Washington — History is the greatest of the humanities. To
remind us of its consequentiality it leaves specimens of itself
around for later generations to discover to their amazement and
edification. The other day Americans discovered a specimen of the
first half of the last century when the contents of a hitherto
undiscovered diary from 1947 was made public by the National
Archives. The 5,500-word diary was in the handwriting of President
Harry Truman. It had been found scrawled in the diary section of a
book that had been gathering dust in the Truman Library for decades
and rightly so. The book’s title is, alas, The Real Estate
Board of New York, Inc., Diary and Manual 1947. Not
surprisingly visiting historians dismissed it as an old reference
book, devoid of much value to them in their reconstructions of
Truman. They were thunderously wrong.
The diary section can be read as a personal confession from the
President to his conscience or perhaps to a sympathetic friend
seated with him at the end of the bar. In smoldering dudgeon the
thirty-third president opined, “The Jews have no sense of
proportion nor do they have any judgement [ a popular spelling in
the 1940s] on world affairs.” He had been provoked by a call he had
received from his Jewish former secretary of the treasury Henry
Morgenthau. Morgenthau was seeking Truman’s assistance on behalf of
a group of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe. That irritated
Truman. “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how
many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get
murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons]….” And the
President’s rant went on to embrace other matters, “When the
country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946,
this incident [another occasion when Morgenthau assisted Jewish
refugees] loomed large on the D[isplaced] P[ersons] program.”
Americans have come to admire Harry Truman as a flinty defender
of American interests. He was a doughty combatant and a very good
president, at least in foreign affairs. Not surprisingly we have
forgotten just how much controversy his Administration found itself
in. He was apparently honest, but nine members of his
administration, including his appointments secretary, were
convicted of criminal behavior. He was also a fiery partisan.
Readers of his very fine memoirs will note that he has rarely a
generous word for those who oppose him. His remark, that “the
country went backward” in 1946, is typical. In his memoirs he lumps
isolationists in with Ku Kluxers and members of the far-right
Silver Shirts — he was not being facetious. To him most
Republicans were reactionaries, and he was not any gentler towards
those political parties on his left.
The New York Sun has published specimens of his
prejudices against other ethnic and religious groups, for instance,
the Chinese and “Japs” whom he told his wife he “hate[ed].” Blacks,
“wops” and others came off no better in his private reflections.
When I read these outbursts I was at first startled, but then I
thought back about the America of the early Twentieth Century. Its
citizens almost all had strong prejudices. An important thing to
remember is that America has changed. Few people hold such strong
beliefs today, even in private. What is more Truman’s generation
began an effort to mollify such prejudices and to extend tolerance
to all. As for Truman, his public policies favored equal rights and
statehood for Israel. Those policies were not easily implemented.
History proceeds slowly.
The irritable, bigoted Harry Truman that again stands revealed
in this long ignored specimen of history brings to mind another
truth that since the political battles of the 1990s I have become
very aware of. Political commitment breeds anger and animosity. The
thirty-third president was for all his faults a decent man, but
like most politically committed people he came to dislike and
distrust those who opposed him. In the 1940s be could become very
angry with Morgenthau for the former secretary of state’s
importunities on behalf of Jewish refugees. In reading his memoirs
you will see he had an even more intense ire for Republicans.
Naturally Republicans had the same view of him. Politics breeds
contempt.
In the 1990s a president was caught in obvious ethical and legal
violations. What saved him was the mutual contempt the political
parties hold for each other. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs are
as angry towards Republicans as were Truman’s, and you can be sure
if Newt Gingrich ever quiets down long enough to produce a memoir
he will match them both in spite. Harry Truman is not the only
politician made angry by politics. A more intriguing point for me
would be to know how many members of the political class enter
politics free of anger. Is it possible that the commonweal is the
product not of benevolence but of malice?
