Successful End to Legal Segregation

The good economy and popular foreign policy (especially the Berlin airlift) did not guarantee President Truman's reelection in 1948.  Inflation was proving to be the one weak spot in the economy as consumer demand outstripped production. Between the middle of 1946 to January 1948 inflation topped double digits, at times reaching nearly 20 percent (compare with 2020 rate of 1.23 percent).  This particularly hurt older Americans on fixed incomes. The rate fell below ten percent in February 1948 and slowly headed downward through the year, but it was not clear it would be enough to help Truman’s reelection chances.

More problematic for Truman were serious splits in the Democratic party.  Angry progressives rallied to former VP Henry Wallace’s effort to replace Truman by forming a new Progressive Party.  Wallace and his supporters believed that Truman was leading the nation toward war with the Soviet Union.

More significantly, Truman alienated white (at the time the only kind) southern Democrats by becoming the first Democratic president to support federal anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation. (There is an irony here that northern Democrats had won over African American voters while southern Democrats denied African Americans the vote). Some angry southern delegates bolted the 1948 Democratic Convention in protest over modest civil rights planks in the platform and formed their own “States’ Rights Party”, better known as the “Dixiecrats”, nominating South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president.

Truman responded to some southern Democrats deserting the party by issuing an Executive Order desegregating US armed forces (26 July 1948) for the first time since the American Revolutionary War. (Truman was reacting also in part to Soviet criticisms of the US discriminatory treatment of its African American citizens)

Truman therefore faced defections from both the left and right wings of his party.  Gleeful Republicans again nominated the affable if not exciting Thomas Dewey who he, the press, the pollsters, and most everyone but Truman expected to win.

Yet Truman campaigned hard against what he called “the Republican do-nothing Congress”. (Republicans had won the House in 1946 for the first time since 1928 and the Senate for the first time since 1930). Dewey ran a civil, positive, upbeat campaign, whereas Truman didn’t (unfortunately negative and nasty politics wins elections more often than positive and polite politics). Critics claimed Dewey also didn’t offer voters much of a choice as he largely supported Truman’s foreign policy and the New Deal.  Still, with the splits in the Democratic party—Henry Wallace was drawing huge crowds and Thurmond was going to win the Deep South--Dewey looked like a shoo-in.  So much so, Gallup stopped polling a week before the election because Dewey was so far ahead…in its polling. (Personally, I would ban polls at least two weeks before an election as they are frequently wrong and can skew elections)

On election day 1948, Truman surprised everyone…except maybe Truman, by winning the election easily, taking 303 Electoral College votes to Dewey’s 189 and Thurmond’s 39. Truman also won 49.5% of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45%, while Thurmond and Wallace each won 2.4%.  See election map below:

So what happened? Fears that a Republican president could bring back the Depression combined with the fact that the right and left wing splits in the Democratic party made Truman the most moderate appearing candidate (which is usually who you want to be in American politics).  Furthermore, Truman had defeated Japan and was overseeing an economic boom.  He had also stood up to the Russians without going to war with them. In retrospect, it's somewhat hard to see why anyone should have thought Truman would lose. (Polls, polls, and more polls)

Below:  To the glee of President Truman, the Chicago Daily Tribune mistakenly declares Dewey the winner in the biggest upset until 2016

Below: An eerily similar mistake in 2016

Unfortunately for Truman, he fell victim to the second term jinx (i.e. with few exceptions, a president’s second term does not go as well as his first) almost immediately with a string of foreign policy embarrassments and mistakes.  In September 1949 the Soviet Union successfully tested its own atomic bomb, breaking the American monopoly. US intelligence had predicted the Russians wouldn’t be able to do this until 1960!  (As noted earlier the US nuclear problem was riddled with Soviet spies without whom it probably would have taken the Soviets until 1960 to build "the Bomb”)

In October 1949 communist revolutionaries under Mao Zedong ousted the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek just two months after the Truman administration cut aid to the corrupt but anti-communist regime which in defeat fled to Taiwan. The new People’s Republic of China immediately allied itself with the USSR which had been supporting its revolution. Suddenly communism, which had been stymied in Europe, was on the march in Asia.  (Btw Mao Zedong, through mass political purges and horrible economic policies, led millions of Chinese to their deaths by murderous executions or starvation.  Only the murderous regimens of Stalin and Hitler—some would estimate combined-- are comparable in the annals of political mass murderers)

Critics of the administration blamed Truman for “losing” China which militarily threatened Japan then under US occupation led by General Douglas MacArthur.  Japan had become a remarkable success story. With almost dictatorial powers, MacArthur dismantled the Japanese military, drafted a democratic constitution, and oversaw a revitalization of the economy that ultimately permitted the restoration of Japanese sovereignty in 1951. The wartime enemy had been transformed into a postwar ally in an incredibly short period of time. (The same was true with West Germany, as noted earlier).

