Harry S. Truman: 5th Best President or Racist War-criminal?
Harry S. Truman – Voted Fifth Best President – CNBC
In 1924, Harry S. Truman was a judge in Jackson County, Missouri. When he was up for re-election, he decided it best to join the Ku Klux Klan to better his chances of getting reelected. He’s also known for this famous quote, taken from one of his diaries: “The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.”
Source: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/page21.htm
How did a man so racist get 77% of the Black vote during his election of 1948? In short, it was thanks to his issuing an order of desegregation to the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment.
People are torn on Harry Truman. Some proclaim him a war criminal, as the act of dropping two atomic bombs on civilian cities to “end World War II” could be seen as a war crime. The massive cover up of the atomic bombings and its effects also shed a negative light on his administration. Others see him as a true American hero, ending the great war and showing the world we were not afraid to defend ourselves by use of nuclear weaponry. I see him as a timid man, unsure of himself and paranoid. His secrecy and arrogance of Nuclear Weaponry led to many tensions with the Soviet Union. Had FDR not died, I think history would have been very different (I don’t believe he would have dropped the atomic bombs, nor do I think the cold war would have escalated so rapidly).
from historywarnetwork.com
Jon Stewart from the Daily Show has recently taken the position that Harry Truman was a war criminal. This video shows segments of the show and why the reporter thinks Jon Stewart is wrong.
I don’t agree with this reporter or this video at all. I don’t think the US gave fair warning (booklets dropped from airplanes above both cities about to be destroyed 5 days prior? Thanks America, good looking out for civilians there!) Also, he uses the attack on Pearl Harbor to justify both Atomic attacks on civilian cities, just as President Truman did.
“I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. The only language they seem to understand is the one we’ve been using to bombard them”. (Mark Selden, Living with the Bomb, p. 181).
How can you seriously use the bombing of Pearl Harbor to justify dropping an atomic bomb on TWO civilian cities? While I agree the Pearl Harbor attacks were unwarranted, they targeted a major naval base and not the surrounding civilian centers (though civilians did die, not nearly the number of causalities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Death Toll Pearl Harbor – 2,402 military, 68 civilian
Death Toll Hiroshima and Nagasaki – more than 200,000 civilian
I can’t believe Harry Truman is shown in such good light today. We are able to look at presidents’ faults and accomplishments easily now. Focusing too much on their negatives or positives can lead to bias, but studying Truman’s presidency is increasingly showing the many faults he had, and I think the biggest one (dropping both Atomic Bombs) is an issue many Americans are torn on even today.
Sources:
Selden, Mark. Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age . Santa Barbara: East Gate Book, 1997. Print. p.181
Plutonium Pandemonium 