On February 19 Truman appeared at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, addressing some twelve hundred people at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, an annual fund-raiser for the Democratic Party in honor of the party’s two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson—the namesake of Truman’s own Jackson County, Missouri. A table directly in front of the speaker’s platform remained empty; Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina and his wife had bought tickets for the event but refused to attend because the Mayflower was not a segregated hotel and Mrs. Johnston was concerned that “she might be seated next to a Negro.”
The move was a publicity stunt aimed at wounding Truman. It worked.
On the Monday after the Mayflower banquet, Strom Thurmond led a special committee of southern governors to Washington to meet in the offices of Senator J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island, who was just taking over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The governors of Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas were led into McGrath’s office at 2:30 p.m., followed by what the Democratic National Committee publicist Jack Redding recalled as “battalions of the press.” The governors all took seats, with the exception of Thurmond, who proceeded to pace furiously, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“Will you now,” Thurmond said, “at a time when national unity is so vital to the solution of the problem of peace in the world, use your influence as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to have the highly controversial civil-rights legislation, which tends to divide our people, withdrawn from consideration by Congress?”
McGrath answered in one syllable: “No.”
Thurmond—a former lawyer—continued to fire questions, as if the senator was on the witness stand. But McGrath repeatedly answered no. Thurmond refused to relent. Chewing on a fat cigar, McGrath laid it on the line: “There’ll be no compromise.”
Just as some American politicos had feared could happen, the Soviets began to foment global political chaos right as the American election season got underway.
On February 25 Soviet-backed forces took control of Czechoslovakia in a bloodless coup d’état. The Czech coup, Truman said in a speech to Congress shortly after, “has sent a shock throughout the civilized world.” The coup appeared to be in response to the Marshall Plan. Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk had publicly entertained the idea of accepting Marshall Plan dollars from the United States. The Soviets reacted. Communists took control of the country and, days later, Masaryk jumped—or was pushed—to his death from a third-story window.
Czechoslovakia was now firmly in the Kremlin’s grasp, and American officials were forced to ask themselves: If the Soviets could take control of Czechoslovakia so easily, without a shot fired, which country was next?
Ten days after the Czech coup, General Lucius Clay—the man in charge of the American-occupied sector of Germany—wrote a memorandum to S. J. Chamberlin, director of army intelligence. The mood in Berlin, Clay wrote, had suddenly darkened. After the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis, the four Allied powers in Europe—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France—had taken control of Germany, and Germany had been carved into four occupation zones, one zone for each of these Allied powers. From the American point of view, reunification and a rebirth of Germany as a democratic nation was the ultimate goal. The United States was now learning that this goal was not shared by the Soviets, who controlled the eastern portion of Germany. The idea that the Soviets would ever willfully relinquish control of their German territory was a chimera, and so the Americans, French, and British had begun to coordinate their own zones into one unified state (soon to become West Germany), and were about to issue a new currency—the deutsche mark.
Berlin lay entirely within the Soviet zone—like an island in a Soviet sea—and the city was also partitioned into four occupation zones. In order for Americans to move people and supplies from the American-occupied sector of Germany into the American sector of Berlin, trains had to travel through Soviet-occupied territory and through Soviet checkpoints. The Soviet- and American-occupied sectors of Berlin bordered each other, putting the United States and USSR nose to nose in one of the most strategically important metropolises in Europe.
“For many months,” General Clay wrote on March 5, “based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war was unlikely for at least ten years. Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.”
The Soviets made no effort to hide their anger over the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In a speech before the United Nations, Andrey Vyshinsky—the fierce Stalin loyalist and Soviet state attorney—attacked the American policies, calling the United States a “warmonger” that was using the atomic bomb as an intimidation tactic. Now the Soviets appeared to be making a move to take control of Berlin, to drive the United States out of the city. On March 25 the Soviets issued orders to restrict train traffic from the American sector into west Berlin. Truman was so unnerved, he wrote the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt: “It is the most serious situation we have faced since 1939. I shall face it with everything I have.”
The reaction from the Truman administration was firm and swift. The president arranged to make his first Cold War address. On March 17, in the Capitol, Truman delivered a fighting speech in favor of the Marshall Plan. All over the country and abroad, people sat by their radios and heard, for the first time, the American president name the Soviet Union as an enemy of peace.
Since the close of hostilities, the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe. It is this ruthless course of action,
