Harry S. Truman - Biography, Presidency, History & Death

Harry S. Truman – Biography, Presidency, History & Death

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Harry S. Truman (Lamar, 8 of May of 1884 – Kansas City, 26 of December of 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States. The last mate running of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, Truman became president on 12 April 1945 after the death of Roosevelt. In his presidency, the USA ended World War II; tension with the Soviet Union grew after the conflict, starting the Cold War.

Harry S. Truman was born in Missouri, spending most of his childhood on the family farm. During the First World War, he served in France with the National Guard as an artillery officer. After the war, Truman owned a haberdashery before joining the Democratic Party.

His first public post was that of a county officer, and in 1934 he was elected United States Senator. He gained national prominence when he headed the Truman Committee, which exposed spending, fraud, and corruption in government war contracts.

Although Nazi Germany surrendered a few weeks after Truman assumed the presidency, the war against Japan was expected to last another year. His decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan accelerated the end of the conflict, but it remains controversial today.

His presidency was a turning point in foreign relations, with the United States supporting an internationalist policy together with its European allies. Working closely with the Congress, Truman helped the foundation of the United Nations, issued the Truman Doctrine against communism, and approved the Marshall Plan of US $12 billion to rebuild Europe.

The alliance with the Soviet Union during the war turned into opposition in times of peace. He oversaw the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and the creation of NATO in 1949. When communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Truman immediately sent US troops and obtained UN support to start the Korean War.

After initial success, UN forces were repelled by Chinese intervention and the conflict was at a standstill during the last years of his presidency.

Accusations of corruption in his administration, which was linked to some members of his White House cabinet, were the main point of discussion in the 1952 presidential election, in which Adlai Stevenson II, Truman’s successor as a Democratic candidate, was defeated by Dwight D Eisenhower.

Popular and academic assessments of his presidency were initially negative but ended up becoming more positive after Truman retired from politics. He passed away in December 1972 in Kansas City.

The Early Life of Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri. He came from a very simple background; his father John Anderson Truman (1851-1914) was a farmer, his mother Martha Ellen Young Truman (1852-1947) was a housewife. Harry was Truman’s first child, followed by a brother and sister. He was English, Scottish and Irish ancestors.

The “S” in Harry S. Truman is not an abbreviation for a middle name, but an initiative that comes from the names of his two grandfathers (Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young); a common way of remembering one’s ancestors in the south of the United States at the time.

Since Truman’s parents could not decide if they should choose the middle name Shipp or Solomon, they merely used the initial. Although the “S” is not an abbreviation, Truman put a point behind it.

In 1890 the Truman family settled in Independence, a few kilometers away, where Harry attended high school. He successfully completed this in 1901. He then went to a commercial school for a short time but returned to his parents after a short time when his father lost his entire fortune in wheat speculation.

Political Career Beginnings

Already in the first half of the 1910s, Harry S. Truman became more interested in politics. President Woodrow Wilson’s enthusiasm for progressive politics soon brought him to the Democratic Party. His political interest and the President’s support was one of Truman’s main reasons to enlist in the army.

Supported by Tom Pendergast, the most influential Democrat member of Kansas City at the time, Truman became the Judge of the County Court of Jackson County in 1922 after his business failed. Truman and Pendergast got to know each other during his career in the army after Pendergast’s nephew had served with Truman.

In addition to Pendergast, he owed his choice above all to his fame as a captain in the First World War; he was able to rely on the support of former comrades, many of whom he knew personally from the region. After the two-year term in which he was primarily responsible for administrative activities, he was not re-elected in 1924 in view of the strong trends towards the Republican Party. Afterward, he worked again on the family farm for two years.

In late 1926, Truman was elected Presiding Judge by Jackson County. Both his popularity as a former captain and Tom Pendergast helped him with this election success. Although the literal translation into German would be “Presiding Judge”, it was not a legal activity.

In other states, the term county executive is used, which in Germany is a district administrator corresponds. In this position, he was responsible, among other things, for the maintenance and construction of the infrastructure. Truman focused particularly on the district roads, bridges, and sewage systems.

With the support of the local party leadership of the Democrats, he also managed to restructure and modernize the administration. However, funding for the implementation of such projects was limited at the end of his term, since the country had been suffering from the Great Depression since 1929.

In 1933, Harry S. Truman was appointed head of a job creation program initiated by the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (although he remained head of county administration). He owed this promotion to Pendergast again.

The U.S. government had been allowed to designate the head of the program after he made a significant contribution to Democratic performance in the Kansas City region in the 1932 presidential election. While serving as director of the program, Truman was a committed supporter of the President and his reforms under the New Deal.

Vice president

The prestige earned in the Truman Committee earned him great prestige and the confidence of Franklin D. Roosevelt who chose him as vice president for the 1944 elections in which they were elected.

December to April of 1945 dies of cerebral hemorrhage Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the brightest American politicians, who led the nation in the most turbulent period in its history when the greatest economic crisis, World War II joined. Harry S. Truman becomes the thirty-third President of the United States.

Presidency of Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman had been vice president just 82 days, when President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. He had had very little communication with Roosevelt about world affairs or internal politics after taking office as vice president and was completely uninformed about the conduct of the war, including, in particular, the Manhattan Project, which was about to test the first nuclear bomb in history.

Shortly after taking office, Truman told reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know if any of you ever had a load of hay drop on you, but when they told me what had happened yesterday, I felt that the Moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Upon entering the presidency, Truman asked all members of Roosevelt’s cabinet to remain in office, told them that he was open to his advice, and established a central principle in his administration: that he would be the one to make the decisions and that they would be the ones to support him.

Few weeks after he took office, on his sixty-first birthday, the Allies achieved victory in Europe.

Harry S. Truman was much more difficult for the Secret Service to control than Roosevelt. When Roosevelt, who was required to use a wheelchair, needed to go somewhere, his Secret Service agents took him at their own pace, yet Truman was an avid walker and took regular walks around Washington.

Retirement and death of Harry S. Truman

After Harry S. Truman left office, he retired to Missouri and his public appearances became less frequent. After Truman’s limited financial scope became known in the mid-1950s, the US Congress passed the Former Presidents Act, which granted all former presidents the right to pension benefits and other benefits such as personal protection and their own office.

To date, neither Truman nor any of his predecessors had received pension funds for his work as head of state. After he left, he wrote his two-volume memoir. The first volume, which deals only with his first year in office, was published in 1955.

The second part was published in 1956. A year later opened in Independence, Missouri, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, the Presidential Library Truman. In the run-up to the 1960 presidential election, Truman was critical of John F. Kennedy, whom he considered too young and inexperienced for the White House.

After Kennedy’s election victory, however, the former president supported his policies as well as those of his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. In July 1965, he was visited in his hometown of Independence by President Johnson, who, in Truman’s presence, signed the Social Security Act of 1965, a Medicare and Medicaid creation law.

Johnson wanted to remind Truman of his efforts, which had tried to pass a similar law during his tenure but had failed in Congress. Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972, at the age of 88 and was buried in his hometown shortly thereafter. At his funeral, US Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson appeared alongside numerous other guests.

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