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Thread ID: 8662 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-08-01
2003-08-01 15:38 | User Profile
Friday Aug. 1, 2003; 10:07 a.m. EDT Dem Hero Truman Exposed as Vicious Bigot
Eight months ago, Democrats and their media friends pulled out all the stops to drive Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott from his post for saying kind words about the presidential candidacy of the late reformed Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.
Most of these same politically correct crusaders, however, consider Thurmond's erstwhile opponent in the 1948 election, President Harry S. Truman, a genuine civil rights hero - even though in private Truman was a vicious bigot who advocated the sending blacks back to Africa and reportedly once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
This week New York Post columnist Eric Fettman reminded us of Truman's penchant for racist outbursts and anti-Semitic diatribes, a facet of the 33rd president's character that the media has spent the last 50 years working overtime to cover-up.
Noted Fettman, "Truman had repeatedly referred to New York as a 'Jew' town, complaining that of its 8 million people, '7,500,000 of 'em are of Israelitish extraction,'"
More bon mots from Democrat icon Truman: "All the damn New York Jews" should "just shut their damn mouths."
Actually, another Truman quote overlooked by Fettman was even more offensive. In letters written to his wife Bess, the then-27-year-old future president proclaimed, "I think one man is as good as another so long as he is honest and decent and not a n----r or a Chinaman."
Though he was later credited with desegregating the military, privately Truman believed in the blacks and other non-white racial groups should leave America, explaining, "I am of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe."
After he entered politics, Truman briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan and reportedly used the "N" word in stump speeches.
Despite his public record of support for Israel and sympathy for blacks, Truman apparently clung to his racist beliefs during and after his White House years.
Martin Luther King, for instance, was labeled a "troublemaker" by the Democats' first civil rights hero. According to Fettman, Truman once boasted a la Lester Maddox that if anyone tried to stage a sit-in at a store he owned, he'd gladly kick them right out.
Truman apparently feared one element of racial integration in particular, once asking a reporter, "Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?"
None of this apparently fazes NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, who praises the anti-black Democrat in a forward for a new book on Truman, saying his "bravery and dogged determination [on civil rights] opened many doors and forever changed the course of history."
Truman's full record on race is worth keeping in mind the next time the media goes into apoplexy when a Republican utters a racial faux pas.