[lbo-talk] letter to editor

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 26 11:16:36 PDT 2010


On 8/26/2010 12:51 PM, shrill.polemic wrote:


> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Carrol Cox<cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>> The head of the Pullman Porters union (I forget both his name and the
>> name of the union) threatened a mass strike if Truman did not
>> desegregate the military. Truman said, "I wish you hadn't said that." He
>> replied, "Mr President, I wish I hadn't had to say that." So while it is
>> certainly important to allow for Cold War pressures, as far as I know
>> that pressure never brought about a single change that wasn't the
>> immediate result of considerable internal pressure

Are you sure you're not talking about the confrontation with FDR in 1941 over employment discrimination and the FEPC?

I'd be interested in hearing an explanation of how the Cold War influenced Truman's decision on desegregating the armed forces. I've never heard this theory before. The policy was one of the recommendations of a liberal civil rights commission Truman appointed in December 1946 - before there was a "Cold War" in any sense that could create that kind of pressure. (In fact, before the term Cold War was popularized.) It was one of the few recommendations that could be passed through executive order, thus bypassing a filibuster.

Is this an actual hypothesis or just a casual assumption?

SA



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