The country was generous and so were the men who drove its planes. American pride was divided almost equally between Operation Vittles and Operation Little Vittles, the inspiration of a first lieutenant named Carl S. Halverson. On his way in and out of Tempelhof, Halverson parachuted bags of candy to Berlin children watching below. The idea caught on; soon all the fliers were doing it. In December 1948 they mounted Operation Santa Claus. Day and night thousands of tiny parachutes floated down bearing gifts from the unseen “amis” soaring overhead to Berliners too young to understand the blockade. Every toy, every doll, every piece of candy was bought by the crews with their own money.
In this as in all ways, the continent was becoming curious about the American national character, with its faith in solutions, its technological know-how, its pragmatism, its interest in things rather than ideas, and, less fortunately, its philistinism. General MacArthur spoke for legions of his countrymen when he condescendingly told a visitor, “It is fascinating to go back and read Plato’s vision of Utopia and see how far we have progressed…. What a remarkable vision—what intellectual flashes—those old fellows had, living under their backward conditions!” To the MacArthurs of America, and they probably constituted a majority, good plumbing and get-up-and-go outweighed the exquisite winding of Socratic reasoning.
Europeans could often identify Americans in civilian clothes before they opened their mouths. In part this was attributable to table manners, tailoring, informality, and the 35-mm cameras that seemed to dangle from every American’s shoulder. There was also something about the way they carried themselves. “Conquerors?” Eric Sevareid had said of the GIs. “They had no sense of conquering a country; they were just after the Germans and had to walk over this particular piece of the earth’s surface to get at them.” Even before the war, when living in Munich, Sevareid had noticed that whenever he or his countrymen went for a stroll, Germans turned to watch. He had concluded, “Nobody on earth walks as easily as the American. His body is neither rigid like an Englishman’s nor compact and crowded like a Frenchman’s, and his head turns very easily upon his neck.” Some called it insolence, others called it self-confidence; conceivably it was indefinable, but it was real. Someone else said, “The British walk the earth as if they owned it; the Americans walk the earth as if they don’t give a damn who owned it.”
In the past, Hollywood had given Europeans a distorted view of Americans, like figures in a carnival fun house mirror. Now their impressions were based upon the homesick soldier, or, more and more, the American traveling abroad. It wasn’t much of an improvement. Tourists from other countries represented its privileged classes; well-educated, well-read, and frequently multilingual. Because of the extraordinary standard of living in the United States citizens from all levels were crossing the ocean, often with loud wives and louder children in tow. It spoke well of their country that second-generation Americans could return to the lands of their fathers, but it played hob with the national reputation.
It was U.S. popular culture on this level—somewhere below what Orwell called “the lower-upper-middle class”—which gave rise to continental concern over the Americanization of the world. Arriving in large numbers from the Atlantic seaboard, a small army of tourists, technicians, exchange scholars, diplomats, journalists, USIS librarians, Red Cross girls, ECA administrators, Point Four agronomists, Stage Door Canteen hostesses, and American businessmen—five thousand of them in Paris alone—were carving out beachheads at customs offices and deploying inland in swelling numbers. Meanwhile the Fulbright and Smith-Mundt programs would soon bring forty thousand foreign students each year to study in America. Europeans asked one another what were these people bringing to Europe? And what were Pierre and Gretchen learning across the water?
To the disgust of French traditionalists, a beloved guillotine had been replaced in 1945 by a shiny new U.S. electric chair. It was somehow symbolic. (Americans agreed, though for other reasons.) In public places once brightened by colorful native dancers at Christmas, Europeans were captives of what had become the most widely heard voice in the history of man—Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas” (1,700,000 records sold by V-J Day), “Silent Night” (1,500,000 records) or “Don’t Fence Me In” (1,250,000). Peasants who for generations had been proud of their vital role in European society now learned that their countrymen were being fed by “The American Middle West—Breadbasket of the World,” and palates once soothed by the finest wines from the choicest grapes were being washed by a cheap brown fluid called Coca-Cola—the notorious “Coke,” now in the late 1940s selling 50 million bottles a day, enough to float a light cruiser. Frenchmen struck back. The continent had hardly recovered from the airlift when the National Assembly in Paris voted 366 to 202 “to prohibit the import, manufacture and sale of Coca-Cola in France, Algeria, and the French colonial empire.”
