# Would President Truman really have said something this bigoted re Jewish people?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [April 28, 2008, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179 "2008-04-28T03:24:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/1 "2008-04-28T03:24:29Z")
[From this wiki on interviewer Davis Susskind](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Susskind)
It hardly seems to be within the realm of possibility that he would be so bigoted (and even if he was bigoted so careless) to say something that objectionable.
> [@](#):
>
> In 1961, Susskind conducted a series of interviews with former president Harry Truman in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri. After picking Truman up at his home to bring him to the Truman Presidential Library for the interviews for a number of days, Susskind asked Truman why he hadn’t been invited into the house. Truman stated to Susskind, according to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “This is Bess’s house” and that there has never been nor will there ever be, a Jewish guest in there.
The quote says “citation needed” and if it’s a hearsay recalled statement that’s unlikely to be able to be verified. Could he have actually been so stupid as to have actually said something like that?
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### Author:  [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/2 "2008-04-28T03:48:03Z")
He was the first person to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948.
One of his closest and earliest friends was a Jew named [Edward Jacobson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jacobson).
I don’t believe it.
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### Author:  [@OtakuLoki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OtakuLoki)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/3 "2008-04-28T03:58:21Z")
Note: I’ve heard the allegation before that Bess Truman was antisemitic before. The way I read the OP it’s not that Truman had a problem with the idea of a Jew in _his_ house, but that his wife had a problem with the idea of a Jew in _her_ house.
And AIUI, that level of antisemitism was not particularly shocking _for the time_.
I have little trouble believing that Truman may have said what the OP quotes. I don’t know that it proves anything about him, rather than about his wife. I’ll be honest that Truman gets enough slack in my books for what he did for race relations that I will not condemn him for catering to his wife’s prejudices in pursuit of domestic tranquility.
**hajario** , I don’t have a cite for it, but ISTM that in the US History trivia quiz Jacobsen was said to have been one of Truman’s long time political allies and never allowed in his personal house because of his wife’s prejudices.
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### Author:  [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/4 "2008-04-28T04:01:09Z")
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Note: I’ve heard the allegation before that Bess Truman was antisemitic before. The way I read the OP it’s not that Truman had a problem with the idea of a Jew in _his_ house, but that his wife had a problem with the idea of a Jew in _her_ house.
[/QUOTE]
This is how it was presented in an NPR story a month or so ago. Bess Truman was upset with her husband for his stance on Israel, as she was anti-Semitic.
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### Author:  [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/5 "2008-04-28T04:04:29Z")
Truman must have been one pussy-whipped son of a bitch.
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### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/6 "2008-04-28T04:19:15Z")
[Here’s a (claimed) more complete version of the quote I found since posting the OP](http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2093EF6A-5741-446B-95CC-E96E5CF07006)
> [@](#):
>
> Years after Truman left office, Susskind was working with the former president on a television documentary. Wrote Humes:
>
> Susskind said that each morning he would arrive at Truman’s house at Independence [Missouri]. He would wait on the porch on a cold February day while Mrs. Truman went to inform her husband of his arrival. After about the fourth morning, he asked the president in his walk why he was never asked inside.
>
> “You’re a Jew, David, and no Jew has ever been in the house.”
>
> A nonplussed Susskind replied, “I am amazed that you who recognized Israel and championed the integration of the army would say such a thing!”
>
> “David,” he explained, “this is not the White House – it’s the Wallace [Bess Truman’s maiden name] house. Bess runs it, and there’s never been a Jew inside the house in her or her mother’s lifetime.”
Plus it indicates he wasn’t as friendly to the Jews in his private diaries.
> [@](#):
>
> Ted Thackrey, the editor of the New York Post who was married to the paper’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, related how stunned he and his wife were when, during a White House visit, Truman let loose on the Jews.
>
> “Now, Thackrey,” Truman growled, “if only the [expletive] New York Jews would just shut their mouths and quit hollering.”
>
> In July 1947, after former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau had phoned Truman to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees blocked by the British from entering Palestine, an enraged Truman wrote: “He’d no business whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.”
>
> And Truman added, for good measure: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP’s as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog…”
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### Author:  [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/7 "2008-04-28T05:56:14Z")
In Truman’s case, I’m willing to believe that actions speak louder than words.
