Inaugural Address (Harry S. Truman)

Summary

Truman's only inaugural address was delivered on 20 January 1949 from the east front of the Capitol, ten weeks after an election almost everyone had expected him to lose. He does not mention the campaign. He accepts the office "with humility," asks for the prayers of his hearers, and then declares that the first half of the century has been marked by two terrible wars and by "brutal attacks on the rights of man." The world, he says, looks to the United States for leadership, so the occasion calls for a public statement of the faith the nation lives by. That statement is short and theological: equal justice under law, freedom of thought, and equality "because they are created in the image of God." Truman then sets democracy against communism in a run of paired paragraphs. Each begins "Communism holds" or "Communism maintains," followed by "Democracy holds" or "Democracy maintains." Communism is said to treat man as too weak to govern himself, to correct wrongs only by violence, and to consider war inevitable; democracy answers point by point. He says he names these differences not to quarrel over belief as such but because communist action threatens recovery and peace. After reviewing what the country had done since 1945 (support for the United Nations, efforts at atomic arms control, and the European Recovery Program), Truman announces four courses of action: support for the UN, continued economic recovery and freer trade, a collective defense pact for the North Atlantic, and "a bold new program" of technical aid for underdeveloped areas. The fourth point drew the most attention at the time. It promised to share technical knowledge rather than large grants, insisted that investors' guarantees be balanced by guarantees to local peoples, and rejected "the old imperialism." The close lists those who aid the free world, from the fearful to the hungry, and ends with a pledge "with God's help." For students the speech is a compact example of deliberative oratory. It sets out a creed, an adversary, and a numbered program, and it invites questions about whether material aid, military alliance, and a stated faith can serve together as one foreign policy.

Plot or Argument

• Acceptance without triumph

  The opening two paragraphs accept the office, ask for prayers and support, and admit that the tasks ahead can be met only together. The 1948 upset goes unmentioned.

• A century of wars and a turning point

  Truman describes the first half of the twentieth century as an age of the two most frightful wars and of attacks on human rights, and says the present may be a turning point in human history. The supreme need is that people learn to live together in peace.

• The creed of the American people

  He proclaims the principles of the nation's faith: equal justice and opportunity, freedom of thought and expression, and equality grounded in creation in the image of God. A single-sentence paragraph seals it.

• Communism and democracy in antithesis

  The adversary is described as a regime with a false philosophy and then named. Paired paragraphs contrast the two systems on the capacity for self-government, the rights of the individual, violence versus peaceful change, and the inevitability of war. Truman says the contrast is drawn because of communist actions, not to dispute belief as such.

• Since the war: a record of reconstruction

  He reviews American conduct since 1945: no territory sought, support for the United Nations, proposals for international control of atomic weapons, freer trade, and the European Recovery Program launched with sixteen nations almost a year earlier.

• Four courses of action

  He lists the program: (1) support for the UN and its agencies; (2) continued economic recovery and lower trade barriers; (3) a North Atlantic collective defense agreement on the model of the Rio treaty, together with military aid to cooperating nations; (4) a new program making scientific and industrial knowledge available to underdeveloped areas, with private capital, safeguards for local peoples, and a rejection of exploitation.

• Allies, liberty, and providence

  A litany of "We are aided by all who…" names the fearful, the propagandized, the voiceless, the insecure, and the unfree as allies. Truman predicts that opposing nations will eventually abandon their delusions, promises that liberty will grow, and ends by committing national strength to a just peace with God's help.

Lessons

• A creed stated in public

  Before any policy, Truman declares what the American people believe. He grounds equality in creation in God's image, not in a court ruling or a party platform. Students should notice that the speech sets this creed up as the standard by which communism is judged. They should also ask what it means for a President to state a theological premise as a national conviction, and what such a statement commits the nation to at home in 1949.

  • Truman lists three beliefs before the sentence about the image of God. Why do you think he places that one last?
  • If equality rests on creation, what does the speech imply about rights that a government did not grant and cannot take away?
  • Can a nation hold a "faith" in the way Truman uses the word? What would count as betraying it?

• Antithesis as argument

  The middle section is built from paired paragraphs, "Communism holds… Democracy holds…" The form is clear and memorable, but it also simplifies. Students should judge whether each pair contrasts the two systems fairly, compare Truman's claims with Marxist doctrine as its own adherents stated it, and note his claim that he is not drawing "issues of belief as such."

