1. Today is the birthday of the President who made the journey named in the title.
1884 Harry S. Truman, 33rd Pres (1945-1953), born in Lamar, Missouri. He was the first President to take office in the midst of a war. He was the first President in 50 years without a college education. For the first time a President shifted the nation from a war footing to a peacetime economy without suffering a depression. He issued a 21-point message called his Fair Deal, calling for full employment, and other economic powers.
In foreign policy, he issued the Truman Doctrine to curtail Russia, and announce the Marshall Plan. In 1948 he issued a civil-rights program to end religious and racial discrimination. Minutes after the state of Israel was announced, President Truman recognized the sovereignty of the nation over the objections of his Secretary of State Marshall.
2. Truman was the third vice-president to the man who was not just the Socialist Godfather of the Democrat Party, FDR, who was a vassal of Joseph Stalin, and who threatened the Democrat Party that he would not run a second time if he were not given a communist as his vice-president... Henry Wallace.
Truman was a compromise between FDR and the Democrat Party.
Truman was an unknown who the Left felt they could manipulate.
3. It has been one of those blessings of Providence that Harry Truman replaced the communist Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's vice president. Truman was a fine American.....yet he could not resist the 'communist disease' any more than many other fine Americans of the era.
a. As President of the United States, he denounced the Hiss case as a "red herring" and tolerated in his Cabinet such abettors of world communism as George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson.
4. As was true of so may other Americans, Truman certainly didn't begin with such inclinations. What happened?
According to "The Man of Independence," an authorized Truman biography by Jonathan Daniels, it was Max Lowenthal, a crafty southpaw government lawyer, who first corrupted Truman's mind with Marxist prejudices against railroads, insurance companies, and "big business" generally. Lowenthal was counsel to a Senate Interstate Commerce Subcommittee. In 1936 Truman, an eager member of the subcommittee, fell under Lowenthal's spell. When Lowenthal proposed to take him to see Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the country boy said he was "not used to meeting people like that," but he went anyway and became a disciple of "the great liberal," who held forth on the evils of the American economic system.
Manly, "The Twenty Year Revolution," p. 137.
Truman moved so far to the Left, that after his election, he received this salute from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,: "The conceptions of the intellectual are at last beginning to catch up with the instincts of the Democratic politician."
5. But, there is this:
"The conduct of President Truman in this case was particularly hard to understand. No one would question the tough-minded anti-Communism of the man who had so boldly initiated the program of Greek-Turkish aid and the Marshall Plan....He denied outright the evidence in front of him and he stumped the 1948 political trail flailing away at 'the red herring'..."
Richard Nixon on the Meaning of the Hiss Case
But Truman learned what Roosevelt wouldn't accept about Stalin.
And, for a time, America returned to being America.
But the Democrats/Communists proved too powerful.....and today they are the majority party.
Happy Birthday, and Rest in peace, Harry......you tried.
1884 Harry S. Truman, 33rd Pres (1945-1953), born in Lamar, Missouri. He was the first President to take office in the midst of a war. He was the first President in 50 years without a college education. For the first time a President shifted the nation from a war footing to a peacetime economy without suffering a depression. He issued a 21-point message called his Fair Deal, calling for full employment, and other economic powers.
In foreign policy, he issued the Truman Doctrine to curtail Russia, and announce the Marshall Plan. In 1948 he issued a civil-rights program to end religious and racial discrimination. Minutes after the state of Israel was announced, President Truman recognized the sovereignty of the nation over the objections of his Secretary of State Marshall.
2. Truman was the third vice-president to the man who was not just the Socialist Godfather of the Democrat Party, FDR, who was a vassal of Joseph Stalin, and who threatened the Democrat Party that he would not run a second time if he were not given a communist as his vice-president... Henry Wallace.
Truman was a compromise between FDR and the Democrat Party.
Truman was an unknown who the Left felt they could manipulate.
3. It has been one of those blessings of Providence that Harry Truman replaced the communist Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's vice president. Truman was a fine American.....yet he could not resist the 'communist disease' any more than many other fine Americans of the era.
a. As President of the United States, he denounced the Hiss case as a "red herring" and tolerated in his Cabinet such abettors of world communism as George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson.
4. As was true of so may other Americans, Truman certainly didn't begin with such inclinations. What happened?
According to "The Man of Independence," an authorized Truman biography by Jonathan Daniels, it was Max Lowenthal, a crafty southpaw government lawyer, who first corrupted Truman's mind with Marxist prejudices against railroads, insurance companies, and "big business" generally. Lowenthal was counsel to a Senate Interstate Commerce Subcommittee. In 1936 Truman, an eager member of the subcommittee, fell under Lowenthal's spell. When Lowenthal proposed to take him to see Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the country boy said he was "not used to meeting people like that," but he went anyway and became a disciple of "the great liberal," who held forth on the evils of the American economic system.
Manly, "The Twenty Year Revolution," p. 137.
Truman moved so far to the Left, that after his election, he received this salute from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,: "The conceptions of the intellectual are at last beginning to catch up with the instincts of the Democratic politician."
5. But, there is this:
"The conduct of President Truman in this case was particularly hard to understand. No one would question the tough-minded anti-Communism of the man who had so boldly initiated the program of Greek-Turkish aid and the Marshall Plan....He denied outright the evidence in front of him and he stumped the 1948 political trail flailing away at 'the red herring'..."
Richard Nixon on the Meaning of the Hiss Case
But Truman learned what Roosevelt wouldn't accept about Stalin.
And, for a time, America returned to being America.
But the Democrats/Communists proved too powerful.....and today they are the majority party.
Happy Birthday, and Rest in peace, Harry......you tried.
