*The end of World War I had seen a significant downturn in important parts of the American economy, and at first it looked like the end of World War II would do the same thing.  However, unlike the government under Wilson, ill from his stroke and obsessed with the League of Nations or during the Return to Normalcy that followed, FDR and Truman made every effort ‘to [as the 1946 Employment Act put it] promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.’  The Employment Act created a Council of Economic Advisers to advise the president on doing just that.

*As soon as the war ended, the government sold off factories cheap, hoping to stimulate the economy, but with government contracts drying up, so did the need for labour.  At the same time, the end of wage and price controls meant that prices were rising faster than wages.

*Reasonably co-operative during WWII, labour unions began to become more active in peacetime, but conservatives moved to cut them off, and the 1946 election of a Republican Congress helped.  In 1947, the Taft-Hartley bill was passed.  Sponsored by Senator Robert Taft, the son of President Taft, and State Symbols (three topics), and Representative Fred Hartley, the Act modified the Wagner Act, outlawing certain types of strikes, boycotts, picket lines, and the closed shop.  It also forced union leaders to swear that they were not communists.  Labour leaders called it a ‘slave-labour law.’

*Another problem for unions was their own difficulty in organizing, which was not helped by the Taft-Hartley Act.  Traditionally strong in the North, the unions had grown more in the industrial centres of the North during the New Deal, but after WWII, they had a hard time making much headway in the South or West, areas traditionally anti-union.  In 1948 the CIO attempted ‘Operation Dixie,’ to organise the South, but this failed miserably, in large part because white and black working-class southerners did not want to work together.  The growing service industry sector would also prove hard to organise.  One reason for the growth of non-industrial employment was the increased level of education in the country.

*One important government effort to help the economy and the average man began in 1944, with the passage of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, or the GI Bill of Rights (or GI Bill).  To help absorb the 15 million returning veterans, the GI Bill helped pay for veterans to go to college—and between 1945 and 1955 around 8 million veterans would take advantage of this, costing about $14.5 billion—more than the Marshall Plan.  The act also allowed the VA to make about $16 billion in loans to veterans to help them buy houses, farms, and businesses—which not only helped veterans, it also helped the construction industry.  Even to-day, the government will help pay to educate members of the armed services (it’s why many people join), and the VA still makes loans to veterans.

*Despite the efforts of the government, the economy was largely stagnant in the first few years after the end of WWII, and unemployment began to rise.  However, things remained far better than they had been during the Depression, and did not drop off as they had after WWI.

*The Cold War did little to ease tensions in America, although it did create a scapegoat for them.  As the Soviet Union came to been seen more and more clearly as the enemy, the fear arose that they were funding spies in the United States.  Eventually the NSC, CIA, and of course the FBI would attempt to foil this espionage, but, of course, it was never possible to be sure who was a spy or if all the spies had been rooted out.  Unfortunately, this reasonable (and justified) concern would soon turn to paranoia and persecution.

*In 1947, Truman launched a loyalty campaign.  The attorney general drew up a list of 90 supposedly disloyal organisations, which were not allowed to refute the charges.  A Loyalty Review Board investigate over 3 million federal employees, and over 3,000 resigned or were dismissed, although none were ever formally indicted.

*States, businesses, and other organisations began requiring loyalty oaths.

*The Smith Act of 1940, an anti-sedition law, was enforced.  In 1949, in New York, 11 communists, including Eugene Dennis, the head of the American Communist Party, were convicted of advocating the overthrow of the government, and were imprisoned.  Over the next two years another 46 members were arrested and charged of advocating the overthrow of the government.  The original conviction (and therefore the subsequent ones) was upheld in 1951 by the Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States.

*Another old law was put to new use in the Cold War.  In 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been created to investigate and eliminate subversion.  Now it was specifically turned against communists (and supposed communists).  In 1948, the young Representative Richard Nixon, a Navy (non-combatant) veteran, a PepsiCo lawyer, not a Mason, and member of the HUAC began to harass communists and alleged communists in the government, most famously Alger Hiss.

*Hiss was a New Deal Democrat.  He has attended Yalta and been deeply involved in the creation of the UN.  Nixon accused him of having been a communist agent in the 1930s when he worked in the State Department.  Nixon had gotten information through the Catholic Church, long opposed to communism (at least Soviet-style) and through the FBI, much of it illegally.  There are even accusations that Nixon made fake artifacts, notably a typewriter, for use as exhibits against Hiss.

*By 1948 Hiss no longer worked for the government, but for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  However, he agreed to stand trial, and was ultimately caught out on perjury, claiming not to know a man he actually had met.  He spent five years in jail, and the rest of his life proclaiming his innocence.  In 1996, opened KGB files indicate (but don’t definitively prove to everyone’s satisfaction) that Hiss did pass information to Soviet spies.

*Anti-communism would only grow as the years progressed.  Almost any change in society was blamed on communism—agitation for civil rights, economic problems, sexual immorality.  ‘Subversive’ textbooks were taken out of schools, and ‘subversive’ had a flexible definition.

*Following in Nixon’s footsteps was the most famous Red-hunter of them all, Joseph McCarthy, representative from Wisconsin, known as ‘Tail gunner Joe’ for his service in the Pacific in WWII, although some have accused him of making up most of his service record.  We’ll see more of Tailgunner Joe later.

