Hello Kossacks! Are some of you still in a hopeful state of delirium? Think we’re going to get anything done by "changing our politics" or sitting down the lobby that killed UHC? Do you still have the wrong idea? Well don’t take my word for it, take a journey back into history to catch the first and second part of this series to see that, indeed, partisanship never was the problem in the first place:
Partisanship Was Never the Problem Pt 1
Partisanship Was Never the Problem Pt 2
For part 3, on we go to the 33rd POTUS Harry S. Truman. "Give em’ hell, Harry!" We hear this quote from John Edwards, because he likes to quote Harry Truman a lot, like when others would say, "hey, you’re giving 'em hell, aren’t ya’ Harry? And he says, "No, I’m just telling the truth and it feels like hell."
Harry Truman was also a fighter. He did not get much done by reaching out and bridging the partisan divide, when it came to corruption. In his first term as a U.S. Senator, Truman spoke out bluntly against corporate greed, and warned about the dangers of Wall Street speculators and other moneyed special interests attaining too much influence in national affairs.
Like our candidate, Truman was an underdog going for his second senate term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Truman's prospects for re-election to the Senate looked bleak. In 1940, both Stark and Maurice Milligan challenged him in the Democratic primary for the Senate. Robert E. Hannegan, who controlled St. Louis Democratic politics, threw his support in the election behind Truman. (Hannegan would go on to broker the 1944 deal that put Truman on the vice presidential ticket for Roosevelt.) Truman campaigned tirelessly and combatively. In the end, Stark and Milligan split the anti-Pendergast vote in the Democratic primary, with Stark and Milligan having more combined votes than Truman.[23]
In September 1940, during the general election campaign, Truman was elected Grand Master of the Missouri Grand Lodge of Freemasonry.[24] In November of that year, he defeated Kansas City State Senator Manvel H. Davis by over 40,000 votes and retained his Senate seat.[25] Truman said later that the Masonic election assured his victory in the general election over State Senator Davis.[26]
The successful 1940 Senate campaign is regarded by many biographers as a personal triumph and vindication for Truman and as a precursor to the much more celebrated 1948 drive for the White House, another contest where he was underestimated.[27] It was the turning point of his political career.
Like our candidate, he was down, but not out; he persevered and was able to impressively win a reelection to the senate, even though times looked bleak. Now there are a lot of aspects of Harry Truman’s career that make the point of this continued series, and that involving partisanship not being the ills of our day in history or how we achieved any of the important pinnacles of our society, for we had to fight for them. We all know or should all know by now about the war profiteers who are contracted out to handle most of our Military duties that our men and women in uniform used to be responsible for. They make more money than our soldiers, about ten times as much, and they don’t properly wash their uniforms or give them enough fresh water.
And companies like Backwater, Halliburton/KBR, CACI, and Bechtel are getting away with massive corruption that we are all paying for, because they purposefully blow our equipment up and charge it to us, the taxpayer, because there is absolutely no accountability for these private contractors. Do you really think we sat private contractors down and convinced them to give up their stranglehold on our foreign and domestic policy? I would hope not, because historically we did not; we fought this abuse like Harry Truman did during and after WWII. Harry Truman didn’t hope these war profiteers would give up their power; he took them on and created the Truman Committee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Truman gained fame and respect when his preparedness committee (popularly known as the "Truman Committee") investigated the scandal of military wastefulness by exposing fraud and mismanagement. The Roosevelt administration had initially feared the Committee would hurt war morale, and Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote to the president declaring it was "in the public interest" to suspend the committee. Truman wrote a letter to FDR saying that the committee was "100 percent behind the administration" and that it had no intention of criticizing the military conduct of the war.[31] The committee was considered a success and is reported to have saved at least $15 billion. Truman's advocacy of common-sense cost-saving measures for the military attracted much attention. In 1943, his work as chairman earned Truman his first appearance on the cover of Time. He would eventually appear on nine Time covers and be named the magazine's Man of the Year for 1945 and 1948.[32] After years as a marginal figure in the Senate, Truman was cast into the national spotlight after the success of the Truman Committee.[32]
In case you haven’t figured it out, Truman didn’t "hope" or "bridge the partisan gap" to stop the fraud and mismanagement of war profiteers during WWII. He created this committee in order to "fight" these abuses; even going against those in his own party’s Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson who feared that the committee would hurt war morale (where have we heard these kinds of excuses before?) and Truman’s committee was able to save 15 billion dollars from the "fight" that the committee took on. Given our dire straights, this is an example that needs to be highlighted if we are ever going to stop the widespread abuses happening in front of our face now. We have to be aggressive against those that wish to profit off the economic downturn of our country and this irresolvable military conflict in Iraq. Let’s start with that 9 billion that Paul Bremer can’t seem to account for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
On January 30, 2005, an official report[32] by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, cited by Time, stated that $9 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq might have disappeared in frauds, corruption and other misbehavior. On one particular salary register, only 602 names among 8206 could be verified. As another cited example, the Coalition Authority authorized Iraqi officials to postpone declaring the reception of $2.5 billion, which the provisional government had received in spring through the Oil for Food program.[33]
You’re not going to coddle these contractors into giving up their grip on the U.S Treasury; not then; not now; not ever. Now back to Truman and the fight for progressive ideals; now I don’t claim to tout success in every form when it came to fighting the good fight, but as President it’s important to know who and what you are fighting for.
