"Did Truman simply want the black vote?"

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20/10/2003                                            HISTORY                                        By Rasmali

President Truman

“Did Truman simply want the black vote?”

When Harry Truman came to power in 1945 his policies were very much associated with black civil rights, in this assignment we must establish whether he simply just wanted the black vote or whether there were underlying reasons for his association and his appealing to the black voters.

Truman was born and raised in the state of Missouri which had a large white population and a small black population, it would have been unusual for Harry Truman not to be a racist. The environment he grew up in was very racist and his own ancestors had owned slaves, many of the blacks in the state of Missouri were also previously slaves. Previous to 1944 Truman did not need the black vote to win, no need to ‘court’ the black vote. Roosevelt in 1944 was looking for a vice president, Truman got the position and for the first time had to appeal to the whole of the USA, therefore he had to ‘court’ the black vote. It was possibly the first time that the black vote actually accounted for something (‘franchisement’- the right to vote). Then in 1945 when President Roosevelt died, Truman became president, at first he was not helpful to blacks.

In 1948 the presidential election was held and it was then that Truman really pushed his civil rights policies, possibly to win the black vote. To win the election he needed to secure at least 270 votes. There are 538 votes in the Electoral College and the candidate who wins the vote in each state receives all of the electoral votes assigned to that state. Each state has a number of Electoral College votes equal to the number of senators it has plus the number of members of the House of Representatives it has (which is dependant upon the population of the state). New York, Illinois and Michigan were the three most important (northern) states in the election process because they had a large black population. It was these three black communities which Truman needed to convince to vote for him, in order for him to become president, they were the deciding states as it were. His rival was Strom Thurmond a republican, who was an overt racist whereas Truman was a democrat. His plan was flaw proof, by offering civil rights to the blacks in the Dixie-southern states and those in the two most important northern states would win him the presidency. This action shows the great influence that Truman’s policies had on the black voters. It cannot be argued that in no means can it possibly be due to his need for the black vote, the fact is ‘it was to do with votes’. In the election Truman carried an unprecedented two-thirds of the black vote. He did however lose the ‘Dixiecrat vote’, which was probably significantly as large as the black vote. However this does not entirely explain his support for civil rights, there were a number of other factors which played a part in his support.

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In 1945 the cold war took place, an ideological conflict between the USA and the USSR followed. Both super powers were involved in a global power struggle and both had the potential to control the entire world. The USA believed the whole world should adopt their capitalist system and at the same time the USSR believed the world should adopt their communist system. In 1945 the USSR and Mongolia were both communist run countries but between 1945 and 1948 Poland, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia and China were a new list of countries that Russia had ...

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