Just Wild About Harry

Billmon notes this Washington Post essay suggesting that George W. Bush will beat John Kerry in the same way that Harry S Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in 1948. Billmon's right that if you have to start comparing an incumbent president to Harry Truman in May of an election year, things are bleak indeed. Truman and Bush did face Congresses controlled by the Republican Party, which Truman ran against to great effect. However since Bush is himself a Republican, it seems unlikely that running against the do-nothing Republican Congress will prove an equally effective strategy.

In 1948 Truman also took a series of courageous stands on civil rights, much more courageous than his precedessor Franklin Roosevelt felt up to. After appointing a civil rights commission in the previous year, (which produced the famous report "To Secure These Rights,") Truman adopted many of its recommendations, proposing new civil rights legislation, including the abolition of the poll tax and anti-lynching laws. He issued executive orders desegregating the military and the civil service and ran his 1948 campaign as a champion of civil rights.

How does this compare with Bush? Well, let's see, Bush's great act of courage was endorsing a constitutional amendment that would prevent gays and lesbians from ever attaining equal civil rights.

Yes, it's true: the similarities really are quite astonishing.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Truman in the past several months because this year marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. What does that have to do with Harry Truman, you might ask? Plenty. Most people don't realize it, but there's a pretty strong argument that without Harry Truman's courage, Brown v. Board of Education (and progress in civil rights for blacks) would have been delayed for many years.

Not only did Truman get behind civil rights through his executive orders, and not only did he appoint William Hastie to the Third Circuit court of appeals, which was at that point the highest federal judicial appointment given to any African-American, but Truman's Justice Department continuously pushed for civil rights before the Supreme Court, particularly in the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kramer.

In 1950 the Truman Justice department asked the Supreme Court to overrule the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson in a trio of cases, the most famous of which is Sweatt v. Painter. The Justices, however, were not so bold as Truman; they simply struck down Texas's dual law school system without overturning Plessy. Two years later, when a series of cases led by Brown v. Board of Education came to the Supreme Court, the Truman Justice department again asked that Plessy be overruled. Two years later, in 1954, the Supreme Court finally agreed, striking down state segregation of public schools in Brown and segregation of public schools in the District of Columbia in the companion case of Bolling v. Sharpe.

Putting the prestige of the Justice Department and the Solicitor General's office behind ending Jim Crow was an important step in paving the way for Brown and Bolling. But probably the most important thing Truman did to make Brown happen was desegregating the Armed Forces by executive order in 1948. Most people don't realize how crucial this act was in shaping everything that happened in the next decade.

To see why, suppose that Truman had not been so courageous. Suppose he does not desegregate the Armed Forces, the war in Korea becomes a long hard slog, as before, and Brown and Bolling come before the Court in 1952, just as Eisenhower assumes the Presidency.

The first question the Justices will have to decide is whether overturning the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson will have any consequences for federal segregation in other programs, in particular, the military. Bolling v. Sharpe said that the federal government couldn't segregate the D.C. schools. But the Court might well have thought twice about that result if they knew that the next case would concern military desegregation. That's because in general courts do not like to interfere with military decisionmaking and they generally like to defer to military judgments. Case in point is Korematsu, in which the Court upheld internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans, despite acknowledging that racial classifications were disfavored and subject to the most searching scrutiny.

The fear that ordering desegregation of the D.C. public schools in Bolling would quickly lead to a court challenge to desegregation of the military would put strong pressure on the Court not to order desegregation of the D.C. public schools. And if the D.C. schools can remain segregated, it looks quite bad to say that the schools in the South must desegregate. (This is, in fact, one reason why Bolling and Brown are decided at the same time. In Bolling Warren says it would be "unthinkable" to desegregate state schools and not the D.C. schools. But this logic cuts in both directions).

Thus, the problem of military segregation might have made the Court much more cautious, and tipped the scales the other way in Bolling and Brown. In the alternative, Chief Justice Warren might have gotten a majority to overrule Plessy, but faced dissents from Justices Jackson, Clark, and Reed, based on their fears of what this would mean for the military, especially given the United States's recent experience in Korea. (The one thing Warren wanted to avoid was a dissenting opinion in Brown, particularly from a Southerner like Reed. The strong threat of a dissent from one or more of these Justices might have made Warren and the other Justices think twice.).

Warren wouldn't have gotten much support elsewhere, either: The Joint Chiefs would have been opposed to desegregation, as they were when Truman was President, and there is no reason to think that Eisenhower, who thought Brown premature, would have gotten behind a decision that might have led to judicial supervision of the Armed Forces.

The conclusion seems inescapable: Without Truman taking the issue of desegregation of the military off the table in 1948, Brown is a very, very hard sell. On the other hand, because Truman set a precedent by desegregating the Armed Forces, he made it possible for the State Department to urge the Court to overrule Plessy a few years later, arguing, as it did, that Jim Crow had become an embarrassment that was hurting American foreign policy interests overseas. The United States was fighting a battle for the hearts and minds of the newly independent countries of the Third World. Jim Crow was the best propaganda weapon that the Soviet Union had. The "Cold War imperative" for Brown became much stronger once the Armed Forces had been desegregated and the South remained the one part of the country that still practiced Jim Crow.

Truman is widely acknowledged to be a great president for many reasons. But he does not get enough credit for his civil rights policies, which were among his most important achievements. It is true that some of these decisions also benefited him politically. But not all of them did, and many of them took enormous moral courage, the sort of moral courage one rarely finds these days in the White House. George W. Bush is supposed to have once told New Yorker writer Ken Auleta: "No President has ever done more for human rights than I have." That statement is laughable on its face. But the more one learns about Harry Truman, the more one has to conclude that he is one of the great defenders of human rights among American Presidents.