Truman could see shattered bridges, railroads, the wreckage of factories, entire cities in ruins, a scarred, burned land where, he knew, people were living like animals among the debris, scavenging for food. The threat of disease and mass starvation hung everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of displaced, homeless, and dispossessed people wandered the country. Not Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, not any war President in American history, had ever beheld such a panorama of devastation.
