Roy Vu

HIST 6393- Empire, War and Revolution

April 5, 2000

Prof. Buzzanco

A Review of Frank Kofsky’s Harry S. Truman and the War Scare

Using tactics of fear to whip up support and define an enemy to accomplish political or economic gains remains unsurprising in history. However, the focus of how scare tactics dominate an entire culture by changing its own social perceptions and the power between elitist groups that form coalitions become much more interesting and appalling. Whether we study the scare tactics to persuade collaboration from its own people, in cases like the Nazi Party in the 1930s Germany, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or on a more personal level, Vietnamese American community leaders and its staunch anticommunism during the 1980s, we remain frighteningly awe of how powerless we can be to swim against the political tides generated by fear.

Frank Kofsky demonstrates this state of powerlessness as he argues that Harry Truman and his administration formed a strong coalition (albeit some differences) between the aircraft industry and the Air Force branch of the military to deceive the U.S. public by creating an environment of fear. In other words, with the aircraft industry suffering tremendously after World War II and with fear of a post-war depression, Truman began to look for an external threat that would give just cause for a military rearmament in peacetime. He successfully manages to perceive the Soviet Union as a security threat to the U.S. despite acknowledgement by American military leaders that the Soviets were neither threatening to take over Western Europe nor providing military and political support to communist forces in Greece and China.

Kofsky begins with the struggles in the post-war economy in the aircraft industries. With the decline of military spending on aircrafts after the war, large firms, such as, Boeing, Douglass, Lockheed, and Glenn L. Martin searched for ways to maintain its growth and profit rates of World War II. With no need for the U.S. air forces to purchase the same amount of aircrafts at times of peace, airline industries began to switch from catering to the military to the consumer market, create new, lighter airplanes for private use, and diversify their capitalist ventures on non-aviation fields, such as, electric razors and dish washers (23). Needless to say, all of these attempts failed to cash in and the aircraft firms were on the edge of bankruptcy from, owing an exorbitant amount of money from banks like Chase National Bank. The decline in the airline industry also affected the steel, rubber, and oil industries as well. Desperate, aircraft business leaders pleaded with Truman to find ways in gaining support from Congress and the public for an increase in military budget and the increased production of more technologically-advanced aircrafts for the U.S. Air Force. To get a clear picture of the decline in sales by leading aircraft industries before Truman’s intervention in 1948, Kofsky includes a report from W. H. Mautz.

Sales declined to about $1.6 billion [from a peak of $8 billion in 1944]; net worth decreased from $700 million at the end of 1945 to $600 million at the end of 1947; working capital dropped from $623 million to $451 million, with inventories representing 88 per cent of working capital.

The industry suffered a $178 million operating loss during the years [1946 and 1947]... Ten of the major companies operated at a loss including the six larger airframe companies. (194).

However, all of this changed as Kofsky asserts the reversal of fortune for the aircraft industry ten months later after Truman’s triumphant war scare in 1948.

At the end of 1948, the aircraft industry was in its best financial condition since the end of the war. Sales of the sixteen major airframe manufacturers reached a postwar high in 1948 of $1,188 million compared with $856 million in 1947 and $730 million in 1946. Only three manufacturers...lost money during 1948, while eleven of the sixteen manufacturers operated at a loss during 1947. (194)

Thus, Kofsky concludes that “an increase in sale during 1948 of fifty percent over the 1946-1947 average, the aircraft industry could thank Harry Truman and the war hysteria that he and his administration set loose” (194). The next few chapters of his book focuses on the tactics used by Truman to change the perception of Congress and the public create a scare that World War III against the Soviet Union could happen at any moment, and with the Truman Doctrine, the American public fearfully accepted the need for a massive military build up for an imminent war.

Despite military and civilian reports that the Soviets were too weaken by the losses in World War II to launch an invasion in Europe, Truman manages to wage a successful campaign to make a threatening enemy out of the Soviet Union. Kofsky cites examples of Truman’s public cry of Soviet aggression: the taking of power by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in February 1848, and Soviet pressures on Finland to conclude a treaty of mutual non-aggression. Kofsky also mentions the telegram that General Lucius D. Clay dispatched from Berlin to Washington on March 5, 1948. Although this telegram was withheld from the public, Clay’s message of “a subtle change in Soviet attitude” and a “feeling of a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations” cloaked the Truman administration with a sense of sudden duplicity on the Soviet’s part (Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare, 104). Kofsky admits the diplomatic blunder by Soviet leaders on the U.S.-Berlin Airlift in 1948 that further provided Truman with political ammunition in his war scare tactics. However, he points out that Stalin was in a desperate situation to maintain diplomatic ties with the U.S. and after fruitless attempts to establish an agreement on Germany, he had to take action on Berlin. Kofsky also states the overthrow of democratically elected officials in Eastern European countries and their replacements with communist officials under Stalin, further enhances Truman’s position in 1948. However, Kofsky reasons out Stalin’s actions came after the multiple failed attempts to get an U.S. diplomatic response on the issue of Eastern Europe. Kofsky acknowledges that Stalin allowed democratic elections throughout Eastern Europe between 1945-48.

Kofsky argues that the Soviet Union still weakened from the war, neither planned a worldwide communist revolution nor an invasion of Western Europe. He points out that Stalin actually condemns the communist movements in Greece, Turkey and China for their use of military actions rather than through diplomacy to gain political power. Furthermore, Kofsky explains that the Soviet Union neither provided military or economic aid, nor political recognition for these communist movements.

Perhaps more significantly, Kofsky analyzes that rather than rebuild the U.S. economy through social reforms and domestic programs like education, welfare, civil rights, and construction of highways, dams and parks, Truman and his administration chose to create a massive military-industrial complex to protect U.S. national security. Without a war scare, U.S. Congress and the public would not have accepted such a drastic military build up at a time when there was no longer a Nazi Germany or an Imperial Japan threat. As we have discussed in class, and to reiterate Kofsky’s main argument, an expansive program of “welfare and public works spending does alter the economy by creating new institutions and worst of all, redistributing income” (260). Such social spending creates a new balance and shift in power among various social groups in the U.S. For Truman and his administration, this was much too dangerous.

Kofsky takes a wider scope on the effects of a culture of fear that permeates the U.S. society for the next forty years. In his work, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948, Kofsky blames Truman for much of the early Cold War anxieties and asserts his failure and refusal to establish a better diplomatic relationship with Josef Stalin. With George C. Marshall and James Forrestal, Truman and has cabinet members duplicitously persuade the U.S. Congress and the public that the Soviets would soon invade Western Europe and start World War III.