Politics And Policies Of The Truman Administration PDF
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POLITICS AND POLICIES OF THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION Politics and Policies o f the Truman Administration Edited with an Introduction by BARTON J. BERNSTEIN CHICAGO QUADRANGLE BOOKS 1970 POLITICS AND POLICIES OF THE TRUMAN AD MINISTRATION. Copyright © 1970 by Quadrangle Books, Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address the publishers at 12 East Dela ware Place, Chicago 60611. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by Burns and MacEachern Ltd., Toronto. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-78302 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 3 American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War BY BARTON J. BERNSTEIN ................................................................................ The Quest for Peace and Prosperity: International Trade, Communism, and the Marshall Plan BY THOMAS G. PATERSON ....................................................................................... 78 America and the German “Problem” 1945-1949 BY LLOYD C. GARDNER ............................................................................................r.113- The Cold War Comes to Latin America BY DAVID GREEN .......................................................................................................tJAfr The Rhetoric of Politics: Foreign Policy, Internal Security, and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era, 1945-1950 BY ATHAN THEOHARIS ...............................................................................................196 The Escalation of the Loyalty Program BY ATHAN THEOHARIS ...............................................................................................242 The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights ( BY BARTON J. BERNSTEIN ............................................................................\ v)v269’ 315 INDEX POLITICS AND POLICIES OF THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION Introduction As th e m em ories of deep freezes, Russian spies, and foreign wars have faded, Americans have come to express grudging respect for Harry S. Truman and the accomplishments of his administration. Many scholars have ranked him as a “near great” President, and a few have placed him among the “great.” Judg ing him in part by his expansion of presidential power and his extension of the nation’s influence abroad, they have found much to applaud in his administration. As admirers of the liberal tra dition, they praise him for continuing the New Deal program and seeking to expand its benefits through his own Fair Deal. Sharing the consensus on Soviet responsibility for the Cold War, they endorse his foreign policy, seeing his resistance to the Soviet “threat” as visionary and courageous. For these historians, Tru man’s postwar administration cast off the shackles of American innocence and moved to a wise and necessary foreign policy. His intervention in Korea, his determined efforts to halt com munism elsewhere, and his containment policy in Europe—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and n ato —all command their respect. In the late forties and early fifties, politicians and scholars sometimes challenged this emerging interpretation. Most dis- 3 4 Introduction senters questioned the administrations will or its ability to resist communism, and criticized the government for belated and timid responses to the Soviet “menace.” Others, like Walter Lippmann and George Kennan, lamented the excessive moralism and legal ism of American policy-makers, their loss of faith in traditional diplomacy, their unwillingness to seek a relaxation of Cold War antagonisms, and their inability to define and act upon the na tional interest. A few scholars, most notably William Appleman Williams, questioned the emerging consensus from a different and surprising perspective. Moving beyond the naive criticisms of American Cold War policies by Henry Wallace and Wilsonian internationalists, Williams explained the Cold War not by Soviet malevolence but by American ideology, which he traced back to the nineteenth century. Not the innocence of American policy makers but their conception of the national interest produced the Cold War. The national interest, for these policy-makers, depended upon an expanding domestic economy which required equal access to international markets and the relaxation of trade barriers (the Open Door). By their analysis, economies which moved to bilateral trading, or revolutions which overturned cap italism, were a menace to the international order, upon which American prosperity, as well as domestic liberties, seemed to depend. Initially, in American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952), and then more fully in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959, rev. ed., 1962), Williams emphasized that American pol icy-makers had sought to impose upon the postwar world their own design for peace and prosperity. America’s Open Door pol icy, he argued, had directly threatened Russian security, pro voking her fears of a renewed cordon sanitaire. The American struggle to roll back Soviet influence, he stressed, was not a response to feared aggression but part of the larger strategy of trying to create a world in which the American political economy could survive. Williams denied that Russia was a military threat to the United States or Western Europe, pointing out that the United States, not Russia, was the dominant military power in the postwar years. Often ignored or rejected at first, the Tragedy has won great
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