Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  But the colonization of North America would probably never have happened as rapidly as it did except for all the troubles that were taking place in Europe. In England, there were two revolutions, one of which was in 1649 and against the King, when Charles I got his head cut off and Oliver Cromwell took over, and the other was in 1660, after Cromwell died in 1658, and the country went back into the hands of Charles I’s son, Charles II, a couple of years later. When the first Charles was deposed, a lot of his followers came over here and settled in the South. And when Cromwell was replaced by the second Charles, a lot of Cromwell’s followers settled in Massachusetts.

  The men who settled in Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina were called the “gentlemen of Britain,” though whether they were or not I don’t know. I will say, though, that Virginia became the most progressive of any of the colonies in that time and period. Virginia was in the forefront of the American Revolution and one of the main reasons that the Revolution was a success, and, of course, many of our great leaders, and much of the leadership in thinking, originated in Virginia. When Jefferson was governor of Virginia, as a good example, his freedom of worship bill was passed by the Virginia legislature and was the first such bill in this country except for one in Maryland, and the Maryland bill was no surprise because Maryland was a Catholic colony and acting as a matter of self-preservation. If you study the history of that period, a great many of the progressive ideas in which we believe today originated in Virginia at that time. Virginia was also one of the last of the southern states to secede during the Civil War and didn’t really want to secede even then. The colonists who came to Virginia were mostly of the royalist class, but when they came to Virginia after Charles I got his head cut off, they changed their viewpoint entirely, and they didn’t become rabidly conservative until long after the War Between the States.

  But getting back to England, eventually Charles II died, of course, and his brother, James II, took over in 1685. But, by 1688, he was finished and running off to France, and his son-in-law William, the Prince of Orange, and his daughter Mary became king and queen. William and Mary were brought in by the lords and the major merchants and other influential people of England, men who didn’t want a return of the House of the Stuarts, once the ruling house of England. And even though James II was a Catholic, the new king and queen didn’t think the same way and began to persecute Catholics, many of whom fled to Maryland.

  William and Mary were as bad in their way as the Bourbons, once the ruling house of France, who never did a thing for the welfare of their country. (In fact, they were descendants of the Bourbons. The truth is that the only good king France ever had was Henry IV, who had an idea, a grand plan, for a league of nations, the first time this concept had ever come up in the world. But if he’d been able to put it through, it might have stopped a great many of the things that caused the settlement of the American continent, so maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t.)

  Aside from Henry IV, however, most of the French kings were pretty terrible, and a lot of French Protestants were being persecuted by Catholics in the same way that Catholics were being persecuted in England by Protestants. And many French Protestants, the Huguenots, left their country and settled in South Carolina.

  Then there were Dutch settlements in New York and New Jersey, and Swedish settlements in Delaware, and German settlements in Pennsylvania, and a lot of indentured people from England also came to Virginia and Georgia and other places. The indentured people came as servants, but they were servants only for a while. There was a time limit on their service, just long enough to pay for their transportation. After that, most of these people became landowners and helped to settle Tennessee and the Northwest Territories, all of the area up to the Mississippi River that was the western half of the United States at that time. Homesteading really began in Virginia. That’s really where the idea started that finally made possible the settlement of the entire West.

  And when you stop to think about it, there really wasn’t any other known place for the colonists to go. The only other possibility was Africa, and that was no good because the Moors controlled the whole northern coast, which was the entrance to Africa from Europe. As I write this, the French are having the same trouble with the Moors that any group has that tries to go in there. The colonists’ only outlet for a free approach to a new life was the new continent in the Western Hemisphere, where there was no opposition on the continent except a natural, and at that time very small opposition by the inhabitants of that continent.

  If I were selecting a place to begin to describe the history of the American people, it wouldn’t just be the period of the settlement of the various colonies - it would also be the beginning of the formation and development of their common attitudes toward self-government. The people who made up early America, the British and the French and the Germans and the Dutch and all the others, brought with them different customs and different ways of dressing and different languages, but they had two really important things in common right from the start.

  One of these was that so many of them had come to America to escape religious persecution. All the European countries oppressed people because, as I’ve said, they had a history in which it was believed that royalty, the kings and queens and emperors and empresses, were placed in their positions by God’s direction, and that people who differed from them in religious beliefs - or any other kind of beliefs, for that matter - were going against the will of God. Well, I felt that was nonsense the moment I was old enough to read about it and start thinking about things of that sort. I happen to be a Baptist (though I attended a Presbyterian church and Sunday school when I was a boy because it was closer to where we lived than the Baptist place), and I’m certain that many Baptists and Presbyterians of the period, and many Lutherans and Catholics and Jews and other people who lived then and became Americans, felt the same way.

