After I saw that Texas Senator Ted Cruz has said that the president is turning the armed forces into a cauldron of social change and that he doesn’t think LGBT people should necessarily be allowed to serve in our military, I headed over to The Truman Library to see how a former president used our armed forces as a cauldron of social change. I encourage you to take a look-see at the timeline which runs from September 1945 to October 1953, when integration was basically complete and Truman was no longer our president.
Perhaps the most relevant elements of the timeline to our present day are these:
January 1948: President Truman decides to end segregation in the armed forces and the civil service through administrative action (executive order) rather than through legislation.
July 26, 1948: President Truman signs Executive Order 9981, which states, “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” The order also establishes the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and opportunity in the Armed Services.
It should be noted that President Truman took his time. It was almost three years after the army first began studying integration that he finally issued his executive order. In the meantime, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in Major League Baseball. It should also be noted that he simply could not have accomplished integration legislatively. To get an idea for how difficult that would have been, all you have to do is look at what happened at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1948.
July 13, 1948: The platform committee at the Democratic National Convention rejects a recommendation put forward by Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Minneapolis calling for abolition of segregation in the armed forces. President Truman and his advisors support and the platform committee approves a moderate platform plank on civil rights intended to placate the South.
July 14, 1948: Delegates to the Democratic National Convention vote to overrule the platform committee and the Truman administration in favor of a liberal civil rights plank, one that called for, among other things, the desegregation of the armed forces.
Let’s look at how things went down at the convention and in the aftermath of the convention:
African-Americans were an important Democratic constituency, but so were white Southerners. Previous party platforms had never gotten beyond bland generalizations about equal rights for all. Truman was prepared to accept another such document, but liberals, led by the ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), wanted to commit the party to four specific points in the president’s own civil rights program: abolition of state poll taxes in federal elections, an anti-lynching law, a permanent fair employment practices committee and desegregation of the armed forces.
Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis and a candidate for Senate, delivered the liberal argument in an intensely emotional speech: “The time is now arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” On July 14, the last day of the convention, the liberals won a close vote. The entire Mississippi delegation and half the Alabama contingent walked out of the convention. The rest of the South would back Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia as a protest candidate against Truman for the presidential nomination.
Nearly two weeks after the convention, the president issued executive orders mandating equal opportunity in the armed forces and in the federal civil service. Outraged segregationists moved ahead with the formation of a States’ Rights (“Dixiecrat”) Party with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its presidential candidate. The States’ Rights Party avoided outright race baiting, but everyone understood that it was motivated by more than abstract constitutional principles.
Truman was slated to deliver his acceptance speech at 10 p.m. on July 14 but arrived to find the gathering hopelessly behind schedule. As he waited, nominating speeches and roll calls droned on and on. Finally, at 2 a.m. he stepped up to the podium. Most of America was sound asleep.
He wore a white linen suit and dark tie, ideal for the stifling hall and the rudimentary capabilities of 1948 television. His speech sounded almost spit into the ether at the opposition. “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” He announced he would call Congress back into session on July 26—Turnip Day to Missouri farmers—and dare it to pass all the liberal-sounding legislation endorsed in the Republican platform. “The battle lines of 1948 are the same as they were in 1932,” he declared, “when the nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction.” New York Times radio and TV critic Jack Gould judged it perhaps the best performance of Truman’s presidency: “He was relaxed and supremely confident, swaying on the balls of his feet with almost a methodical rhythm.”
The delegates loved it. Truman’s tireless campaigning that fall culminated in a feel-good victory of a little guy over an organization man. It especially seemed to revitalize the liberals, for whom the platform fight in Philadelphia became a legendary turning point. “We tied civil rights to the masthead of the Democratic Party forever,” remarked ADA activist Joseph Rauh 40 years later.
In truth, the ramifications of that victory would require two decades to play out. In the meantime, Thurmond, winning four states and 39 electoral votes, had fired a telling shot across the Democrats’ bow. Dixiecrat insurgents in Congress returned to their seats in 1949 with no penalty from their Democratic colleagues. Party leaders, North and South, understood the danger of a spreading revolt. Truman would not backtrack on his commitment to civil rights, but neither would Congress give him the civil rights legislation he requested.
Strom Thurmond would eventually flip over to the Republican Party and he was followed by the rest of the segregationists and their political descendants.
It would take the assassination of a Democratic president, the persistent organizing of black Americans, and the courage of Lyndon Johnson to create actual legislation to assure civil rights and equality before the law for black Americans. But the cauldron of change had begun in the armed forces, at the instruction of President Truman.