Resentment of what had come to be called “Americanization” was as widespread as the unpopularity of John Bull in the long century of British domination, and as inevitable. In Europe’s view, the colossus from across the sea was smothering its pride with a new economic imperialism even more demeaning than the old. One didn’t need to be a Marxist to sympathize. What were the Oxford don’s feelings when he read in the Times that the British Marketing Council was sending fifty executives each year to the Harvard Business School, with the Crown footing the bill? Or a Roman who learned that once more the lira was being devalued because of a “technical readjustment” on the New York Stock Exchange? Or the independent little Belgian service station owner upon discovering that Esso sold more gas on the continent than in the United States? Or any European when told that to the U.S. Department of Commerce Lausanne was known only as the capital of Union Carbide Overseas, Zurich as the home of the Corn Products Company abroad, and Paris, Brussels, and London, respectively, as the European headquarters of IBM, the Celanese Corporation, and Standard Oil of New Jersey?
Yet apart from the heavy-handed campaigns of these commercial Caesars, it did appear that the country’s best men and best efforts were often badly abused. It seemed hard that the embassies of a country which had given over a hundred billion dollars in foreign aid should have to weigh the advantages of installing shatterproof window glass because they were so frequently the target of hostile demonstrations. The gifts had been taken quickly enough, and within a month, sometimes less, those who received them had publicly displayed their contempt for the dollar. It was in these Truman years that Louis Kronenberger, an American intellectual with a following in Europe, and certainly no chauvinist, wrote in exasperation:
Americans have every right to be proud of a pioneer heritage that, first conquering and subduing the land, has gone on harnessing and commandeering the air waves. Americans have a right to exalt a national ideal and a native modus operandi that, beginning with maximum hardship, has ended in maximum comfort. Why shouldn’t we be proud of how openhanded and hospitable we are, how alive and alert, of how the American way has conferred unimaginable opportunity on the poor and the elsewhere rejected?
Others struck back at European critics; Time, in a memorable issue, called France a prostitute. (Another riotous scene in the National Assembly.) Doubtless cutting all foreign aid from the budget would have enhanced presidential popularity, but it was never seriously considered. Even Senator Taft knew a return to isolationism was impossible, and conceded that an American President could no longer concern himself solely with domestic pressures. In an age of thermonuclear weapons, on a globe shrunk to a fraction of its prewar size, understanding the hopes and aspirations of other countries had become a matter of national security. It was precisely in this area that Harry Truman defied all the form sheets drawn up in the early weeks of his Presidency. Lacking brilliance in statecraft, he compensated for it with courage and native shrewdness. “When the Truman government found its feet,” Dean Acheson later wrote, “its policies showed a sweep, a breadth of conception and boldness both new in this country’s history and obviously cen
trally planned and directed.” And at the time, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V, Acheson said that America’s allies had been reassured, and her enemies discomfited, by the realization that in the darkest hour of any international crisis, the President would be a formidable adversary, providing “a little touch of Harry in the night.”
***
Throughout the spring before the Berlin airlift, Republicans were watching the calendar with a mounting sense of pleasure. Sixteen years had passed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had first cast them into outer darkness. They continued to despise everything about That Man, and in a sense thousands of them were still running against him, but his sorcery, they believed, had died with him; nevermore would the Grand Old Party be daunted by that wicked grin, that maniacal laughter, that tilted cigarette holder and flashing pince-nez.
