(Harry) Truman Committee -- A Refresher Course

By Sara

As we all lick chops and anticipate the sunrise of oversight hearings in January, we hear much talk about the old Truman Committee of World War II fame, and I thought I would seed our imaginations and anticipation with some historical spice.  The name of the Committee was "Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program" -- it was established (actually against the wishes of FDR) on April 15, 1940, and the initial appropriation for the effort was $15,000.  Yea, that's right, Fifteen Thousand Dollars.  At the time the National Defense was budgeted for 20 Billion minus the Lend Lease Program. 

Truman got the thing created by taking his old Dodge car and driving around (no official driver, he drove himself with just his wife Bess along for the ride), to visit bases under construction.  He started with Fort Leonard Wood in MO, but his Dodge eventually took him on a tour from Florida to Michigan, and on this tour he collected evidence that building bases was a sink hole of waste, fraud and abuse.  He found thousands of workers with no work to do, no materials for construction delivered, etc., and he found valuable materials rotting in the mud and snow with no effort to shelter them.  He established the reality of huge cost over-runs -- unaudited contracted costs of half a million costing 2.5 million, but paid because the contracts were cost-plus.  FDR was none too happy with Harry -- and when Harry linked up with Senator Cox of Georgia (Dem who hated FDR), the President was even more concerned.  But in April 1941 this was useful because Truman got his budget expanded to half a million, and he was cleared to investigate a broader scope of projects.  (Things like the Quartermaster Corps and the Army Corps of Engineers). 

Now the Truman Committee would have been unthinkable had it not been for the efforts of Gerald Nye (D-MO) earlier in the 1930's.  Nye was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but was given leadership of a special subcommittee on Munitions, that established how thoroughly the US Government, and the taxpayers, had been taken to the cleaners during World War One by Big Finance and Big Industry.  The upshot of Nye's work was the two neutrality acts passed in the 1930's, the strict neutrality act coming in 1935.  This required totally impartial neutrality with absolutely no discretion for the President among foreign warmakers wanting to purchase US Munitions or equiptment.  (Cash and Carry Only) It also banned foreign loans for such.  Nye fully understood that much of US Financial policy during the 1920's was about protecting repayment of foreign debt to US lenders for the costs of World War One, and he was out to prevent a repeat.  Nye and much of Congress -- and the American People -- viewed the financial policy of Harding/Coolidge/Hoover as tilted toward these interests, and a significant cause of the Great Depression.  It was against the well understood background of Nye's case that the Truman Commission was first established.  Roosevelt tried to block or weaken the Neutrality Act, but he totally failed.   This set the culture for what Truman was about -- even though Truman agreed with FDR's interests in supporting the British and confronting the Nazi regime.   Truman's concern was Finance and Profiteering -- not constricting the President's ability to do either foreign policy or build a US Military. 

Once the Army got used to the idea that Harry and Bess might show up in the old Dodge and take a good look at base construction, whether workers were really hard at work building something, and comparing what they saw to the actual contracts, Harry went on to bigger and better targets.  His next concern was "dollar a year" men.  These were captains of industry recruited to manage mobilization.  Truman was bothered that major industry was unwilling to give mobilization priority -- consumer production came first -- even though they were demanding the placement of their top management people in high war production positions.  Perhaps as important, the "Dollar a year" men seemed to spend an undue amount of time and effort trying to frustrate the labor movement -- essentially count labor out of any sort of say in how war production should be organized.  In fact Truman's first set of hearings pretty much established that if an industry was union organized prior to the war -- it stayed organized with wage controls.  If it was not organized, Labor still had rights to organize.  The War would not be used as an excuse to scuddle the CIO.   Dollar a year men were quickly weeded out. 

As folk talk about a "New Truman Committee" it is useful to dip back and remember just what kind of battles Truman actually fought with his committee.  Yes, it was against waste, fraud and abuse -- and that is how he got it organized, but it was also about preserving labor rights, and not allowing the war-songs to abdicate those rights hard won, and it was about preventing a corporate take over of the management of war production by Wall Street and its collaborators in the giant corporations.  For Truman, it was also about contracts for everything including the main street small business man, and the small scale production operations, and with the profits for these being proportional to those of large corporations. 

We can guess that in his own fashion FDR approved of what Truman was up to, though if you follow the public dialogue, that isn't clear.  The best representation of FDR in matters like this is probably the paper mache Sphinx you can view in the Hyde Park Museum -- the guy never really showed you his hand.  But I suggest FDR approved, because he short listed Truman for VP in 1944.   In fact it was Truman's only real claim to fame before April 12, 1945.  (The other person on the short list was William O. Douglass on the supreme court.) 

But what is important about the original Truman Committee is that it had a narrative that reached all the way back to World War One, and all the war profiteering done in the name of a war to end all wars, and then another decade defending a world economy that placed priority on the US recovering every cent of debt from both the victors and the defeated, as well as the destroyed but on neither side.  During the 1930's there was a consensus abroad in the US that was both pro-Labor and anti-Finance Capital.  Progressives really lack that asset of an underlying agreement today -- so I really question whether a new Truman Commission can shadow the old one.  Perhaps there will be a new version of it -- debatable, but we will see.   

 

Comments

[Ehci]

Oversight of Congress' Intelligence Committee is coming around as the CIA(analysts) move to DOD/DIA and the financing of CIA operations is being scrutinized. The idea here is that Congress is now moving to control more of DOD, using funding of CIA and other covert DOD/DIA operations. It's seen as Congress trying to move into DOD, through financing, and taking away the power to run DOD from the Presidency.

