We’ve been assessing the merits of political leaders in (more or less) democratic countries, illustrated by a single board game each, on this blog for a few years now. Today’s subject is another US president – domestic reformer turned foreign policy prophet Woodrow Wilson. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Versailles 1919 (Geoff Engelstein/Mark Herman, GMT Games)?

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The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Wilson’s Life

Receiving and Providing Education

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856 as the son of a Presbyterian pastor in Staunton, Virginia. Wilson grew up in several states of the American South before, during, and after the Civil War. He would be the only American president who had been a citizen of the Confederacy.

Wilson became a lawyer, but found it not to his liking. Instead, he pursued graduate studies in political science with a dissertation on Congressional government at Johns Hopkins University. His PhD, awarded in 1886, makes him to this day the only US president with such an academic distinction. Even though Wilson had never bothered to take a trip from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to see the object of his study in action, his dissertation was well received. Atypically for a southerner, he advocated for a strong federal government. At the end of his graduate studies, Wilson married Ellen Louise Axson, who came from a southern clergy family like himself.

Wilson’s academic career led him to teach at several universities. Eventually, he became president of Princeton University in 1902. He took the university out of the grip of Presbyterian traditionalists, appointed the first Catholic and Jewish professors, but worked vigorously against the enrolment of Black students. Wilson turned Princeton into one of America’s leading teaching and research institutions, fueled by the large contributions of outside donors which he attracted. At the same time, Wilson advocated – in often fiery rhetoric – for the independence of the university; a contradiction he could never resolve. Both his administrative reforms and his powerful oratory aroused interest in him political circles; and Wilson put out feelers to the Democratic Party.

To the Presidency

The Democrats, perennially shut out of national office since the Civil War, were in dire need of fresh candidates. Wilson seemed like an ideal fit to party bosses due to his reputation as a natural conservative with progressive credentials. He ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910 and was the first Democrat to be elected to the office in 18 years.

Anyone who believed Wilson to be a conservative at heart was swiftly disabused of the notion once he took office. He directed his energy to labor, electoral, and education reform. Within his first two years in office, Wilson had gained nationwide fame as a progressive leader.

That made him a contender for the 1912 presidential election. His campaign was ably run by the Texas businessman Edward M. House, and Wilson entered the 1912 Democratic National Convention second only to Speaker of the House James “Champ” Clark. When Clark gained the support of New York’s Tammany Hall political machine, that threw the liberal wing of the party, led by three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, into Wilson’s arms. Wilson gained his party’s nomination and went on to run against a split Republican Party in the general election: Incumbent president William H. Taft represented the party’s conservative wing, former president Theodore Roosevelt mounted a progressive challenge. As the Republican vote split, Wilson’s 42% of the popular vote were enough to give him a landslide victory in the electoral college.

Reforms and Interventions

Wilson started the presidency where he had left off the governorship – with an ambitious domestic reform program. To clinch the reforms, he broke with the tradition that separated the executive and legislative branches of the American government: Wilson was the first president to appear before Congress since John Adams, a precedent which has since become standard practice. In another momentous move, Wilson focused his efforts to build legislative majorities on mobilizing his own party (which held both the Senate and the House), ignoring the Republican opposition. With these measures, Wilson enacted far-reaching economic reforms:

• He replaced tariffs with a federal income tax as the chief source of federal revenue.
• He established the Federal Reserve system to stabilize the heretofore decentralized, fragile American finance world.
• His Antitrust Act clarified that unions and collective bargaining did not constitute a breach of freedom of contract.

Other Wilsonian reforms were less progressive: Wilson introduced segregation in several federal institutions including the Navy Department and the Post Office.

Wilson’s belief in a racial hierarchy also carried over into his foreign policy. During his presidency, the United States intervened in Mexico (twice), Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti (where a new constitution imposed on the country reintroduced the forced labor of corvée). The most momentous of these interventions took place in Mexico, where a US-backed coup had brought the authoritarian Victoriano Huerta to the presidency shortly before Wilson’s own accession to power. Wilson opposed Huerta and first imposed an arms embargo on Mexico, then landed forces in the Mexican port of Veracruz. The intervention did not shift the political situation in Mexico, and US forces left Veracruz after seven months of occupation in November 1914.

