Conferinta de la Postdam, eforturi de pace, “babying the Soviets”, Harry Truman:O Scurtã Istorie a Statelor Unite ( 2 )

Conferinta de la Postdam, eforturi de pace, “babying the Soviets”, Harry Truman:

O Scurtã Istorie a Statelor Unite ( 2 )

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.- Harry S. Truman

When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril. - Harry S. Truman

The Fair Deal

Truman, trying in the summer of 1945 to turn his attention to the home front, was determined to keep the nation on the progressive path.

The country was emerging from the war with a tremendous debt, but also with a tremendous increase in its productive capacity.

The techniques of mass production, assisted by scientific discovery and engineering advance, were working greater wonders every year.

At the peak of the war, in 1944 – 1945, all records in manufacturing, agriculture, and transport were broken by wide margins.

Production was estimated at two and a half times what it had been in 1929.

As a hungry, impoverished world demanded all that America could provide, fears that demobilization might result in acute unemployment proved quite unfounded.

But as production continued to increase ( in 1950 national income was $275 billion, as against $40 billion in the depth of the depression ), would it be equitably shared ? Would social justice prevail ?

A disciple of Roosevelt, Truman naturally wished to keep the New Deal moving.

In September, 1945, he gave a defiant answer to those who declared that the time had come for retrenchment and consolidation.

Addressing Congress, he offered a program which he called the Fair Deal.

It embraced government action, if needed, to provide full employment, a rise in minimum-wage rates, a broadening of the social-security system.

Federal expenditures for slum clearance and better housing, higher crop price-supports, and duplicates of the TVA on the Missouri, Columbia, and other rivers.

Clearly, he wished to maintain the old New Deal alliance of labor and farmers to give the country a dynamic social and economic democracy.

But he encountered difficulties.

Agricultural and laboring groups, never really congenial, fell apart as farm prices began to drop while wages continued to rise.

Conservative business and professional elements wanted fewer government controls and lower taxes ; many white Southerners were alarmed by Truman’s requests for Federal legislation against the poll tax and lynching, and for a continuance of the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee to give the Negro a full share of jobs.

In Congress, Truman soon faced an iron wall of Republican conservatives and Southern Democratic Bourbons.

Probably the most important immediate result of the Fair Deal program was that it protected the New Deal gains already won.

It gave progressives a rallying point, and served notice thate the administration would fight every backward step.

In the long run most of Truman’s proposals went on the statute books.

But a ten-year fight, many vicissitudes, and the leadership of many other men, Republicans as well as Democrats, had to be recorded before this happened.

The vital fact is that the country did not experience such a postwar reaction as occurred after the Civil War and First World War.

Efforts at Peacemaking

High government officials were quicker than the general public to comprehend that the establishment of a peaceful world would be a difficult and perhaps impossible task.

Before his death President Roosevelt had begun to recognize the aggressive designs of Stalin’s regime.

Ambassador Averell Harriman and others stationed in Russia were quick to warn Truman.

The President attended the tripartite conference at Postdam July 17 – August 2, 1945, in a watchful mood.

East and West quickly deadlock on important issues, and adjourned after handing over the continued work of peace-making to a Council of Foreign Ministers, on which the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China were represented.

American forces occupied a zone of almost 40,000 square miles in southwestern Germany, the British 42,700 square miles, and the French 16,700, while the Russians held 46,600 square miles in East Germany.

The city of Berlin inside the Russian zone was under occupation of the four Powers.

Austria, too, was divided into four zones.

Japan was kept under the strong hand of General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

Korea, which was promised her independence, was divided, Russia controlling the northern half, the United States the southern.

It quickly became evident that Russia was intent on establishing a broad zone of satellite states about her, on reaching the Dardanelles and Mediterranean, on getting a hand in the management of the Ruhr and its huge manufacturing facilities, and on using Communist parties in France, Italy, and other war-weakened nations to paralyze, if not control, their governements.

Secretary Byrnes exerted himself, like Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin in Britain, to reach a modus vivendi with the Soviet governement.

He was in fact all too hopeful.

Compromise was a word alien to the Russian vocabulary ; Moscow took everything it could get, and yielded little in return.

Particularly highhanded was the course of the Soviet Union in Poland, which the Western Powers hoped to make a truly democratic, self-governing nation.

Not content with annexing some 78,000 square miles of the old Poland, Russia used its military occupation to strike down representatives of the London governement-in-exile, establish a Constitution on the Soviet model, and create a subservient Communist regime under Boleslav Bierut.

While the Western Powers drastically reduced armaments, Russia increased her fighting power, consolidating her forces early in 1946 under General Nikolai Bulganin.

To meet the Russian menace, the United States steadily stiffened its attitude.

At conferences held in London in the fall of 1945, Moscow that December, and Paris from May to October, 1946, American representatives showed increasing stubbornness.

Treaties were concluded respecting Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania which Stalin at once misused ( again American and British protests ) to gain control of those countries.

Finland was freed, but shortly compelled to sign a ten-year mutual assistance pact with Russia.

Italy alone, which became a republic in 1946 and later accepted a peace treaty stripping her of all her colonies, was saved to the Western group.

The free territory of Trieste was garrisoned by American and British troops under jurisdiction of the UN Security Council.

Anglo-American action also excluded the Russians from any voice in the management of the Ruhr, in the British zone.

Russia refused to agree to any treaty for the liberation of Austria, which Moscow wished to use to extract wealth from her occupation area, and as an excuse for maintaining troops along supply lines in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

One matter on which the West and Russia did agree was punishment of the highest Nazi leaders.

Indictments were framed and twenty-two war leaders were brought to trial in Nuremberg, in November, 1945.

The case, fully argued on both sides, dragged on until September 30, 1946.

Eleven men were sentenced to hang October 1.

Hermann Goering committed suicide by poison in his cell ; the other ten, includind Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, died on the gallows.

Opinion in the United States was much divided on the justice and expediency of this unprecedented international action.

The crimes of the Nazis were unspeakably foul, but they might have been punished by a German tribunal.

Moreover, many of the German crimes were paralleled by Russian offenses of equal heinousness, and Germany and Russia, raising the signal for the Second World War in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, had invaded and devastated Poland in arrogant partnership.

The cold-blooded murder of 7,000 captured Polish officers, attributed by the Russians to Hitler, almost certainly was ordered by Stalin.

( Extras din A Short History of The United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968 )