Truman’s Americanism
At 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, 1951, the president wouldn’t—and didn’t—hold back. “Mr. Truman delivered the strongest denunciation he has yet made of the activities of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” The New York Times reported the following day.
Speaking from a stand erected in front of the new headquarters of the American Legion in the nation’s capital, Harry Truman had a routine task: to dedicate the event. Yet, Truman planned to go beyond the ordinary. His was a much more profound task: to marshal a defense of “Americanism”—not from external but from internal forces.
Truman reminded the Legion of its founding purpose: to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States… to foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism… to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of freedom, justice, and democracy.”
“At the present time,” Truman said, “it is especially important for us to understand what these words mean and to live up to them.” The bedrock of American government, the president explained—its very “keystone”—is “the liberty of the individual,” expressed in several different ways: freedom of thought, speech, religion, association, and opportunity.
Truman clarified that liberty “is not licensed,” a point that the founders went to great lengths to explain themselves. “There is no freedom to injure others,” Truman said; “the right of free speech does not authorize slander or character assassination.” Such “limitations,” such qualifications, “are essential to keep us working together in one great community.”
Truman then turned his attention to Communism—not the reds in Moscow, but, ironically, the capitalists within the United States who, overcome with paranoia, fear, and anger, had turned on each other and the very Americanism Truman had defined as essential to the workings of democracy.
Specifically, Joseph McCarthy and his politically charged goons were, to Truman, the very definition of liberty abused by license. They, not Moscow, were the closest enemies threatening Americanism. The country was “being undermined by some people in this country who are loudly proclaiming that they are its chief defenders,” the president argued. “These people claim to be against communism. But they are chipping away at our basic freedoms just as insidiously and far more effectively than the Communists have ever been able to do.”
Captivated by Communist conspiracies, McCarthy believed that infiltration was inevitable at every level unless someone (like him) acted. From churches to schools to congressional staff, McCarthy stumbled in the dark in the hopes of shining a light on that which seemed to haunt him. At the deepest level, politics was to him the art of emotion and perception, and there is no emotion more exploitable than fear and no perception more gripping or politically valuable than creating a monster (or exaggerating its strength) to slay it in front of everyone and emerge from the ashes a savior.
One historian recalled that McCarthy’s “shrill cries of conspiracy appealed to those who sought a simple answer to the complex problems of clashing ideologies.” But in another sense, McCarthy’s shrills appealed most to himself.
McCarthy sought to be the hero of a narrative arc of his own making, one that painted men like General George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and even Truman as Communist agents, the villains that the hero would have to defeat. When Communism gained ground abroad, it was the administration’s fault because they were sympathizers. At home, leftism was, in almost any shape, considered Communism—if not in totality, at least in part.
The answer to the Communist threat was war, not against Communists necessarily, but against Americans who maybe, just maybe, leaned toward whatever place Communism occupied on the spectrum of ideas.
Truman dismissed McCarthy personally as a “pathological liar” and, as he told the media in March 1950, described the senator as being “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.” Yet his hold on American politics and culture was undeniably strong and could not be ignored. McCarthy had created a chokingly dense atmosphere of “fear and suspicion… by the use of slander, unproved accusations, and just plain lies,” Truman said. “These slander mongers are trying to get us so hysterical that no one will stand up to them for fear of being called a Communist.”
McCarthyism was, in effect, a kind of Communism. “In a dictatorship everyone lives in fear and terror of being denounced and slandered,” Truman said. “Nobody dares stand up for his rights. We must never let such a condition come to pass in this great country of ours.” Truman concluded by calling on Americans to spread the word that “these things are a threat to every single citizen everywhere,” adding, “when even one American—who has done nothing wrong—is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.”
Democrats like Truman weren’t the only ones who took a stand against McCarthyism. The Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine issued a “Declaration of Conscience” on June 1, 1950. Congress, she said, “has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination,” adding that those “who shout the loudest about Americanism” seem to also “ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” such as the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think independently.
The Republican Senator Robert Hendrickson believed that Truman’s words—described by the Washington, D.C., Evening Star as “bristling with feeling”—rightly addressed “some of the things that are being said in certain quarters of the Nation today [which] closely approach the Fascist technique,” a fact “as dangerous as communism” itself.
McCarthy’s response, meanwhile, was pure McCarthy: the people would have to “choose between Americanism or a combination of Trumanism and Communism,” he said, ever arrogant and self-assured.
Ultimately, Truman’s Americanism—rooted in our core values—carried the nation through the early Cold War, not McCarthy’s. Today, we would do well to remember his indispensable leadership and faith in the better America.