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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 22, 29 May 1950, p. 1 & 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Why President Harry Truman’s recent 6,000-mile “whistlestop” tour ever was called “non-political” belongs in the realm of either japery or political psychopathia. It was universally recognized for what it was, the first round in the fight for a Fair Deal Congress in an off-year election that is traditionally hard on the party in power, and a build-up for Truman in preparation for the 1952 elections. As such, it was a preview of the issues and how they will be fought on the Democratic side.
From the whistlestops – Grand Island, Ravenna, Broken Bow, Snake River Valley, Ottumwa, Galesburg, etc. – with gifts galore, introductions of Mrs. Truman and Margaret and induction of the president into the Sioux tribe – Truman wound up with a gala political orgy in Chicago prepared by the well-oiled big-city Democratic machine noted for “weighing its ballots,” complete with parade, balloons for the children and a TV showing of the cabinet in action.
Just as Senator Robert Taft has lived to regret the “whistlestop” appellation for the Truman barnstorming, he and Governor Dewey, prime Republican presidential aspirants, may yet regret the appellation “socialism” for the Fail-Deal program. A sample of Truman’s replies:
“So you see that the cry of socialism is as old as the hills. They used it against woman suffrage, against the Federal Reserve, against social-security ... [But] I am going to keep right on working for better houses, better schools ... and I don’t intend to be scared away by anybody who calls that program socialism.”
Truman’s argument closely resembles the type of speech Norman Thomas is accustomed to make in defense of socialism. Only Thomas calls all government reforms “socialism,” whereas Truman realistically appraises the Fair Deal for what it is, “welfare state” or government assistance to the economy.
Truman further replies to the "socialist” charge by saying:
“All of us, I am sure, have heard many cries about government interference with business and about creeping socialism. I should like to remind the gentlemen who make the complaints that if events had been allowed to continue as they were going prior to March 4, 1933, most of them would have had no business left ... to interfere with – and almost surely we would have had socialism in this country – real socialism.”
This argument, while it has an element of truth, has a triple political purpose for the Democratic program: it is to frighten the people with the bogey of “socialism,” as popularly and falsely identified with Stalinism, to place the blame for the depression on the opponent Republican Party (“the Hoover depression”) and to take credit for the current prosperity period of the country.
The president does a little better, however, when he leaves political theory alone. His off-the-cuff speeches were loaded with the folksiness and hominess which are felt by some to be the basis of his political glamor: the reference to the “little men with acorn minds” who opposed the “great oak” of the Hoover Dam project; the regionally appealing remark about Mrs. Truman’s uncle who graduated from Knox College; the “It’s a real pleasure to be back here,” said 50 times in 50 places the description of his “sashay” into politics; the “Old West” in Wyoming; potatoes in Idaho; corn in Iowa – and corn everywhere.
The appeal to backwardness and rural prejudice was not lacking. Praising Wyoming for its early recognition of women’s suffrage, Truman said:
“Can you imagine what some of the stuffy reactionary Easterners had to say? Listen – listen to this – you will like this, you will want to remember it. The editor of a prominent magazine published in New York said: ‘This unblushing female socialism defies alike the Apostles and the Prophets ...’” etc.
Yet, much as this type of demagogy may make Easterners wince, the verdict of a New York Times correspondent was admiringly to the effect that Truman can pare issues “to town size so any dirt farmer can understand them.”
But Truman is more than his style and more than a political father image with wife and daughter in tow. It is as the main exponent of the “welfare state” idea and the spokesman of American capitalism that we are interested in him and hence, above all, in his program. And most especially, since that program is so dear to the hearts of the labor leaders. It is the dominant program today in American political life, and indeed in the world – although the major foreign manifestations of the program at the time Truman was rhaking his tour was the decision to aid the Bao Dai regime in Indo-China and support the French in what is widely known in France as the “dirty war” against Indo-Chinese nationalism.
What does the welfare program consist of? “International cooperation” against isolationism, federal spending, public power projects, the Brannan plan of assistance to agriculture, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law, improved social-security laws, federal aid to education, better housing for low- and middle-income families, conservation of natural resources. jpid to small business, equal rights legislation.