The new ethics committee is not billed as oversight of the Intelligence Committee, but ethics. It is made up of people from the Intelligence Committee and Appropriations, so they're really not addressing the issues of covert funding and actions where the Intelligence Committee may have made errors; it's 'gifts,' etc. It's self policing and not addressing the 'ethical' errors Congress in the Intelligence Committee may have made, but is seen as the answer in 'gifts' rather than real ethical errors that have been made. This is more evident in the CIA planning and financing of the Afghan war than it is in the use of the Intelligence Committee by CIA operations officers - to their own ends. Leaks and complaints about basic intelligence work members of the committee may have not understood and been taken advantage of by their histories and profesional affiliations. This may have occurred in operations and the financing of operations. The leaks that were later provided to the American people 'to decide' were actually old, basic intelligence work. Most operations officers and persons on the intelligence committee have participated and done this work. It was given to the public to 'vindicate' those, although it really was used as a tool to attack the administration, the US government, based on an incomplete understanding by the public of what basic intelligence actually is.

So, the funding of DOD is already being moved upon by Congress, as long as they have access to the funding, which is how they get and keep power over DOD and, for this time, covert DOD funding. New jobs were created at DOD for the new CIA analysts(Bush had the number of CIA employees doubled) and this can be seen as the second way Congress, dems, take care of federal employees. Go for the funding, go for the federal jobs, and take care of the federal employees. The move to DOD/DIA by CIA was planned after Congress tried to abolish CIA. Next, DOD funding.

Trueman? I keep on thinking of Patton. He was not good in politics or the press. He was, however, a hero to America. He died in a car accident as running for the White House was being thrown around. Maybe he really never got along with Winston Churchill knowing that America was drawn into the war after lend lease by 'shipping accidents.' He also may not have apporved of how Churchill got where he was, using 'life's little journey' to his advantage. Churchill really was a from of dem before they were and also, foreign. These two things would have upset Patton and make those his enemies. He was followed by other Generals and perhaps that's where we should wonder about Patton and his Americanism, death, and, depending on how life's journey is done; his legacy.

Refresher.

[JWC]

My husband is a volunteer over at the Truman Library.

Years ago they recorded "oral histories" from everyone who knew or worked with HArry. They have since then transcribed them and now they are putting everything on the internet. (My hubby is transferring the Word documents to HTML.)

Hubby didn't know much about Harry before, but has learned a lot in the last six years. Historians are still VERY active in studying the Truman years, and he was very much involved in the initial formation of Isreal.

Almost all of the histories are now available on the internet, with a good search function.

[Sporty]

Thanks for this excellent post! Why were the "dollar a year" men called that? Were they working on commission to break up labor movements?

[Sara]

They were called "dollar a year" men because that is what they were paid. They kept their positions in major private industry, which paid their salary, but they served on things such as the WPB -- War Production Board, which had the power to allowcate resources for War versus Consumer production. Thus a President or VP of General Motors might be spending a day a week in DC deciding with other Industry Chiefs, how much steel production should be reserved for war production and what percentage remain available for consumer products. It was a profound conflict of interest issue, and Truman's position was in opposition to turning this power over to the then captains of industry.

You have to contextualize this issue, as you must do with all history, but Truman initiated his interest in this matter during his campaign for re-election in the fall of 1940. FDR had gotten the draft past by a very narrow margin in the summer of 1940, and both Truman and FDR were on the ballot that fall. Popular opinion regarding US interests in what was then a European War was in favor of cash and carry sales to the British, increased since the fall of France in June of 1940 -- and reinforced by the "new thing" of listening to Edward R. Murrow present the Battle of Britain live on Radio at dinner time every night during the fall of 1940. For the first time since the late 20's unemployment was decidedly on a downward trend and in some industries, at full capacity. Remember we had made few if any investments in new plant and equiptment during the 1930's decade. Thus, much of the National Defense Budget was directed toward an increase in industrial capacity, but it was not yet on line.

Public Opinion toward supporting, or even participating in WWII shifted in major ways between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1941, but even by late 41 it was weak support. (Renewal of the draft passed by one vote in August, 1941 -- support for Lend Lease to the Soviets passed by a majority, but half the house failed to vote.) The last Gallup taken before Pearl Harbor (late October, 41) indicated that 66% believed the US would become involved in the war, but half of those opposed involvement.

The Truman Committee emerged in this context, and it seemed directed toward assuring that if the US did become involved, war would not be allowed to become an unregulated toy of the captains of industry. War industry including profits would be very heavily regulated, and very transparent. It supported FDR's direction by a kind of indirection -- it assumed the validity of much of Gerald Nye's investigative work regarding profiteering during WWI, and put forward the idea that heavy congressional oversight and regulation could avoid the run-away fraud of the earlier War Economy.

My own intent here is in response to the recent effort to characterize the new Congressional interest in oversight under the cloak of the now more popular name of Harry Truman as a kind of argument -- without journalists doing a mite of research to find out in some detail, what Truman actually did in the context of the early 1940's, and then later during the actual war years. It was sufficiently important and useful that it got him short-listed for VP in 1944 -- but what was it? (We should not be beguiled by brand names!).

[BirdGirl]

Sara,

You do good history! I salute you.

A grateful

BG

[Nell]

It was established (actually against the wishes of FDR) on April 15, 1940

I believe Sara meant 1941, yes? Chuck Schumer wrote about the Truman Committee this past winter and mentioned it being created in March 1941. I'm assuming the difference is authorization vs. appropriation.

Great post.