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### Author:  [@Carson\_O\_Genic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carson_O_Genic)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 10:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/8 "2008-04-28T10:49:42Z")
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
Truman must have been one pussy-whipped son of a bitch.
[/QUOTE]
A wise man keeps peace on the domestic front.
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### Author:  [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/9 "2008-04-28T11:06:56Z")
[QUOTE=Carson O’Genic]
A wise man keeps peace on the domestic front.
[/QUOTE]
]
Also, this was an era in which women often had a whole lot of say about what happened inside the home and no say at all about what happened outside it–it’s not about being whipped, it’s about rigidly defined separate spheres.
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### Author:  [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/10 "2008-04-28T11:20:56Z")
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
And AIUI, that level of antisemitism was not particularly shocking _for the time_.
[/quote]
True, and as an example, I have personal knowledge of at least one Midwestern US real estate development in the late 1930’s that included a mandatory, perpetual convenant prohibiting Jews from not only purchasing property, but from being an overnight guest of anyone else’s. And the penalty proscribed was loss of the property by the owner without recourse to courts, AFAIK, legal in those days.
And while pre-war and post-war might seem like a world apart, we’re only talking 10 years with no significant civil rights movement at work.
An interesting sidelight which shows how paranoid some people can be…the covenant, attached to every deed, also prohibited the keeping of ducks, pigs, chickens and cattle inside the house. No penalty was given; presumably if someone heard a cock crow next door, the sheriff would be called and he would hand out a ticket. But if Josh Goldberg crashed on your couch overnight…
At least you didn’t have to shoot them on sight.
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### Author:  [@An\_Arky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Arky)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/11 "2008-04-28T13:28:58Z")
[QUOTE=Alessan]
In Truman’s case, I’m willing to believe that actions speak louder than words.
[/QUOTE]
Yup…and I’m sure Lincoln said some fairly unfriendly things regarding negroes, but I think his actions were pretty substantially in their favor.
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### Author:  [@Charter\_Member1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charter_Member1)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/12 "2008-04-28T16:03:05Z")
[QUOTE=Alessan]
In Truman’s case, I’m willing to believe that actions speak louder than words.
[/QUOTE]
The actions he made for political reasons speak louder than the actions he made for personal reasons?
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### Author:  [@Sunrazor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunrazor)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/13 "2008-04-28T16:11:33Z")
Viv-a-vis Truman’s remarks about Jews in his private diary:
It isn’t anti-Semitism to accuse a group of people of being selective in their demands for human rights. When the Israelis were bulldozing the homes of apparently innocent Palestinians because family members had participated in violence against Israel, it was suggested by some that this was exactly the kind of pogrom-like persecution the Jews themselves had suffered, thus they should have known better than to indulge in it. Just because one doesn’t unfailingly support all things Jewish doesn’t mean one is anti-Semitic.
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### Author:  [@Lama\_Pacos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lama_Pacos)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/14 "2008-04-28T19:01:42Z")
> [@Sunrazor](#):
>
> It isn’t anti-Semitism to accuse a group of people of being selective in their demands for human rights. When the Israelis were bulldozing the homes of apparently innocent Palestinians because family members had participated in violence against Israel, it was suggested by some that this was exactly the kind of pogrom-like persecution the Jews themselves had suffered, thus they should have known better than to indulge in it. Just because one doesn’t unfailingly support all things Jewish doesn’t mean one is anti-Semitic.
It’s not possible for a cultural-genetic affiliation to “be selective” in anything. An invite to the club doesn’t arrive on every Jewish baby’s doorstep. “The Jews” can no more “be selective in their demands for human rights” than “The Kurds” can like hamburgers. You’re buying into ancient anti-Semitic notions of a unified Jewish consciousness.
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### Author:  [@Rick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/15 "2008-04-28T19:41:50Z")
[QUOTE=Alessan]
In Truman’s case, I’m willing to believe that actions speak louder than words.
[/QUOTE]
I agree, and since he was business partners with Edward Jacobson in his haberdashery, I think that says a lot.
