a different way than circumstance would have you assume that he would think?”
Some other things happened between Truman’s childhood of the late 1800’s and his ascension to President of the United States in 1945. One of them was the Great War.
Truman was 33 years old when he joined up and headed to France as Captain Truman (3,102). Truman came back a changed man, a man interested in running for office, for example. His experience was different than the experience of black soldiers.
The US military was segregated in World War I. I’m quoting an official report here, which described the military’s position on the matter thusly, quote “Tests conducted by the military disclosed that the level of ability and technical skill of Negroes as a group is considerably below that of whites as a group…As for the question of racial segregation, the military services argued that they must be guided by precedent and custom…they must take care not to get ahead of the country.” Therefore, in practice, as in during wartime such as World War I, quote “Negroes could not be employed over the same range of military jobs as whites.”
This is the armed force Harry Truman served in. While he came home inspired to get his life really going, to seize the opportunities afforded him, black soldiers came home to the old life, to steal a quote from a soldier Dr. Lentz-Smith researched: “I have the world's experience.”
William C. Fox to Adriane Lenzt-Smith:
“Sergeant Christopher Columbus Watts. I think the quote that you pulled from him that I hear most often is ‘I have the world’s experience.’ That’s in reference to his time during World War I coming back to America. What was his experience in Europe, and why did he use those words when writing about his time there?”
Prof Lenzt-Smith:
“Christopher Columbus Watts was a black Viriginian who joined a combat unit during World War I. And was part of the battle of the Meuse–Argonne, so vicious battle. And that was part of Watts’s experience, he came back with injuries, some of which stayed with him for his whole life. But the other part of his experience, as was the case for many black soldiers who journeyed abroad during World War I was just seeing a world beyond the places that they knew. And that could mean a lot of things. It could mean seeing black soldiers, or African descended soldiers from elsewhere in the world and realizing that blackness was bigger. It involved being in a place where the racial codes and the racial strictures were different - that isn’t to say non-existent, but at least different. And for black Americans and especially black Southerners realizing that the system of labor exploitation and inequality that we shorthand as Jim Crow that they grew up with - it was place - it was particular to the place that they were. Right. Everyone told them that white supremacy was universal and timeless. And traveling abroad let them see the way it was contextualized. And for it to not be everywhere and everything also meant that it could be hemmed in, constrained, and undone.”
How does a black soldier come home from Europe having served the country, having seen another world, an imperfect but non-Jim Crow world, and just go back to how it was. These were the people who returned home, and many of them started advocating for change decades before Truman’s executive order.
So you see: the story isn’t simply Truman changed his attitude and then made a change in power. The narrative has to start further back, go deeper, acknowledge that change doesn’t start top-down all the time.
The thing I want to leave you with is the expanded sense of cause and effect that I’m wrestling with, not because I’ve got it figured out, but because I’m working on it right now. It’s the last open question of this quest, and an open question in a lot of my recent work. If you join me in thinking about it, the two of us won’t be alone.
If you’ll allow me to put the pretentious pedal to the metal one last time, here’s a passage from Tolstoy’s War and Peace that kept popping in my head while working on this piece. Tolstoy was giga chad enough to interrupt his fiction book to give a hot take on the history profession:
“The sea of history was not driven spasmodically from shore to shore as previously. It was seething in its depths. Historic figures were not borne by the waves from one shore to another as before. They now seemed to rotate on one spot.”
I love the idea of human history as an ocean. There are depths, shores, currents, mysteries, these are the waves upon which historical figures breach and sink.
And that’s how I choose, finally, to see Truman’s actions on civil rights. Looking out to sea, in the distance, a figure might emerge from just below the surface, they might splash and leave ripples, and we can admire that. And that’s ok. As long as we remember there’s a vast ocean to explore too. History isn’t as simple as presidents and pens.
Heads held high, happy warriors. Later y’all.
-William C. Fox
I learned so much! Thank you!