Was Truman a New Dealer, or was he not? He had of course voted for all its most controversial aspects in the 1930s, but that may have owed more to party loyalty than ideological conviction. He was in favour of extensions of welfare provisions, and proposed several important ones that fall. But he was alleged to be unsound from a New Deal point of view on deficit financing (but so, it could be argued were Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Treasury: they preached virtue and practised sin) and he was not instinctively at home with the liberals who had been Roosevelt’s most enthusiastic supporters before ‘Dr New Deal’ was replaced by ‘Dr Win the War’. ‘Same bunch of Prima Donnas who helped drive the Boss to his grave are still riding his ghost,’ he wrote on his appointment sheet after a meeting with the Roosevelt National Memorial Committee on September 5th.7 And many of those who were close to him in these early days were pretty vehemently conservative. Snyder, even before his elevation to the Treasury, was probably the closest of the lot, both personally and as an economic adviser. His instincts were those of a business man and banker and they were not made any more liberal by the fact that his outlook was that of small town business and banking rather than of the Wall Street establishment.
Snyder, with the cumbersome title of Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, was constantly in dispute with Chester Bowles, the head of the Keynesian-oriented Office of Price Administration (Bowles for controls, Snyder for setting the businessman free). He was also the inspirer of a right-of-centre group within Truman’s own staff, composed principally of Matthew Connelly, who had served the Truman Committee during the war, and Jake Vardaman, another St Louis banker, whose main service to Truman was to bring Clark Clifford, a vastly abler man than himself, into the White House.2 The liberal view was upheld by Samuel Rosenman (former special counsel to Roosevelt, who continued with Truman until early 1946) and Charles Ross, his old Independence classmate and current press secretary. The intellectual weight on this line-up came from Rosenman, the weight of rank and friendship from Snyder. The result was that here again Truman was buffeted about in mid-stream.
In particular he got the worst of both worlds in dealing with the food shortage which beset even the United States more in 1945-6 than during the war itself. It was a sign of America’s relatively favoured position that the issue there was the non-availability of adequate sized steaks, whereas in Britain it was about adding bread to a whole list of rationed foodstuffs, and on the mainland of Europe it was about getting enough calories to keep alive. Nevertheless beefsteaks were a major issue up to and over the 1946 elections. Had Truman listened to Bowles alone he might have produced a limited quantity of cheap rationed meat for everybody. Had he listened to Snyder alone he might have achieved butchers’ shops well-stocked with expensive meat. As he veered between the two he produced neither and paid a heavy price in votes. There were then few metabolic experts to convince the American people of their good fortune in not being able to dig their graves with steak knives. Many voted with their stomachs. ‘You’ve deserted your president for a mess of pottage, a piece of beef, a side of bacon,’ Truman wrote on October 14th, 1946, in one of the several self-pitying undelivered speeches which he had become addicted to preparing in the period, ‘You’ve gone over to the powers of selfishness and greed.’8
The mood had been largely fostered by the unprecedented wave of industrial trouble which he had lived through in the preceding twelve months. The labour union leaders had of course been crucial to putting him where he was. Without their pressure at Chicago in 1944 he would not have agreed to run. Without their support he would not have been nominated. This however had the curious and in many ways rather healthy effect that he regarded them as being more obliged to him than vice versa. If they put him in the White House, they ought to behave responsibly during his presidency. In his view they did not.
John L. Lewis was of course a case apart. He had separated himself from the Democratic Party, and acted, in Truman’s view, with total disregard for the national interest before, during, and after the war. Truman wrote of him with a hard, almost vicious contempt: ‘He is, as all bullies are, as yellow as a dog hound pup. He cannot face the music when the tune is not to his liking. On the front under shell fire he’d crack up. But he can direct the murder, assault and battery goon squads as long as he doesn’t have to face them … I had a fully loyal team and that team whipped a damned traitor.’9
The others he regarded differently, but without particular warmth. ‘Big money has too much power and so have big union s’, he wrote to his mother and sister on January 23rd, 1946: ‘both are riding to a fall because I like neither.’10 As the first half of that unfortunate year went by his feelings became more embittered, with the leaders of the two largest railroad brotherhoods, Alvanley Johnston and A. F. Whitney, who had been his supporters not merely in 1944 but in his nadir year of 1940 as well, moving into the centre of his zone of disapproval. On top of the long-running steel and General Motors strikes of the winter, Lewis brought the coal miners out on April 1st, and a rail strike was called for May 18th and actually started on May 23rd.