American Experience

Historian Alonzo Hamby on Truman and Civil Rights

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Truman starts out trying to support the major elements of the liberal constituency on reconversion. He gives the labor unions more or less of a hunting license to go out and negotiate large increases with management. He supports price controls, but there's another side of him also. Here's a man who has a background as a small businessman, so that he doesn't have a feeling that unions are a hundred percent right. He as a small businessman, has a certain level of distrust of price controls. So the result is that when the unions ask for 30 percent wage increases and business says, "We've gotta have equivalent price increases to finance this," the government winds up backing off trying to look for compromises. The labor unions especially get upset. They feel the Administration's deserting them. They expect a hundred percent backing from a Democratic president. So throughout late 1945 and into 1946, Truman's estrangement from the labor leadership -- here's a constituency absolutely crucial to the Democratic Party -- grows until some leaders are saying he's anti-labor.

I think maybe his biggest mistakes are tactical. He doesn't give a country any sense of direction. He seems to be going back and forth. He gives the appearance of being unable to deal with all the economic problems of reconversion and he comes to be the person that the unions blame for not being able to get the large wage settlements that they had wanted, that consumers blame when they can't go into a store and buy what they want, and that a public fed up with one strike after another blames for labor disorder.

Whatever he does, it's not going to please everyone who's associated with the Democratic Party. And he is sort of caught up in the divisions among different constituencies that he needs to appeal to. If you go all the way with labor, then the the Southern Democrats, the more conservative Democrats in general, are going to be very unhappy with you. And he's sort of trapped in this mode and he's not able to emerge as a decisive leader until the Democrats lose control of Congress. And then he can sound tough and decisive, particularly since by that time he's done away with the economic management apparatus with price controls, rationing altogether as a result of the 1946 election.

Once the Democrats have lost control of Congress in 1946, Truman no longer has to worry about leading a Democratic majority in Congress. Moreover, by this point, price controls, rationing have been phased out. The economy's been de-controlled. So he's no longer responsible for this impossible job of trying to manage it so that we have a smooth reconversion. And, as a matter of fact, if the economy goes badly, particularly if there's a lot of inflation, he can blame it on the Republicans, who were the most vociferous opponents of price controls, anyway. A lot of things are no longer as pinnable on him as they had been.

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