Reading the Truman Doctrine Address | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:03 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Bill of Rights Institute’s Primary Source Close Read where we are walking you through really important primary sources in US history. I’m Mary Patterson, I am the Senior Specialist of Content here at the Bill of Rights Institute. And today I am joined by my colleague and BRI’s senior fellow Tony Williams.

0:26 Hi Mary, how are you? I’m great Tony, how are you doing? Great. So today we are going to be taking you through Harry Truman’s Truman Doctrine address which he gave to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947. So if you checked out our close read

0:47 of Winston Churchill Sinews of peace address we are about a year forward in time and Harry Truman, President Truman was present as Winston Churchill gave that address where he talks about special relationship between United States and Great Britain and the British Empire and their pivotal role in setting up the free world after World War II.

1:12 And he talks about this Iron Curtain in the Soviet menace. And of course Truman varies in the audience as Churchill is giving that speech and then he’s addressing Congress now with this very famous address that comes to known as the Truman Doctrine. So Tony, is there anything else that we should know for context or background

1:32 before we dive into what Truman had to say? Yeah, I think there’s some important things to consider. Truman of course has been President for a few years now. He took over, he was Vice President under FDR and became President when FDR died in April of 1945,

1:54 right at the end of the war and then led America through the final defeat of Nazi Germany and then imperial Japan during the summer. And he took over a lot of the statesmanship from FDR and so went to Potsdam, one of the final wartime summits conferences, and

2:20 had to make a lot of decisions that shaped the post war world. And he was faced with an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. Right. So this Cold War develops and I think a few facts, particularly specifically for this are important.

2:44 The Soviet Union in American eyes and Truman’s eyes and several policymakers eyes, has become increasingly hostile, increasingly aggressive. A couple of examples. It’s taking a firm control over Eastern Europe as we explored in our Churchill conversation.

3:04 The Soviet Union also is looking towards the Middle East and the Mediterranean and has troops in northern Iran which refuses to evacuate because it wants to establish a presence in the Middle East military one. Eventually it does withdraw. Those after the Truman administration gets tough with the Soviet Union.

3:27 But they’re also demanding control over the Straits of the Dardanelles near Turkey, which are controlled by Turkey and they’re fostering the communist parties throughout Western Europe. There’s a great deal of devastation, as we mentioned in our Churchill

3:50 conversation, there’s physical devastation. The economies of Europe are shattered. There are millions of displaced persons throughout the continent there’s starvation and hunger. The people of Europe are really suffering at the end of World War II. And into that vacuum comes a pretty aggressive Communist.

4:14 Parties controlled by Moscow and Stalin forms the common form to direct those efforts and fund those efforts. And there’s a Greek war. There’s a civil war in Greece in which the Communists are fighting for control there.

4:35 So as Truman is looking at the world in 1940, 619, 47, he sees an increasingly hostile Soviet Union and one that has taken control over Eastern Europe or one that’s trying to spread its influence, whether ideologically through parties

4:55 throughout Western Europe, militarily, financially, ideologically, et cetera. So they are really trying to expand their influence, and Truman and other policymakers in the United States decide that they can’t allow that.

5:16 Okay. And I think we talked about this in our discussion of the sinews of peace address, but the destruction, like you just mentioned in Europe, I think, again, it’s difficult for now and certainly not for people living in the United States to understand that the World War One and World War II were fought in Europe and they’re just

5:39 devastated, just like people are starving because there’s no food. And it’s just again, we had no concept of that. So talk about desperation and needing some help, and who can you turn to? You have the Soviets coming in and then can we offer them some sort of alternative?

5:59 Right? And I think those are great points and really important to note just how exhausted Europe was. Right. And there was a real sense of disillusionment, and it’s very noted by a lot of teachers after World War I and the writers and all the disillusionment, but

6:23 civilization itself seems exhausted by the end of World War Two. I mean, they’ve had 20 to 30 years of just almost non stop war and ashes and totalitarianism. I think it’s a largely forgotten set of facts about that devastation that are really important not to forget.

6:48 And here in the text of what Truman is saying to this joint session of Congress is the gravity of this situation. So it’s a very serious time, and it’s not just foreign policy, but he says, it’s our own national security as well, which I think is interesting.

7:08 Right. We mentioned that the Greek civil war and also the Soviet threats against Turkey. It’s also really important to note that the British had appealed to the Americans and they said because they were the ones largely responsible for those area, with that line kind of spreading

7:31 throughout the British Empire over to India. And the British told the Americans, we cannot handle we don’t have the wherewithal anymore to handle the financial and military burden of this, and you have to take it over. Otherwise the situations will deteriorate and collapse, and the Soviet Union will

7:54 expand into those areas in a very significant and dangerous way. The question that Truman and his advisers had to face is will the United States take over those commitments? Will it sort of be the leader of the free world, if you will?

