When the Second World War ended, two strains of thought dominated in the American political sphere.
One was that the death of FDR ought not be an impediment to America’s rise as a Britain-like power, a social democracy that used massive social spending and egalitarian legislation at home and a mixture of hard power and economic leverage abroad to become something of an empire of liberalism. This was broadly in line with the desires of the Anglo side of the Anglo-American Establishment, which was paring back the empire as it liquidated the accumulated wealth of centuries to pay for a ruinously expensive welfare state and doubled down on maintaining the City of London’s status as a financial empire. While Churchill would have preferred the old empire remain intact, his nation lacked the will to do so, and he had been replaced in power by socialists who were happy to hand the empire off to the natives, the Americans, or even the communists, so long as they could leave.
Internationalists in America preferred this strategy, and chomped at the bit to pick up where Britain had left off. Generally, this was justified either by appealing to pro-democracy sentiments, or by pointing to the threat of world communism. The latter justification became more common as the Cold War began in the bitter ashes of postwar Europe.
The other strain of thought was the old American conception of our nation and its role in the world. To such men, America should be neither a social democracy nor an empire. It did not need welfare or the high taxes required to pay for it. It needed a strong military, but primarily to keep Fortress America strong, not to influence the politics of Equatorial Guinea or the social organization of Burma. Such is what the Europeans did; America’s business was business, and questing after dragons to slay would irrevocably reshape America for the worse.
Such is what Harry Byrd thought. He was always a strong proponent of national defense, but understood that America was, as Pat Buchanan would later put it, A Republic, Not An Empire. So, he thought, America would have to resist the siren song of empire in the early years after World War II. It needed to retrench, to shrug off the absurd regulations and tyrannies of FDR’s regime, and get back to the business of America while protecting it from attack.
This set up an important conflict, and helped shape Byrd’s opposition to the even more revolutionary social change that was to come with the Civil Rights Movement.
Before the resistance to Truman began, the Democrats hoped that they would be able to reunite in the wake of FDR’s death. It was Truman who was president, after all, rather than outright communist Henry Wallace. Perhaps the Southern Democrats like Byrd, embittered over FDR’s New Deal policies and attempts to transform America, could be brought back into the fold…
But it was not to be. Though he gave Truman a shot, Byrd found his reform-minded, internationalist approach to government unacceptable. And so Byrd mobilized the bipartisan conservative coalition he headed, firmly entrenching himself as its Congressional leader in a fight to bring back old America that pitted him against those who dreamed of a new America dominated by imperial ambitions and domestic equality.
Standing firmly athwart that tide, Byrd and his conservatives battled Truman at every level. Domestically, he fought not just for the traditions of the Old Dominion, but to dismantle wartime economic controls, check aggressive labor unions, and block the expansionist welfare measures of Truman’s “Fair Deal.” Internationally, Byrd resisted Truman’s open-ended, massive global spending—rejecting foreign economic aid programs like the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and warning that the permanent entanglements of NATO would bankrupt the republic. His opposition to Truman was grounded in a “Fortress America” philosophy of balanced budgets, national economic vigor, and national defense rather than imperial obligations.
Overall, this was a battle Byrd fought in a desperate attempt to shield the Old Dominion and the nation from a dangerous drift toward socialism and imperial overextension. This is important, for it presages the fight between Byrd and Truman over Civil Rights, the next step in the transformation of America, and shows what America’s path might have been had it not transformed itself for the ostensible purpose of fighting the Cold War.
The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger, and The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. Ronald Heinemann’s Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion was less instrumental in this article than Part II, on FDR, but was nevertheless a useful read as well.
Read Part I here: The Byrd Organization, The Bulwark of the Patrician Order
Read Part II here: The Man Who Stood Down FDR
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
Opposing Truman
The Domestic Battle
Byrd had the advantage, as his fight with Truman began, that the new president was of a decidedly poor political position compared to FDR, who, whatever else, had spent most of his presidency in a position of dominance and strength. As Wilkinson notes:
Lacking the stature of his predecessor, Truman seemed vulnerable to congressional leaders, many of whom were former colleagues... The country was no longer charged with the crisis of depression, recession, or world war, and congressional leaders after 1945 were freer to resume their bickering with the executive.
This meant that Byrd was on relatively solid political ground when he prepared the conservative coalition to resist Truman’s attempts to transform America, declaring in a speech that Trumanism was “a definite and precise trend toward socialism and away from the free enterprise system. [It] is contrary to the basic principles upon which America was founded and has grown great.”
But while the battle between Byrd and President was one for which the conservatives were prepared, it was not one that was pre-ordained. It could have been avoided, had Truman charted a more traditionally American path.
