Truman - God Bless America - Part 2

Part 2

Democratic President vs Democratic Racism

In 1792, Jefferson and Madison created the Democratic-Republican Party, and in 1825 it split into several fractions, one of which was called the Democratic Party. In 1854, the Republican Party appeared, and the two parties separated. Republicans mostly represented the “marketers of the North” – merchants, entrepreneurs, industrialists, successful farmers, i.e., the middle class. Democrats turned into spokesmen of the federal bureaucracy of the North and the slave-holding bureaucracy of the South, hoping to subdue the marketing North. Racism became their main ideology. And today it still remains so, but much meaner, driving the blacks into welfare-towns – ghettos that destroy people’s psychic, making them dependent, demoralizing them with the policy of all-permissiveness and the Critical Race Theory demagogy [1].

After the Civil War that liberated Blacks from slavery, the Republican Congress and the Federal Government took measures to ensure their rights (Amendments 13, 14, and 15 to the Constitutions, the Civil Rights laws of 1866 and 1875). Having lost the “war for slavery,” the Democrats kept silent for some time and were satisfying themselves with small matters, such as participation in the Ku-Klux-Klan[2]. But by 1890, they regained power in many southern states and in a hurry started enacting the Jim Crow Laws that significantly limited the rights of blacks, Indians, and occasionally Latinos and Asians, established segregation in learning institutions, hotels, stores, restaurants, hospitals, public transport, restrooms, ships, cemeteries, voting participation, etc.

 

 

“Father of Bureaucracy” Woodrow Wilson extended the segregation onto the army that was fighting in Europe. But the man who took this really seriously was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During his rule, segregation and discrimination of “people of color” in the already very unfree America only got worse. For example, social programs had special conditions that made them available for Whites only, excluding most African and Latino Americans. During the war, over one hundred thousand Americans of Japanese descent were interned (sent to concentration zones). Even in the army, Blacks served mostly in separate special divisions, such as heroic Tuskegee Airmen Black Pilots. Because no way should a black officer or even a general give orders to a white soldier! Nobody even thought about the antidiscrimination of the “colored.”

Roosevelt disgraced his country by closing the opportunity for the emigration of German Jews, thus contributing to the Holocaust and helping Hitler send thousands to the death camps crematoria. And during the war, he forbade to bomb the access routes to Auschwitz on the grounds that the American aviation had more important objectives. This could have saved thousands of people of various nationalities sentenced to death.

Soon after taking office, Truman initiated an aggressive civil rights program that he called “Moral Priority.” The start to the desegregation movement was given in 1948 by the special address from President Truman to the Congress where he proposed to enact the laws forbidding the most blatant acts of racial intolerance and create the “Presidential Committee” that started actively implementing equality in the armed forces for people of all races.

The Presidential decree of 1948 declared that race discrimination of people intending to join civil services was to become unlawful. And in 1951, the Corporate Governance and Compensation Committee (CGCC) was established. It ensured that the defense industry contractors did not discriminate on the basis on race.

All these decisions made by President Truman[3] and supported by Republicans, despite the aggressive resistance from the Democratic Party apparatus and the majority of Democrats in Congress, resulted in the development of the general movement against segregation in the 1950’s.

Go, Market!

Restoring the country’s economy was Truman’s primary objective, and this required freeing the businesses from the “government’s tight embrace.” As early as September 1945, just 4 months after taking office, while publicly praising Roosevelt and explaining to everyone how to follow his legacies, Truman actually cancelled the socialist “New Deal” and declared a set of proposals to move the country towards the market economy, which got the name “Fair Deal.” This term characterizes the entire activity of Truman from 1945 to 1953. In his address to Congress in 1949, Truman stated that “every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from our government a fair deal.”

The president acted quickly, decisively, and consistently. He appointed people of action instead of Roosevelt’s liberal demagogues, professors, trade-union bosses, and “progressive journalists” that captured the administration. In 1947, the Labor-Management Relations Act (the Taft-Hartley Act) was passed. It cancelled the most business-endangering socialistic provisions of the Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and limited the dangerous powers of trade-unions. And the worst and most inexcusable thing happened – bureaucrats started to get punished, fired, and even prosecuted for corruption!