Are we supposed to look back at that executive order and see in it some great injustice? Some great constitutional overreach?
Or are we supposed to look back admiringly on a president who did the right and courageous thing when everyone around him seemed to be consumed with prejudice and hate?
What I think is, every single time I’m talking to a conservative about the 1960s and I mention the Civil Rights movement, there’s an uncomfortable silence or they roll their eyes. Every single time.
I can understand getting some cultural pushback on the youth movements or the drugs or the cultural permisiveness or the roots of 1970s malaise. “Hating hippies” (or at least making fun of them) makes sense to me, although I don’t agree with it.
But the Civil Rights movement just never gets an “amen” or any kind of approval from conservatives. They know they shouldn’t speak against it — nobody wants to say they don’t like Martin Luther King — but I always get that silence. (Or they make a face.) It’s like a litmus test for conservatism.
And this really couldn’t have greater contemporary relevance. I mean, what does this tell us that arguably the most important social and political breakthrough of the last century isn’t really liked. It’s the ultimate example of conservatives’ use of “political correctness” as a description of how they’re rhetorically constrained: they know there’s a strong social force making them “like” Martin Luther King and the hard-won triumphs of the 1960s, and forcing them to shut up if they don’t. I honestly think its easier to get an “amen” mentioning Stonewall then Selma.
Where Obama drives the conservatives nutty is when he talks about his mother and especially his grandparents. They shaped his political values, something that is rarely understood by progressives. His sense of his blackness is not as much from family teaching as from other people’s (especially white people’s) reaction to him and from his experiences as an adult.
When President Obama refers to himself as a “mutt”, it pushes bigot buttons that transcend ideological boundaries. Unexamined racism permeates American society, even in the most liberal and progressive white areas.
That fact does not however immunize Obama from straightforward criticism of his policies. But going on seven years, his legacy is looking better and better.
The question is whether the Republican Party implodes before or after the 2016 election. And if the Democratic Party can mount a campaign as a party ever again. There are huge rips in both big tents, but little indication how they will shape the 2016 election.
To a great extent, that uncertainty and open possibilities is the result of how President Obama has governed over the past approaching seven years.
And there are 15 months left to run. That is ample time to tie up a lot of loose ends.
My second favorite scene in “The West Wing” after the demolition of Leviticus by Martin Sheen is the scene where Sam is trying to convince the pentagon folks to drop DADT, and they’re resisting because it’s was a ‘danger to unit cohesion’. In walks Admiral Fitzwallace “50 years ago they were saying that about me…I’m an admiral and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Beat that with a stick.”
You’re clearly preaching to the choir, which is why my comment is just third in this thread. I wish liberals would give Obama more credit for the good he has accomplished.
My father served in the army from “53 to “55. He said there was quite a bit of prejudice in those days, but the haters were ordered to stuff it. As a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, he felt really good about this. Made it easier for him to serve too because it sent a clear no B.S. message that we’re all Americans and we’re all in this together.
Tru dat.
I get furious with my wife (a red diaper baby) when she dismissingly talks about Obama’s centrism. Yeah, he’s a centrist.
He got more done in health care than anyone since 1964. He got more done in the military than anyone since 1948. He got more done in stopping American involvement in foreign war than anyone since 19fucking15. He got more done in diplomacy than anyone since 1972.
But I must admit, he hasn’t got an assault rifle ban, he hasn’t gotten the negotiation with big pharma and we are still lacking in climate control.
Idiots. Hardline lefties are idiots ready to throw all babies out with bathwater because of some perceived lack.
Thank you.
Your last two long-form posts have been excellent pieces of work. I hope this is working you into the national conversation. We could use some new framing of discussion.
Took the invitation to watch the full speech Truman gave at the 1948 Convention. Take a look at the link; it won’t imbed for some reason:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3389-1/harry-truman-acceptance-speech
Boy, I can see why Truman ended up having high disapprovals. He calls out both the farmers and the Labor communities, asserting that four straight terms of Democratic Presidents have vastly improved the conditions for each, saying that if they didn’t push hard in support of the Democratic ticket, they were “the most ingrateful people in the world”. Then he spends more than half the speech in an extremely detailed policy attack on the Republican Congress.
The bit about “we’ll beat the Republicans and make them like it” was pretty satisfying, I must say.
It’s also interesting to experience the state of television production in 1948 as they covered the POTUS election results.
That’s a lot of dead air there.