American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Upon becoming president, Truman, both sets of whose grandparents had owned slaves, zigzagged back and forth on civil rights, sensitive to the political pressures to attack discrimination but fearful of losing southern support in Congress and the 1948 election. Unlike Roosevelt, Truman publicly backed a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), though he failed to win its congressional approval. In 1946, under pressure from black protest groups and their white allies, who organized a fifteen-thousand-person march to the Lincoln Memorial, and personally shocked by the brutal attacks in the South on black war veterans, Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights to come up with recommendations for action and appointed African Americans to a number of high-profile positions.

  Pressure on Truman to take a strong civil rights stand grew as the 1948 election neared, since his likely opponents had solid records of opposing discrimination. New York governor Thomas E. Dewey had signed the first state law outlawing racial and religious discrimination in employment. Wallace held speaking tours in the South where he refused to address racially segregated audiences. In June 1947, Truman became the first president to address a meeting of the NAACP. That October, his civil rights committee came out with a sweeping report. Saying that “the National Government . . . must take the lead in safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans,” it recommended the passage of a federal anti-lynching law, federal legislation making police brutality a crime, a poll tax ban, comprehensive voting rights legislation, an end to discrimination in the armed services, a federal FEPC, and an upgraded civil rights division in the Justice Department. The committee did not conceive of civil rights as simply an issue of the treatment of African Americans, as it also called for statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, home rule and voting rights in presidential elections for the District of Columbia, and compensation for the property Japanese Americans lost when forcibly evacuated during the war.

  Truman accepted the report and in February 1948 asked Congress for legislation implementing many of its recommendations. He also promised to issue executive orders ending discrimination in the federal civil service and segregation in the armed services. But then, with southern Democrats up in arms—Mississippi senator James Eastland said Truman’s message to Congress was proof that the government was controlled by “mongrel minorities” out to “Harlemize” the nation, while Texas senator Tom Connally called it a lynching of the Constitution—the president retreated, failing to issue the promised executive orders and allowing Democratic leaders to sit on the proposed legislation.

  Five months later, civil rights splintered the Democrats at their convention. Truman backed a vague platform plank calling on Congress to use its authority to protect civil rights, sparking opposition from delegates who found it too weak and those who found it too strong. Southern Democrats saw Truman’s calls for national civil rights action as a threat to the racial structure of power that most of them believed in and benefited from. Fearful that an expanding, nationalizing federal government would destroy the ability of their home region to maintain the system of racial oppression that kept wages low and political power in the hands of small cliques, southern white leaders adopted states’ rights as the ideological basis for the defense of racial and class privilege. A group of southern delegates demanded that the Democratic convention amend its platform to declare civil rights a state issue.

  A second civil rights challenge came from a coalition of black, labor, and liberal delegates, spearheaded by the ADA. It put forth an alternative civil rights plank that essentially consisted of proposals Truman himself had made. They believed in civil rights on principle but also feared that Wallace would win significant black and liberal support if the Democrats failed to take a clear stand on the issue. (The Republicans represented a threat, too, since their convention had called for anti-lynching legislation, an end to the poll tax, and integration of the military.) ADA leaders like Hubert Humphrey, the young mayor of Minneapolis, saw civil rights as a vehicle for transforming the Democratic Party into a more effective vehicle for liberalism and a way for anticommunist liberals to establish their progressive credentials. In a powerful speech, Humphrey declared that “the time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” His speech helped garner the support of big-city bosses eyeing the black and labor vote, defeat the southern plank, and win the passage of the liberal proposal.

  Many southern delegates responded to the liberal civil rights victory by walking out of the Democratic convention. Others voted to nominate Richard B. Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, for the presidency, rather than Truman (who easily prevailed). In four states, leaders of the anti–civil rights effort succeeded in listing South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, rather than Truman, as the Democratic candidate. (In Alabama, Truman did not appear on the ballot at all.) Elsewhere in the South, Thurmond ran as the candidate of a newly formed States’ Rights Party, commonly called the Dixiecrats. With the Democrats split three ways, and Truman’s popularity low, few observers gave him much chance for victory.

  Truman’s Revival

  The Republicans had fissures of their own in 1948, though not as deep as those in the Democratic Party. During the 1940s, a more isolationist, conservative wing of the party, headed by Ohioans John Bricker and Robert Taft, vied with a more internationalist, liberal wing, fronted by Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey. In 1948, Taft and Dewey emerged as the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.

  Taft, the son of a president, led the Republican forces in the Senate, where his fierce partisanship earned him the moniker “Mr. Republican.” Deeply skeptical of expanding federal power at home or abroad, he nonetheless sometimes backed sweeping social benefit plans, like the housing program he cosponsored with liberal Democrat Robert Wagner and a proposal for federal aid to education, a measure of how much the New Deal had reshaped political thinking, even on the right. Dewey, who had close ties to Wall Street, held a more expansive notion of the role of government than the leading congressional Republicans, though he too wanted to reduce taxes and see more done by the states than Washington. His wing of the party, better funded and organized, with strength on both coasts, repeatedly bested the midwestern- and southern-based conservatives at national conventions, including in 1948, when Dewey captured the presidential nomination, picking liberal California governor Earl Warren as his running mate.