Inasmuch as Truman was speaking in what has been the heartland of American isolationism and which thus tends to produce isolationist representatives in Congress, he struck hard against isolationists and “obstructionists” who would cut the military appropriations. He denounced them as abetters of Russia. “I am confident that we shall continue to defeat isolationism. This is the way to defeat communism. This is the way to build a prosperous world,” he said in one speech.
Since isolationism goes hand in hand with high tariffs, he “sashayed” into political theory at one point to allege that it was high tariffs that led to the last depression, which led to World War II – thus making it seem that W’orld War II was a Republican-engineered conflict. This theory won’t bear much examination, even around a cracker barrel.
He called for a kind of “new world order of free trade,” a sort of “one world of international trade.” It is implicit that high tariffs account for the cold war.
Truman’s allusions to the problem of atomic warfare, so closely linked with international relations and world affairs, were terse and strange. Of atomic energy for peacetime use, he said: “If we ... have not the sense to do that ... then I am here to tell you that we probably ought to be destroyed.” The meaning in this speech is somewhat obscure. It seems to express a profound desire for peace and peaceful application of atomic energy and at the same time conceives possession of and maneuvers with the A-bomb as a means toward peace. Elsewhere he said the United States was determined to use the A-bomb again, if necessary, for its “security.” “I did it and I say to you I would do it again if I had to.”
With A-bomb stockpiling going on all the while, H-bomb experimentation in the works, new “tactical” A-bombs for use against armies being developed, Truman enunciated a bigger peace slogan than ever, before, not “peace in out time, but peace for all time.”
The president likes to make predictions about the fate of the “welfare” economy. On this tour, he stated that his ten years’ goal was an average family income of $4,000 by 1960 and more prosperity than ever before. He expressed with a note of regret that “everybody knows” that 70 per cent of the national income goes for wars, past and future, and only the remaining 30 per cent for national welfare. He did concede that the 30 per cent was very important.
So the expressed aims of the Democratic Party’s chief boil down to: maintenance of the high profits of the American capitalist system with government spending and controls to increase social security of the people, and heavy military expenditures to fortify this system and its Allies in the Western bloc against the Stalinist bloc. A little human welfare, some democracy, great armaments, peace. Yes, peace is part of the scheme even if the measure to achieve it is an ever mounting military budget.
As against the Republican program, the Fair Deal has a widespread appeal. It was the labor wing which revitalized the Democratic Party, gave it “grass roots” and helped to account for Truman’s victory. Truman expressed the wish that the Republican Party would stand “for something” instead of just being “against.” This is partly campaign oratory typical of the party in power; the Republicans who are “for something” are likely to be ignominiously labeled “me-tooers.” But he likewise stated he was for the two-party system. We are sure he means this. For any important third party would be a party of labor and would inevitably captivate many who are now supporters of the Fair Deal program of the Democratic Party.
Can the U.S. economy – that is, private, unplanned, anarchic enterprise – bear a continued rise in the standard of living, the inflationary spiral, the 70 per cent military budget and maintain peace-through-an-arms-race? The danger signals are apparent. The system shows serious unemployment spots. There is a pronounced curtailment of civil liberties, toward thought-control. The Western European area, the depressed area of the democratic capitalist world, is in a permanent crisis and must be maintained in large part by U.S. assistance; at the same time it is not so sure it wants to be either an economic and political subdivision of the United States, or an atomic battleground, no matter who is dropping the bombs, Russia or the United States. The Third World War, given the division into two competitive, exploitive societies, is guaranteed. Only the date of the outbreak is unknown.
These factors are part of the counter-trend in welfare statism, capitalist variety. Left to operate by themselves, they could produce a world nightmare of war, totalitarianism and a blackout of culture and perhaps life itself. The only counter-trend to this, as yet small, is the tendency to independent and conscious activity on the part of labor, which could make of welfare a new, ringing cry that would herald a new civilization – a human civilization for the first time, of world brotherhood. Seen in this perspective, the political campaigning of President Truman is neither genial nor amusing.
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