On 8/26/2010 2:45 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> I'd be interested in hearing an explanation of how the Cold War influenced Truman's decision on desegregating the armed forces.
> If I'm remembering right, I read it in a book by the late economist Lynn Turgeon. It must have been State and Discrimination: The Other Side of the Cold War (Sharpe, 1989).
>
Both of the major works on civil rights and the Cold War - Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights and Thomas Borstelmann's Cold War and the Color Line - attribute the decision to domestic politics primarily. Borstelmann (the only one I have handy) says "African American votes were clearly more immediately important to Truman than the friendship of impoverished nations" (59) and "Truman's primary foreign policy advisers all stood to his right on racial issues. There was no equivalent on the international side of the administration to political aide Clark Clifford's encouragement to promote civil rights more forcefully" (49). 1948 was not 1963.
So Clark Clifford has now come up in two recent threads, and that reminds me that when I was going through his papers at the Library of Congress I found a 1983 letter from William Fulbright raising the question of whether the Soviets' KAL 007 shootdown was some sort of American put-up job. I still have the letter in PDF if anyone's interested. I vaguely recall that there were conspiracy theories floated in the left press at the time.
SA