Truman's domestic policies as President proved far less successful than his foreign policies. Here also he dealt with three major issues: administration of the modern American presidency, a legislative program known as the Fair Deal, and Republican accusations of internal subversion and corruption. He managed well with just one of these domestic matters.
Truman was the first chief executive to organize the administration of his high office. He deplored Roosevelt's sloppy and sometimes byzantine administrative ways. He sought ideas from his assistants, welcomed arguments over matters of policy, and asked that contentions be set forth in well-reasoned memoranda. Once he set the lines of policy, he expected support from assistants.
In addition to reorganizing the White House staff, Truman vastly expanded the Executive Office of the Presiden, because Congress forced his hand. Uncertain over the economic advice Roosevelt had received, Congress in 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers, a three-man panel of trained economists. Truman also brought the sprawling federal bureaucracy under control. At the outset of his tenure, he found that the bureaucracy had grown from 600,000 civilian employees in 1932 to 2.6 million twenty years later, with 4,000 in the judicial branch, 22,500 in the legislative, and 2.57 million in the executive (1.3 million in defense, 500,000 in the post office, and the rest in other activities). He could not have controlled his part of this mass through the White House staff and the Executive Office staff. Moreover, most civilian employees were under civil service; the President appointed only 3,000. Truman therefore had to rely on his cabinet. He trusted that cabinet members would control their departments and thereby do the bidding of his administration. Truman, upon becoming president, was appalled to learn of the formlessness of the Roosevelt cabinet: He insisted upon dealing directly with members of the cabinet, and it was their task, he said, both to show loyalty to him and to control their departments. Cabinet meetings became business sessions, each official taking up his problems by bringing them before the group, with the president making the decision himself.
The domestic legislation of the Truman era followed carefully the main lines of expansion of economic and social programs advanced by the New Deal. Most of his initial months were consumed by arguments whether price controls would prevent inflation while manufacturers sought to fill the huge postwar demand for civilian goods. By early 1949 could he go back to his domestic program of three years before? Continued were New Deal themes that proposed federal control of prices, credit, commodities, exports, wages, and rents; a broadening of civil rights laws; low-cost housing; and a 75-cent minimum wage. It asked repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, which had passed over a presidential veto in 1947 and which outlawed industry-wide strikes, closed shops, and mass picketing; made unions liable to suits; required union leaders, before they could use the National Labor Relations Board, to file affidavits declaring that they were not Communists; set up cooling-off periods before strikes; prohibited the use of union funds for political contributions; and gave the president power to obtain anti-union injunctions. The Fair Deal promised increased coverage for Social Security, federal aid to education, and compulsory health insurance. The last issue brought Truman into frontal conflict with the American Medical Association, whose leaders cried "socialized medicine" and eventually helped to establish private programs of health insurance.
The time was not right for the Fair Deal, in either 1945 or 1949. Truman bemoaned the public selfishness of the period when arguments between his administration and Republican leaders in the House and Senate, who wanted to lift price controls because of shortages, notably a meat shortage in 1946, persuaded the president to give up the effort to control consumer prices. Then victory in the election of 1948 convinced him that Americans, by voting Democratic, had affirmed the New Deal and the Fair Deal. He only managed to get parts of his program through the Eighty-first Congress, and the rest of it became a footnote for successor administrations.
Truman made a attempt to rationalize the nation's agricultural production—to solve what generations of Americans, ever since the opening of the Trans-Mississippi West, had described as the farm problem. But the Republicans would not support his farm program. They preferred to let prices fall and de-claimed against subsidies in favor of disguised payments, such as price supports and conservation awards. The Brannan Plan failed of support, and the farm problem staggered on.
The Fair Deal scored a triumph in one important respect in his eyes—the first national breakthrough in the protection of civil rights of black Americans. Late in 1946 he established the Committee on Civil Rights, which presented its report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947. The cabinet split over the question of asking Congress for legislation, but Truman followed his own course and, on February 2, 1948, sent Congress a ten-point civil rights message calling for a new law against lynching, a federal fair-employment-practices committee, an end to segregation in interstate transportation, and protection of the right to vote. None of these proposals were enacted.
The Democratic convention of 1948 in Philadelphia turned into a donnybrook over civil rights, with representatives from the Deep South departing the hall to found the States' Rights Democrats, a group that hoped to throw the election into the House of Representatives. The Dixiecrats, as the group became known, led by Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. The President already faced a challenge to party unity from the Progressive party, supporters of the Communist former Vice President Wallace. A reporter asked the governor why he was taking the drastic step of forming a new party. "President Truman is only following the platform that Roosevelt advocated," the reporter argued. "I agree," Thurmond said. "But Truman really means it." After the election, when civil rights legislation met resistance in Congress, Truman, by executive order, forced compliance with nondiscriminatory rules in government contracts, and by the end of 1951 the order covered a fifth of the nation's economy. During the Korean War the integration of the armed forces, begun in 1948 by executive order, reached completion. The use of the Executive Orders were a sign that he did not care about the will of the people.
