THE PRESIDENCY: Old Act, New Lines

The barrage of political questions at Harry Truman’s weekly press conference was interrupted by NBC’s Earl Godwin. “Mr. President,” he began, “I have a question which is obviously planted.” Harry Truman laughed at the frank admission and told him to go ahead. Godwin explained that he had two friends in the theater business and they thought there was a great revival in vaudeville—which meant re-employment for a lot of people. “That is a planted question,” said Godwin, “so please say something nice about it.”

Harry Truman laughed again. That’s not hard to do, he said, because when he was about 16 or 20 years old, he used to go to every vaudeville show that ever came to Kansas City. He had seen the Four Cohans and Eva Tanguay, he remembered. And he used to be an usher every Saturday afternoon at the Grand and see the shows free. “Where was the Grand?” a Kansas City Star reporter asked. Down at Seventh and Walnut, said Truman. “Gosh,” said the reporter, “we’ll have to put up a plaque there tomorrow.”

New Showing. Harry Truman, who is never happier than when he is off on the old political two-a-day himself, was in bubbling spirits. On Labor Day, he had tried out his act again for the first time since last fall, and it was still the unchallenged best on the political boards.

Bouncing out of the wings and turning on his Missouri accent, he had gotten off a rousing, “give-’em-hell” speech, designed for the farmer-labor combination that had elected him last November. The audience at the Allegheny County Fair was tailor-made—farmers from the countryside, steelworkers from Pittsburgh’s mills. “Farmers and industrial workers . . . depend on each other,” he told them.

He produced last year’s whipping boys — the 80th Congress and “selfish interests”—but he had freshened up the lines. Now, he declared, there was a “scare-word” campaign. “The people want public housing for low-income families,” Truman said. “The selfish interests . . . think it will cut down on their own income so they call it ‘collectivism’ . . . The people want fair laws for labor. The selfish interests . . . mistakenly fear that their profits will be reduced, so they call that ‘statism’ . . . We don’t care what they call it . . . The people want a fair program for the farmers, including an effective price-support program. The selfish interests . . . call this ‘socialism.’ We don’t care what they call it.

“The selfish interests don’t know—they don’t care—what these words mean. They are using those words only because they want to turn the American people against the programs which the people want, and need, and voted for. We can afford them, we ought to have them, and we will have them.”

Slow Up. Whisked over to Des Moines in his DC-6, Truman gave the country’s farmers a rousing fight talk over the heads of the delegates to the Amvets convention. “The new Congress has already repaired most of the damage done to farmers by the 80th Congress,” he declared. “Of course, there are still many reactionary Senators and Representatives . . . still doing all they can to slow up our Congress, but they are not able to stop it.”

He carefully discussed the beauties of the Brannan Plan (high prices for farmers, low prices for workers, the bill to be footed by taxes). Republicans, who had all but forgotten how good the Truman act was, suddenly began clearing their throats, eyeing the future nervously and taking practice jogs to loosen their political muscles.

Scare-Word or Issue? Truman had given them an issue—statism. Asked at his press conference for his own definition, Truman was offhand. It’s simply another one of the scare-words, he declared. He had looked it up himself in several dictionaries and none of them were in agreement. But others seemed to know what it meant—notably New York’s John Foster Dulles (see below).

Asked to identify the “selfish interests” who were using scare-words, Truman turned suddenly coy. He could not identify them at present, he said, but a little further along in the campaign he might identify some individuals and some special interests. “Which campaign?” a newsman shot back. The 1950 campaign, said Truman with a grin. The campaign always begins on Labor Day of the year before the election takes place—didn’t he know that?

Harry Truman obviously planned to be in it to the last whistlestop. He was even considering an invasion of Ohio to tangle with Mr. Republican himself. One of the most energetic campaigners in presidential history was raring to go.