Harry Truman was able to achieve a lot, despite the fact that his fight against the Taft-Hartley Act failed and so union power was then weakened, significantly. The pickup of 55 seats by the Republicans certainly did not help, for they have been fighting to reverse the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act), which Congress had passed ever since 1935. Harry Truman did veto the legislation, but unfortunately it passed. Truman’s fight against this was part of his fight for a Fair Deal platform:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
After many years of Democratic majorities in Congress and two Democratic presidents, voter fatigue with the Democrats delivered a new Republican majority in the 1946 midterm elections, with the Republicans picking up 55 seats in the House of Representatives and several seats in the Senate. Although Truman cooperated closely with the Republican leaders on foreign policy, he fought them bitterly on domestic issues. He failed to prevent tax cuts or the removal of price controls. The power of the labor unions was significantly curtailed by the Taft-Hartley Act, which was enacted by overriding Truman's veto.[53]
The passage of the Taft –Hartley Act was a crushing defeat that affects this country in a lot of ways even to this day. Since the Taft-Hartley Act went into effect and even implemented in a number of state constitutions in the south, it made it almost impossible for southern candidates to could get elected to office in the south who directly oppose the Taft-Hartley Act, especially if you’re a Democrat in a southern red state, because of the mass Republican support of that amendment over the years halting any and all efforts to repeal the amendment to this day.
However, that does not change the fact that because Truman was a fighter; he fought to bring these important issues to the forefront with conviction; he gave them a longer life by doing so, for we are at the forefront of this fight, today. Despite the fact that these progressive ideals would probably not even be on the radar if it weren’t for FDR and Truman continuing this dialogue along with other Democrats following in their example since that time, this particular war was worth fighting; even if the loss of a number of battles had to be sacrificed in order to keep these issues on the political map.
What people don’t understand is that a lot of the time, a progressive solution is defeated, precisely, because it’s progressive. You could water down important life changing legislation to curb the point in bringing it to the forefront in the first place, but that defeats the whole purpose of the said platform. So bipartisan legislation is not all it’s cracked up to be, and I would rather fight and lose, then capitulate and receive a false sense of security that something was done, when it was not. This is one of the many reasons why John Edwards must stay in the race, for he has defined this race with his platform, and it’s about more than just winning the nomination.
It’s about not surrendering to the terms in which we bring the fight for Universal health care in the first place. Capitulation to murder by spreadsheet, by compromising "change" by "changing the definition of change" in the context of what we are trying to accomplish is a "hopeless" naive strategy and it won’t work. Though it’s an uphill battle for Edwards’s supporters and our candidate is a serious underdog, he is really fighting to keep these important issues on the forefront; the true path to see these issues come to fruition, would not be there if it weren’t for John Edwards, period.
Particularly for the poor and middle class Americans who still feel these struggles, personally, everyday. John Edwards is advocating a true path to real UHC started once Truman introduced it as part of his platform in 1948.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
As he readied for the approaching 1948 election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal tradition, advocating universal health insurance, the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and an aggressive civil rights program. Taken together, it all constituted a broad legislative agenda that came to be called the "Fair Deal."
This is where the fight for universal health care was brought out in full force to the forefront as an issue since the idea’s inception from FDR’s administration; it was another integral part of the Fair Deal, expanding on the New Deal. Like many UHC bills, it ultimately did not pass after Truman won a surprisingly successful reelection in 1948, despite having poll numbers in. However, that does not mean that the fight was in vain for we would not even be discussing the idea of Universal Health care if Truman’s Fair Deal were not aggressively part of his platform for 1948. The Fair Deal also aggressively pushed Civil Rights reforms aggressively in accordance with the President's Committee on Civil Rights from 1946:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The President's Committee on Civil Rights was established by U.S. President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9808 on December 5, 1946. The committee was instructed to investigate the status of civil rights in the United States and propose measures to strengthen and protect the civil rights of American citizens. After the committee submitted a report of its findings to President Truman, it disbanded December 1947[1].
Snip
On July 26, 1948, President Truman advanced the recommendations of the report by signing executive orders 9980 and 9981. Executive Order 9980 ordered the desegregation of the federal work force and Executive Order 9981 ordered the desegregation of the armed services[4]. He also sent a special message to Congress on February 2, 1948 to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights[5
Think he didn’t have to fight to press these much needed reforms?