  I think the men and women who worked so hard to escape from oppression, and left their homes and relatives and friends to make the long and dangerous move to America, did a lot of thinking about what really constituted human liberty, and about freedom and their own welfare and the welfare of the people around them. (There’s no doubt about the fact that, after they got here, some people turned out to be just as oppressive as the people they’d left, but, fortunately, there weren’t all that many of those.) To some extent, the vision of the four great powers, Spain, France, Holland, and Britain, and the decision to open up the Western Hemisphere, might be said to be what really caused the United States, but the desire to escape from persecution is what sped it up and shaped and developed our country.

  The second thing all the colonists had in common was the deep-seated, let’s even call it urgent, desire of so many of the people to improve their financial status. The people who came here were transplanting some of the customs of the British and the Dutch and the Swedes and the others, but one thing they were determined not to transplant was the notion that they had to remain in the same economic class as in the old country. Most of the people who came over were economically below the class of the people who were running the government, or at least below the people who had the ear and the friendship of the people running the government, and many of the men and women came to the Western Hemisphere with the idea of perhaps ending up economically in the same position as the ruling classes in Britain, Holland, Sweden, and the other places. Everybody felt he could better himself if he could go to a continent that had not yet been explored and settled and taken over by the great powers. It was all finally taken over by the great powers, anyway - Spain and France and Britain eventually controlled the whole Western Hemisphere, for all practical purposes - but there was still a very good chance for financial improvement and even wealth for any colonist who was willing to work hard for it.

  They had to work plenty hard, all right. There were some parts of the colonial front on the Atlantic Ocean that were fertile and rich, but there were other parts that were not so fertile and rich, inc
luding Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Truthfully, I don’t see how in the world those people in those three places ever made a living when they first landed here. The same thing can be said about Georgia, where a lot of the poor people were taken out of the prisons of Britain and came here to farm but found exceedingly poor soil. The best soil on the Eastern coast at that time was in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland; and then later on, of course, people went over the Appalachian Mountains and found something they’d never even dreamed about, the richest part of the agricultural world. That area, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies, and from the border of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, is still the richest agricultural area in the world. But the people of Connecticut and Georgia and the other places managed somehow, and it made tough citizens of them, and they made a contribution to the country on that account.

  So there they were, people from just about every European country and every type of European culture, speaking different languages but coming here for the same two important reasons. It was a melting pot in every sense of the phrase, and there’s nothing like a melting pot to bring people together. They soon began to realize that the only difference between them was language, and it wasn’t all that hard for people of other backgrounds to learn English when that became the official language of the country, and before we knew it we were an undivided nation. I think the uniqueness of the United States is due to the fact that our people came originally from every section of Europe but were essentially the same kinds of people with the same reasons for being here, and the fact that the people who eventually ran our first government were in many cases scholarly men who’d studied government through the ages and knew a lot - not only about all of the colonies and their similarities and differences, but about world history and the things we’re taught by past events as well. And when we got to the point where we finally became a sort of unit, a unified group, with the Continental Congress, we had a group of men who knew more about the history of government than any group of men who’ve ever gotten together anywhere.

  Keep in mind the fact that it took quite a while for these men to get together - from 1608 to 1760. That’s a long time. Part of it, of course, was the result of the slowness of communication and transportation. It’s improvements in communication and transportation that have made the United States what it is today, because we now have communications systems and transportation systems that are out of this world when you come right down to it. In those days, it took five or six days to go from Baltimore to New York. Now you can do it in half an hour. But mostly it took all those years for the colonists to decide to form their own country because they really weren’t ready for a long time, emotionally and psychologically, to break away totally from their homelands. There had to be plenty of injustice to put them in that frame of mind, but when they finally got there, they were so determined that they were immovable.

  There’s no way to arrive at a conclusion on the reasons for the existence of the American government, in the way in which it was set up, without an examination of the history of government long before that, because the idea of individual freedom and individual rights goes back to ancient times. You’ll find thinking along those lines all the way back in the time of Hammurabi, who ruled Babylonia, the huge area of the Mesopotamian Valley in Asia around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, about 1,700 or 1,800 years before the birth of Christ. (Babylonia was one of the kingdoms in the ancient region of Mesopotamia. Its capital was the city of Babylon. The Mesopotamian people were the ancient Persians: They were part of the Semitic race.) The fundamental basis for a just government, in my opinion, originated there in the Mesopotamian Valley long before the Greek and the Roman empires came into existence.

  Hammurabi was no saint in a lot of ways: He’s the fellow who popularized the phrase “an eye for an eye,” and he meant it literally and carried it out lots of times. He also divided his people into three different and rigidly separated classes: the very rich merchants and landowners and priests, the poorer merchants and the artisans and peasants, and the slaves. Whenever the Babylonians conquered a place, they made slaves out of the people they conquered. And as I say, it wasn’t exactly a classless society even aside from the slaves. Even in that upper group, they had nobles and people who were allegedly in charge of the government, but in all those countries, Egypt and the countries of Mesopotamia and the rest of them, the priesthood really ran things. That usually came to a violent end, as all those priesthood governments did. In the case of Babylonia, the Kassites, a nomadic tribe from nearby Elam,16 took it over after a while, and then it became a subsidiary state of the Assyrian Empire.