  • Choose one communism/democracy pair. Is Truman's description of communism one its defenders would accept? What evidence from 1949 supported his account?
  • Why might Truman have kept the word "communism" out of the speech until after he had described the "false philosophy"?
  • Does the claim that democracy has "proved" peaceful change can achieve justice hold for every episode of American history? What would Truman have answered?

• Help that is not empire

  Point Four promised knowledge rather than charity. Truman wanted peoples to produce more "through their own efforts," and he wanted investors' guarantees balanced by guarantees to the people whose labor and resources were used. He also explicitly rejected exploitation for foreign profit. The lesson asks what separates real help from a new form of control. That question belongs to Christian ethics of charity, and also to later disputes about development aid.

  • Why does Truman stress that the United States has limited material resources but inexhaustible technical knowledge?
  • What safeguards does the speech name to keep development from turning into exploitation? Are they enough?
  • Truman says American commerce will also benefit. Does self-interest weaken a charitable act, or can the two be honestly joined?

• Deterrence and peace

  The third course of action argues that an armed attack might never occur if it is made clear in advance that such an attack would meet overwhelming force. This is the logic of the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in April 1949. Students should weigh it against the speech's hope for a just and lasting peace "freely arrived at by equals," and against the Christian tradition that distinguishes peace from mere absence of war.

  • How can threatening overwhelming force serve peace, according to Truman? What does the argument assume about the adversary?
  • Truman puts military alliance third and technical aid fourth. Does the order matter?
  • Augustine calls earthly peace a real but fragile good. Which parts of the speech show that Truman sees its fragility?

Context

By January 1949 the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union had broken down. The Truman Doctrine (1947) had pledged aid to Greece and Turkey, the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) had begun in 1948, the Berlin airlift was still under way, and communist forces were winning the Chinese civil war. Truman had just won the 1948 election against Thomas Dewey, Strom Thurmond's States' Rights ticket, and Henry Wallace's Progressives. With that victory he had a full term of his own.

Composition

The address was drafted within the White House and State Department in the weeks after the election. The fourth point, technical assistance to underdeveloped areas, is usually credited to a suggestion from State Department staff that Truman adopted as a bold, new element. The text stored here follows the Project Gutenberg #4938 transcription, including its double-hyphen dashes.

Reception

The 1949 ceremony was the first inauguration seen on television across a wide network of stations. "Point Four" became the common name for the technical-assistance program, which Congress authorized in the Act for International Development of 1950. The North Atlantic Treaty that Truman said he hoped soon to send to the Senate was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949. Historians still debate whether the address is best read as idealism, Cold War strategy, or both.

Comparisons

• Fourth Inaugural Address

  Roosevelt's brief wartime address of 1945 was the inauguration at which Truman became Vice President. Set beside it, Truman's 1949 speech shows how the postwar order Roosevelt hoped for had become a divided world needing a program rather than a summons to endure.

• Inaugural Address

  Kennedy's pledge in 1961 to peoples "in the huts and villages" to help them help themselves continues Point Four in more ringing cadence. Both speeches tie aid to the contest with communism, but Kennedy insists aid is right regardless of that contest, a claim worth testing against Truman's more openly strategic framing.

• First Inaugural Address

  Eisenhower succeeded Truman in 1953 and also opened his inaugural on moral and religious ground. Comparing how the two men state the free world's faith, and how far each moves from creed to concrete policy, shows continuity across a change of party.

• First Inaugural Address

  Washington says almost nothing about foreign affairs and dwells on the new republic's dependence on Providence. Truman speaks as head of a world power, yet he also begins in humility and ends by invoking God. The pair shows how much the office's reach had grown while its ceremonial piety stayed the same.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• What Truman leaves unsaid about the 1948 election, and what he asks for instead.
• The one-sentence paragraphs ("From this faith we will not be moved," "That false philosophy is communism," "The initiative is ours") and where each falls.
• The repeated "Communism… Democracy…" pairs: count them and note what each pair contrasts.
• The words "First," "Second," "Third," "Fourth," and how much more space the fourth receives.
• The litany of "We are aided by all who…" and its turn to the language of the Beatitudes.

Key terms and names

Point Four

The fourth course of action in this address, a program of technical knowledge and encouraged investment for underdeveloped areas, which gave the later aid program its popular name.

European Recovery Program

The Marshall Plan, begun in 1948 with sixteen European nations. Truman calls it the greatest cooperative economic program in history.

Collective defense

An agreement by several nations to treat an armed attack on one as a matter for all; here the planned North Atlantic pact, modelled on the 1947 Rio treaty.