Wilson’s rhetoric accompanying the intervention was based on lofty principles, but he applied them rather flexibly: He argued both for imposing and for lifting the arms embargo with the “standards of neutrality”; and he justified both beginning and ending the intervention on moral grounds – the former with his commitment to constitutional government, the latter with Mexico’s right to national self-determination.

Neutrality, Honor, and Prosperity

While the United States had been busy in Mexico, a much bigger conflict had erupted in Europe – the Great War. Over the next years, Wilson pursued a course which would allow the United States to maintain three competing objectives – neutrality, honor, and prosperity.

Wilson was driven by an honest desire to keep the United States out of the war. That did not mean that he was indifferent to its outcome. His sympathies lay clearly with the Allies. Every few months, his administration launched a peace initiative which would invariably come to nothing as they demanded very different things from the belligerents: The Allies were given the idea that Wilson wanted them to win victories before a peace should be negotiated, the Central Powers presented with unacceptable demands (like the cession of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany to France as a precondition for a peace conference).

Honor was an even trickier business than neutrality. Wilson demanded that the belligerent parties adhered to the London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War (which none of them had ratified), but in practice complied with the British violations of the Declaration – the harassment of neutral (including American) trade and the blockade of the German coast – while he denounced the German violations – submarine warfare. When a German submarine sunk the British ocean liner Lusitania shortly before it arrived in Liverpool with its cargo of ammunition for the Western front as well as over a thousand passengers – 128 of them American citizens – Wilson was outraged. He declared in a note to the German government that he would hold Germany responsible for any damages to American citizens and property. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned after the incident, believing Wilson endangered American neutrality with his hardline insistence on German (but not British) respect for trade rights.

That brings us the third leg on which Wilson’s stool rested: While he never mentioned prosperity (much unlike neutrality and honor), it was a major motive for his wartime policies. In August 1914, Wilson had publicly opposed bonds for the Allies to be raised by American banks, but when the banks started issuing them, he did not contest it. Consequently, the American economy was effectively mobilized for the Allied cause: US goods were bought with money from US bonds. Allied victory thus became a national interest for the United States to see the bonds repaid.

In the short term, Wilsons’s hard line was successful. He forced Germany to comply with his notions of naval law while the American economy boomed from the war trade to the Allies. America reaped all the benefits of the war at none of the costs.

That made Wilson a strong contender for re-election in 1916. The Democratic Party touted his foreign policy success with “He Kept Us Out of the War” (a slogan which had been adopted without consulting Wilson). Still, Wilson’s main advantage of 1912 – the split Republican field – had evaporated. To beat his Republican opponent Charles Evans Hughes, he had to make inroads in states where Democrats had not fared well over the last decades. As Wilson feared that the new women voters in many of the western and midwestern states might take objection to his marriage to Edith Bolling Galt – just a year after his first wife Ellen had died – he tried to balance it out with publicly supporting women’s suffrage. While we do not have electoral statistics by gender for 1916, Wilson’s strong showing (for a Democrat) in the West and Midwest indicates that his strategy worked. In the end, Wilson’s victory in California by the hair’s breadth of 3,773 voters decided the presidential contest in his favor.

Into the War

In Wilson’s second term, his three-way balancing act between neutrality, honor, and prosperity became ever more precarious. One of them had to give – and the most likely candidate seemed neutrality, whose meaning Wilson had stretched beyond recognition anyway. Ironically, that happened just as Wilson made his first attempt to put pressure on the Allies (by withholding bonds if they did not agree to a peace conference).

Germany, unaware of any rifts between the US and the Allies, played the elephant in the diplomatic China shop again in January 1917: The German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann secretly instructed the German embassy in Mexico to sound out the Mexicans for an alliance in case the United States entered the war. Two weeks later, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in the British home waters again. Wilson felt he could not honorably back down from his hardline position of American trade and travel rights which he had taken in 1915, and broke off all diplomatic relations to Germany. A few days later, British naval intelligence relayed the contents of the “Zimmermann Telegram” to Wilson. Its release helped inflame American public opinion against Germany, but the essential decision had been made already: America would enter the war as an “associated power” on the Allied side. Congress voted in favor of a declaration of war at Wilson’s request on April 6, 1917.

Militarily, the United States was a dwarf in 1917. Safe itself due to large oceans and weak neighbors, its armed forces had been minuscule since the end of the Civil War. Expanding and training them would take time. And economically, the awesome might of America had been mobilized for the Allied cause anyway. Thus, the American war entry mattered little for the course of the war in the short term.