With China now communist, Secretary of State Dean Acheson publicly announced in December 1949 that US defensive interests in the Asian Pacific lay with Japan and the Philippines. Other Asians nations confronted by China or another communist threat, would have to either go it alone or rely on the United Nations for military assistance. Crucially Acheson left out the Korean peninsula.

Korea, which had been occupied by Japan during the war, was divided with a communist government supported by Stalin in the north at Pyongyang, and a noncommunist somewhat democratic government in the south at Seoul supported by the US.

Acheson's statement served as a green light for North Korea’s dictator Kim Il Sung, with military and financial support from Stalin and Mao, to launch a surprise invasion of the south in an attempt to forcibly unify the country under a communist regime in June 1950.  (Kim Il Sung is the late grandfather of current North Korean communist dictator Kim Jong-Un, who former President Trump once dubbed “Rocket Man”)

Truman politically could not afford to let South Korea fall after the China debacle and the threat that would pose to Japan.  Truman decided to go to the United Nations (UN) to get its authorization for the US and other willing nations to intervene militarily on behalf of South Korea. The UN resolution passed because the USSR was boycotting the session and failed to use its veto to block the authorization of a  "police action"  (not technically a war) to save South Korea. Truman immediately ordered MacArthur to send US troops from Japan to Korea.

Truman claimed he didn’t need Congressional approval to deploy troops on grounds that as Commander-in-Chief he had the right to deploy US troops to uphold UN treaty agreements.  (Do you all recall Henry Cabot Lodge’s fear that if the US joined the League of Nations, the US would be bound to militarily intervene in conflicts without Congressional authorization?  Hmmm)

Fortunately for Truman…and South Korea, the American public supported the Korean War, at least initially, so Congress went along.  Unfortunately, US and South Korean forces were quickly driven south in September 1950, losing Seoul and finding themselves under siege in the Pusan Perimeter (see map below)

That some month however, MacArthur executed perhaps the most brilliant counter-attack in US military history with an amphibious landing behind North Korean lines at Inchon on the peninsula’s west coast.  In about two weeks, MacArthur had killed, wounded, or captured some 65,000 North Korean soldiers and had restored the 38th parallel as the border between the two countries. Total US casualties numbered around 5,000.  

BEYOND CONTAINMENT: Truman agrees to allowing UN forces (although the US provided most of the troops, a host of other nations also sent forces to Korea) to move beyond the 38th parallel in an effort to unify Korea under a single (somewhat) democratic government. Communist China warned against such a move but nevertheless US forces took Pyongyang and even reached the Chinese border on the Yalu river.  In response, 300,000 Chinese troops in November 1950 (diverted from a planned invasion of Taiwan) counterattacked.  US troops were beaten and forced to retreat rapidly back below the 38th parallel and Seoul fell again. 

At a congressional hearing, a dismayed US senator said to Acheson (arguably the clumsiest Secretary of State this country has ever had): "They really fooled us...didn't they."  Acheson replied, "Yes sir."

A United Nations counteroffensive (again led by the US)  took Seoul one more time in March 1951 but thereafter a stalemate emerged along or near the 38th parallel followed by truce talks that dragged on for two years.  (See maps below of the major Korean War campaigns) 

MacArthur wanted permission to use atomic bombs on Chinese military targets. Truman refused fearing Soviet nuclear retaliation.  MacArthur then publicly criticized the Commander-in-Chief’s conduct of the war which led Truman to rightly fire him.  (Whether a president is right or wrong, no president can tolerate any government subordinate to criticize him publicly. To do so would ruin the president’s credibility with his administration, the public, and foreign governments, making it impossible to govern effectively).  

Although there weren’t demonstrations on college campuses or young men burning draft cards as happened later in protests against the Vietnam War, Americans were aghast at the war’s growing costs in blood and treasure.  In 1952 Truman decided not to run again (though he was exempted from the 22nd Amendment passed in 1951 limiting a president to two terms or ten years if serving the remainder of a previous president’s term).

The Republicans nominated General Dwight (“Ike”) David Eisenhower, who had planned and executed the D-Day invasion and had defeated Germany on the western front.  Most Americans believed Eisenhower more likely than his Democratic opponent, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, to bring about a successful end to the war. See the link to a political advert for Eisenhower: