DEMOCRATIC PARTY PROPAGANDA POSING AS HISTORY

HARRY TRUMAN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

By Robert Shogan (Lawrence: U. Press of Kansas, 2013)

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            In April 1965 former Pres. Harry Truman received the annual award from Freedom House at a dinner attended by 1,200 in the Grand Ball Room of the Waldorf Astoria.  Pres. Johnson sent a telegram calling Truman “the man to whom the cause of freedom owes the greatest debt.”(NYT, 14 April 1965)  Earlier in the day Truman called Rev. Martin Luther King a “’rabble-rouser’ who has hurt the Negroes’ cause ‘because he hasn’t got any sense.’”(ibid.)  The day before, he referred to King as a “troublemaker.…When reminded that the civil rights leader had won a Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Truman replied: ‘I didn’t give it to him.’”(NYT, 13 April 65)  In the 1960s Truman was no longer running for office and no longer needed Black votes.  The “civil rights President” was showing different colors.  In March 1960, a month after the first modern sit-ins, Truman declared: “If anybody came to my store and tried to stop business, I’d throw him out.”(NYT, 25 March 60)  In April 1960, Truman was the first guest invited for Cornell University’s “distinguished visitors’ program” where he asserted that “Communists were engineering the student sit-downs at lunch counters in the South…You can never tell,…where you’ll find their fine Italian hand, and it’s not Italian – it’s Russian”(19 April 60)

            It was not only sit-ins that riled the former President.  “Truman…criticized Northerners who have gone South as Freedom Riders as meddlesome intruders.  ‘They stir up trouble…they ought to stay here and attend to their own business and work through the people who are interested in the Negro’s welfare…(NYT 6 June 61)  Two years later, in a talk at a dinner for a Democratic Senator from Ohio, Truman elaborated on his view, “the argument on civil rights has been stirred up by Boston and New England demagogues just as the War Between the States was brought about by Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison.  If the Northern busybodies would stay at home and clean up their own back yard, the rest of the country will obey the laws.”(NYT 15 Sept. 63)  Nevertheless, Truman insisted in 1965 that he had “done more for Negroes than any other President,”(13 April 65) and Shogan and other prominent historians appear to agree with him. Indeed, a back-cover blurb by History Channel’s Steven Gillon states: “[Shogan]…tells the story of how Harry Truman overcame the prejudice of his youth to become a powerful force in the struggle for civil rights.”  Shogan, a journalist, is like many academics whose narrative is an endorsement for the Democratic Party.

            Shogan writes well and makes his points.  The problem is what he omits from his history.  True, in the 195 pages of text, he concedes in one paragraph that Truman opposed the sit-ins.  Shogan even cites NYT stories, but few readers will bother to check how important Truman was in the early 60s in labeling sit-ins and other protest actions as Communist directed.

            Shogan rightly notes how little FDR did for Black civil rights in the 1930s.  The creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee was forced upon Roosevelt by the threat to stage a March on Washington by A. Philip Randolph (whose organization was not the NAACP).  Truman became president upon the death of Roosevelt in spring 1945.  He had won Black votes in Missouri by being fair, honest, efficient, and by supporting creation of a home for wayward Black girls and other local improvements.  He opposed lynching, beating of Black service men home from the war, and general discrimination, but even as Senator, Truman may have favored segregation.  Certainly, he was not in favor of social mixing.  Over time, that may or may not have changed.

            As president, Truman surely hoped to get the Black vote.  And he did think that some features of American society should be reformed.  He favored FEPC, but knew Congress would not make it permanent.  He did appoint a commission to report on the race problem, and it produced a liberal report, To Secure These Rights.  Truman was the first President to address the NAACP, and even in the 1960s was praising the NAACP, while in effect smearing all the other civil rights groups, like King’s SCLC, and CORE, SNCC, etc.  Truman did use his power as Commander in Chief to push for integration of the armed services.  Moreover, Shogan demonstrates how Truman used his Department of Justice to become involved in cases pressing for the end of segregation through “friend-of-the-court” briefs, trying to influence the judges by indicating that the government had taken a side in these cases.