It did, however, have immediate domestic repercussions: On the one hand, government spending exploded. The expenses which the federal government accrued in the 19 months of war from April 1917 to November 1918 would exceed those of almost 130 years since the founding of the country. And Wilson cracked down on perceived opponents of the war: The Espionage Act made interference with military operations or recruitment illegal, which in practice meant that any kind of anti-war activism could – and often did – send the protester to prison.  “Illoyal” publications were banned from postal transport which made them practically unavailable at any distance from their printing.

Preparing for the Post-War World

In the meantime, the war raged on. Wilson’s initial lofty rhetoric of a “war without victory” by which the world would be “made safe for democracy” had been largely superseded by the gritty requirements of military buildup and diplomatic compromises with the Allies. The day-to-day realpolitik of the Allies suffered a heavy blow when the October Revolution took Russia out of the Allied coalition in late 1917; and Wilson was subsequently also replaced as the leading visionary by a certain Vladimir Lenin whose radical rejection of imperialist war (along with capitalism as a whole) proved popular with the European masses after three years of carnage – and they set Russia to seal a deal with Germany and leave the war for good.

Wilson countered by laying out his vision for the post-war world before Congress on January 8, 1918: The Fourteen Points contained a mix of specific territorial changes and universal principles – the freedom of navigation and trade, disarmament, the rejection of secret diplomacy, and the founding of a “general association of nations”.

By summer 1918, American forces had arrived in Europe in substantial numbers. They contributed to turning the tide on the Western Front, and their ever-growing numbers (which matched the British and neared the French) and excellent supply situation convinced the German High Command that the war could not be won anymore. The German generals abandoned the sinking ship. Their civilian successors applied for a peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

Wilson, meanwhile, urged the American voters to consider the 1918 midterm elections as a plebiscite on his policies, especially the post-war order he had formulated. The voters soundly rejected him by giving majorities in both houses to the Republicans for the first time in eight years.

Germany and the Allies agreed to an armistice on the Western Front on November 11, 1918. While Germany’s new parliamentarian leaders dealt with the turmoil in their new republic, the Allies met on the outskirts of Paris to negotiate the peace treaty, chief of them the “Big Four” France, Britain, Italy, and the United States. Wilson attended the Versailles negotiations in person, which made him the first US president to leave the country on official business. After he had alienated the Republicans by his adversarial rhetoric before the 1918 midterms, he snubbed them even further by not including a single Republican senator in his delegation.

Versailles 1919

All of Wilson’s political goals merged at the Versailles peace negotiations. He wanted a new world order which would provide for long-term peace: “I am playing for a hundred years hence”, he told those who asked him why he would forgo short-term American gains. And the US was indeed different as the country did not angle for territorial enlargement – unlike the other major countries, which sought colonial expansion (especially Britain and France in the Middle East and Africa) or direct annexations of regions bordering their mainland (especially France along the Rhine and Italy in the Alps and on the Dalmatian coast). Wilson held mixed views on the territorial changes in Europe, but supported colonial expansion, especially where it benefitted European imperial powers rather than imperial Japan (another expression of his racial views).

Make no mistake: The US had direct material interests at stake as well. On the one hand, Wilson’s interest in free trade aligned with American business wanting to sell goods in the European markets, on the other, American finance expected the war bonds to be repaid. In the view of the European debtors, that required large reparations from Germany, so that the vanquished would pay for the costs of the war.

Wilson’s most cherished goal, however, was the establishment of that “association of nations” outlined in the Fourteen Points. In an ironic repudiation of the other principles of the Fourteen Points, Wilson engaged in the secret diplomacy horse-trading of Versailles, making large concessions to the wishes of the other Big Four nations for territorial enlargement, to get them to agree to what would become the League of Nations.

In June 1919, the negotiations were concluded and the Treaty of Versailles presented to Germany. The Germans engaged in some naïve protests and then signed anyway, as the only alternative of resuming hostilities was utterly impossible for the country. Wilson’s task now was to convince his own countrymen that America must join the League of Nations.

