Harry S. Truman: Inaugural Address

About the Author

Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. He graduated from Independence High School but never attended college. He worked as a clerk and then served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army during World War I. On his return from the war, Truman settled in Kansas City, Missouri, and opened a haberdashery. Active in the Democratic Party, Truman was elected as an administrator of Jackson County, Missouri, in 1922, a position he lost in the election of 1924 but regained two years later. In 1934 he ran for the U.S. Senate and won. During his tenure in the Senate, Truman developed a reputation as a reformer by opposing government waste and corruption. For the 1944 election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Truman as his vice presidential running mate to replace the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace. Wallace was thought to be too liberal by many, and in view of Roosevelt's failing health, Wallace's possible ascendancy to the presidency was considered a risk.

Roosevelt and Truman were elected, but the president died in office on April 12, 1945. Truman faced daunting challenges, foreign and domestic, after he assumed office. Thrust into the role of wartime president (in the final days of World War II) and successor to the highly popular Roosevelt, Truman attempted to craft a balance between continuing his predecessor's policies and developing and implementing his own. His first challenge came when he made the decision to use the newly developed atomic bomb against Japan in order to end the conflict in the Pacific and avoid the casualties associated with an invasion of Japan. He announced the implementation of his decision to the American public on August 6, 1945. The Japanese surrender followed quickly.

With the end of World War II, the United States was confronted by a growing threat from the Soviet Union. Truman endeavored to contain Soviet expansion through a mixture of economic and military aid to non-Communist states. In March 1947 the president issued the Truman Doctrine, which pledged assistance to those states threatened by Communist insurgencies and provided more than $400 million to Greece and Turkey. The following year, the administration unveiled the European Recovery Plan (commonly known as the Marshall Plan), which provided $13 billion to west European democracies to help them rebuild. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Truman became the first U.S. president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, articulating his views of civil rights in a speech delivered in June 1947. His Executive Order 9981, issued on July 26, 1948, integrated the U.S Armed Services.

After a close campaign in 1948, Truman was reelected, and in his inaugural address he outlined specific policy efforts that would be the focus of his second term. Apart from the foreign policy he outlined there, in his second term he hoped to fulfill the potential of Roosevelt's New Deal through a package of domestic programs that he titled the Fair Deal. Although Republicans and conservative Democrats blocked the passage of most of the Fair Deal programs, Truman was able to expand Social Security, increase the minimum wage, and enact public housing reforms. He soon also reorganized the nation's security agencies to create a unified Department of Defense and new intelligence bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., and brought into being the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a collective defense organization formed to contain both Germany and the Soviet Union.

Truman's popularity began to be undermined in 1950 by the outbreak of the Korean War, a war that began when Communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbor. In June of that year, Truman ordered U.S. troops to join the conflict, seeing intervention as necessary to the global containment of Communism. In April 1951, in a radio address to the American people, he defended the continued U.S. presence in the region. At the same time, Truman faced the so-called red scare at home—a period of intense anti-Communist hysteria when accusations were rife that Soviets had infiltrated the State Department and other parts of the federal government. Many of the attacks of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, chief instigator of the red scare, were directed at members of the Truman administration, and the accusations weakened public confidence in the president. Truman could have run for a third term but chose to retire. He left office in 1953 as one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history. Nevertheless, today he is considered one of the ten most effective presidents. His personal motto, “The Buck Stops Here,” emblazoned on a sign on his desk, came to symbolize his political courage and fortitude. In retirement he remained active in public life and campaigned on behalf of successive Democratic presidential candidates. Truman died on December 26, 1972.