Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States, taking office in 1945 after Franklin Roosevelt died. He led the country through the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. As a senator from Missouri, he gained a reputation for honesty and fiscal responsibility. As president, he made the difficult decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan and oversaw the creation of the United Nations. However, his presidency was also challenged by tensions with the Soviet Union and unpopular decisions around the Korean War. After leaving office in 1953, he retired to Independence, Missouri where he later died at the age of 88.

1. HARRY S TRUMAN (1884-1972)

2. OVERVIEW
 Born May 8, 1884, Lamar, MO
 Died December 26, 1972 (aged 88), Kansas City, MO
 Member of the Democratic Party
 33rd President of the United States (April 12, 1945-January 20, 1953)
 34th Vice President of the United States (January 20, 1945-April 12, 1945)
 U.S. Senator from Missouri (January 3, 1935-January 17, 1945)
 Presiding Judge of Jackson County, MO (January 10, 1927-January 3, 1935)

3. EARLY LIFE
 Harry S Truman was born May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri (birthplace shown right); he was the
oldest of three children.
 His father, John Anderson Truman, was a farmer and mule trader.
 Harry was named after his maternal uncle Harrison Young, even though his parents could not
decide on a middle name; after more than a month, they agreed to just use the letter S as an
homage to both his maternal grandfather Solomon Young and his paternal grandfather
Anderson Shipp Truman.
 Truman grew up on the family farm in Independence, Missouri.
 He did not attend college, and is the most recent U.S. president with no college degree; after
high school, he worked a number of jobs, first as a timekeeper for a railroad construction
company, and then as a clerk and a bookkeeper at two different banks in Kansas City.
 After five years, he resumed farming and joined the National Guard.

4. TRUMAN FAMILY FARM, INDEPENDENCE, MO

5. MILITARY CAREER
 Truman volunteered for military service when the United States entered World War I in April,
1917.
 Even though he was thirty-three and two years over the age limit for the draft and entitled to
discharge as a farmer, he nevertheless assisted in organizing his National Guard battalion,
which at last was ordered into service in the 129th Field Artillery.
 Truman became a captain while in France and allocated Battery D, which was famous for
being the most disorderly battery in the battalion.
 Despite a mostly reluctant and uncertain character, Truman won the respect and veneration
of his men and effectively led them through substantial fighting throughout the Meuse-
Argonne campaign.

6. MEUSE-ARGONNE CAMPAIGN

7. EARLY INVOLVEMENT IN POLITICS
 After the war, Truman returned to Missouri and married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth
“Bess” Wallace, in June 1919; in February 1924, they gave birth to a daughter, Mary Margaret.
 In 1919, he made an incursion into business when he and an assistant set up a hat shop in
Kansas City.
 The business proved to be a failure at the start of the 1922 Great Depression, and Truman
owed $20,000 to creditors.
 He did not accept bankruptcy and urged on paying back all the money he borrowed, which
took over fifteen years.
 Around this time, he had an encounter with Democratic boss Thomas Pendergast, whose
nephew James served with Truman during the war.
 Pendergast gave Truman a position as a supervisor of highways; after a year, Pendergast
selected Truman to run for one of three county-judge positions in Jackson County.
 Truman was elected judge, which was an executive rather than a jurisdictive position, but he
was defeated when he ran for reelection.
 Truman ran again in 1926 and was elected as a presiding judge; he held this position until he
ran for senator in 1934.

8. TRUMAN WITHTHOMAS PENDERGAST

9. TRUMAN IS SWORN IN AS JUDGE OF JACKSONCOUNTY,
JANUARY 10, 1927

10. SENATOR, 1935-1945
 Truman was elected to the United States Senate in 1934.
 During his first term, he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was
responsible for distributing tax money for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal
projects, and the Interstate Commerce Committee, which supervised railroads, shipping, and
interstate transport.
 Together with Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Truman started investigating railroads; in 1940, he
initiated legislation that enforced tighter federal regulation on the railroads, which helped
him prove his standing as a man of honesty.
 By the time Truman was up for reelection in 1940, Thomas Pendergast had been convicted of
tax evasion and associated with voter deception, and many anticipated that Truman’s ties to
Pendergast would lead to defeat.
 However, Truman neither tried to conceal nor distort his relationship with Pendergast, and
his reputation as a truthful and principled man helped him win reelection, although only
barely.
 During his second term, Truman chaired a special commission to investigate the National
Defense Program to prevent war profiteering and wasteful spending in defense industries.
 He gained public support and acknowledgement for his forthright reports and useful
commendations, and he won the admiration of his associates and the public alike.

11. SENATORTRUMANWITH SENATORWHEELER

12. PRESIDENCY, 1945-1953
 When President Roosevelt had to find a running mate for the 1944 presidential election, he
did not consider Vice President Henry A. Wallace an acceptable choice.
 The majority of the high-ranking Democrats in Washington did not like Wallace; because it
was clear that Roosevelt had only little chance of surviving his fourth term, the vice
presidential pick was particularly important.
 Truman’s popularity and his standing as a fiscally responsible man and a supporter of citizens’
rights made him the perfect choice.
 Truman may have initially been hesitant to accept, but he campaigned enthusiastically once
he was nominated.
 In November 1944, the already popular Roosevelt won election to a fourth term with Truman
on the ticket.
 On January 20, 1945, Truman took the oath of office as the thirty-fourth Vice President of the
United States.
 But he would only serve eighty-two days; on April 12, 1945, Roosevelt died of a massive
stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Truman was sworn in as the thirty-third President of
the United States.