The Struggle for Ratification

Initially, popular support for the League was high in America. However, the Senate which needed to ratify the Treaty for America to join the League was not on board with Wilson:

• A small part of the senators, the “Irreconcilables”, was adamantly against the Treaty. Some of the Irreconcilables were adherents to America’s traditional isolationist foreign policy, others came from (or were supported by) groups which had been against the United States’s entry into the war (chiefly German-Americans and Irish-Americans), a third subset were Republicans eager to get back at Wilson for the hostility he had shown them at least since 1918.
• A larger, but not sufficiently large group were Wilson’s loyal supporters, who wanted ratification of the Treaty without any changes.
• Lastly, the largest group were not opposed to the Treaty as such, but wanted changes which would confirm Congress’s sovereignty on foreign policy decisions, ensure that no territorial mandates could be forced on the United States, and that the Monroe Doctrine would be confirmed and its interpretation left to the United States alone.

Wilson once more relied on public pressure. He embarked on a speaking tour to advocate for the Treaty. When a bipartisan majority of senators, led by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, put forward a proposal for a Treaty with amendments in November 1919, Wilson rejected it, and the proposal could not find a two-thirds majority in the senate against Wilson’s allies and the Irreconcilables. By then, Wilson had suffered a stroke and was physically unable to partake in competition for hearts and minds in either the Senate or the public arena. The Treaty of Versailles would never be ratified, and America never joined the League of Nations.

The Final Years

Wilson prepared for another presidential run in 1920 (the Twenty-second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms would only be passed under Harry S. Truman). His party, however, had enough of him and chose Ohio governor James M. Cox as their candidate – a mixture of a turn from Wilson’s policies and the simple truth that his poor health made him barely able to discharge the duties of his office in the present, let alone for another four years. Wilson, undeterred by his defeats in 1918 and 1919, framed the 1920 election once more as a plebiscite on his policies, specifically the League of Nations. The American voters had enough of them and gave the Republican party in the person of Warren G. Harding the presidency and enlarged its majorities in both the House and the Senate. The end of Wilson’s presidency also marked the end of the Progressive Era of sweeping in the United States.

Four years later, Woodrow Wilson considered another presidential run. Yet just a few days after he had laid out his program, he died on February 3, 1924.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Woodrow Wilson really pushed America on the global stage with the entry into World War I. From then on, no matter of great importance in the world has been decided without the United States, very much in line with Wilson’s programmatic thinking. His practical policies, however, were disjointed. His interventionism in Latin America infringed on the locals’ freedoms (up to the point of practically reintroducing slave labor in Haiti), but did not come at a high cost for the United States. The entry into World War I, on the other hand, prioritized export opportunities and especially the travel rights of the affluent few over the lives of the American soldiers who then had to defend those rights and opportunities. Despite all these costs, it is hard to find a positive foreign policy outcome for the United States besides its increased global stature.

Domestic policy:

By 1920, most Americans were less free than they had been eight years before. Wilson’s expansion of segregation shut down opportunities for African Americans, his wartime policies of censorship and oppression limited the traditional American freedom of expression. Women’s suffrage, the great enfranchisement, was brought about during Wilson’s time, but his support for the cause was minimal.

Economic policy:

Wilson’s early economic reforms (federal income tax replacing tariffs, the Federal Reserve System, and the Antitrust Act) benefitted consumers, workers, and the economy as a whole. Later, Wilson’s interpretation of neutrality meant that the United States enjoyed a long war boom as a supplier of goods to the Allies. This prosperity came with risks, as it relied on the Allies winning the war and eventually being able to repay their loans, which would become a major matter of contentment after the war and endanger both the American and the global economy.

Vision:

Wilson redefined the presidency. He strengthened the executive and established the president as lawmaker-in-chief, a change which has held up until today.

He looked far beyond the day-to-day issues of politics. While his idea of a liberal internationalist global order was discredited when he left office, and remained so for the next twenty years, it was rehabilitated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. As these later presidents had more political common sense than Wilson, they were able to form them into a bipartisan consensus which only eroded in recent years.

Pragmatism:

Wilson parlayed his electoral triumph in 1912 into a sweeping reform agenda, which he got through Congress by mobilizing his own party and cowing the opposition with the force of his public oratory. He later found out that there were limits to speaking from the bully pulpit. His electoral success ran out in 1918, and his stubborn intransigence made it impossible for him to reach compromise in Congress. Wilson would rather be right and achieve none of his goals than concede a little and receive a lot – a distinctly unpolitical trait for a politician.

