American Expectations<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harry Truman was known as the \u201cSenator from Pendergast.\u201d Tom Pendergast was the leader of the Democratic political machine of Kansas City. He controlled the patronage \u2013 the political jobs \u2013 for Western Missouri. One of the politicians that Pendergast sponsored was Harry Truman, elected Judge (commissioner) of Jackson County. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the Great Depression, Truman moved from Judge to Missouri\u2019s Director for the Federal Reemployment Program, a patronage job from the Roosevelt Administration. Truman wanted to move onto Washington, DC, but he wasn’t Pendergast\u2019s first choice for the US Senate in 1934 (actually he was the fifth.) Pendergast eventually changed his mind, and Truman was able to win the Democratic nomination and the election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truman did solid work in the Senate, leading a sub-committee investigation of price gouging and abuses in military appropriations in the months before World War II. As a middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-country Democrat, he was the perfect \u201cmiddle\u201d choice in 1944 when the Party decided to drop the more liberal Henry Wallace as Roosevelt\u2019s Vice President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There weren\u2019t many expectations for Truman as Vice President. He was politically the right man; but Roosevelt did little to bring him into the critical decisions of 1945: the end of World War II, the development of the United Nations, the atomic bomb. Truman managed to get in some trouble with the press, allowing Lauren Bacall to pose on the piano while he played in the Press Club, and attending the now disgraced (tax evasion) Pendergast\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then Franklin Roosevelt died.\u00a0\u00a0Truman rushed to the White House, asking Eleanor Roosevelt if there was anything he could do.\u00a0The First Lady responded, \u201cis there anything we can do for you, for you are the one in trouble now<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Truman told the press later the next day:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an American traditional belief that the \u201cman\u201d will rise to the Presidency, regardless of his background or previous service.\u00a0\u00a0Harry Truman has always been the greatest example of that story; the machine politician who through political happenstance fell into the Presidency at one of the United State\u2019s, and the world\u2019s, most critical times.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was Truman who decided to use the atomic bomb, develop the Marshall Plan and NATO, and encourage the United Nations. It was also Truman who faced the economic impacts of the post-war America, as the wage and price controls of the Great Depression and war economy were released. Prices went up, workers demanded higher wages, and the Democratic President found himself in direct conflict with the railroad unions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it was Truman who got the last laugh ay all of the polls that predicted he would lose to Republican Tom Dewey of New York in 1948.\u00a0\u00a0The famous picture of a smiling Truman holding up the\u00a0Chicago Tribune\u00a0<\/em>with the headline \u201cDewey Defeats Truman\u201d opened his second term as President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Truman or not, he was a President who steered America through the beginning of the Cold War. And while he left the Eisenhower Administration with the twin concerns of Korea and McCarthyism, he is generally acknowledged as a man who \u201crose above himself\u201d in his Presidential service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other American Presidents have risen to the office as well. George W. Bush gained stature during 9-11, and a corporate lawyer and one term Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, became arguably our greatest President during the Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, with the Trump Administration, we now know that it\u2019s not \u201cmagic.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Not everyone who enters the Oval Office emerges in greatness, and not every elected President gains the \u201cgravitas\u201d of the Presidency.\u00a0\u00a0Certainly Donald Trump is the exception to prove that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now there are even greater concerns that Donald Trump, the candidate who pointedly refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election in advance, might not accept defeat in 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another American tradition is recognition of the will of the voters. It started in one of the roughest elections in American history, where the governing party was faced with a diametrically opposed political force. It was an election where the press attacked both sides, even accusing one candidate of having an affair with an under aged \u201cemployee.\u201d It was the election of 1800, and Federalist John Adams did everything he could to hang onto the Presidency against Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On inauguration day, Adams packed up and left the White House early. He didn\u2019t stay to participate in Jefferson\u2019s swearing in ceremony. Adam\u2019s wasn\u2019t a \u201cgood sport\u201d about it, but he did acknowledge Jefferson\u2019s victory, establishing the tradition of peaceful transition of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Should the election of 2020 turn the Trump\u2019s out, we can only hope he will do the same. Will the President who created the phrase \u201cfake news\u201d cry foul against an election that went against him? We know that was his intent if he had lost in 2016, now with the trappings of Presidential power, it is an open question what Trump will do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The power of the Presidency only resides in his authority to direct the government. Regardless of who Trump appoints, we know that those leaders have sworn an oath:<\/p>\n\n\n\n