Antithesis

Setting contrasting ideas in parallel form; the backbone of Truman's communism-versus-democracy section.

Imperialism

In Truman's usage, exploitation of another people for foreign profit, which he sets against development guided by democratic fair-dealing.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What four courses of action does Truman announce, and which one does he develop at greatest length?
2. Comprehension According to the speech, what had the United States done since the end of hostilities to restore peace, stability, and freedom?
3. Interpretation Why does Truman describe the "false philosophy" for two paragraphs before naming it, and what effect does the single-sentence paragraph naming it have?
4. Interpretation How does the fourth point try to answer the charge that American aid would be a new imperialism?
5. Interpretation What work does the borrowed phrase "hunger and thirst after righteousness" do at the end of the "We are aided" series?
6. Big Question Truman says the creed he states is the faith by which the nation lives. Should a President speak of a national faith? What does the speech gain or risk by doing so?
7. Big Question Is it possible to help another people in a way that respects their dignity and does not make them dependent? Use the safeguards Truman names to frame your answer.

Faith Connections

• Genesis 1:27 (Scripture)

  Truman's claim that all men are created equal "because they are created in the image of God" rests directly on this verse; ask students what other duties follow from that premise besides the ones he names.

• Matthew 5:6 (Scripture)

  The phrase about those who hunger and thirst after righteousness is taken from the Beatitudes and applied to the free world's allies; students can test whether Jesus' meaning and Truman's use agree.

• Micah 4:3–4 (Scripture)

  The prophet's picture of swords beaten into plowshares and every man under his own vine fits Point Four's hope of more food and less fear, but Micah places that peace under the Lord's judgment among nations rather than any program.

• Augustine, City of God XIX.12–17 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine treats earthly peace as a real good that the heavenly city uses while knowing it is partial; a useful measure for Truman's promise of a world of justice, harmony, and peace.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Because the United States holds a faith in human dignity grounded in creation, and because communism's actions threaten world recovery, the nation must pursue peace through four combined means: international institutions, economic recovery, collective defense, and technical aid that helps poor peoples help themselves.

Rhetorical device: Antithesis in paired paragraphs. "Communism maintains that social wrongs can be corrected only by violence." is followed immediately by "Democracy has proved that social justice can be achieved through peaceful change."

Debate: Resolved: Truman's fourth point, not his third, was the more important answer to communism.

Memory Work

We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God

The old imperialism--exploitation for foreign profit--has no place in our plans

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace how Truman moves from creed to adversary to program. Does the statement of faith in the image of God actually shape the four courses of action, or does it stand apart from them? Use at least two quotations from the text.

Comparison with Inaugural Address: Kennedy promises aid to the world's poor "not because the Communists may be doing it." Truman presents aid as part of the answer to communism. Compare the two justifications and decide which is more honest about motives.

Medical Lens

The address is not about medicine, but Point Four rests on a public-health premise. Truman describes more than half the world living near misery, with inadequate food and widespread disease, and he claims that modern science and technique can now relieve that suffering. Historians of medicine can read it beside the founding of the World Health Organization (1948) and the postwar confidence in technical public health. That confidence later encountered the practical and political limits of development programs.

• Fourth course of action (Point Four), opening paragraphs

  Truman portrays underdeveloped areas as marked by inadequate food, disease, and stagnant economies, and says humanity now has the knowledge and skill to relieve that suffering.

  Public Health Sanitation Starvation Nutrition

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Print the communism/democracy section and lay the paired paragraphs side by side in two columns. For each row, write one question a skeptical 1949 listener on either side might have asked.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1950 between a Point Four agricultural adviser and a village elder who remembers foreign officials who came to take rather than to teach. Let the elder test Truman's promise that the old imperialism has no place in American plans.

• Essay

  Truman calls the free world's allies "the millions who hunger and thirst after righteousness." Is that a fitting use of the Beatitude or a stretch? Argue from the speech and from Matthew 5.

Further Reading

• Memoirs, Vol. 2: Years of Trial and Hope, Harry S. Truman

  Truman's own account of his second term, including the origins of Point Four and the North Atlantic Treaty.

• Truman, David McCullough

  Full narrative biography (1992); strong on the 1948 campaign and the inauguration that followed.

• The Sources of Soviet Conduct, George F. Kennan ("X")

  The 1947 Foreign Affairs article that set out the containment thinking behind the speech's contrast with communism.

• The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey K. Tulis

  Places twentieth-century presidential speech, including inaugurals, within changing ideas of what a President should say in public.