Encouraging distinctions and the misnamed ‘good ole days’
Among other topics, I like to read history, especially American history, and one of the dominant lessons this has taught me is how misguided we often are in our remembrance of the past, even those who have lived it.
I encounter this misapprehension often and personally when people suggest that newspapers today are more error prone and less objective than in the past, when even cursory analysis suggests quite the opposite is true. The same can surely be said for politics as well. Those who believe political leaders of today are more corrupt, duplicitous, conniving or partisan than leaders of the past will find ample evidence to the contrary in even briefh eviews of the political lives of everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond.
Both of these observations are appearing to me with striking clarity as I read a 2017 biography of Harry Truman by A.J. Baime, “The Accidental President / Harry S. Truman And The Four Months That Changed The World.” While the influence — or lack of it — of the press does not play a central role in Baime’s description of Truman’s rise from obscurity to the most powerful position in the nation, the story repeats a frequent theme regarding the efforts of the press to influence political outcomes involving Truman — mostly opposing him — and especially demonstrates how frequently wrong news agencies were in predicting the outcomes of Truman’s political races, all the way from his first election as a county judge to his selection as Roosevelt’s vice president and, of course, to the famous “Dewey defeats Truman” headline mistakenly describing the result of the 1948 presidential election.
Such reflections, I think, deserve serious attention in our own time. Americans face momentous crises and frightening possibilities in this political year, to be sure. But we are seriously wrong if we think we are the first to encounter such situations or that previous generations handled them more deftly and honorably than ours.
It’s worth noting, for example, that Truman owed his early political victories and his first win for the U.S. Senate to the backing of a Michael Madigan-like figure whose machine politics in Missouri were rife with claims of corruption and voter fraud and who would eventually go to prison for a tax fraud conviction. It seems also relevant to our own times to consider that Truman, who became one of the most popular presidents of the 20th century, was plucked from political near anonymity to become the running mate of an incumbent whose precarious health was all but an open secret.
Can one really imagine an American press today that would suppress with virtual unanimity information about the president’s health? Are we really so misinformed that we believe backroom deals and efforts to use the courts, the rich, disinformation or outright lies are functions of our own time alone?
Our contemporary assessments of the similarities between what exists now in society and what existed in the past does not excuse misbehaviors, of course. In fact, to my mind, they only emphasize why it’s so important for us to understand two points: One, that we don’t need to entirely blow up our system to improve it; and two, that we must constantly keep trying to improve it.
I’m less than halfway through Baime’s account of the Truman story, but a section describing the candidate’s campaign philosophy in his 1940 bid to defend his Senate seat against an overwhelming opponent sticks with me as particularly relevant to us in 2024. In the midst of nasty political circumstances all too familiar today, Truman insisted his supporters “not engage in personalities,” stick to his positive record rather than the negatives of his opponent, recognize “the press is a function of our free institutions ... (and) under no circumstances attack them” and demonstrate the positive goals of the party.
That kind of thinking does stand in sharp contrast to our prejudices about politics today, but it also emphasizes the distinction Truman was trying to establish against the politics of his own time. He would go on to win that campaign, against devastating odds and all the political wisdom of the era. It is appealing to me to think that a similar approach could prove successful now. But perhaps what encourages me most is a realization that we have had to make such distinctions often in the past.
As much as we like to disparage our own time and politics, isn’t it at least a little comforting to see that our circumstances are not so different from those of our forefathers? And that through faith in our system and our institutions and sincere and constant efforts to improve, we have managed to keep moving forward?
It is to me.
@jslusher@dailyherald.com