In his place stood a humbler politician, who looked very much like a man of straw. HST could hardly have resembled FDR less. Truman’s height was average, he wore ordinary spectacles, and his flat, high-pitched voice carried no echo of the cultivated, prep-school accent which had identified his predecessor as a patrician. Since it was assumed that Roosevelt alone had infused his programs with dynamic appeal, the obvious corollary was that all of them could be repealed, like the Eighteenth Amendment, after the American people had spoken in the next quadrennial referendum. That would come on November 2. They could hardly wait.
It was going to be so easy. “Truman is a gone goose,” said Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the lovely blonde lawmaker from Connecticut, and although Democrats flinched, no one contradicted her. Since the Republican sweep of the off-year elections in November 1946, every public opinion poll, every survey of political experts had spoken with one voice: if Harry Truman ran for the Presidency, he would be doomed. Gallup reported that between October 1947 and March 1948 the percentage of Americans who thought the President was doing a good job had dropped sharply—to 36 percent—and that if he ran then he would lose to Dewey, Stassen, MacArthur, or Vandenberg.
“If Truman is nominated,” Joseph and Stewart Alsop told their readers, “he will be forced to wage the loneliest campaign in recent history.” Even he had misgivings. His approach to Eisenhower at Potsdam was repeated in the autumn of 1947; he asked Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall to tell the general that if Ike would run for President on the Democratic ticket, Truman would be proud to be his running mate. Eisenhower asked Royall to convey his heartfelt gratitude to the President, but with it his regrets. Possibly he thought that with Truman as his vice presidential nominee he would lose.
In the middle of November 1947 presidential Special Counsel Clark Clifford handed his chief a thirty-five-page reelection scenario. In it Clifford pointed out that Truman had achieved far more than most people realized. He had been good to the farmer. He was the man who had faced down John L. Lewis. Jews were happy because he was an enthusiastic Zionist, blacks because he had ordered the commissioning of Negro officers. He had unified the armed forces and vetoed antilabor bills, and it was the Republican reactionaries on Capitol Hill—Taft, Wherry, Millikin, Bridges, Joe Martin and Charlie Halleck—who had turned back his proposals for a massive housing program and a social security base for medical care for the elderly. Clifford wanted the President to run as an underdog, and against the Eightieth Congress.
Truman’s overtures to Eisenhower are unmentioned in his memoirs; he gives the impression that he never considered standing aside. In reality, he appears to have been hesitant as late as March 1, 1948, when he told a Key West press conference that he had been “so darned busy with foreign affairs and other situations that have developed that I haven’t had any time to think about any presidential campaign.” During the following week the CIO took a firm stand against Henry Wallace’s third party candidacy. Apparently that persuaded him that he could make it. On March 9 he called in Chairman J. Howard McGrath of the Democratic National Committee and said, “Well, Howard, if you think so, let’s do it.” McGrath was puzzled (he hadn’t asked the President to run, only to make up his mind), but in the lobby outside he gamely faced the White House press and announced: “The President has authorized me to say that if nominated by the Democratic National Committee, he will accept and run.” Truman’s stetson was in the ring.
Immediately most of the party’s leaders demanded that he withdraw it. Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx and a former Democratic national chairman, refused to appear on the same platform with the President in New York; a husky presidential aide literally had to drag him from his car. Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina publicly snubbed Truman. Fulbright of Arkansas proposed that he resign so that a Republican could take over at once and restore national confidence. A six-man delegation of southern governors led by Strom Thurmond, alienated by the administration efforts at racial integration, prepared to secede from the party and back a southern candidate—thus guaranteeing a four-party race, two of them formed from Democratic splinters. In Manhattan McGrath had to cancel a meeting of wealthy Democratic contributors—only three men would come—and when he mentioned Truman’s name at a Los Angeles rally he was drowned out by boos. The hecklers were led by James Roosevelt and other apostles of the New Deal. They were in good company. Among those vowing to dump Truman were James’s brother Elliott, Leon Henderson, Claude Pepper of Florida, Chester Bowles, Walter Reuther, Wilson Wyatt, and young Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis. Boss Jake Arvey of Illinois announced that he would no longer support Truman, and the ADA hierarchy came up with what Time called “an extraordinary idea.” It was breathtaking. Why hadn’t it been discovered before? They would draft General Eisenhower!