Integrity:

Wilson was driven by an honest commitment to better his country, and through the means of it, the world. His practical politics were not always this clean. His appointments were often based on loyalty rather than merit, he treated his political opponents as enemies and traitors, and he clung to power even when his health limited his ability to discharge the duties of his office to the point that even his cabinet pondered if to declare him unfit.

Overall:

Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest visionaries in the White House. The completion of his visions was left to others due to his own lack of political skills. The great principles for which he strove – prosperity for all, free trade, eternal peace – were mixed with his authoritarian tendencies and his hostility to his political opponents as well as non-whites. His presidency contains the sublime and the ignoble, and calling it middling is charitable.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Woodrow Wilson 15/30
13. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
14. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Wilson? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

The most recent full-length biography of Wilson is O’Toole, Patricia: The Moralist. Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, Simon & Schuster, New York City, NY 2018.

For a snappy, but nuanced biography, see Berg, Manfred: Woodrow Wilson. Amerika und die Neuordnung der Welt. Eine Biographie [Woodrow Wilson. America and the Reshaping of the World. A Biography], C.H. Beck, Munich 2017 (in German).

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20^th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 70-116.

Last year, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, we branched out to an American president and a German chancellor. Today’s subject is another US president – Harry S. Truman, the first Cold Warrior in the White House. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Truman’s Life

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884 as the son of Missouri farmers. He took a few classes at a local business school, but remains the only US president of the 20^th and 21^st century to not have attended college. After a few years of odd jobs, he returned to help on his parents’ farm. As he had political ambitions, he joined the National Guard in 1905 and volunteered for service during World War I.

Back from the war, Truman opened a haberdashery (which went bankrupt in 1921) and was elected county judge (in 1922). His political career was tied to Tom Pendergast’s political machine. Over the course of the following years, he struggled both economically and politically. His fortunes only improved when he was named Missouri’s director for the Federal Re-Employment program (which got him in touch with important people from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs) in 1933 and was elected senator in 1934.

Truman’s first term in the Senate was unremarkable and he only barely won re-election in 1940. The following year, his career took off when he headed a special committee to investigate inefficiencies in US war production – a crucial task with war ravaging both Europe and the Pacific, which the United States would enter later that year. Truman’s reputation for honesty and efficiency recommended him to president Roosevelt who was looking for a running mate in the 1944 presidential elections. As the favorites of the two wings of the Democratic party – Henry Wallace for the liberals, James F. Byrnes for the conservatives – were anathema to the respective other wing, Roosevelt chose Truman as a non-offending alternative – the “second Missouri compromise”. Roosevelt barely met with Truman either on the campaign trail or after their successful election and kept him in the dark about his political initiatives, particularly regarding foreign policy. When Roosevelt died barely three months after the start of his term, Truman entered the presidency woefully unprepared.

His first task was the victorious conclusion of World War II. Germany surrendered only weeks after Truman’s inauguration. When soon after the first nuclear bombs were successfully tested, the United States dropped them on Japan in order to “shock” the country into surrender – a policy which Truman endorsed, but did not specifically authorize (the bomb was treated like any other weapon at the disposal of the commanders in the theater).

In the meantime, Truman grew more distant to America’s erstwhile Soviet allies. He had wanted the Soviets to join the United Nations and the war against Japan, but once they had done both, Truman took a hard line against what he perceived as Soviet expansionism. The first test of strength was Soviet refusal to leave Iran – in violation of the agreement among the Allies after their invasion of Iran in 1941, which specified that they would leave the country six months after the cessation of hostilities. Truman’s   tough stance won the day by spring 1946 – but in a pattern typical for his presidency, he did not receive the credit for it among the American public.

At home, Truman was faced with the transformation of the economy back to peace time. Increased unemployment and inflation dashed the hopes for a beautiful, carefree post-war life for many Americans. Truman’s heavy-handed handling of a railroad strike – he proposed a law that would draft strikers into the army – intimidated the strikers into submission. Yet while it antagonized labor (and questioned Truman’s commitment to constitutional practices), it did not win him support among business or the middle class. Truman’s Democrats were shellacked the 1946 midterm elections.

The electoral defeat freed Truman from his obsession to walk a middle course and please everybody. Instead, he proposed the policies that he thought were right. Domestically, that encompassed a series of ambitious bills to preserve and expand civil and economic rights which he called the “Fair Deal.” Most of them were squarely defeated by a cross-aisle conservative majority in Congress, but Truman’s activity put Congress on the defensive and no further New Deal legislation was rolled back.