Mutually Beneficial Help

The Versailles Treaty, a bureaucratic procreation of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, was based on the dumb and essentially lawless idea, “Boches will pay for everything[4].” It later became the reason for World War II. President Harry Truman and hist State Secretary George Marshall acted much smarter when, after the end of World War II, they abandoned the dangerous formula “the loser pays for all”[5]!

Truman realized that communism can win only in economically dysfunctional regions, and the best way to protect against it is to improve the living standards for people. He was able to prove this and make Congress sanction huge investments necessary for restarting the dying European economy.

According to the European Recovery Program known as the Marshall Plan, the USA provided for the winners exhausted by the war, as well as for the losers, voluntary aid in the amount of 12.5 billion dollars (about $170 billion in today’s money) throughout four years. This allowed the countries demolished by the war to get their market economy back on track and create decent living conditions for their population, as well as preserve or rebuild democratic institutions[6]. This also helped them to get rid of the odious “Ghost of Communism” and drastically limit the powers and greed of their own bureaucracies.

All this stumbled upon two seemingly unsurmountable obstacles:

• In those countries that do not offer property rights and economic freedom for businesses, no “infusion of money” can create a market, for everything would be stolen and embezzled by those who have the civil and/or military power.
• Attempts to simply help the poor and pay unemployment allowances could temporarily, to a certain extent, alleviate the people’s situation, but at the same time would corrupt them and turn them into parasites always expecting handouts instead of creating their own wealth.[7]

 

The intent of the Marshall Plan was to ensure the recipients would not only guzzle away the money but also help themselves. The aid was provided under the following conditions:

• Encourage private entrepreneurship
• Create favorable conditions for investments
• Lower customs tariffs
• Support financial stability
• Provide reports on spending the received money. This kind of control by America over the distribution of money is what induced the most resentment in Stalin and the masses of bureaucrats in the recipient countries. What a pity – so much money is flowing around, but it cannot be stolen or spent for bombs and tanks!

 

All of this took place in the presence of the American army[8] that totally dismissed the possibility of extremists coming to power or bureaucrats redistributing in their own favor the moneys allocated within this plan.

But Truman did not intend to keep half of Europe and other countries under military control forever. He activated the process of regeneration and reinforcement of national armies and law enforcement agencies and creation of the joint safety system called North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO – a military-political union integrating 10 countries of Europe, USA, and Canada. The main objective of NATO was to counteract any form of aggression against the countries within this union.[9] This ensured the success of the Marshall Plan. However, just like with the Holy Alliance, as the new rise of bureaucracies evolved, NATO (and the UN as well) soon turned into a malignant bureaucratic system.

But most importantly, the Marshall Plan was no “beneficence.” By helping others, America wonderfully helped itself. The Marshall Plan created millions of new workplaces in the U.S. and provided jobs for discharged soldiers; it generated huge international markets that were so badly needed for the growing economy. The implementation of this plan contributed largely to preventing a new global economic crisis in the mid-fifties that would be similar to the one in 1929 and which was impatiently awaited by many.

Heal Yourself[10]

The biggest achievement by Truman was restoring the classic market economy and the market psychology for people. Looks almost incredible, but the country that in 1945 was totally crushed by bureaucracy, ten years later, all of a sudden, became market-oriented. How can this be explained?

“Truman’s market revolution” can be explained only by the fact that eleven years of “reason-beating Roosevelt’s socialism” was not enough to destroy the market mentality of real Yankees. People, mostly unconsciously, have accumulated a lot of discontent for the bureaucracy and, at the same time, reminisced about the “happy twenties,” their dreams of freedom, free market, and the related good life. This combination of “energy of discontent” and “energy of dreams” exploded, once Truman “poked a hole” in the bureaucratic barrage, resulting in a chain reaction of its fast erosion and the unwinding of market economy.