The third major domestic issue during the Truman administration centered on a twin accusation by the Republicans that the president made little effort to clean the Communists out of government departments and that he condoned and covertly supported corruption among members of the White House staff and within government departments. The amalgam of charges produced by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin in 1950, along with the conviction of the onetime State Department officer Alger Hiss for perjury that year and the discovery that spy rings had infiltrated the wartime and postwar nuclear projects, promised to push the GOP to victory in 1952. Combined with charges of Democrat corruption, which had a strong basis in fact, the Republican strategy became irresistible.
Truman's opponents pressed the Communism-in-government issue, and the \President could not easily deny the charge, for a denial would necessarily have forced him to answer many charges—and his enemies would always have the advantage of first exposure with their assertions. Moreover, Communists did get into the government, for how else could they have attempted to obtain nuclear secrets or, for that matter, subvert the government?
The President also had to deal with the charge that the Republicans linked to Communism—namely, corruption. It was in meeting allegations of corruption within the federal government, in the White House staff, and particularly in the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) that the president's patience with his political tormentors ran out. Another factor entered into his clumsiness in dealing with the corruption issue—loyalty.
One of the president's principal errors in handling the corruption issue was his loyalty to an old Missouri friend from World War I days, his military aide, Major General Harry H. Vaughan who was friendly with individuals who procured federal contracts for a fee of 5 percent. The term "fivepercenter" became a political epithet. General Vaughan was not transferred but remained in the White House for Truman's entire administration.
More telling was presidential insensitivity to corruption in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and the BIR. The RFC naturally attracted employees who made themselves useful to borrowers and left government employ for private enterprise; one of them, unfortunately from Missouri, presented his wife, a secretary in the White House, with a mink coat worth $9,540, paid for by a lawyer for a firm seeking an RFC loan. Congress abolished the RFC in 1953. The BIR offered similar temptations to many political appointments to collector-ships in regional offices around the country. The BIR was the most sensitive government bureau because its operations touched all taxpayers. The President should have watched it closely and moved against miscreants instantly.
Opinion polls reflected Truman's failure to marshal public support during his second term, and by November 1951 his popularity had dropped to 23 percent, down from a July 1945 high of 87 percent. This rating was one point lower than that of President Richard M. Nixon on the eve of his resignation in 1974. For the rest of Truman's administration his popularity rating was very low, and by January 1953 it had risen to only 31 percent.
Part of the reason for Truman's low popularity was the tactics he used to deal with the steel strike of 1952. Seeking not to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, he chose to seize the mills in the name of the government. The mill owners went to court, and the resultant decision, in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer , forced Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to give the mills back to the owners and constituted a sharp blow to Truman's prestige. It was one of the century's most important Supreme Court decisions limiting the power of the President.
In domestic affairs he left the executive branch securely organized, a helpful inheritance for his successor Eisenhower. The Fair Deal appeared to Truman as a thoroughly reasonable program, a belief not justified by its enactment in the 1960s and tenuous retention by subsequent administrations. The issues of Communism and corruption, which bedeviled his last years in the White House, he firmly believed to be a red herring, although his usual political judgment failed him in their handling.
President Truman was the champion of the UN in its first years, when it had to face quite different problems from the ones FDR had expected. Truman believed strongly that security must be collective and indivisible. That was why, for instance, he insisted, when faced with aggression by North Korea against the South in 1950, on bringing the issue to the United Nations and placing US troops under the UN flag, at the head of a multinational force. The shared sense of risk and its treatments were easily extended into future pandemic and climate responses across the globe. Truman also made known that global welfare is also an issue. We are, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare. Global solidarity was both necessary and possible in Truman’s eyes. He was also concerned with global health. A logical extension and prerequisite for both security and development in his eyes were a universal view of what constitutes core Human Rights and International Law. As such, the US has been a leader in Human Right and International Law. Truman felt that when power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose – for broadly shared aims – in accordance with broadly accepted norms. He believed that governments must be accountable for their actions in the international arena, as well as in the domestic one. This responsibility would extend into non-state actors. Truman believed that a nation could only do all these things by working together through a multilateral system. For these reasons, Truman was the first of the American globalist leaders.