8:14 Did it have the wherewithal did it have the resources and did it have the historical mind to want to do that? Did this break with tradition? This is something we’ll talk about, I’m sure, throughout the speech, but these are really important considerations. What are the purposes of American foreign policy?

8:36 And is it to be the leader of the free world? Great. And I think, again, the British turning to the United States say we can’t do this anymore is because they’re so devastated by the war. They’re still on their wartime rations into the 50s. They just wrecked, really. And we spoke about this with Churchill Sinews of Peace.

8:59 Britain is sort of the junior partner and like the mantle or the torch is passing if the United States is willing to take it. And Truman answers that question at the bottom here. I don’t believe that the American people and the Congress wish to turn a deaf ear to the appeal of the great government. So I think the question is, is the United States ready for this shift in our role in the world?

9:22 And Truman seems to be saying, well, yeah, I think we are. I think the people are. And the people in their Congress, right? These are pretty new trends, right? For centuries, since the founding, the United States has largely taken

9:43 the view that they’re going to be a model of freedom for the world, but not physically spread that or spread it through arms and that they would have no sort of entangling alliances, as Jefferson and also Washington said.

10:03 And largely we follow them under a doctrine. So we defended our interest in the Western hemisphere and largely left Europe to govern their own affairs. This changes a bit during World War I, actually pretty dramatically, as Wilson argues, that we were fighting to, quote unquote, make the world safer democracy, right?

10:26 And so spreading our ideals through strategic means, through warfare. And FDR spoke in a lot of the same language that Truman is speaking in terms of the US. Commitment to the free world and having responsibilities to defend those principles against the forces

10:51 of totalitarianism, whatever form they might take. And so Truman is following in the strain of sort of 20th century foreign policy thought that says with the rise of American power comes these great responsibilities for leading the free world and that we would, as Kennedy would later say, bear that burden.

11:16 And he mentioned down here. So again he’s saying the British government just can’t handle this anymore. And there’s the United Nations now, which is formed after World War II to try to mitigate situations like this. But the United Nations can’t help either, according to Truman, it’s ours to do something if we are willing to do it.

11:37 It’s two years old. The UN is still figuring out its mission and how it’s going to accomplish that. And how do you get the forces to support their policies from various nations? The Soviet Union and their allies, either through force or not, they have a veto.

11:59 The Soviet Union have a veto in the Security Council also. The UN is struggling, I think, to define itself. And I think Truman understands that they’re just not in a position to resolve the crises around the world. And he believes the United States has to be the one to step in and do it because

12:21 the older powers of the world, such as Great Britain, they can’t do it either. It’s really going to be up to one of the two superpowers United States to face off against the other world superpower. So in this part of his speech, Truman, he’s directly talking about the objectives of the foreign policy.

12:44 So one of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. So, Tony, you mentioned before that foreign policy in United States changed. If you think about George Washington’s famous farewell Address,

13:04 which we also stepped you through in another primary source close read, it was just this idea of beware entangling alliances. That’s not what the United States is about. And here what Truman is proposing is a very different role for the United States and how we’ve really changed over time and what our responsibilities are.

13:27 Right? Yeah. It becomes a very sort of internationalist foreign policy and one that, again, now we’re creating the conditions in which other nations will be able to live free from coercion. And that may have been necessary, but during World War II, after World War II.

13:49 But it’s certainly a shift, right, that we’re not going to just promote world peace, we’re not going to be a city upon a hill, but we will actually help create the conditions for freedom to thrive. Very different and very expensive obligation.

14:17 Okay, I skipped over one. So again, the goal here is to, as you said, create these conditions where the will of the majority and free institutions, representative government, re elections, where these things can actually happen. And they’re not going to happen in a place where people are starving or there’s no roads.

14:38 There’s so much death and destruction and displacement that people are desperate and they’ll turn to what’s there. And if the Communists, the Red Army and Stalin’s minions are there and offering something or forcing something upon them, then this is the second way of life, as he’s describing here, then the United States should do something.

15:02 Right, and I think you see a real clear moral vision. In many ways, it’s even more starkly put than Churchill did in the Sinews of Peace speech. But he’s very clear. This is what the free world is based on majority rule, free institutions, representative government, free elections,

15:23 individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, freedom from oppression, again, however imperfectly applied. But the second way of life, the Communist way or other totalitarian systems, the will of a minority imposed upon the majority, right? Certainly the Eastern Europeans would understand that it relies upon terror,

15:46 an oppression, a police state, the KGB, a controlled press radio. There’s no freedom of the press. There is no free speech. There’s no elections. When they’re held, they’re fixed. And the suppression personal freedoms and a liberal system. And so

16:07 he’s painting a picture for Congress because he’s delivering a speech there. And for the American people broadly, these are the options, right? The free world versus the communist world. And obviously he’s saying we have responsibility to the free world and really we want to promote those ideals in the first way of life around the world.