Here are the basic mechanisms behind the market economy unwinding:

• The war spurred the powerful development of technology – high-precision mass production, polymer materials, high-frequency electronics (radios and radars that were just one step away from television and microwave ovens), refrigeration appliances, computer hardware, aviation, medicine, etc. This turned out to be a powerful resource for the post-war development, which allowed to eliminate most of the restrictions and shortages of the old times, feed the population, and create decent living conditions for all the people.
• Almost 25 million unemployed people – discharged from the army and working in the defense industry, mostly youngsters who survived the war, got serious life experience, had no “anchors” in the form of homes or families, but still full of hope – were ready to take chances and work hard for a better life.
• Among these people, there was a rather small but very noticeably and capable percent of those with “entrepreneur spirit” and real management experience – former officers and sergeants, technical specialists, procurement agents, medical workers, etc. They had authority over former soldiers and were trained to make decisions and enforce their implementation.

 

All of this was sufficient to boost the market, the only hindering factor being the system of tough restrictions and bans created by the bureaucracy. Under these conditions, all that was needed is the simple message of truth to be delivered to the people: “bureaucratic restrictions are lifted, and there will be no punishment for their violation”; “all is permitted, unless it is prohibited by the Constitution.” And follow up with one simple call: “Get rich!”[11] This resulted in an immediate chain reaction that gave a huge boost to the growth of the market and, accordingly, the middle class.

Those who got discharged from the army or lost their jobs received pensions and/or retirement benefits; the government financed the construction of roads, airports, and the housing repairs. Back in 1943, Roosevelt, for the purpose of triumph of socialism, froze the rent without compensating the residence owners in any way. As time passed, the general rise in expenses and inability to raise the rent caused the residence owners to lose profits, so they stopped repairing their facilities and reduced maintenance. Houses became deserted and turned into slums... Some were simply abandoned, and fires began to erupt – this was the best way to get rid of the property that didn't bring any profit but could produce some return in the form of insurance money. Cities stopped receiving taxes. Consequently, these areas suffered from lack of maintenance, garbage removal, road repairs and construction; the police presence was cut, resulting in rising crime... Downtowns started to die.

In 1948, Truman cancelled these “socialist measures” and proposed the program of constructing 100 thousand new buildings each year. New houses required a lot of production of furniture, television sets, and other home appliances and consumer goods. Although the taxes on businesses remained quite high, the situation where the market was undersaturated with goods and began growing fast allowed the majority of people to get rich.

The government has allocated a lot of money for the Marshall Plan, while the Berlin blockade by the Soviet troops and its supply by air required additional growth in production of many various goods and support of efficient industry. Construction of new roads, mass production of automobiles, and privileges for house construction resulted in the fast growth of suburbs and small towns, where ever-increasing number of people, stores, and businesses moved from downtowns. The demand was growing for office equipment, furniture, tableware, home and garden equipment, automobiles, light and heavy trucks, etc.

This process was accompanied by deconcentration of production. Before the start of the industrial revolution, people mostly worked at home. In the 19th century, the start of the industrial revolution initiated the process of concentration of production (equipment and workers) and the growth of large enterprises, which led to the creation, in the mid-20th century, of gigantic factories with thousands of workers. But the second half of the 20th century was marked by the reverse process of deconcentration related to the growth of automation in production and creation of a system of relatively small supplier companies. Many small factories “followed” the people and settled in suburbs and small towns.

The construction of highways went at a very high rate, sea transport and civil aviation were getting developed, airports were built, and the extraction of oil and natural gas kept growing... And these processes kept accelerating due to the creation of efficient means of communication (satellite, cable, cellular, Internet, etc.) and the appearance of multiple jobs that would be performed by people at home or at local small businesses.

People strived to work more, earned more money, wanted to buy more, even though at first there was nothing much to buy. The production of commodities during Roosevelt and especially during the war was at a very low level, with shortages on nearly everything. This is why the appearance and the growth of new businesses had an avalanche effect, while large companies also started devoting more attention to consumer goods production.

