Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

"All the 'Artists' with a Capital A, the parlor pinks and the soprano voiced men are banded together. . . . I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin."

IT HAPPENS OFTEN in history that nations take bold moves only when external events force their hand. That happened to the Truman administration in early 1947, when Great Britain sent word that it no longer had the resources to maintain political stability in Greece and Turkey, areas that the British had until then considered parts of their sphere of interest.

Truman's now more harmonious team of foreign policy advisers, led by Secretary Marshall and Undersecretary Acheson, quickly determined that the United States must step into Britain's shoes and provide military aid to Greece and Turkey. But the administration worried about Congress.

A much larger problem was the attitude of Republicans, who had swept to majorities in both houses in the 1946 elections. That made Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan head of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Acheson then jumped into action with a dramatic and deliberately florid statement of what was later to be known as the "domino theory" of foreign interconnection.

Truman, however, had succeeded in seizing a political middle ground between anti-interventionists, most of whom were on the right, and Wallaceites on the left. Anti-Communists in both parties swallowed their reservations and generally supported the President.

The Truman Doctrine was not by itself a turning point in American foreign policy.

Still, the Truman Doctrine was a highly publicized commitment of a sort the administration had not previously undertaken.

Equally important was the other half of American foreign policy ventures in 1947, the so-called Marshall Plan of economic aid to western Europe.

The gears of Big Ben froze, and England at one point was but a week away from running out of coal.

On the contrary, the aid would give the Europeans the means not only to rebuild themselves but also to buy American goods. The Marshall Plan, in short, would abet American prosperity as well as European recovery.52

It is arguable, especially in retrospect, that the Marshall Plan had some unfortunate, though unintended, consequences. Together with the Truman Doctrine, it greatly alarmed Stalin, who more than ever suspected that these American efforts were part of a concerted conspiracy to encircle him.56

It is also possible to exaggerate the impact of ERP on the European economies. Americans, certain of their rectitude, power, and wealth, tend to do this without recognizing the important role that the industrious and efficient west Europeans played in their own recovery.

But most of these qualifications do not detract from the remarkable success of the Marshall Plan, which funneled $13.34 billion in aid to western Europe between 1948 and 1952.

Instead the services, notably the Navy Department under Forrestal, fought tenaciously against centralization, and the final bill left the services with considerable autonomy.

The National Security Act created two other agencies that were later to become important parts of America's defense bureaucracy. One, the National Security Council (NSC), was to be controlled by the White House, not—as Forrestal had wanted—by the Pentagon. The other, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), promised to give the United States—at last—a permanent intelligence-gathering bureaucracy.

It was only later, in the 1950s and 1960s, that the provisions of the National Security Act turned out to be significant additions to the centralized power of the State.

It was not only raising the risk of armed conflicts but also souring the political atmosphere at home.

To focus on mistakes of the Truman administration or on the role of American popular opinion, however, is to miss the most significant source of the Cold War in the 1940s. That was the uniquely difficult and bipolar world that suddenly arose after World War II: two very different societies and cultures found themselves face-to-face in a world of awesome weaponry.

To secure this support they resorted to a fair amount of harping—and some exaggeration—about the dangers that the Soviet Union and international Communism posed to the "Free World."

The apocalyptic character of the Cold War owed even more, however, to the peculiarly suspicious, dictatorial, and often hostile stance of Stalin.

Truman's uncertainty was entirely understandable, for to millions of Americans, especially the poor, Roosevelt had been an almost saintly father figure. Liberals had regarded him as the very model of strong presidential leadership in battles for social change.

By 1945, however, many of these people, such as upwardly mobile blue-collar workers, were becoming "haves"—interest groups with much to be gained from supporting the status quo.

In this way, as in many others, the recovery of the American economy reshaped American politics—for the most part toward the center and the right.5

But since 1937 power on Capitol Hill had usually belonged to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, many of them from the South.

Some of Truman's views also put him at loggerheads with liberals. One was his fiscal conservatism.

Moreover, few politicians in Truman's lifetime (Roosevelt included) favored deficit spending in times of prosperity.

Truman also believed strongly that he was President of all the people. This did not mean that he claimed, as President Eisenhower later did, to be above politics.

As much as anything, Truman's personal style discouraged liberal Democrats in 1945–46.

Liberals also assumed wrongly that there was great reform sentiment among the people, just waiting to be aroused by an inspiring leader.

A powerful medical lobby headed by the American Medical Association (AMA) attacked the plan as socialistic, and conservatives in Congress agreed. The plan never came close to passage.18

Instead, the AMA backed the so-called Hill-Burton bill, which Congress approved in 1946. It provided federal aid for hospital construction, thereby pleasing building company interests as well as medical leaders.

The Hill-Burton Act mainly benefited doctors, hospital administrators, and the rising network of medical insurers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield.19

Jokes reflected the popular mood. "Would you like a Truman beer? You know, the one with no head." "To err is Truman." Remembering FDR, people asked, "I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive."

In doing so the Republicans underestimated Truman, who counter-attacked vigorously after his party's decisive defeat in the 1946 elections.

Nothing did more for Truman's standing among liberals than his ringing veto message condemning the Taft-Hartley bill in June.

CLARK CLIFFORD, A NATIVE of St. Louis, had worked as a lawyer before serving in the navy during the war. He entered the Truman administration in 1945 as a junior naval aide.

Truman's support for civil rights did not include social mixing of the races.

Still, Truman's appointment of such a liberal committee, and his endorsement of the report, stamped him as a friend of civil rights. No American President before him, FDR included, had taken such a strong stand.

The order affecting the civil service called for an end to discrimination, not immediately to segregation.

More important was his order against segregation in the armed services, into which millions of impressionable young men were later to be drafted.

But this order, too, was implemented only slowly, in part because of resistance to it among top military leaders, who were frightened that desegregation would damage military discipline and provoke fighting among the troops.

Not until 1954 was the process of desegregation in the Army complete in the sense that no unit was more than one-half black.

Truman's caution on the issue of civil rights greatly bothered many liberals. But his backtracking rested on a political reality that had paralyzed Roosevelt, too: the Democratic party had always been badly divided on the issue of race.

"Dixiecrats," as opponents branded them, carried four Deep South states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) for Thurmond in November. So much for Clifford's predictions about the loyalty of what was obviously the no-longer-so-solid South.

It was immediately clear, however, that partition—which involved creation of a Jewish state—would drive the Arabs to war.

Helping to set up an independent nation for the Jews, they thought, would endanger American relations with the Moslem world, thereby undermining Truman Doctrine efforts to promote stability in Turkey, Iran, and Arab countries.

Here as at other times in his presidency, Truman vacillated, exhibiting little of the "buck stops here" decisiveness with which he has been credited.

Truman's policies had controversial long-range results. Hoping for the best, Truman aligned the United States with the Jews and therefore against the Arabs.40

Some liberal Democrats who were cool to Wallace also searched for ways to dump Truman in early 1948.