  But Hammurabi believed to some extent in the rights of the individual, and he wrote a code of laws that are absolutely astonishing when you read them now because so many of them are applicable to present times. They’re concerned with the rights of the individual to live his own life as he went along, and the rights of property, and how to deal with murder and adultery and divorce, and just about everything else. Hammurabi had his codification carved on a diorite column, and it’s a short document that says it all in just 3,600 lines of cuneiform. (Diorite is a type of rock, and cuneiform is an ancient form of wedge-shaped writing something like Egyptian hieroglyphics.) I believe the French got hold of the column in modern times and it can be seen in Paris. But you don’t have to learn cuneiform and go there to read Hammurabi’s laws; they’ve been published in book form, and it’s just a little book, but it’s fascinating. I’ve read the book over and over, and it’s interesting to read every time.

  There were also ideas about justice and the welfare of the individual in the Greek city-states, the colonies that the Greeks formed in the eighth through the sixth centuries before Christ, and that were similar in some ways to the American colonies, except that the city-states also believed that there were classes of people, in their case two classes, those who didn’t have to work, and those who did. But at least they had some people with ideals of how fair government ought to be set up. You take the statements of Plato, who lived from about 427 B.C. to about 347 B.C., and Socrates, who lived from 469 to 399 B.C.; they always worked with the idea that the individual had his rights. (Unfortunately, they also believed that there was a certain set of individuals who didn’t have any rights. But then, let’s face it, so did we. At least until we got rid of slavery we did.)

  The Romans had exactly the same ideas as the Greek city-states. They got their ideas, in fact, from the Greek city-states, and the basis of these ideas was, again, the freedom of the individual and the rights of the individual. The objective of the Roman Republic was to make people feel that the greatest honor that could come to a man was to be a Roman citizen, a citizen of the city of Rome, and the men there were willing to fight for the freedom of the city of Rome and of the individual. They had slaves, too, of course, but no matter whether a man was a slave or what he was, he had his rights under the law to make an appearance and get justice.

  But then, naturally, the success of the Roman Republic, which became the Roman Empire and conquered the whole known world, was such that the people began to take it for granted and think that it would continue forever. The Romans began to grow fat and lazy, and the Empire was broken up from the outside. It wasn’t broken up by a revolution or anything like that, it was broken up by the Gauls and all the rest of those savages; though I guess it would have broken up sooner or later in some other way, anyway.

  In any case, the breakup of the Roman Empire was what eventually brought on European civilization - though let’s call it so-called European civilization, since it sometimes wasn’t too civilized. After the downfall of the Roman Empire, after it had been torn apart by the Vandals and the Gauls and all the other savages, there were a whole lot of little kingdoms, all of the kings always fighting with each other and killing each other. Then the Germans, across the Rhine, eventually began to settle down, and other places began to settle down, and in time, the nations of Europe were formed more o
r less along the same lines as we have them today. They were on a very small scale as compared to the Roman civilization in the Mediterranean, but the countries on the western coast of Europe - Spain and France and Britain - were the great nations of the world at the time of the settlement of our own country. There were no sprawling empires in the Roman sense, huge territories next to each other being conquered and becoming a single land, but none of the European countries were adverse to the idea of owning lands all around the world and becoming an empire that way. And when everybody learned what Columbus had opened up, all of these countries were anxious to have a hand in the settlement and control of that part of the world.

  I’ve just read an article, a day or two ago, on the policies of the Roman Catholic Church, and the author made the interesting statement that, if the church had been more tolerant of Martin Luther, there wouldn’t have been any Reformation, no real breaking away from the Catholic religion. But the church wasn’t tolerant of Luther when he was the leader of the movement of Protestantism in Germany in the sixteenth century, and you might also say that the real Reformation, or at least the real advancement of the Reformation, took place when Cardinal Richelieu became chief minister of France in 1624. Richelieu, whose full handle was Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, was a prelate who became powerful politically as a protégé of Marie de Medici, second wife of King Henry IV of France. The marriage in 1600 was the great event of the turn of the century, and Rubens did a whole series of paintings about it, which I’ve seen in the Louvre and which are just beautiful; but then Henry was assassinated in 1610, and Marie became regent for her young son, Louis XIII, born in 1601. Marie continued to rule France for three years after her son came of age, and Richelieu eventually found himself in trouble when Marie became jealous of his increasing power and friendship with the young king; but then Louis exiled his mother in 1630 (remember what I said about so-called civilization?) and Marie ran to the Netherlands and died there in 1642, without ever returning to France. Richelieu pretty much ran the country after that as chief minister, a position equivalent to prime minister in England.