There is a strain of high comedy in the Democrats-for-Eisenhower movement of 1948. Unaware that he had twice turned down such a proposal from the President, or that he regarded himself as a conservative Republican—even Truman didn’t know that—the prospect of Ike as the leader of their party swept up all the dumpers cited above, plus Frank Hague of Jersey City, John Bailey of Connecticut, Happy Chandler of Kentucky, Richard Russell of Georgia, Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago, and Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama. The final antic touch—it was also an unforgivable insolence—was a telegram to the White House from Hugh Mitchell, Democratic leader in the state of Washington, asking the President to serve as chairman of the Draft Eisenhower Committee.
So appealing was the Ike-or-die movement that as long as there was a glimmer of hope that the general might change his mind, it was quite clear that Truman couldn’t be nominated by his own party. On the eve of the conventions Eisenhower slammed the door shut by announcing that “I would refuse to accept the nomination under any conditions, terms, or premises.” With that, the party rank and file abandoned hope. A pall fell over Democratic delegates. Convinced that they would lose in November, and trying to cut their losses wherever possible, they asked the Republicans, who would be the first to convene in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, to leave their flags and bunting in place. Noblesse oblige; the GOP charitably agreed. Democratic gratitude was almost pathetic. They were already saving for a head start in 1952. Maybe Eisenhower would be willing to lead them then.
***
Meantime, Truman’s staff was busily refurbishing what Clifford called his “portrait.” (“Image” still hadn’t come into general use.) The President was disdainful of the public relations approach—he called it “gimmickry”—but the idea of attacking the Republican Congress aroused his militant instincts. The first tactic in the grand strategy was to hit the Hill every Monday with a popular proposal that Taft and his colleagues were sure to table. In swift succession Truman proposed a St. Lawrence Seaway, broader civil rights legislation, federal housing, aid to China, extension of wartime controls, highway construction, and extension of the Reciprocal Trade Act—all destined to become issues in November.
If the polls are to be believed, Truman’s prospects looked dimmest in April. It was then that the greatest inspiration of the campaign struck his staff, and it was perhaps indic
ative of the general confusion there that afterward none of three men—Clifford, George M. Elsey, and Charles S. Murphy—could remember whose idea it had been. All of them knew that the President had never learned to read a speech. He hung his head over the manuscript, had no sense of pace or emphasis, and usually killed his applause. In extemporaneous remarks, on the other hand, he was lively and effective. The question therefore arose, why not talk him into delivering an off-the-cuff speech before a sizable audience? He liked the idea, and on April 17, after reading a prepared text before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he improvised for a half-hour on American-Soviet relations. The difference was startling and heartening; the editors cheered him at the end and remarked to one another on how well he had spoken. Four more extemporaneous addresses followed, climaxing in a political chalk-talk before a thousand young Democrats at the Mayflower Hotel on May 14. At the end of it he brought them all to their feet with: “I want to say to you that for the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House—and you’re looking at him!” Next morning’s New York Times called it a “fighting” speech, delivered “in the new Truman manner.” Satisfied that he had found the right campaign style, he and his staff now proposed to submit it to a coast-to-coast trial run.
Here they encountered a financial obstacle. It looked immovable. The party war chest was almost empty. Poverty was destined to haunt the Democrats throughout the campaign; few men of means had any confidence in the candidate’s chances. Even in April suggestions for cutting costs were valued, and after the Mayflower dinner the staff came up with a big idea. Why shouldn’t Truman dip into his $30,000-a-year presidential travel allowance to make a nationwide railroad journey to educate the people about his achievements at home and abroad, and, while he was at it, to say a few choice words about his problems with Congress?
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 67