*Red-hunting got much worse after the Soviets built their a-bomb, and Americans began looking for the spies who leaked the information to them.  The trail eventually led to, among others, David Greenglass, who had worked on the Manhattan Project.  Already convicted as a spy, he sold out his sister to save his life.  Her name was Ethel Rosenberg, and she and her husband Julius were tried and convicted in 1951 of passing information on to KGB spies.  They were electrocuted in 1953.  Greenglass has since claimed he committed perjury and that Ethel was innocent, and several other known spies said she was as well (although at least some of them are known to be untrustworthy sources).  However, KGB documents show that Julius was certainly a spy, quite likely involved with nuclear secrets.  Ethel, though, may well have been innocent.

*As the Red Scare began, and as the economy continued to lag in 1948, Harry Truman chose to run for the Presidency in his own right.  He had several problems, however.  One of the worse, from the point of view of a very traditional Democratic constituency was his support for civil rights.  Truman was a racist at heart, once saying ‘I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman,’ but he felt the Constitution was not racist and, moreover, it was more important than his personal or regional convictions.

*Truman really changed his mind about the racial situation when he heard about Black servicemen newly returned from WWII being beaten and killed while still wearing their uniforms when they got back home or traveled through the South.  This was not just an attack on a Black man, it was an attack against the government of the United States, and Truman (who admired Andrew Jackson) would not stand for that.

*As early as 1947, Truman, through a report issued by a Presidential commission called ‘To Secure These Rights,’ had tried to reorganise and strengthen the Civil Rights section in the Justice Department, establish federal and state permanent commissions on Civil Rights so as to maintain constant surveillance on it, end Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial segregation, make police brutality, lynching and all forms of peonage illegal, and withhold federal grants from public and private agencies that practiced discrimination and segregation.  His success was mixed at best, but simply making the attempt, and making it official government policy at the same time, alienated many Southern Democrats.

*At the same time, some extremely liberal Democrats were upset at Truman’s stand against communism, and by the fact that he was not enacting sweeping social changes of the sort FDR had done.  In 1948, the Democrats were split.

*Truman, after a hard campaign, was nominated as the party’s candidate.  However, many Southerners broke away to follow Strom Thurmond, a highly-decorated WWII veteran and governor of South Carolina.  Thurmond formed, and ran as president for, the States’ Rights Party, also known as the Dixiecrat Party.  At the same time, certain liberal Democrats broke away to support the so-called Progressive Party and Henry Wallace, FDR’s second vice-president, and a communist.

*The Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, governor of New York.  He had run against FDR in 1944, mostly as a formality, but this time around he was expected to win.  Truman’s first term had not been as successful as FDR’s terms had been, and most people thought the country was tired of him, and that, with the Democrats split, he was in trouble.  The big cities of the east mostly voted for Dewey, too, and he carried several states.  The strongly Republican Chicago Daily Tribune (founded by a Lincon supporter) had gone so far as to print "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" as its post-election headline, to its later embarrassment.

*Dewey did carry 16 states and win 45% of the popular vote and 180 electoral votes.  Strom Thurmond carried four states in the Deep South and got one electoral vote from Tennessee, but he only got 2.4% of the national vote and 39 electoral votes.  Thurmond would go on to be a Senator from South Carolina, would be the oldest Senator, the longest-serving senator, the only senator to serve at the age of 100, one of the few politicians to serve in the 21st Century while having once received votes from Civil War veterans, and he would hold the record for the longest filibuster ever on the floor of the Senate (speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to stop civil rights legislation in 1957).  Wallace only got about 12,000 fewer popular votes than Thurmond, but he got no electoral votes.  Truman got the eleven electoral votes from Tennessee that Thurmond didn’t get, and he also won 49.7% of the popular vote and enough other electoral votes to total 303, enough to win a term on his own.

*Truman had won, in large part, by appealing directly to the people, with whom his plain style resonated.  He was known as ‘give ‘em hell Harry’ because in one speech at a train stop, someone in the crowd yelled that out as Truman lambasted his political opponents.  After that, it became a popular slogan, and if no-one in the crowd would say it spontaneously, Truman usually had someone planted to say it for him.  Truman attacked the Taft-Hartley Act, promised to support and increase civil rights, promised to improve health insurance and labour benefits, and generally attacked the Republicans in an appealing style.  Dewey, by contrast, was stiff, and seen as arrogant, while Wallace was too socialistic and Thurmond too racist to appeal to anyone outside the South.

*In his second term, Truman would promise a deal for America, a Fair Deal.  In many ways an extension of the New Deal, it promised better housing, full employment, a higher minimum wage, better farm price supports, new organisations like the TVA, equal rights for all, and an extension of Social Security to more people.

*Much of the Fair Deal was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who rejoiced at finally ending the New Deal.  In 1951, Republicans succeeded in adding the XXII Amendment to the Constitution, preventing anyone being elected to more than two terms or serving more than ten years.  Although this did not affect Truman (as the sitting president), it was clearly a slap against him and FDR, and a re-affirmation of Washington’s two-term tradition.

*However much trouble he had from Congress, Truman did manage to provide some public housing through the 1949 Public Housing Act, did extend Social Security to more beneficiaries in 1950, did raise the minimum wage, and did create the Committee on Government Contract Compliance, which required (although it could not enforce it) any contractor selling goods to the government (especially military equipment) abide by fair, non-discriminatory hiring practises.

*Truman’s civil rights plans and his Fair Deal did not go as far as he had hoped, but he was the first president since the end of Reconstruction to make racial issues and civil rights part of government policy, and he did his best to continue the traditions of the New Deal and to sponsor the UN.  However, beginning in 1950, Truman would have a new problem to confront, the communist invasion of South Korea.

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