Harry Truman

Thirty years have now elapsed since Harry S. Truman departed the White House for the friendly confines of the Gates-Wallace house at 219 North Delaware in Independence, Missouri. We come here to Hofstra to commemorate, a year early it is true, the 100th anniversary of the birth of this remarkable man by assessing the state of Truman scholarship today.

Seldom has any president been the recipient of so much public affection as Truman has received in recent years. As a result of the political malaise which has settled over this country since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the divisive Vietnam War, and the dispiriting trauma of Watergate, Harry Truman has become an authentic folk hero to many Americans. Truman mania boomed in the mid-1970s; Margaret Truman affectionate Harry S. Truman and Merle Miller's popular Plain Speaking were both best-sellers. James Whitmore triumphantly toured the country with Samuel Gallu one-man play, "Give 'em Hell, Harry," in 1975. This play also became a very successful motion picture. Three television shows, all very favorable to Mr. Truman, appeared within a relatively short span of time. A Republican President, Gerald Ford, who had tenaciously battled Truman as a young Congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, proudly proclaimed the Missourian as his own and conspicuously displayed a bust of Truman in the oval office. In the 1976 campaign both Ford and his Democratic rival, Jimmy Carter, outdid one another in claiming to be cast from the Truman mold. As recently as 1980 when the Gallup Poll asked "Of all the Presidents we've ever had, who do you wish were President?", Harry Truman finished an impressive third behind John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This great outpouring of affection is especially interesting to those of us who remember how unpopular Mr. Truman was as president. For years he held the dubious distinction of receiving the lowest popularity rating ever given to an incumbent president.

As we approach the centenary of Mr. Truman's birth it is very fitting that we take stock of the state of the art of Truman historiography. Before going any further I should make it clear that I shall not attempt to give a comprehensive overview of all the books and articles that have appeared on Mr. Truman. The task is beyond the scope of a paper of this size. What I would like to do is to survey some of the most important work that has been done on Harry Truman and make a few suggestions about what remains to be done.

Although Harry Truman possessed a great sense of history, it was not until 1975, approximately three years after his death, that the most revealing of his personal papers became available to researchers. These are the President's Secretary's Files (PSF) and the Post-Presidential Files (PPF). These are very well described by Robert Ferrell in his "A Note on the Sources" in Harry S. Truman and the Modern Presidency, so there is no need to go into detail here. It will be interesting to see what impact these files will have in the years ahead. Thus far only Robert Ferrell and Larry Yates have made extensive use of this rich, new material, Ferrell for his own books and Yates for Robert Donovan.

By far the most impressive scholarly treatment of Truman to appear in the early 1970s was Alonzo Hamby Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism. None of the old adages cautioning readers to beware of revised doctoral dissertations masquerading as real books apply here. Hamby has written a very well reasoned account of the love-hate relationship that existed between Mr. Truman and the New Deal liberals in the years after Franklin Roosevelt's death. It is generally accepted that Truman had loyally and enthusiastically supported the New Deal, but had never been particularly fond of New Dealers. Truman told Clark Clifford that most of the liberals around Franklin Roosevelt were "crack-pots" and the "lunatic fringe."