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
A 1947 report by the Truman administration titled To Secure These Rights presented a detailed ten-point agenda of civil rights reforms. In February 1948, the president submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a storm of criticism from Southern Democrats in the run up to the national nominating convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying: "My forebears were Confederates. . . . But my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."[
That’s right, Harry Truman stood up to Southern Democrats who all pretty much started to leave the party after Truman’s stunning come from behind victory over Republican Thomas Dewey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Within two weeks, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the U.S. Armed Services.[71][72][73] Truman took considerable political risk in backing civil rights, and many seasoned Democrats were concerned that the loss of Dixiecrat support might destroy the Democratic Party. The fear seemed well justified—Strom Thurmond declared his candidacy for the presidency and led a full-scale revolt of Southern "states' rights" proponents. This revolt on the right was matched by a revolt on the left, led by former Vice President Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. Immediately after its first post-FDR convention, the Democratic Party found itself disintegrating. Victory in November seemed a remote possibility indeed, with the party not simply split but divided three ways.
That’s right, taking a stand for civil rights was just that, it was a stand. Especially for Truman who took considerable political risk in doing so on all fronts. Civil Rights was well worth the fight, even if it disintegrated the Democratic party and Truman knew this to be true. Truman could have took the safe road in order to try to unite Dixiecrats in order to unify his party, but he took a strong principled stand, like he did in his campaign that succeeded against all the odds. I find the parallels here, give me and my fellow Edwards supporters a little hope in our darkest hours of this primary:
There followed a remarkable 21,928 mile presidential odyssey,[74] an unprecedented personal appeal to the nation. Truman and his staff crisscrossed the United States in the presidential train; his "whistlestop" tactic of giving brief speeches from the rear platform of the observation car Ferdinand Magellan came to represent the entire campaign. His combative appearances, such as those at the town square of Harrisburg, Illinois, captured the popular imagination and drew huge crowds. Six stops in Michigan drew a combined total of half a million people;[75] a full million turned out for a New York City ticker-tape parade.[76]
I hope we all can see the parallels here, and stop the COM meme of Edwards is too angry to get anything done." That is really ignorant, when it comes to the historical insight as to how we actually achieved major pinnacles of our civil society in this country; as the point of this ongoing series alludes to. John Edwards has a similar campaign style and he just finished a similar cross country tour, though the COM is much worse today, so we have that mountain barricading us, though it’s not hopeless. This has happened before:
The large, mostly spontaneous gatherings at Truman's depot events were an important sign of a critical change in momentum in the campaign—but this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps, which continued reporting Republican Thomas Dewey's apparent impending victory as a certainty. One reason for the press's inaccurate projection was polls conducted primarily by telephone in a time when many people, including much of Truman's populist base, did not own a telephone.[77] This skewed the data to indicate a stronger support base for Dewey than existed, resulting in an unintended and undetected projection error that may well have contributed to the perception of Truman's bleak chances. The three major polling organizations also stopped polling well before the November 2 election date—Roper in September, and Crossley and Gallup in October—thus failing to measure the very period when Truman appears to have surged past Dewey.[78][79]
This is not the first election, where polling seems to have skewed the real data, though unfortunately for us, the polls have been more accurate than not, as of late, but the disparity of NH, does give way to other similar disparities that may count in our favor as John Edwards fights on. As I alluded earlier, Truman’s civil rights platform was reason enough for most to writ him off, because of the division in the Democratic party that I mentioned earlier, but he knew that it was a fight that had to be kept on the front lines of the campaign, because it simply was not moral to do otherwise. And though true civil rights reforms may have not taken full precedence as Truman hoped, later on, particularly with voting rights, he led a civil rights movement that inspired others to follow, such as Kennedy and finally LBJ(With the bigger movement led by MLK, Malcolm X, and Bobby Seal) to push these rights to finally took shape in the end of 1965, with the defeat of Barry Goldwater who opposed these reforms.
There is a lot to cover when it comes to Truman, and the bleeding heart in me, does have some issues with some things he has done (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but that does not mean he was not a progressive who fought for what he felt was right, and he introduced the progressive platform inherited from FDR with a forward agenda towards civil rights and universal health care. Though we still have a huge fight to really implement this desperate change that our party has been fighting for, ever since FDR/Truman’s day, I am glad there is one fighter out of the mix who knows what it takes to reach this goal. One can only hope for the same fitting end, but in the Democratic primary:
In the end, Truman held his midwestern base of progressives, won most of the Southern states despite his civil rights plank, and squeaked through with narrow victories in a few critical "battleground" states, notably Ohio, California, and Illinois. The final tally showed that the president had secured 303 electoral votes, Dewey 189, and Thurmond only 39. Henry Wallace got none. The defining image of the campaign came after Election Day, when Truman held aloft the erroneous front page of the Chicago Tribune with a huge headline proclaiming "Dewey Defeats Truman."[80]
Thank you for reading and to those who are following this series.
We need to wake up and nominate a Fighter. A fighter named John Reid Edwards, otherwise we will never see the "change" or progress that this country has been hungering for in full force since Truman’s day.
We need John Edwards, now.