Harrying Truman

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Like the Republicans this week, the 80th entered barking furiously: a conference of leaders promised to slash $10 billion from the budget, lower taxes and repeal all social and welfare legislation passed since 1932. The freshmen that year included a crowd of eager red baiters, including Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. But the 80th's bite was surprisingly mild. The aid of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican, assured passage of Truman foreign policy initiatives from the Marshall Plan to containment of the Soviets to the recognition of Israel. Domestically, Truman suffered some stinging rebukes, most famously the override of his veto of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. Yet the 80th passed his consolidation of the military services and some other major bills, and the threatened welfare "repeal" never materialized. The 80th was contentious but not remarkable.

It took Truman to immortalize it with his "give 'em hell" strategy. William Manchester, in his book The Glory and the Dream, records that "the first tactic was to hit the Hill every Monday with a popular proposal ((the Republicans)) were sure to table." Armed with that record, the no longer amiable Truman initiated the famous railroad tour that was named when Senator Robert Taft complained that the President was "blackguarding Congress at whistle-stops all over the country." The master stroke followed: when the Republicans put out an ambitious party platform in June, Truman immediately convened a special session of Congress and challenged them to pass their own plan. They refused; and he "do-nothinged" them all the way to his famous photograph, holding up the Chicago Daily Tribune's incorrect front page.

If you're a Clintonite, the parallels are tempting. For red baiters, read religious right. For the Republicans' ill-fated platform, read Newt Gingrich's brash "Contract with America." For the amiable, unrespected Missourian, read an affable Arkansan. But scholars counsel caution. The economy had ironed itself out by '48, notes Columbia's Brinkley, whereas today the public is experiencing "the kind of frustrations that are not likely to be alleviated very easily."

More important, says historian Michael Beschloss, "in 1946 the majority of Americans were Democrats. There was mass national support for the New Deal program. So the election of '46 turned out to be more of a deviating election." Bu he continues, "We are in a very conservative period now. If the Republicans pass their program and their program works, it could confirm them as the definite majority party in this country for the next generation." That would leave Clinton's 1992 election as the deviation -- and history refusing to repeat itself.