Honest Harry the Haberdasher

by Liberty and Power

Here are some quick thoughts about Thomas Fleming pro-Truman HNN article, Obama's from Chicago ... Why that Shouldn't Worry Us:"

How fortunate that Honest Harry chose Mr. Fleming to help his daughter.

No mention by Fleming of how Truman in heading the Senate investigation into war-profiteering in WWII sanitized it to the benefit of his Party. (See Bruce Catton, The Warlords of Washington.

That certainly went a long way to his replacing Wallace as VP in 1944.

No mention of Truman's decision to drop the A-Bombs when Japan was already defeated.

No mention of his decision to reverse FDR's policy on Indo-China and help place the French back in power there.

Not to worry, David McCullough's over 1,000 page Pulitzer Prize winning biography doesn't mention Harry's role in early Vietnam policy either.

Finally, Truman set another precedent in getting the US into a UN"police action," in Korea with no Declaration of War, thus greatly increasing Executive Power. Well, Harry WAS an"honest" proto-Caesar in promoting the Empire!

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Tim Sydney - 12/29/2008

William Marina leaves out the role of the Truman administration in establishing various "anti-communist" measures, "Loyalty Checks" etc, today seen as violations of civil liberties. These measures are today somewhat unfairly lumped together under the label "McCarthyism", a movement much larger and much more bipartisan than it's label suggests.

In any event, Senator J William Fulbright would have disagreed with Thomas Fleming's benign assessment of Truman. Here is what Fulbright had to say on March 1951.

"Scandals in Government are not a new phenomena. What seems to be new about these scandals is the moral blindness or callowness which allows those in responsible positions to accept the practices which the facts reveal. It is bad enough for us to have corruption in our midst, but it worse if it is to be condoned and accepted as inevitable."

After Fulbright helped expose scandals within the RFC, Truman would call Fulbright "an overeducated s.o.b."

The administration was dogged with scandals in the RFC, FHA, tax breaks swapped for campaign contributions, as well as government contract and surplus property sales scams.

Jules Abels, former Small Business Administration and 'Newsweek" economist produced a volume called "The Truman Scandals" which details the items mentioned. Abels' book was considered the definitive work on the subject for many years, and is now a forgotten footnote from the Old Right.

Of course, in Truman's defense it should not be forgotten that it was his accession to power, over rival Henry Wallace, that more pro-business elements rise in the New Deal coalition. This period and the left / right conflict within the FDR administration is discussed by Fleming in his "The New Dealers' War".

This change may have made possible the size and depth of the postwar demobilisation, the true end of the Great Depression as Robert Higgs details. The more progressive and Keynesian wing of the New Deal wanted to maintain wartime economic controls and mutate them into machinery for domestic economic planning to counter what they saw as the inevitable return of the big slump.