            Yes, Truman was the first president to address the NAACP.  But when one of the founders of the organization refused to support Truman in the campaign of 1948, and instead endorsed Henry Wallace and the Progressives, the NAACP fired W. E. B. Du Bois.  In effect, that was the beginning of the NAACP as a Democratic-Party front group.  And two years later, Truman’s Department of Justice arrested Du Bois as a foreign agent.  Though Shogan discusses Du Bois in the era of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson, especially when Wilson segregated the civil service, Shogan omits how Du Bois was treated by Truman.

            Truman praised the NAACP in the 60s.  But Shogan never mentions what Truman’s Administration did to other civil rights organizations.  The NAACP was certainly not the only major civil rights group.  For example, in the 1930s it was the International Labor Defense that led the struggle to free the Scottsboro boys in Alabama.  Later in the 1930s a plethora of new groups formed like the first snick, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, the Council on African Affairs, etc.  All these groups were placed on Truman’s Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations.  By the mid-1950s, all of these had been destroyed.  If the NAACP had not fired Du Bois, and become a Democratic-Party front group, might it not have been placed on the Attorney General’s list for destruction, too?

            In many ways, the Southern civil rights movement did NOT begin with sit-ins in 1960.  I would argue it began in with the campaign throughout the South to elect Henry Wallace and the Progressives in 1948.  When Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho (the Prog. VP candidate) went to Birmingham to address the SNYC, Sheriff Bull Connor arrested him for entering through the Negro entrance.  Henry Wallace spoke at mixed rallies in the South, often receiving rotten eggs and tomatoes hurled by segregationists.  The PP efforts in Georgia were akin to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party efforts in the 1960s. 

            Some of the PP figures would re-emerge in the 1950s;  the Black woman who pushed the NAACP to integrate Central High in Little Rock; and the white women who, in the midst of the threatening white mobs, sought to shield a Black teen seeking to integrate Central High.  Is it a coincidence that SNCC in 1960 became the new “snick”?  There were people in the 1930s and 40s who were dissatisfied with the NAACP’s law-suit approach.  They were not sending atomic secrets to Moscow.  They were sick of the Democratic Party that ruled the South.  They were subversive to the system of segregation.  They formed some of the links between the PP and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.

            There are other flaws in Shogan’s volume.  He discusses Truman and Israel and how Sec. of State Marshall was strongly opposed to recognizing the Zionist state.  Yet, Shogan never mentions that in two bi-elections in NYC the American Labor Party (by 1948 the NY branch of Wallace’s Progressive Party) won election to Congress by demanding recognition of Israel.  Did Truman “believe” recognition was good policy?  Or did he realize he needed the Jewish vote?  How much did Truman believe in civil rights?  Or did he realize he needed the Black vote?

            When Shogan discusses the importance of Justice Dept. attorney Philip Elman, Shogan incredibly omits the revelations that Justice Frankfurter was colluding with Elman concerning the school segregation cases bundled in Brown v. Board of Ed.  If another Supreme Court Justice had been discussing with the attorney for the segregationists, former Democratic candidate for President, John W. Davis, on what would be the best arguments to convince all the court of the legality and fairness of segregation, you can imagine the outcry of cheating, foul, corruption, etc.!  They would have demanded the impeachment of the Judge.  Yet, Frankfurter informed Elman that some of Thurgood Marshall’s arguments were unconvincing, and how other integrationist presentations might better sway the court – thus tainting of the court process.  This goes unmentioned in Shogan’s book.

            Truman was an excellent politician.  Yet he did much to retard and destroy the civil rights movement developing in the South in the 1940s and 50s; and he denounced it once in was underway in the 1960s.  Moreover, one can argue that the man most involved in the friend-of-court suits, praised by Shogan, was literally corrupting the Supreme Court.  Meanwhile the Attorney General was heading the campaign against the integration movement (destroying all except the Dem. Party approved NAACP).

            Shogan even criticizes Republican Eisenhower!  In Little Rock, Ike was the first president since Grant to send troops to the South to defend Blacks.  What Democrat would do that?  Shogan is impressed by speeches.  Henry Wallace acted.  President Eisenhower acted.

            Shogan has written a pro-Democratic Party account of civil rights history.  The academedia complex will be satisfied.  Because of the major omissions, this book is an utterly distorted narrative.