When Truman sat back down, he turned to Walter White and told him, “I said what I did because I mean every word of it—and I am going to prove that I do mean it.”
The next day, newspapers hailed Truman’s speech as one of the most significant moments in American civil rights history. Yet as Truman expected, the address infuriated white southern Democrats, who were incensed by what they perceived as a betrayal. Going back to the 1870s, southern politicians, though traditionally conservative, had aligned themselves with northern Democrats primarily for a single reason: race. Southerners voted Democratic, and in exchange, northerners would leave matters of race and law enforcement to state governments, even those with traditions of white supremacy and segregation going back generations.
Now the times were changing. The war was a race reboot in America. If black Americans could be drafted to go to war and fight and die for their country, activists like Walter White argued, they should be able to vote in every state, and sit next to a white person on a bus. If black Americans were to pay the same taxes as white Americans, then they should enjoy the same benefits. Truman’s NAACP address recommended federal civil rights laws that threatened to destroy long-held southern traditions, and end the South’s allegiance to the Democratic Party in the process.
Reaction played out in the press. The popular senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called Truman’s speech a “devastating broadside at the dignity of Southern traditions and institutions,” and warned of “disastrous results in racial hatred and bloodshed.” A group of twenty-one Southern Democrats in Congress led by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia announced they would plan a filibuster to “stand guard” against any civil rights legislation.
During the weeks after Truman’s NAACP speech, racial anxiety gripped the South, and a grassroots campaign of white power began to inject fear into local communities, where in many cases black residents far outnumbered whites. Cross burnings were reported. “Talmadge White Supremacy Clubs” popped up in Georgia, named for the late Eugene Talmadge, a three-term Georgia governor who for years had actively promoted segregation in the state. According to one newspaper account, the Talmadge Club’s pledge card read in part that “the rule of our Government should be left entirely in the hands of white citizens.”
Truman’s stand on civil rights put him in a game of chicken against the southern power base of his own political party. Senators, congressmen, and governors from the South were sure that, if they put enough pressure on him, the president would back down.
“The world seems to be topsy-turvy,” Truman wrote Bess, who was back home in Missouri. “I can’t see why it was necessary for me to inherit all the difficulties and all the tribulations of the world—but I have them on hand and must work them out some way—I hope for the welfare of all concerned . . . All we can do is go ahead working for peace—and keep our powder dry.”
In the spring of 1947 Truman and the Eightieth Congress clashed in their most fierce battle yet. “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft of Ohio and Fred Hartley Jr., a House Republican from New Jersey, introduced the Taft-Hartley bill, sweeping legislation aimed at pulling power away from labor unions. The bill proposed outlawing closed shops (workplaces allowing only union workers), restricting labor unions from making contributions to political campaigns, making certain kinds of labor strikes unlawful, and requiring union leaders to declare that they were not members of a Communist party.
The bill, Truman believed, unjustly favored big business and Wall Street, and labor union members agreed. Tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in protest. On June 4, nearly twenty thousand union workers jammed New York’s Madison Square Garden to hear speakers denounce the bill; above the stage hung a sign saying, MR. PRESIDENT: VETO THE TAFT-HARTLEY SLAVE LABOR BILL. Six days later, another sixty thousand workers marched up Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. On June 17, ten thousand leather and shoe workers marched through Lynn, Massachusetts. More than 170,000 letters, 550,000 cards, and 27,000 telegrams flooded the White House mail room, mostly urging Truman to veto the bill—which he did.
Truman’s veto message to the Eightieth Congress included words like startling, dangerous, far-reaching, unprecedented, unworkable, burdensome, arbitrary, unnecessary, impossible, ineffective, discriminatory, clumsy, cumbersome, inequitable, backward, unfair, unwarranted, interfering, drastic, and troublesome.
In June, the Senate voted to override Truman’s veto, as Republicans joined with many Democrats including the president’s close personal friend Tom Connally of Texas. In the House, more Democrats voted for the bill than against it. Taft-Hartley was enacted on June 23, 1947. “The defeat,” recalled the Democratic National Committee’s publicist Jack Redding, “seemed like the end of the world.”
At the same time, Truman faced a furious backlash from liberal politicians over an executive order the White House released on March 21. Executive Order 9835 created a “loyalty board” that subjected federal employees to background checks to ensure that “maximum protection . . . be afforded the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of employees.” Suddenly, the FBI had the power to look into people’s private lives and root out those who had affiliations to organizations that were, or at least were believed to be, politically unacceptable. That is, Communist.
Executive Order 9835 was issued in response to Cold War jitters. A 1946 spy scandal in Ottawa, Canada, that resulted in the arrest of some three dozen suspected Soviet undercover agents shocked both Americans and Canadians, and “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and danger of Soviet espionage,” as the New York Times put it. Subsequent accusations that Communism was rife in federal agencies empowered Republicans to attack the Truman administration for being weak on Communism. Truman’s decree sought to calm nerves, but in fact, for many, it had the opposite effect.
“It was a political problem,” Clark Clifford explained. “Truman was going to run in ’48, and that was it . . . The President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called
