February 1947
In
welcoming George C. Marshall as the new Secretary of State, H.A. said, “In
almost every nation that has suffered heavily in this war, men and women are
desperately trying to alter the old order of things because the old order has
brought them poverty, disaster and war…
Almost without a battle we have yielded to the Russians the loyalty of
millions of workers and peasants because they believe the Russians and not
ourselves are their only guarantors against hunger and war. We cannot permit this to go on or we shall
find our only allies are the tired men who have lost the faith of their own
people.”
Speaking
of tired men who have lost the faith of their people, it looks like King George
will fall in Greece, as might the government in Turkey. The anti-communist Whiskey Rebels want to
send military aid to these regimes; however, the anti-communist, but
isolationist, subsection of the Whiskey Rebels do not want any more tax dollars
spent on more foreign aid.
H.A.
responded that sending military aid to Greece and Turkey would be a down payment
on an unlimited expenditure aimed at opposing communist expansion. America, in effect, would be forced to police
Russia’s every border. To the Whiskey
Rebels there is no regime too reactionary for us to support provided it stands
in Russia’s expansionist path. There is
no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest, which may widen until
it becomes another world war. He said, humanitarian
aid to Greece was needed, but not military aid to a repressive regime. A policy of military aid H.A. said, “is
utterly futile. No people can be bought. America cannot afford to spend billions and
billions of dollars for unproductive purposes.
The world is hungry and insecure, and peoples of all lands demand
change. American loans for military
purposes won’t stop them. …once America
stands for opposition to change, we are lost.
America will become the most hated nation in the world.”
H.A.
called for action through the U.N. “If
the United Nations is untested, let us test it.
If the United Nations lacks support, let us support it. If the United Nations is weak, let us
strengthen it.”
The
way to fight communism, H.A. concluded, was “by what William James called ‘the
replacing power of the higher affection.’
In other words, we must give the common man all over the world something
better than communism. I believe we have
something better than communism here in America.”
© 2014 Ron Millar
January 1947
Okay
I’m not paranoid. We found out that J.
Edgar Hoover, in his paranoia of “Communist conspiracy,” has made dossiers on
everyone connected with H.A. It seems
Hoover secretly questions the president’s “Americanism” and he, and everyone
associated with him, is suspect. Beware
the clean-cut men in gray suits.
H.A.
was on Meet the Press and almost every question was, in one way or
another, about the infiltration of communists in our society. He simply replied, “If you allow that little
thing to dominate your mind, it means that you have become a red-baiter, a
person who wants to sic the F.B.I. onto your neighbor; its interferes with
everything you want to do.”
However,
fear of communist infiltration is growing.
Spurred by the Whisky Rebels, Conservative Republicans such as Robert
Taft of Ohio and Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, and William Knowland of California
allied with racist southern Democrats such as Mississippi’s Senator James O.
Eastland and Congressman John Rankin attacked the New Deal as “un-American” and
“unconstitutional” and in foreign policy they said that H.A. would allow the
Communists to take over the world.
Congress
has started investigations to identify and expel communists in the federal
government. To facilitate their efforts
they sought to establish a Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. The program would not allow employees under
suspicion to confront their accusers or to know the evidence against them.
H.A.
said that Congress was overstepping its bounds.
He was the President and he was responsible for government
employees. H.A. correctly sees this as
means to discourage the best and brightest from staying, or joining, government
service to advance the New Deal. H.A.
will not allow the New Deal to be stymied.
Again
from the sidelines, Truman said he would issue an Executive Order to implement
the Congressional program and weed out communists in government. Fortunately, Truman is not the president and
innocent employees will not lose their jobs due to red-baiting.
© 2014 Ron Millar
© 2014 Ron Millar
December 1946
Although
mid-term election results were bad [see November 1946 entry –AS], this was a
good financial year for H.A., he expected his 40 percent ownership of Pioneer
Hi-Bred will provide him with $150,000.
This compared to his presidential salary of $75,000, Vice President salary
of $20,000, and his former Secretary salary of $15,000.
Even
with this income, H.A. is notoriously cheap.
One of my jobs, before he became President, was to surreptitiously
supplement his restaurant tips. As
President, this does not come up as often, since he doesn’t need to carry cash
or even a wallet, but on occasion still need to reach into my pocket.
Fortunately,
H.A. is generous to labor in the big picture.
H.A.
used the full force of his office to mediate labor disputes and helped prevent
strikes. His efforts helped ensure that
wages did not fall as the labor force increased with the returning service men
and women. He did this through the public bully pulpit of shaming big business
in their efforts to reduce wages and through private meetings explaining the
importance of big business to work with his administration to ensure the
continuance of lucrative government contracts, fair business regulation, and
open markets overseas. Strikes still
occurred but I believe our efforts greatly limited the number of strikes and
shortened their duration. For those
recalcitrant big businesses, unidentified members of our administration hinted
that we were considering using the administration’s authority under the
Smith-Connally Act of 1947, passed over FDR’s veto, to seize plants closed by
labor disputes. Since the law was
designed to weaken organized labor, our opponents howled that this would be an
illegal nationalizing of industry. H.A.
has not had to use this option, but the threat has been powerful.
This
month, we created a Committee on Civil Rights to provide recommendation on how
to eliminate, or at least reduce, racial discrimination in government. H.A. wants the government to serve all
Americans and to ensure that it does he knows that government must be made up
of all Americans. Once these
recommendations are made, I hope that H.A. will expand the focus of this
committee. The Whiskey Rebels attacked
the formation of the committee in their normal hysteria that promoting civil
rights is a communist plot to divide and destroy America.
