Per the wikiand this vignette she does not seem to be an especially nice or gracious person. Is there more to her story than this bitchiness and bigotry?
What’s so unreasonable about that?
Moving thread from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.
It’s unreasonable because she only refused him because he was a Jew. There’s nothing inherent in being Jewish that makes someone an undesirable houseguest, unless you live in a pork palace.
There was a previous thread on this, I thought. I’ll do a search.
Here’s the previous thread. It only gets to the Bess Truman topic indirectly, but I recall enjoying reading it.
It is not unreasonable for that time and place. Blacks would be left outside, or met at the back door in many areas of the country at that time as well.
Don’t use todays PCness to look at the past. Think of it as going through the looking glass.
And there were many people who acted much, much better than that. It would have been very far from unthinkable for Bess Truman to treat Susskind as a human being, and invite him in on a cold day. Many people at that time surely would have.
It’s bigoted and horribly offensive by our standards, I agree, but doesn’t surprise me that people would be anti semetic. At the time, though, would they have explicitly come out and said it like that, though? That, to me, is pretty shocking, I must admit.
In his clumsy, unsophisticated way, Truman retreated behind the plausible excuse of ethnic prejudice to avoid mentioning the true problem: David Susskind smelled like bad cheese.
Harry Truman wasn’t an anti-Semite, though, so it is somewhat unreal that the man who championed the creation of Israel would bow to his wife in this regard, even when he was close friends with other Jews. These are supposed to be some of the most sophisticated an educated people in the country (the president and his wife), yet you see attitudes that were far from ubiquitous by the end of the Second World War.
Well, I meant…I could see her disliking him for being Jewish, but that she’d actually make him stand on the porch, like a dog? That’s mind boggling. What if he’d come in a group of people–would she actually have said, you’re not allowed in?
Oops, sorry! I was actually agreeing with you. I think her treatment of him was horrible, given her station, her associations (i.e. being married to Harry), and the fact that this wasn’t Medieval Europe, where antisemitism was a given.
It was not uncommon for that time and place. By any standard, it was absolutely unreasonable.
AS it was not uncommon, it also wasnt unreasonable for it to happen.
Blacks and jews being barred from buying land in certain communities was not uncommon, and not unreasonable at that time either. It was unjust theoretically but if someone asked why the property hadnt been sold yet and you responded the only people wanting to buy it were black, you woupd pretty much get a noncommital Oh, pity that, Hope you have better luck this week.
Don’t underestimate peoples actual level of prejudice and the influence in their actions. They may have nothing agains blacks or jews personally at work, but not living next door to them …
The fact that Susskind didn’t realize why he was not invited in suggests to me that it was not the norm for that time. If it had been, he would have been accustomed to being left on porches and would not have had to ask.
Also, I would venture to suggest that refusing to invite in a close associate of your husband’s, even for a somewhat common reason, might indeed have been seen as unreasonable at the time.
Ah, gotcha. Misread.
I guess I always assumed that people wouldn’t act racist on the surface, but would be in their intentions. Like you might not be able to buy a house in a certain area if you were Jewish, but people wouldn’t come right out and say why–more like, “Oh, I have no more houses to show you.”
There’s a reason “uncommon” and “unreasonable” are two different words, and that’s because they have different definitions.
And let’s keep in mind that this “different time” we’re talking about was 1961.
We’re talking about 1961 Missouri, not 1861 Mississippi. You’d think that someone who’d been the post-war First Lady of the U.S. would be more worldly than that. Eleanor Roosevelt preceded Bess Truman, and wouldn’t have left a guest standing out in the cold.
That’s kind of my point. Re the wiki beyond being a reluctant and somewhat ungracious hostess, she just seems kind of mean and crass.
Dude, Shelley v. Kramer was in 1945 … The United States Supreme Court held that racially-based restrictive covenants are, on their face, not invalid under the Fourteenth Amendment. Private parties may voluntarily abide by the terms of a restrictive covenant, but they may not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, because enforcement by the courts would constitute state action. Since such state action would necessarily be discriminatory, the enforcement of a racially-based restrictive covenant in a state court would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. [yoinked out of my con law book] and in 1962 Lombard v Louisiana went all the way to the supreme court to force desegregation of public accomodations [hotels, stores, businesses and schools in general.]
Racial issues were going to court in the 50s and 60s…Prejudice didnt magically end just because.
Religion is just as hot a button as race, at least where jewishness was considered. We and pretty much every other country in the world refused to let german and polish jews in. They got palestine from sheer GUILT over the holocaust. We are still antisemetic in the US … Index of Anti-Semetic Beliefs this is the current one, but if you dig back it is based on a periodic study starting in 1964 WARNING:PDF
I do not find Truman’s wife’s behavior untypical. Rude, yes. Untypical? Not entirely. I have heard all sorts of unkind remarks from my grandmother’s generation growing up in the 60s and 70s. I can remember the migrant kids not being allowed to sit with us or play with us on the playground in the late 60s in small town western NY [mainly blacks and mulattos. I dont really remember any hispanics or orientals.]