26. Cold War Politics in the Truman Years, 1945–1953

HEADS TURNED WHEN CONGRESSWOMAN Helen Gahagan Douglas walked through the U.S. Capitol. Not only was she one of only ten female representatives in the 435-seat body, she also drew attention as an attractive former Broadway star and opera singer. Douglas served in Congress from 1945 to 1951 when the fate of the New Deal hung in the balance and the nation charted an unprecedented course in foreign policy.

Born in 1900, Helen Gahagan grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and left college early for the stage. She quickly won fame on Broadway, starring in show after show until she fell in love with one of her leading men, Melvyn Douglas. They married in 1931, and she followed him to Hollywood, where he hoped to advance his movie career and where she bore two children.

Helen Gahagan Douglas admired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership during the depression, and she and her husband joined Hollywood’s liberal political circles. Douglas was drawn to the plight of poor migrant farmworkers when, visiting migrant camps, she saw “faces stamped with poverty and despair.” Her work on their behalf led her to testify before Congress and become a friend of the Roosevelts. In 1944, she won election to Congress, representing not the posh Hollywood district where she lived but a multiracial district in downtown Los Angeles, which cemented her dedication to progressive politics.

Like many liberals, Douglas was devastated by Roosevelt’s death and unsure of his successor. “Who was Harry Truman anyway?” she asked. A compromise choice for the vice presidency, this “accidental president” lacked the charisma and political skills with which Roosevelt had transformed foreign and domestic policy, won four presidential elections, and forged a Democratic Party coalition that dominated national politics. Besides confronting domestic problems that the New Deal had not solved—how to avoid another depression without the war to fuel the economy—Truman faced new international challenges that threatened to undermine the nation’s security.

By 1947, a new term described the hostility that had emerged between the United States and its wartime ally, the Soviet Union: Cold War. Truman and his advisers insisted that the Soviet Union posed a major threat to the United States, and they gradually shaped a policy to contain Soviet power wherever it threatened to spread. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Douglas urged cooperation with the Soviet Union and initially opposed aid to Greece and Turkey, the first step in the new containment policy. Yet thereafter, Douglas was Truman’s loyal ally, supporting the Marshall Plan, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the war in Korea. The containment policy achieved its goals in Europe, but communism spread in Asia, and at home a wave of anti-Communist hysteria—a second Red scare—harmed many Americans and stifled dissent and debate.

Douglas’s earlier links with leftist groups and her advocacy of civil rights and social welfare programs made her and other liberals easy targets for conservative politicians seeking to capitalize on the anti-Communist fervor that accompanied the Cold War. Running for the U.S. Senate in 1950, she faced Republican Richard M. Nixon, who had gained national attention for his efforts to expose Communists in government. Nixon’s campaign labeled Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear” and sent thousands of voters the anonymous message, “I think you should know Helen Douglas is a Communist.” Douglas’s political career ended in defeat, just as much of Truman’s domestic agenda fell victim to the Red scare.