Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks (review)

Abstract

According to Michael Gardner, Harry S. Truman's civil rights initiatives were acts of "moral courage and political recklessness" (3). Gardner finds in Truman an [End Page 592] unlikely candidate for civil rights advocacy. The bias of family background and his hailing from a border state meant that "Harry Truman was conditioned to be a racist" (4). Gardner's book offers a credible, often enlightening account of race relations in the United States in the post-World War II, pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. Even the nation's capital's racist practices and segregated policies were the thorny and recalcitrant norm. It was in the context of this apartheid society, Gardner argues, that Truman, under no immediate pressure or crisis, unlike Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, undertook a campaign "to do what he felt was morally right"—to place the federal government at the forefront of the attack on segregation and discrimination in the United States. An insistence on equality of opportunity and justice for all Americans was a primary motivation in the president's stance. Gardner argues that politics was a secondary concern.