  Though Dewey had lost the presidential race in 1944, most observers assumed he was a shoo-in the second time around. But Truman ran a shrewd campaign, moving to the left to attract labor, black, liberal, and urban voters and to mobilize mass organizations, like unions, which in many cases had greater organizational capacity and esprit than the Democratic Party itself. With the southerners having bolted, Truman finally felt free to issue the executive orders on civil rights he had earlier promised. To highlight the differences between the parties on domestic issues, Truman called a special session of Congress, sending it a long list of legislative proposals, some of which the Republicans had endorsed in their platform. When Congress adjourned after two weeks, having passed little significant legislation, Truman attacked it as a “do-nothing” Congress. At the same time, Truman supporters portrayed Wallace as a dupe of the communists. The indictment, during the campaign, of twelve Communist Party leaders for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government hurt Wallace’s Progressive Party effort.

  Expecting an easy victory, Dewey ran a cautious, low-key campaign. Like many eastern businessmen, he did not share the isolationist views of midwestern Republicans like Taft, which had the effect of removing foreign policy as a campaign issue. Truman rarely discussed foreign policy himself. Instead, crisscrossing the country by train, he stressed the benefits the New Deal had brought various constituencies. If the Republicans took control of the White House, he told voters, those gains would be jeopardized, as the cou
ntry would become “an economic colony of Wall Street.” Abandoning formal speeches, which did not serve him well, Truman adopted a feisty, plainspoken, off-the-cuff speaking style that contrasted favorably with Dewey’s stiff, bland demeanor.

  In spite of an unusually broad range of choices, the public found the 1948 presidential race less than enthralling, voting in exceptionally small numbers, in the lowest turnout for a presidential election between 1928 and 1976. Wallace and Thurmond did more poorly than expected, each getting only 2.5 percent of the vote. Wallace won no electoral votes, while Thurmond carried only the states where he ran as the Democratic candidate; where he ran under the States’ Rights banner he received a fifth of the vote or less. In the popular vote, Truman beat Dewey by 5 percent. He won by holding together the Roosevelt coalition, with a strong showing among union members, urban voters, European immigrants, black voters, Jewish voters (helped by his decision to recognize Israel as soon as it declared itself into existence), and farm voters (scared, in the face of falling crop prices, that the Republicans would cut farm subsidies). Truman easily carried the electoral vote, and the Democrats recaptured control of both houses of Congress.

  No Fair Deal

  Truman’s surprise success reinforced the stalemate in national politics that had more or less existed since the New Deal lost its momentum in the late 1930s. His victory proved too narrow to give much impetus to liberalism. Truman and the national Democratic Party welcomed back with no penalty the southern Democrats who had supported Thurmond (they needed them to maintain congressional majorities), which meant that conservative southerners took control of many key congressional committees. Once again, they used their Senate power to block civil rights legislation, as well as home rule for Washington, D.C., which they feared would elect a black mayor.

  Truman saw almost his entire second-term program of domestic legislation, what he termed the “Fair Deal,” go down to defeat. In his 1949 State of the Union address, he introduced a remarkably comprehensive, liberal program, including proposals to repeal Taft-Hartley, create new TVA-like authorities, and introduce national health insurance and federal aid to education. He also put forth a farm plan that would have moved toward ending price supports, thereby lowering food costs for urban consumers, while aiding farmers through direct subsidies capped at a level that would ensure that family farms, as opposed to large agribusinesses, would be the main beneficiaries. None of these proposals succeeded in the face of the weakness of congressional liberals and opposition from well-organized interest groups, such as the American Medical Association, which attacked the health insurance plan as socialized medicine.

  Truman did substantially increase the minimum wage. Also, with a great deal of help from organized labor, he managed to protect Social Security from the corrosive effects of inflation while extending it to ten million additional workers, including those doing domestic and agricultural labor. But he got through only one major initiative, a housing program that benefited from Taft’s support, which authorized the construction of additional federally financed public housing for the poor and federally subsidized slum clearance for urban redevelopment. Postwar prosperity had undercut popular support for a general expansion of domestic government activity, and interest-group politics replaced the advocacy of the kind of broad reform programs liberals, labor, and Roosevelt had once embraced.

