The Long View 2008-07-09: The Truman Show
This blog post by John J. Reilly amounts to a mini-review of David McCullough’s biography of Truman [Amazon link], which John mentioned in another post shortly before this one.
I find John’s thoughts on Truman’s economic policies interesting:
I don’t want to suggest that higher taxes and infinite regulation are a formula for prosperity. Actually, reading about the economic thinking of the Truman era is a little like reading about an 18th-medical text on bloodletting as a cure-all treatment. Truman thought he needed to control the price of steel, for instance, because that was the only way to control inflation. The idea of controlling inflation through monetary policy was entirely off the radar screen. (Richard Nixon, 25 years later, would be no better informed, and with less excuse.) We should take the record of the Truman years as evidence that the purposes of God and all His angels do not turn on whether the marginal tax-rate rises or falls a few points, or whether we have the Right Man at the Fed. One might even begin to suspect that the economy is surprisingly invulnerable to policy.
The Truman Show
I’ve finished David McCullough’s nearly 1000-page biography of Harry Truman . (The exercise was facilitated when the huge paperback edition I was reading fell apart in the warm weather into 50-page fascicles, suitable for subway reading or at other odd moments.) I have already mentioned the book in this space, but rather than do a full review, there are just three points I’d like to mention that have more than historical interest:
Truman lived in freer world. He was a historian’s dream because he was an inveterate letter-writer and diarist. McCullough mentions that there are no presidents, and indeed few historical figures, who left such treasury of off-the-record commentary about what they were doing and why they were doing it.
We know not only what he said to others, but also what he would have liked to say. When Truman was vexed about something, he would have what he called “long-hand spasms.” He would write a blistering rebuke to a colleague or a subordinate, or a speech in which he called for obstructive persons to be hanged. He would then review the document with great satisfaction, put it in his desk, and leave it to be found decades later by delighted historians. (Famously, he mailed such a document just once: that was the letter to the editor of a newspaper whose music critic President Truman threatened to punch in the nose after the critic gave Truman’s daughter a bad review as a singer.)
I mention this because it is impossible to imagine anyone in public life creating the same kind of record today. Politicians now leave enormous paper-trails, of course, but the contents of the documents are usually generated by staff. Even when a politician actually writes his own memoir, as seems to have been the case with Barack Obama recently, the result has been vetted for its novelistic effect.
The problem is not simply the danger of embarrassment, but the threat of subpoena. I know of a case of a midlevel federal official who was so ill-advised as to make frank and pointed comments in his in-house email about a matter of departmental mismanagement. When he was called to testify before Congress on the matter, the text of some of the messages had been blown up on posters and displayed about the committee room. The result of this kind of treatment, of course, is the continuing trend toward post-literate government. Increasingly, important matters are not discussed on paper, but in hurried conversations. This means a real degradation in the quality of administration. I do have a possible solution to the no-diary rule. Someone who wished to write a diary or other personal history, but did not dare keep one, might consider creating a trust managed by an attorney in a foreign jurisdiction that could be trusted not to execute frivolous subpoenas. The terms of the trust would be that the trustee would receive and preserve diary entries from the writer for a term of years. The trustee would be irrevocably forbidden to turn the material over to the writer or to his agents until the term had passed. But getting back to Truman...
...who, in terms of today’s economic consensus, was a diabolist. The wartime controls on wages and prices continued into Truman’s time as president from (1945-1953), and he fiercely opposed lifting them. Taxes rose, a lot, throughout his administration. He did not extend the scope of the New Deal as he had hoped (he never got Congress to act on universal-health insurance, for instance). On the whole, however, regulations spread like a banyan tree.
Meanwhile, the economy expanded as it never had before. This was not a matter of market bubbles: the expansion was a broadly base rise in real income and in consumption. We should note that the phenomenon surprised everyone. There was a general assumption that the war had ended the Depression, and that therefore the Depression would return when the war was over. (Stalin had some thoughts along these lines, by the way. McCullough notes that, in a rare radio address in 1946, Stalin said that war with the capitalist countries was inevitable and would probably occur in the 1950s, when they would be in a state of economic collapse.) Instead, when the troops came home, they did not flood the labor market; unemployment almost disappeared.
I don’t want to suggest that higher taxes and infinite regulation are a formula for prosperity. Actually, reading about the economic thinking of the Truman era is a little like reading about an 18th-medical text on bloodletting as a cure-all treatment. Truman thought he needed to control the price of steel, for instance, because that was the only way to control inflation. The idea of controlling inflation through monetary policy was entirely off the radar screen. (Richard Nixon, 25 years later, would be no better informed, and with less excuse.) We should take the record of the Truman years as evidence that the purposes of God and all His angels do not turn on whether the marginal tax-rate rises or falls a few points, or whether we have the Right Man at the Fed. One might even begin to suspect that the economy is surprisingly invulnerable to policy.
Finally, we should note that Truman was a conscious Jacksonian. He admired Jackson himself and studied his presidency in general, but he particularly embraced the Jacksonian principle that, when one’s party came to power, the party faithful were entitled to public patronage. It was a simple as that.
Truman had entered politics through the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City, Missouri. Before his elevation to the US Senate, Truman had in effect been a commissioner of public works (a “judge”) of Jackson County. He distinguished himself by becoming an expert on all matters relating to construction and public finance; he also never took a bribe, and presented the spectacle in Washington of a Pendergast senator who had trouble finding the money to keep an apartment in the city. However, he never questioned that part of his job as construction administrator was to distribute patronage fairly among the local Democratic interests. As president, he saw nothing wrong with the “five-percenters” who embarrassed his administration, the old friends who gave responsible jobs and who used their influence, for a fee, to see that certain matters were handled by the bureaucracy more expeditiously.
Most of this was not illegal at the time; some of it still isn’t. Recently, we saw this Jacksonian attitude not least among the late Republican Congressional majority, whose leadership saw no trouble with spending legislation earmarked for favored constituents, and who really did not see why they had to listen to interest groups who had no intention of donating money to their campaigns. Some of that still isn’t illegal, either, but this Jacksonian principle seems to be less and less well-regarded each time it resurfaces.
* * *
Well, maybe this entry was long enough to be a review, but at least readers have been spared an account Truman’s struggle to learn trigonometry, or his saintly patience with his intolerable mother-in-law. In any case, I am now reading Douhat & Salam’s Grand New Party, for which I hope to do a formal review. After that, I plan to review Thomas F. Madden’s Empires of Trust: How Rome Built – And America Is Building – A New World. There is no avoiding it, I suppose.
By the way, my review of Otto Rahn's Lucifer's Court is available on this site as well as at the Southern Literary Messenger. The difference is that I inserted some links.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
Comments ()