Hundreds of thousands of discharged servicemen received education and became qualified entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, lawyers, bankers – and their labor joined the general flow of the market growth. Money circulation accelerated, and the economy entered the period of high demand and active investments into all kinds of businesses. All this led to a world-scale social revolution – the formation of “Consumer Society” where the goods of life, previously available only to the upper class of aristocrats and bureaucrats, now became available to the majority of the population, much to the aristocrats’ dismay.

Consumer Society

In the beginning of the Perestroika in the USSR, the wave of “Glasnost” enabled the publication of many interesting documents. One of such documents was the letter to Stalin from the French communist leader Thorez and the leader of Italian communists Togliatti. These “patriots” suggested organizing mass provocation that should serve cause for the occupation of their countries by the Red Army and give them the coveted power[12]. But Stalin, frightened by the atomic bomb, tried to sober up his “useful idiots” by explaining them that, according to Soviet and many Western economists-Marxists, the post-war economic growth will certainly lead to the overproduction crisis, like in 1929, which will completely destroy capitalism. Of course, Marxists didn’t know and could not understand that the mentioned crisis was caused by the sabotage of the bureaucrats against the president, the market enthusiast Hoover, and not by the “immutable laws of Marxism.”

In reality, just the opposite happened. By the mid-50’s, in the U.S. and in the countries covered by the Marshall Plan, the basic human needs were satisfied at the lowest admissible level. All those who were willing to work could provide themselves with a worthy level of living. The majority of people were able to save some decent money, and the demand for various goods was growing like an avalanche.

As a result, a pretty usual economic situation of shortages and competition between consumers for the chance to receive certain goods or amenities under the unspoken slogan “The manufacturer owns the market” was replaced by a new and very unusual situation “The consumer owns the market” and “The consumer is always right!” The appearance of intense competition between manufacturers for the consumer led to the Great Marketing Revolution – the transition from manufacturer dictate to consumer dictate. Prices dropped dramatically, while the quality of products and services went up, and a great number of new products and services appeared...

This, along with the weakening of bureaucracy’s power thanks to Truman’s efforts, significantly lowered the possibility of overproduction crises. But the possibility still remained of local financial crises and smashups of individual companies due to errors in their management and the change in demand, but their negative impact on the people and the country fell dramatically. The formation of “consumer society,” where each one should do something useful for others and give something to society, was happening very fast. Some produce food, some build cars, some keep public order, write music, do boxing – and they get paid only if other people need it and are ready to “vote with the dollar.”

 

The consumer society is the society where each one serves others, directly or indirectly, and all serve one. Where each gets what others are ready to pay him voluntarily. Where the bureaucracy is paid according to the good it provides to people, has no chances of capturing power, and cannot go unpunished for robbing the society.

“Flight from downtowns” and the development of consumer society led to the situation where most Americans today live in small cities, in houses surrounded by nature and the environment native for humans – forests, meadows, bushes, trees, etc. We go out for a morning walk and count the animals we see on our way that aren’t even scared of us – squirrels, rabbits, deer, wild ducks and geese, occasionally cranes and turkeys...  But the return of humans to the natural environment is just the first step in the process of general improvement of living standards. With the development of market relations, other components of life quality kept improving as well – personal freedoms, including the suppression of racism and segregation, life satisfaction, aim for education, pride for the country and the way of living.

So why don’t the bureaucrats and their parties like this? Why is “consumerism” being cursed and damned by the communist ideologists, European social democrats, American Democrats, the world “green bureaucracy,” and the guardians of “global warming”?

For bureaucrats, both federal and local, the “consumer society” means loss of control over the people using bans, directions, and “pinching supply pipes.” Of course, they are very unhappy with this. They reacted to the growth of the market and people’s wealth by inventing all kinds of scares directed at the “consumer society.” The urge to scare with the coming resource deficit, squealing about nature destruction and the way of life, psychology, etc. Propaganda of ascetism, in one form or another, of contempt for the market and for normal life, accusation of “narrow-mindedness” and “suburbanity.”

