Anniversary nears of Truman's landmark military desegregation order

Perhaps forgotten in the annals of history is a bold move Missouri’s only Oval Office occupant made 72 years ago this Sunday to improve race relations.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. military.

“(The order) was a hallmark of using executive power to enhance civil rights,” said Steve Hoffman, a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University.

Hoffman, coordinator of Southeast’s historical preservation program, teaches four courses in African American history at the school.

Truman’s executive order bypassed Congress and came roughly three months before the 1948 election, which Truman was widely expected to lose.

“The order helps him with African American voters, no doubt,” Hoffman said. “But (Truman) loses the white South who had assumed the president was one of them.”

Less than 10 days before Truman’s order, then-Democratic Gov. Strom Thurmond formed the so-called “Dixiecrat” party to oppose the 33rd president’s election.

The Dixiecrats, Hoffman said, were enraged by Truman’s championing of a civil rights bill.

“The ’48 bill (eventually) got watered down,” said Hoffman, who said the legislation nonetheless laid the groundwork for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ordered school integration and made employment discrimination illegal.

A recent Truman biographer, A.J. Baime, said Truman was ahead of his time.

In his book, “Dewey Defeats Truman: the 1948 Election,” Baime suggested Truman took decisive action after becoming aware of the shooting and lynchings of black Americans.

“Long before most other whites,” wrote Baime, “Truman could see that the nation was at a crossroads with respect to its racial identity.”

What made Truman’s order more remarkable, Baime said, is that in his home state of Missouri, segregation was the norm.

“Some of his (Truman’s) closest friends and political allies ... were highly entrenched in southern traditions of white supremacy,” Baime wrote.

“(Truman) was not overly calculating when it came to politics,” Hoffman observed.

“Truman called it like he saw it,” he added, “and if it was the right thing to do, Truman wanted to see it done.”

In what is perhaps a cautionary tale for those looking toward the 2020 election, Truman — who rose to the presidency upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 — was given very little chance by pollsters of being elected in his own right in 1948.

On Election Day, Truman defeated favored Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey by 2.1 million votes and received 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party picked up just 39 votes in the Electoral College.

The Missourian carried 28 states, including his own, and won the electoral vote in six states that had been part of the Confederacy: North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

The Chicago Daily Tribune was so confident Dewey would win, the newspaper printed an early edition emblazoned with the headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Two days after the election, in one of the most iconic political photographs of the 20th century, a grinning Truman held up the newspaper before disembarking from a train Nov. 4, 1948, in St. Louis.