16:30 It’s all people. In fact, Truman would have said he hoped that the Soviet people could enjoy those things as well. Those are good and fundamental truths for human nature and better suited to them than the second half.

16:52 I think in this last piece here, he’s basically saying he outright said that. He’s very clear, as you said, option one. The American way of doing things, however imperfectly applied. Of course, the United States has a lot of problems, too, in 1947. But when you contrast it with the other option, it’s like a no brainer.

17:13 It’s no contest. So it’s the policy of the United States to support three peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities and by outside pressures. And we should do this through economic and financial aid because if people again, the desperation, the wreckage of Europe after World War Two has to be addressed.

17:35 So like your hierarchy of needs so you can have this orderly political process that he’s describing here. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. He’s appealing here for economic for financial aid. I think it’s crude of him, while economic and financial aid could

17:58 solve those problems, that Americans don’t want another war. Right. So Truman is very careful not to couch this in military terms. We’ve demobilized from World War II. People are not eager to fight another major war. And so he’s telling Congress, telling the American people that economic, financial aid will suffice for this point.

18:25 And I think that’s a smart appeal on his part. So does this policy passes with bipartisan support? Yeah, it really does. There is a really important Republican senator named Arthur Vandenberg who works with Truman on a lot of these policies.

18:48 Actually, they’re the main architects of the Truman Doctrine in many ways. Also, eventually they worked together on the Marshall Plan. And Vandenberg is helping Truman get a lot of his Cold War policies through Congress, specifically through the Senate,

19:10 because there is a pretty good amount of Republican opposition to it. Led by Senator Robert Taft from Ohio. He helps lead sort of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. And they’re very wary about the military spending and the worldwide obligations.

19:32 They want to return to an isolationist kind of foreign policy. And Truman and Vandenberg as well as many others, but Truman relies on him in Congress to help get these policies passed. So it’s a great in many ways, bipartisan,

19:53 cooperative venture from people in different parties, something you don’t normally see too much today. And maybe that’s a good story there and a good lesson for us to reach out to the other side a little more often. But I do think it’s interesting that it’s worth pointing out that there was opposition to this.

20:15 And I think that’s part of the American way too, that it’s a discussion in a conversation and it’s not one way or the highway. And that also makes we talked about continuity and changes in American foreign policy with this speech, but also it makes me think of after World War II and trying to ratify the

20:38 Versailles Treaty and how the opposition there, and very partisan, but just this idea of what is the role of the United States? I think that’s a timeless question. That’s a question that people still have differing viewpoints on even in 2020. History doesn’t repeat itself. As I said, I’m repeating myself from our last video.

21:01 But it’s interesting to look at these past examples and see how they played out and remember that not everyone was on board with it and that there was discussion around it and debate. And I think that’s important to be aware of as well, even if this is an example where there was bipartisanship collaboration. I think you’re right

21:23 if you look at our entire Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness book you’ll see that we do address these sort of timeless questions throughout history, these perennial questions, and the purposes of American foreign policy and what our role is in the world that has been there from the beginning.

21:44 It’s not a question that’s going to go away. And as you say, there’s been disagreement, but it’s been a deliberative process, right? And sometimes we have not agreed and have killed policies like the Versailles Treaty. I know the times they work towards supporting a more expansive role in the world. And so, yeah, that deliberative process,

22:06 those checks and balances on the presidency and with the Senate, those are all really extremely important and representative of the American system. For this particular document. It’s really a big change in what foreign policy is going

22:30 to be, but it’s not the end of the story, as you said. And you referenced Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, so we hope that you will check that out. That’s the Bill of Rights Institute’s free online US history textbook, and it’s aligned to the AP US. History standards in this particular source. You can find there with annotations and questions and vocabulary.

22:51 If you’re interested in checking that out, you should look at mybri.org, click on Educate or you can look at the link down in the show notes below. Tony, did you have any other concluding thoughts on Harry Truman or just going to stop here? Well played, Mary. Well played.

23:11 Thank you. Such an important speech. I really hope students and teachers read this document together and compare it to the farewell Address compared to the Monroe Doctrine. Look at Woodrow Wilson’s war message, look at the debate over

23:32 the Versailles Treaty, and then even later on, Johnson’s speech is about Vietnam and Kennedy’s inaugural speech. All of that is in Life, Liberty, in the Pursuit of happiness. And so some really great resources to really chew on this idea throughout your study of American history.

23:52 So we hope you learned something and we hope that you will come back and see us again. For another Primary Source Close Read again, you can check out Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Click on the link in our notes below it’s. And thank you so much for joining us today.