13. TRUMAN’S SWEARING-IN CEREMONY FOLLOWINGTHE DEATH OF
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, APRIL 12, 1945

14. PRESIDENCY, 1945-1953 – CONT.
 With no earlier experience in foreign affairs, Truman was thrown into the role of
Commander-in-chief and tasked with ending a world war.
 In the first six months of his term, Truman announced the Germans’ surrender,
dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—ending World War II—and
signed the charter that created the United Nations.

15. PREAMBLETOTHE UN CHARTER

16. AFTERTHEWAR
 Despite these early achievements, Truman’s diplomatic situation was affected by post-war
challenges.
 While the Soviet Union may have been a key ally of the United States during the war,
relations rapidly worsened when it became clear that the Soviets wanted to remain in control
of Eastern European states that were supposed to hold free elections after the end of the war;
this, along with the omission of the Soviets from the rebuilding of Asia, started what would
be known as the Cold War, a period of political and military tension between the United
States and its capitalist allies and the Soviet Union and its communist allies.

17. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1948
 In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans won both houses of Congress; this was
understood as a judgment of Truman’s policies, and polls suggested that victory for Truman
in the Presidential Election of 1948 was practically unlikely.
 Victory for the liberal Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York,
seemed so sure that the Chicago Daily Tribune famously printed the headline “Dewey Defeats
Truman” even before many polling locations disclosed their results.
 The final result was a surprising win for Truman in a fairly close election: Truman won 49.5
percent of the vote, compared with Dewey’s 45.1 percent; this was one of the biggest upsets
in the history of U.S. elections.

18. CHICAGO DAILYTRIBUNE HEADLINE, NOVEMBER 3, 1948

19. THE KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953
 Truman announced his domestic policy initiative, the “Fair Deal” program, in his 1949 State of
the Union address.
 Modeling this initiative off Roosevelt’s New Deal, it comprised universal health care, an
increase in the minimum wage, more funding for education, and a pledge of equal rights
under the law for all citizens.
 This program met with mixed success.
 In 1948, racial discrimination was outlawed in federal government hiring practices, the
military was desegregated, and the minimum wage went up.
 National health insurance was ignored, as was more money for education.
 In June 1950, the Korean War erupted, and Truman quickly sent troops to the conflict.
 He believed that the North Korean invasion of South Korea was a challenge from the Soviets,
and that, if left abandoned, it could intensify to a third world war and to further communist
aggression; following a short-lived upsurge of public support for his decision, disapproval
mounted.

20. THE KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953
 Truman originally supported a rollback plan and encouraged General Douglas MacArthur to
open the 38th parallel, and brought forces into North Korea to take control of the
government.
 But when China sent 300,000 troops to help North Korea, Truman changed his strategy.
 He returned to the containment strategy, and focused on defending the independence of
South Korea instead of defeating communism in the north.
 MacArthur openly disagreed; for Truman, this was disobedience and a confrontation to his
authority, and he discharged MacArthur in April 1951.
 MacArthur was a popular general, and Truman’s already-low approval ratings plunged
further.

21. STEEL STRIKES
 Truman’s challenges did not apply only to international affairs.
 On the domestic front, he struggled to deal with a labor dispute between the United Steel
Workers of America and the major steel mills.
 The union demanded a wage increase, but the mill owners did not permit it except on the
condition that the government allowed them to increase the expenses of their consumer
goods, which had been restricted by the Wage Stabilization Board.
 Because his efforts to broker an agreement were not successful and he was hesitant to raise
the Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed despite his veto in 1947 and would have allowed him
to seek a restriction that kept the union from striking, Truman took control of the steel mills
in the name of the government.
 The steel companies responded by filing a lawsuit against the government, and the
case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer (sometimes known as "The Steel Seizure
Case") went before the Supreme Court.
 The Court ruled in favor of the steel mills, and pressured Secretary of Commerce Charles W.
Sawyer (right) to give the mills back to the owners.
 Truman's handling of this dispute further damaged his reputation with the American people.

22. POST-PRESIDENCY
 In March 1952, Truman announced that he would not run for a second full term.
 He endorsed Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, who ran as the Democratic candidate,
though Stevenson kept himself distant from the president because of the president’s poor
approval ratings.
 Truman left office on January 20, 1953; he was succeeded by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
 After he departed from the White House, Truman returned to Independence, Missouri, where
he wrote his memoirs, supervised the construction of his presidential library, and took long
walks.
 He died at the age of eighty-eight on December 26, 1972.
 His wife Bess lived for another decade; she died at the age of ninety-seven on October 18,
1982.
 The Trumans are buried in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

23. TRUMAN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

24. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 http://www.biography.com/people/harry-s-truman-9511121  Other sites
 First Speech toCongress (April 16, 1945):
http://millercenter.org/president/truman/speeches/speech-3339
 Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947):
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp
 Inaugural address (January 20, 1949):
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13282