Peacetime Foreign Policy
Truman's presidency was marked throughout by important foreign policy initiatives. Central to almost everything Truman undertook in his foreign policy was the desire to prevent the expansion of the influence of the Soviet Union. As a Wilsonian internationalist, Truman strongly supported the creation of the United Nations, and included Eleanor Roosevelt on the delegation to the UN's first General Assembly. With the Soviet Union expanding its sphere of influence through Eastern Europe, Truman and his foreign policy advisors took a hard line against the USSR. In this, he matched American public opinion, which quickly came to view the Soviets as intent upon world domination.
Although he claimed no personal expertise on foreign matters, Truman won bipartisan support for both the Truman Doctrine, which formalized a policy of Soviet containment, and the Marshall Plan, which aimed to help rebuild postwar Europe. Truman oversaw the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and the creation of North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) in 1949. To get Congress to spend the vast sums necessary to restart the moribund European economy, Truman used an ideological argument, arguing that Communism flourishes in economically deprived areas. As part of the U.S. Cold War strategy, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and reorganized military forces by merging the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the National Military Establishment (later the Department of Defense) and creating the U.S. Air Force. The act also created the CIA and the National Security Council. In 1952, Truman secretly consolidated and empowered the cryptologic elements of the United States by creating the National Security Agency (NSA).
The one time during his presidency when a communist nation invaded a non-communist one—when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950—Truman responded by waging undeclared war.
Truman signing the North Atlantic Treaty
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization built a military barrier confronting the Soviet-dominated part of Europe.
Transitioning the Economy
The end of World War II was followed by an uneasy transition from war to a peacetime economy. Little planning had taken place, with officials assuming that it would take a year to beat Japan once war in Europe ceased, giving them time to create proposals. With the war's sudden end and an immediate clamor for demobilization, little work had been done to plan how best to transition to peacetime production of goods while avoiding mass unemployment for returning veterans. There was no consensus among government officials as to what economic course the postwar U.S. should steer.
he president was faced with the reawakening of labor-management conflicts that had lain dormant during the war years, severe shortages in housing and consumer products, and widespread dissatisfaction with inflation, which at one point hit 6% in a single month. Added to this polarized environment was a wave of destabilizing strikes in major industries. Truman's response to them was generally seen as ineffective. A rapid increase in costs was fueled by the release of price controls on most items, and labor sought wage increases. A serious steel strike in January 1946 involving 800,000 workers—the largest in the nation's history—was followed by a coal strike in April and a rail strike in May. The public was angry, with a majority in polls favoring a ban on strikes by public service workers and a year's moratorium on labor actions. Truman proposed legislation to draft striking workers into the Armed Forces, and in a dramatic personal appearance before Congress, was able to announce settlement of the rail strike. His proposal passed the House of Representatives, but failed in the Senate.
Opposition from Republican Congress
In addition to economic woes, because Roosevelt had not paid attention to Congress in his final years, Truman faced a body where Republicans and conservative southern Democrats formed a powerful voting bloc. This dissatisfaction with the Truman administration's policies led to large Democratic losses in the 1946 midterm elections, when Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since 1930.
Truman hoped to extend New Deal social programs to include more government protection and services and to reach more people. He was eventually successful in achieving a healthy peacetime economy, but only a few of his social program proposals became law. The Congress, which was much more Republican in its membership during his presidency than it had been during Franklin Roosevelt's, did not usually share Truman's desire to build on the legacy of the New Deal.
The Truman administration did go considerably beyond the New Deal in the area of civil rights. Although the conservative Congress thwarted Truman's desire to achieve significant civil rights legislation, he was able to use his powers as President to achieve some important changes. He desegregated the armed forces and forbade racial discrimination in Federal employment. He also established a Committee on Civil Rights.
The Republican Congress significantly curtailed the power of labor unions by the Taft–Hartley Act, which was enacted over Truman's veto. The parties did cooperate on some issues; Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, making the Speaker of the House rather than the Secretary of State next in line to the presidency after the vice president.
Fair Deal
As he readied for the 1948 election, Truman made clear his identity as a Democrat in the New Deal tradition, advocating national health insurance, the repeal of the Taft–Hartley Act, and an aggressive civil rights program. Taken together, it all constituted a broad legislative agenda that came to be called the "Fair Deal." Truman's proposals were not well received by Congress, even with renewed Democratic majorities in Congress after 1948.
Although Truman was unable to implement his Fair Deal program in its entirety, a great deal of social and economic progress took place in the late Forties and early Fifties. A Census report confirmed that gains in housing, education, living standards, and income under the Truman administration were unparalleled in American history. By 1953, 62 million Americans had jobs, a gain of 11 million in seven years, while unemployment had all but vanished. Farm income, dividends, and corporate income were at all-time highs, and there had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. The minimum wage had also been increased while Social Security benefits had been doubled, and 8 million veterans had attended college by the end of the Truman administration as a result of the G.I. Bill, which subsidized the businesses, training, education, and housing of millions of returning veterans.