For a deputy, Batt hired Dr. Johannes Hoeber, a European-born political scientist who had been working for the city of Philadelphia. “We had been told right at the beginning that this Research Division was to operate in the strictest anonymity,” noted Hoeber, “that even its existence should not be publicly known, mainly for reasons of security.”
For living space, the researchers were given rooms at the national club of the American Veterans Committee on New Hampshire Avenue, around the corner from their office space. From July on, remembered Hoeber, “we lived, literally, a rather monastic life, locked up in this men’s club on the third floor, almost dormitory style rooms . . . We were on tap 24 hours a day, and when we went from our office around the corner to the AVC club where we lived, to eat our dinner, the work just went on.”
All of Truman’s campaign advisers were thrilled with his performance at the Democratic National Convention. As Bill Batt put it in a July 22 memo to Clark Clifford, Truman had to show the American people “his courage, his coolness, his determination, his sincerity, and his fighting spirit—qualities he demonstrated in his magnificent acceptance speech at Philadelphia.” That set a tone, they believed, that the president had to continue going forward—bold, fearless, and relentlessly aggressive.
Soon after the Philadelphia convention, Truman received a visit from Oscar Ewing. The Democrats had adopted a strong civil rights platform in Philadelphia, Ewing said. There was no turning back. He argued that Truman had to act now, to take the civil rights program to its logical next step. If he did not, Ewing intimated, voters would see him as waffling on the issue. If civil rights was to be an anchor of the Democratic platform, why wait?
Truman inquired exactly what Ewing was suggesting, and Ewing dropped a bombshell: The president should desegregate the military by executive order. If Truman asked the Eightieth Congress for legislation, he could lose, and that would be that. Nothing could make a statement about the future of race in America more than desegregation of the military. And by doing so by executive order, Truman could steer the black vote to the Democratic Party, perhaps for years to come.
The president considered the matter. It would be a dangerous move. The Southern Democrats had bolted the party, and this would be like slamming the door on them on their way out. How would America’s military leaders respond? And the soldiers themselves? Yet it was the right thing to do, Truman believed. He decided to push forward, and he handed the mechanics of the job over to Clark Clifford, who handed it over to his assistant, George Elsey.
Normally, a White House staffer named Philleo Nash handled such matters, as Nash was the president’s special assistant on minority affairs. Elsey went hunting through the executive mansion for Nash, only to find that he was on vacation.
“My gosh,” Elsey told Clifford, “Nash is away and he’s the only one that knows anything about this. This is his bailiwick—it’s his department.”
Deep in northern Wisconsin, Nash was on a fishing trip when he got a phone call at his hotel summoning him back to Washington. “[I] jumped on the night train,” he recalled, “and was in Washington the next day.” He arrived on a Friday, and by Sunday night, two executive orders were drafted and finalized. Truman was ready to pull the trigger.
On the morning of Monday, July 26, reporters were busy out in the field as the first day of the emergency special session of Congress began. But news of two executive orders quickly spread across Washington and beyond. Truman’s Executive Order 9980 created a system of “fair employment practices” within the federal government, “without discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Simply stated: Any American who paid taxes would be as eligible for federal employment as any other, no matter the color of their skin.
The second executive order—9981—was the historic one. With the swipe of a pen, Truman desegregated the United States military. The move was entirely unexpected; it “caught almost everyone off guard,” recalled Clark Clifford.
Soon after issuing the presidential decrees, Truman appeared before Congress to talk about his plan for civil rights legislation. He got a cool reception; some members of Congress refused to stand when he entered the Capitol. All he wanted to fight for, Truman said, was the ideals expressed in the US Constitution. “I believe that it is necessary to enact the laws that I have recommended in order to make the guarantees of the Constitution real and vital,” he said.
The question on everyone’s lips was about Truman’s motivation. Was he a man on a moral crusade? Or was he after votes? Or both? The president knew how unlikely it was for him to be making such earthshaking decisions in the first place. He could easily recall his life before politics. Now he was the central figure of dramas that went to the core of what it meant to be an American. “I think he was motivated by a profound sense of what’s right and what’s wrong,” observed Truman speechwriter Charlie Murphy, “and not by politics.” Truman was from a family that sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, from a family that had been slave owners, from a family where the word nigger could be spoken at the dinner table. “All I can say is that I’m sure this is what he thought was right,” Murphy said of Executive Order 9981. “His views on the subject, as you may know, did not agree with those of other members of his family, including his mother.”
Shock spread through the offices of members of Congress from the South, who immediately began planning a filibuster on the Senate floor. The talkathon began on July 29, with twenty-one southern senators, one after the next, teeing off on Harry Truman, beginning with John C. Stennis, a Jim