Truman’s greatest achievements belong to the realm of foreign policy. Faced with the challenge of possible Soviet inroads into the Eastern Mediterranean (from where the United Kingdom was about to withdraw), Truman countered with the promise of aid to any free nation which resisted subjugation – the Truman Doctrine. He backed this unprecedented American commitment to internationalism up with the European Recovery Program – or, as it was more popularly called, the Marshall Plan. (Truman was wise enough not to attach his own name to it, as his unpopularity in Congress would likely have resulted in a defeat of the proposal.) The ERP did not only help Europe in its recovery from the destruction of World War II, but also provided a welcome stimulus for the American economy on whose goods the money was spent, and it was a major PR success for the United States in the nascent Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets played hardball in 1948 and blockaded West Berlin, a western-controlled island within the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, Truman found a measured response in supplying West Berlin from the air – steering clear of both abandoning West Berlin and risking war.

Truman’s relationship with both wings of the Democratic Party had been uneasy through his tenure – the liberals disliked him for his handling of labor disputes and his tough stance on real and perceived Communists. As the Cold War developed, a second “Red Scare” swept the country. Truman, who personally did not believe that a large number of Communist spies had infiltrated federal institutions, nonetheless lent this conspiracy theory credence with the vain attempt to ward off more radical legislation on the matter by examining the loyalty of all federal employees – with “reasonable doubts” sufficient to be fired. Even though the past of five million federal employees was scrutinized, not a single Communist spy was found.

On the other hand, the conservatives, particularly those from the Democrats’ southern bastions, warily regarded his Civil Rights stance. Truman created a committee to make proposals for Civil Rights whose recommendations he endorsed. Yet only when the Southern Democrats abandoned him in the election year 1948 (and supported the segregationist Strom Thurmond instead) did he stick out his head and decreed the desegregation of the armed forces and the federal civil service.

Truman took to the campaign trail and vigorously attacked the Republicans for not supporting his domestic reform agenda. Against the predictions of the pollsters, Truman defeated his Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey soundly, with Thurmond coming in a distant third (and defeated in most southern states as well). Truman’s inauguration in 1949 was the first to which Black Americans were invited as guests.

Truman’s second term was less eventful than his first – and less successful.

When North Korean forces crossed the 38^th parallel to unite Korea by force (with Stalin’s approval), Truman faced another Cold War crisis. Truman attached an importance to it that went far beyond Korea – if such a blatant breach of the peace was not checked, it would spell doom for the rules-based peace order embodied in the United Nations. Thus, he sent in US forces to stop the Northern invasion and attained UN approval for the operation. US troops under General Douglas MacArthur blunted the offensive of the North Koreans and landed in their rear – thus throwing the entire invasion force back in disarray. As the coalition forces approached the 38^th parallel, Truman disregarded Chinese warnings and authorized a crossing into North Korea. The ensuing Chinese entry into the war now caught the coalition forces off guard and forced them into an ignominious retreat. MacArthur then pressured Truman to extend the war to China – and the use of nuclear bombs. Truman refused, and as MacArthur kept defying presidential authority, relieved him of his command. For the remainder of Truman’s tenure, the Korean War would be a bloody stalemate.

Domestically, Truman did not fare better. His attempt to prevent a full-on Red Scare by the loyalty check program turned out to have failed entirely – instead Representative Joseph McCarthy levelled (unfounded) charges of Communist sympathies and activities at government officials, academics, left-leaning politicians, labor activists, and entertainers (especially in the film industry). The climate of fear which infringed on free speech also damaged the United States’ standing abroad.

Finally, another strike – this time in the steel industry – aroused the president’s anger. He seized the steel mills from their private owners to deal with the strike. This was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in April 1952. By the time of the Court’s decision, the deeply unpopular Truman had already announced that he would not seek re-election. The Democratic Party instead chose the governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, as their nominee. Stevenson lost in a landslide against the Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general credited with winning World War II in Europe.

Harry S. Truman lived a relatively modest post-presidential life, devoting much of his time to writing his memoirs. He died on December 26, 1972.

