5 gen 1949 anni - Truman's State of the Union speech

Descrizione:

Fair Deal: The domestic policy agenda announced by President Harry S. Truman in 1949, which included civil rights, health care, public housing, and education funding. Congress rejected most of it.


Balancing act or no, Truman and progressive Democrats forged ahead. In his State of the Union speech on January 5, 1949, Truman proposed an ambitious extension of the New Deal, which he dubbed the Fair Deal: national health insurance, civil rights legislation, education funding, a housing program, expansion of Social Security, a higher minimum wage, and a new agricultural program. The Fair Deal’s attention to civil rights reflected the growing influence of African Americans in the Democratic Party. In 1948, Truman had desegregated the armed forces, and his Fair Deal proposals included desegregation, fair employment, and voting rights legislation. A March 1949 editorial in the Chicago Defender, a leading African American newspaper, credited the “Negroes, labor and liberal whites who joined hands to put the Democrats in power” and promised that “the civil rights program to which the Democratic Party dedicated itself … is not going to be scuttled by entrenched hate-mongers.”

Congress, however, remained a huge stumbling block, and the Fair Deal fared poorly. The same conservative coalition that blocked Roosevelt’s initiatives in his second term stymied Truman’s as well. Civil rights went nowhere, blocked by southern Democrats and probusiness Republicans. Cold War pressure shaped debates about domestic social programs, while the nation’s growing paranoia over internal subversion weakened support for bold extensions of the welfare state. Truman’s proposal for national health insurance, for instance, was a popular idea, with strong backing from organized labor. But the plan was denounced as “socialized medicine” by the American Medical Association and the insurance industry. In the end, the Fair Deal’s only significant successes were improvements to the minimum wage and Social Security, and the National Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the construction of 810,000 low-income units.

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