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### Author:  [@Sunrazor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunrazor)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2008, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/16 "2008-04-28T21:13:41Z")
[QUOTE=Lama Pacos]
It’s not possible for a cultural-genetic affiliation to “be selective” in anything. An invite to the club doesn’t arrive on every Jewish baby’s doorstep. “The Jews” can no more “be selective in their demands for human rights” than “The Kurds” can like hamburgers. You’re buying into ancient anti-Semitic notions of a unified Jewish consciousness.
[/QUOTE]
I may be buying into an ancient notion of a unified Jewish consciousness, and that may be mistaken. But mistaken does NOT equal anti-Semitic. Bigotry is born of ignorance, but ignorance doesn’t always produce bigotry. I’ll plead guilty to ignorance, not to bigotry.
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### Author:  [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2008, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/17 "2008-04-29T03:37:02Z")
From the info presented in this thread, my gut feeling is Truman (Mr.) may have been pretty liberal and a reasonable civil-rights dude, but his old lady (Mrs.) was not. Perhaps, to keep the peace, he had to give a little to get a lot.
It wouldn’t be the first compromise in American politics that looked wrong years later.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2008, 10:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/18 "2008-04-29T10:28:02Z")
I **highly** recommend that folks interested in the subject check out [_Truman_ by David McCullough.](http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209464006&sr=1-1) An excellent read, as well as a detailed look at the man. He grew up in the era of Jim Crow laws, and was able to rise above them, while still carrying the taint of predjudice. He intergrated the military in response to the lynching of an African-American WWII vet. He told racist jokes, but when he found out about the lynching became enraged that this could happen to someone who fought for the country and thought, perhaps, this would prevent it from happening in the future.
As for Bess, he fell in love with her when they were in school, and pledged to marry her, even though her mother felt that he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. Truman really adored Bess, and when he was President, risked his life to travel home during a snow storm (Bess and Margret were in MO, as the White House was a wreck when Truman was in office). Bess gave him hell for doing this, as he was the President and shouldn’t be doing such things. Truman, when he got back to the White House wrote a letter telling her that she’d hurt him terribly by chewing his ass out. He never sent it. It was discovered in his desk drawer after his death.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2008, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/19 "2008-04-29T11:35:49Z")
> [@](#):
>
> I highly recommend that folks interested in the subject check out Truman by David McCullough. An excellent read, as well as a detailed look at the man. He grew up in the era of Jim Crow laws, and was able to rise above them, while still carrying the taint of predjudice. He intergrated the military in response to the lynching of an African-American WWII vet. He told racist jokes, but when he found out about the lynching became enraged that this could happen to someone who fought for the country and thought, perhaps, this would prevent it from happening in the future.
>
> As for Bess, he fell in love with her when they were in school, and pledged to marry her, even though her mother felt that he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. Truman really adored Bess, and when he was President, risked his life to travel home during a snow storm (Bess and Margret were in MO, as the White House was a wreck when Truman was in office). Bess gave him hell for doing this, as he was the President and shouldn’t be doing such things. Truman, when he got back to the White House wrote a letter telling her that she’d hurt him terribly by chewing his ass out. He never sent it. It was discovered in his desk drawer after his death.
>
> * * *
I’ve read Truman, and have it on audio as well (It contains clips from his speeches, and has him playing the “Missouri Waltz” over the closing credits), which I’ve listened to many times on a long commute. But the book doesn’t say a thing about the Susskind incident, or Bess’ anti-semitism, which is news to me. The book portrays Bess as a well-educated and capable woman, and I find this anti-semitic bent surprising. I realize that one can be well-educated and still bigoted, but, then again, I really have no experience with anti-semitism. I knew bigits when I was growing up in the 1960s, but even my bigots weren’t anti-semitic.
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### Author:  [@Sunrazor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunrazor)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2008, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179/20 "2008-04-29T16:05:07Z")
[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
I may be buying into an ancient notion of a unified Jewish consciousness, and that may be mistaken. But mistaken does NOT equal anti-Semitic. Bigotry is born of ignorance, but ignorance doesn’t always produce bigotry. I’ll plead guilty to ignorance, not to bigotry.
[/QUOTE]
Nice article in [Salon](http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/04/29/j_street/) that’s very helpful in this area.
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-president-truman-really-have-said-something-this-bigoted-re-jewish-people/447179.md?page=2)