© 2013 Ron Millar
November 1946
The
mid-term elections were a disaster for H.A. and the progressive Democrats. The Republicans two-word slogan “Had Enough?”
captured the mood of the nation. The
slogan was also modified to include “Had enough strikes?” and “Had enough
communism?” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio
accused the president of seeking a Congress “dominated by a policy of appeasing
the Russians abroad and of fostering Communism at home.” The Archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal
Spellman wrote an article prior to the election saying “only the bat-blind can
fail to be aware of the Communist invasion of our country.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce widely
distributed a report entitled “Communist Infiltration in the United
States.”
The
voters gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first
time since 1928. The Republicans now
have a 58-seat majority in the House (246 to 188 -AS) and a six-seat edge in
the Senate. However, the actual loss for
H.A. is even higher when you consider that the vast majority of the Southern
delegation is also hostile to H.A. Many
Republican elected officials are talking of leaving the Democratic Party to be
more closely associated with the Whiskey Rebel controlled Republicans. I guess their hatred of Communists exceeds
their hatred of the party of Lincoln. Two
rabid anti-communists are going to be taking seats in Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and
Representative Richard Nixon of California both of whom obtained their seats by
smearing their opponents as pinkos and communists. Nixon defeated Congressman Jerry Voorhis by
linking him to the “Moscow-CIO PAC-Henry Wallace line.”
H.A.
responded by saying that “As a result of this election, the Democratic Party
will either become more progressive or it will die. I do not expect it to die.” He added, “The American people have rejected,
as they will always reject, a Democratic Party that is not militantly
progressive… Of course, we need organization.
The primary effort of progressives may be to rebuild the Democratic
Party as a liberal party.”
In
response the red-baiting of the Republicans, conservative Democrats and Whiskey
Rebels, H.A. said, “We shall hold firmly to the American theme of peace,
prosperity and freedom and shall repel all the attacks of the plutocrats and
monopolists who will try to brand us as reds.
If it is traitorous to believe in peace, we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity
for all, we are communists. If it is
red-baiting to fight for free speech and real freedom of the press, we are
red-baiters. If it is un-American to
believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation, we are un-American. I say that we are more American than the
neo-Fascists who attack us. I say on
with the fight.”
In
response to subsequent attacks, H.A. said, “Those who put hatred of Russia
first in all their feelings and actions do not believe in peace. We shall never be against anything simply
because Russia is for it. Neither shall
we ever be for anything simply because Russia is for it. We shall hold firmly to the American theme of
peace, prosperity and freedom.”
Needless
to say the Whiskey Rebels and other opponents used this language to confirm
their rhetoric of fear and hate. To
further drum up the fears of Communism, J. Edgar Hoover at a speech before the
American Legion charged that at least 100,000 Communists were loose in the
nation’s schools, colleges, churches, newspapers, movie studios, and radio
stations.
H.A.
had dealt with this type of fear mongering before. Texas Congressman Martin Dies, an ultra-conservative
and chairman of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, wrote a
letter to H.A. on March 28, 1942, which he gave to reporters the next day,
charging that “at least thirty-five high government officials employed by the
Board of Economic Warfare have public records which show affiliations with
front organizations of the Community Party.”
H.A. hit back immediately and strongly.
In a four-page rebuttal H.A. accused Dies of seeking “to inflame the
public mind by a malicious distortion of the facts.” Citing the need for unity in our war effort,
H.A. said, “the doubts and anger which this and similar statements of Mr. Dies
tend to arouse in the public mind might as well come from [Nazi propagandist
Joseph -AS] Goebbels himself as far as their practical effect is
concerned.” The newspapers, and the
public, saw this as yet another attempt by Dies to promote himself at the
expense of others and then sided with the Vice President.
© 2013 Ron Millar
October 1946
H.A.
gave a speech in Madison Square Garden that is giving him grief from both the
Left and Right. The Left boo’d and
hiss’d when he said, “We may not like what Russia is doing in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial
expropriation, and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of
the people of the United States.” And
the vast majority of people attending were of the Left.
The
Right attacked him for appeasing the Russians and interference with States
Rights – read Jim Crow and segregation for saying, “During the past year or so,
the significance of peace has been increased immeasurably by the atom bomb,
guided missiles, and airplanes which soon will travel as fast as sound. Make no mistake about it – another war would
hurt the United States many times as much as the last war… He who trusts in the
atom bomb will sooner or later perish by the atom bomb – or something worse. I say this as one who steadfastly backed preparedness
throughout the thirties. We have no use
for namby-pamby pacifism. But we must
realize that modern inventions have now made peace the most enticing thing in
the world – and we should be willing to pay the price for peace… The price for
peace – for us and for every nation in the world – is the price of giving up
prejudice, hatred, fear and ignorance…
Hatred breeds hatred. The
doctrine of racial superiority produces a desire to get even on the part of its
victims. If we are to work for peace in
the rest of the world, we here in the United States must eliminate racism from
our unions, our business organizations, our educational institutions, and our
employment practices. Merit alone must
be the measure of men.”
H.A.
closed by saying that peace was the “basic issue” facing voters in the coming
mid-term elections and in the presidential election two years from now. “How we meet this issue will determine
whether we will live not in ‘one world’ or ‘two worlds’ – but whether we live
at all.”
A
New York Times reporter [James Haggerty -AS] asked if the boos and
hisses surprised him. H.A. said, “It was
to be expected. I was following a
straight American line.”
On
a happier note, Jean [Wallace’s daughter -AS] was married this month.
© 2013 Ron Millar
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