  Truman’s victory failed to revive liberalism, but it did convince most Republicans of the folly of threatening, or even appearing to threaten, the fundamental reforms of the New Deal. Only occasionally, over the next quarter century, would mainstream Republicans attempt direct forays against the welfare state, usually with disastrous results. Conservative efforts to undo the New Deal largely had to operate outside the national political arena, in business-funded educational campaigns, think tanks, and marginal right-wing organizations, or through the growing use of anticommunism as an oblique weapon against liberalism. Too many Americans had benefited too greatly from the New Deal system for it to be overthrown. For all his bumbling, Truman managed to defend the political order he had inherited and win a consensus behind a foreign policy that required the kind of expansive and expensive state apparatus his opponents thought they had been on the road to dismantling just a few years earlier.

  CHAPTER 4

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  National Security State

  Very early on a rainy Sunday, June 25, 1950, on the Ongjin peninsula in western Korea, troops from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) began exchanging artillery fire. In the past, the two armies had repeatedly skirmished along the 38th parallel, which divided the communist-led north, the DPRK, from the conservative-led south, the ROK. This time, it soon became clear that North Korea had launched a full-scale invasion. DPRK infantry, led by Soviet-built tanks, poured across the border, followed by an amphibious landing on South Korea’s eastern coast. Within days, the North Koreans had captured the South Korean capital, Seoul, while steadily advancing down the Korean peninsula.

  Though surprised by the invasion, U.S. leaders reacted quickly. Almost immediately they got the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for North Korea to return to the 38th parallel, a move made possible by the absence of the Soviet Union, which had been boycotting the council since January 1950 to protest its failure to give China’s seat to its new communist government. Two days later, a second Security Council resolution called for UN members to assist South Korea in repulsing the attack. On July 5, the first American soldiers ordered to Korea by President Truman, a small unit flown in from Japan, spotted a North Korean infantry column approaching their position in the village of Osan, thirty-four miles south of Seoul. To the GIs’ surprise, the North Koreans, rather than being intimidated by U.S. forces, marched right through them, led by tanks with armor too thick to be stopped by American weapons.

  By the time the Korean War ended three years later, fifty-four thousand U.S. troops had died in the fighting, and nearly twice that number had been wounded. For Koreans, the war took a staggering toll; nearly three million people—about 10 percent of the population—were killed, wounded, or missing. Another five million became refugees.

  The Korean War has not loomed large in American memory or culture, in spite of its heavy cost. Yet the war had a profound impact on the way the United States developed. It locked the country into an unprecedented militarism, which continued after the war and included the long-term deployment of troops in Europe and Asia. It also brought domestic anticommunism, already a growing force, to new heights, marked by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, political repression, and pressure for cultural conformity.

  Neither militarism nor anticommunism broke the stalemate in domestic politics. If anything, they reinforced the status quo. When in 1953 a Republican moved into the White House for the first time in two decades, only modest changes occurred in the contours of domestic policy. The basic structures of an enduring postwar order were in place when the Korean War ended soon thereafter, the outcome of the struggles at home and abroad that had occurred since World War II.

  Korea

  The Korean War grew out of a combination of local and global circumstances related to the process of decolonization and the deepening division between the communist and capitalist camps. When World War II ended, 250 million people lived under colonial rule, but the war had undermined the ideological, economic, and military bases of colonialism. Starting in Asia and then moving to Africa and the Caribbean, independence movements succeeded with remarkable rapidity in freeing their countries from European rule. By 1970, only a few large territories, all in central or southern Africa, remained colonies.

  In principle, the United States supported decolonization. In practice, its record was mixed. The United States gave its own colony, the Philippines, independence in 1946; encouraged the British to leave India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka); and pressured the Dutch to abandon their mili
tary campaign to retain Indonesia. But American leaders gave a higher priority to winning support from Western European countries for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union than to backing colonial independence movements, especially those that leaned to the left. Accordingly, the United States allowed its European allies to use Lend-Lease supplies to reoccupy their colonial possessions and looked the other way when they forcibly suppressed nationalist movements.

  World War II brought Japanese colonial control of Korea to an end but left open how it would be organized as an independent entity. Korean nationalists, across the political spectrum, had long fought Japanese rule but did so through competing independence movements. During the Second World War, the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union concurred that Korea should be given its independence after a transitional trusteeship, but they failed to develop a specific plan. As the war drew to an end, the United States and the Soviet Union hastily agreed to jointly occupy the country, with the Soviets staying north of the 38th parallel and the United States to its south.

  Episodic postwar talks between the United States and the Soviet Union failed to come up with a plan for establishing a government for Korea as a whole. In the north, the Soviets backed a provisional government headed by communist Kim Il Sung. In the south, the United States backed a right-wing interim government headed by Syngman Rhee. On both sides of the border, the dominant factions, with the aid of the occupying powers, repressed their opponents and narrowed their ruling coalitions, so that by mid-1948, when the rival governments assumed full sovereignty over the former occupation zones, Korea had two fiercely antagonistic, authoritarian regimes, each cracking down on internal dissent while seeking control over the whole peninsula.