Truman and cancel culture

While researching the theme of today’s Pittsburgh Puzzler, I stumbled upon — spoiler alert for you crossword fans — a cache of letters from President Harry Truman to his wife, Bess.

Insightful, pithy and often “politically incorrect,” the letters had me thinking about today’s merciless political climate. What would our intolerant Twitterers make of Truman’s wry, undiplomatic and even vulgar speech?

Well, they wouldn’t have any problem with the vulgarity, of course, but this graduate of Kansas City’s Harry S. Truman Elementary School wonders whether his achievements would be enough to preserve public use of his name and image.

This is the man who decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan — twice — and who left the presidency with a 22 percent approval rating.

His contemporaries in government clearly respected him, though — including Joseph Stalin. Today is the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference, the summit at which Stalin, Truman and Winston Churchill (replaced midway through by Clement Attlee) hashed out the shape of post-war Europe. That’s how I came across Truman’s letters to his wife, written during this historic event and available online from the Truman Library.

With the exception of one dictated and typed early in the three-weeklong series, his handwritten missives are messy, unguarded and funny. There’s a good bit of endearing husbandly boasting: “I reared up on my hind legs and told ‘em where to get off,” and “They are beginning to awake to the fact that I mean business.”

But some folks might be upset by his regular references to “the Jap War.” He pushes back against Stalin’s seeking reparations from Germany, commenting, “Of course, the Russians are naturally looters.”

Conservatives can be alarmed for his admitting, “I like Stalin. He is straightforward.”

Globalists can deplore his nationalism: “I have to make it plain to them … [that] Santa Claus is dead and that …my first interest is the U.S.A.”

These Truman sentiments, however, are relatively tame. The sad truth is that in other letters and private conversation he expressed racist sentiments that to modern ears are simply appalling — things I don’t want or need to quote here.

But there is “sad truth” to be told about any of us, isn’t there? You have your sins and I have mine, habits of mind, speech and body that have been hard for us to conquer or give up.

Truman, however, unlike today’s moral crusaders, knew this about himself. When he learned in 1946 of terrible assaults on black GIs returning from war, he confessed his native prejudices even as he promised, “I shall fight to end evils like this.”

And he did. He issued executive orders and pushed legislation in Congress that fully integrated the military and prohibited discrimination in hiring. The military had been integrated during and after the Civil War, until the insufferable Progressive and racist Woodrow Wilson resegregated it during World War I.

Wilson lacked Truman’s humility, but are Truman’s moral accountability and good deeds enough to balance his prejudices? Or his threatening, in vivid detail, bodily harm to the music critic who panned his daughter Margaret’s voice recital?

Or, on an infinitely more serious level, the man who used the atomic bomb to defeat Japan?

One Potsdam achievement was a unified call for Japan’s surrender. Truman wrote Bess, “[W]e’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing.”

But within a week of the conference’s conclusion, bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took over 100,000 Japanese lives. We still debate whether this was necessary and how it could have been different.

All of history’s greats were flawed because all humans are. With time and hindsight, we sift through their lives — and, ideally, our own.

There is no self-examination in today’s mob, though. And if the mob can topple 18th-century giants, they wouldn’t hesitate over a somewhat lesser man who died in 1972.

To indict him, though, they’d first have to read something besides tweets. Perhaps Truman is safe for now.