The most vocal squealers about the harm of “consumerism” were Russian communists that were unable to provide even regular food, not to mention other demands of the people, so they declared the development of consumerism unworthy, asocial, and unnatural. They declared contempt for luxury and even simple comfort, calling for abstinence and ascetism in one form or another. However, the ascetism propaganda did not apply to the middle- and upper-layer bureaucracy that preferred to live in comfort, no worse than the “damn bourgeois.”

Harry Truman unexpectedly came to power in the “world of bureaucracy,” when it seemed that the market and normal capitalism would never reemerge. And in just 8 short years he was able to rearrange this world! He locked up the lawless aggressive Stalinism behind the “iron curtain” and freed millions of people in dozens of countries from the bureaucracy dictate, giving them the opportunity to freely build and improve their lives.

Shame on History!

Modern historians and politicians are very unfair to President Truman. Republicans don’t like to praise him because he was a Democrat. And Democrats don't even want to mention him because he destroyed their socialist utopia and the dreams about the power of the bureaucracy that raised them. Even today he still cannot be forgiven, almost 70 years after he left office and almost 50 years after he died.

We are certain that the Greatest President of the 20th century, or maybe simply the Greatest Politician of the World is by no means the socialist leader Roosevelt, but

Harry S. Truman

We suggest to complement the Mount Rushmore National Memorial with the sculptures of the presidents who rebuilt the greatness of America – Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and certainly Donald Trump.

 

Truman, the Man Who Saved the World from the Deadly Bureaucracy Pandemic - Part 1

[1] We will cover this in detail in a separate article titled “The Democratic Party of Racism.”

[2] In 2019, during the hearing by the House Judiciary Committee on Hate Crime, the brilliant black publicist Candace Owens called Ku-Klux-Klan a “democratic terrorist organization,” because Ku-Klux-Klan was created by the members of the Democratic Party.

[3] An amazing paradox – the “northerner” Roosevelt actively supported segregation, while the “southerner” Truman halted it...

[4] The sum of reparations by Germany, according to the Versailles treaty, was approximately 100 thousand tons of gold, which is one and a half kilograms (3 pounds) for each German citizen, including infants.

[5] This idea was used by the USSR that went on a rampage of extensive robbery of personal and industrial property in its zone of supervision in Germany. One of the authors grew up in the GULAG area and remembers pretty well the huge territories occupied by multiple freight vans filled with who knows what and by semi-destroyed barracks where and next to which thousands of various machines and spare parts were rusting. This junkyard was safeguarded by soldiers, but they could not prevent us, kids, from snooping around and unscrewing nuts, handles, and breaking the protective glasses of various gauges...

[6] By the way, the Marshall Plan was also proposed to the Soviet Union, but naturally declined by Stalin who least of all cared about the living conditions of his people and viewed the democratic institutions as a procreation of the imperialistic Satan.

[7] When we first came to the U.S., my old friend who lived here for 20 years instructed me, “Never live on allowance under any circumstances! This will not destroy you, but it will be very hard to scramble out.”

[8] Interesting situation. The protests against “the dominance of American militarism” that systematically broke out in Europe were mostly the squalling of European “bureaucracy dreamers” who were quite disturbed by this militarism. And they all calmed down at the drop of a hat when bureaucrats, such as Carter or Obama, came to power.

[9] NATO became the reincarnation of the Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria created in 1815 to maintain international order established after the Napoleon defeat. This Alliance that forbade any unlawful power changes and was damned by all leftist historians and politicians provided for Europe 40 years of existence without wars and became the catalyst for the development of the European market and the technological revolution.)

[10] Heal yourself, in Latin “Cura te ipsum,” which means the call for paying attention to oneself and one's own drawbacks.

[11] On March 1, 1843, François Guizot, the foreign minister of France, declared to his parliament, "Now, use these rights granted to you by the government: reinforce your institutions, get educated! Get rich! Improve the morale and the material conditions of our France...” Up to this day, this slogan is considered the motto of real market capitalism where the main principle is noninterference of the state in the economy.

[12] They did not understand that they would be the first whom Stalin would order to execute.