Harry Truman grew up in Independence, Missouri.
As a child he devoured history books and literature, played the piano,
and wanted to become a great soldier. His poor eyesight made a commission
to West Point impossible, and his family's financial problems kept
him from attending a four-year college.
Truman worked on the family farm between 1906 and 1914.
It was during this difficult time that he fell in love with Virginia Wallace,
whom he had known from childhood. They wed in 1919 and five years later
had their first and only child, Mary Margaret.
In 1914, after his father's death, Truman tried to earn a
living by operating of a small mining company and oil business,
while remaining involved with the family farm. In 1917, Truman's National
Guard unit shipped out to France as part of the American Expeditionary
Force fighting the world war. Truman turned a group of soldiers considered
unruley and ineffective into a top-notch unit.
After the war, Truman opened a men's furnishings store with an army buddy.
The shop failed after only a few years.
In 1922, Truman ran for a judgeship on the county court of Jackson County's
eastern district. Truman served one term, was defeated for a second,
and then became presiding judge in 1926, a position he held until 1934.
As presiding judge, Truman managed the county's finances during the
early years of the Great Depression. Truman established a reputation
for personal integrity, honesty, and efficiency.
In 1934, Truman was elected to the U.S. Senate. He became a national figure during World War II when he
chaired the "Truman Committee" investigating government defense spending.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Truman as his running mate
in the 1944 presidential campaign. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won
a comfortable victory over its Republican opposition, though Truman
served only eighty-two days as vice president. When FDR died April 12, 1945,
Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third
President of the United States.
Truman took office as World War II in Europe drew to a close. Adolf Hitler
committed suicide in Berlin only two weeks into Truman's presidency and
the allies declared victory in Europe on May 7, 1945. The war in the Pacific,
however, was far from being over. The war might lasted another year and
required an American invasion of Japan. The U.S. and British governments
had secretly begun to develop the world's most deadly weapon, the atomic bomb.
Upon its completion and successful testing in the summer of 1945, Truman
approved its use against Japan. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S. Army
Air Force dropped atomic bombs on two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
immediately killing upwards of 100,000 people. Japanese emperor Hirohito
agreed to surrender days later, bringing World War II to a close.
In response to what it viewed as Soviet threats, the Truman administration
constructed foreign policies to contain the Soviet Union's political power
and counter its military strength. By 1949, Soviet and American policies
had divided Europe into a Soviet-controlled bloc in the east and an
American-supported grouping in the west. That same year, a communist
government sympathetic to the Soviet Union came to power in China,
the world's most populous nation. The Cold War between the United States
and the Soviet Union had begun.
President Truman presided over the transition from a
war-time to a peace-time economy. During World War II, the American
government had intervened in the nation's economy to an unprecedented
degree, controlling prices, wages, and production. Truman lobbied for a
continuing government role in the immediate post-war economy and also
for an expansive liberal agenda that built on the New Deal. Republicans
and conservative Democrats attacked this strategy. An immediate postwar
economy characterized by high inflation
and consumer shortages further eroded Truman's support and contributed to
the Democrats losing control of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections.
Newly empowered Republicans and conservative Democrats stymied Truman's
liberal proposals and began rolling back some New Deal gains, especially
through the Taft-Hartley labor law moderately restricting union activity.
Truman won the presidential nomination of a severely divided Democratic
party in the summer of 1948 and faced New York's Republican governor
Thomas Dewey in the general election. Few expected him to win, but the
President waged a vigorous campaign that attacked Republicans in
Congress as much as it attacked Dewey. Truman defeated Dewey in
November 1948 with one of the most stunning political comebacks
in American history.
Truman viewed his reelection as a mandate for a liberal agenda,
which he presented under the name "The Fair Deal." The President
miscalculated, however, as the American public and conservatives
in both parties on Capitol Hill rejected most of his program. He
did win passage of some important liberal legislation that raised
the minimum wage and expanded Social Security. Moreover, the American
economy began a period of sustained growth in the early 1950s that
lasted for nearly two decades. Increasingly, though, his administration
was buffeted by charges of corruption and being "soft on communism."
The latter critique was extremely damaging as anti-communism became
one of the defining characteristics of early Cold War American political
culture. Some of the anti-communists, lambasted the
administration and the State Department.
Foreign policy challenges persisted into Truman's second term.
The President committed the United States to the defense of South Korea
in the summer of 1950 after that nation was invaded by
its communist neighbor, North Korea. The American military launched a
counterattack that pushed the North Koreans back to the Chinese border,
whereupon the Chinese entered the war in the fall of 1950. The conflict
settled into a bloody and grisly stalemate that would not be resolved
until Truman left office in 1953. The Korean War globalized the Cold War
and spurred a massive American military build-up that began the nuclear
arms race in earnest.
Truman's popularity sank during his second term, due largely to
accusations of corruption, charges that the administration was "soft on
communism," and the stalemated Korean War. Truman chose not to run in 1952.
The Democratic Party's candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson, lost to
war hero and Republican General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the fall election.