The Rating

Foreign policy: Truman shifted from cooperation to confrontation with the Soviet Union with remarkable skill. He found adequate responses to most foreign policy crises – from the first test of strength in Iran over the Greek/Turkish crisis which prompted the Truman Doctrine to the Berlin Blockade and the North Korean invasion of the South. His rare misstep was the foolhardy decision to push further in Korea which drew the Chinese into the war.

Structurally, Truman’s influence is even more profound: Almost the entire modern US security architecture was founded by him – the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and NATO.

Domestic policy: Truman’s domestic record is mixed. While he was the first 20^th century president to stick his head out for the equal treatment of Black Americans, he only turned to action after the Southern Democrats had abandoned him already. His anti-Communist loyalty checks infringed on the individual liberties of federal employees and did not achieve their goal of pre-empting more radical measures by the anti-Communist conspiracy theorists like Joseph McCarthy (and rather emboldened them). Finally, Truman’s invasive meddling in the economy – both his law to draft strikers and his seizing of the steel mills – show an instinctive preference for a security-based war presidency over individual economic freedoms.

Economic policy: Truman faced the challenge to transform the US economy back to peace time – for which conservatives/business and liberals/labor had starkly different ideas. Truman initially attempted a middle course, but turned more liberal after his electoral victory in 1948. His Fair Deal legislation (most notably the near-doubling of the minimum wage, the expansion of Social Security to another 10 million Americans, the rural electrification programs, and the building of homes for low-income Americans) contributed to the broad prosperity of the post-war decades.

In the end, it was Truman’s foreign policy that was most influential for the economic development of the US: The Marshall Plan had shown how a further internationalization of American businesses could be profitable for them. Truman’s turn toward the security state after the outset of the Korean War led to a quadrupling of defense spending which would never again fall to the level of the inter-war years. This perpetual state of war-readiness and the resulting military-industrial complex of the United States play a crucial role for the structure of the US economy until today.

Vision: Nobody regarded Truman as a visionary when he entered the presidency. Yet his policies captured not only the present but also the future: The Truman Doctrine, a sharp break with the American isolationist tradition, was employed for the remainder of the Cold War. Every other Cold War presidential doctrine rested on it (and usually interpreted it for a particular region). Its basic tenet – to aid free nations against attempts to subjugate them – informs US policy until today (say, in Ukraine). In practice, the Truman Doctrine resulted in the “containment” of the Soviet Union and global Communism – another basic principle of US foreign policy for the next 40 years.

Truman’s predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt, much more a visionary in the public perception, had relied on his own personality to see through all the great breaks with political tradition. Truman, on the other hand, built the institutionalized security state which is until today the foundation of the US presidency. Despite the pivot to “security” as the new main goal of American government activity, Truman maintained the primacy of politics over the military and defeated the specter of Bonapartism when he fired MacArthur over his insubordination.

Pragmatism: Truman’s early attempts to chart a middle path often antagonized both sides – and sometimes led to contradictions (as when he publicly endorsed both Henry Wallace’s and James F. Byrnes’s foreign policy statements which differed markedly on the matter if the Soviet Union was an ally or an opponent of the United States).

Truman was at best middling at winning public support for his initiatives. While he won the 1948 election, his Congressional allies fared badly both in 1946 and 1950, and Truman had low approval ratings through most of his tenure (excepting the honeymoon period in 1945 and his time of foreign policy glory in 1947), sometimes as low as 23%.

Despite these troubles with both Congress and the wider public, Truman could see some of his key policy initiatives through Congress despite their impulses towards isolationism and a limited role of government.

Integrity: Truman honestly strove for the interests of the whole nation. Yet he tested the limits of the Constitution with his reaction to strikes and when he did not seek Congressional approval for the war in Korea. His appointments were often based on loyalty rather than merit (and turned out lackluster in these cases more often than not). While Truman never used the presidency to enrich himself personally, his reputation for being extraordinarily honest is rather an artifact of being compared favorably to his morally flexible successors Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Overall: Despite Truman’s unassuming personality and his low popularity during his tenure, he laid the foundations for American foreign policy for decades. His many moments of foreign policy brilliance are interspersed with a mixed record at home and many individual mistakes in running the office. He was an above-average, but not great president.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Woodrow Wilson 15/30
13. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
14. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Truman? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For a short and accessible biography, see Dallek, Robert: Harry S. Truman, St. Martin’s Press, New York City, NY 2008.

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20^th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 243—326.