Harry Truman

“Unless we accept the Russian view of the nature of man, we cannot work with the USSR to a common end for human society.”

During an address to the US Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman called for military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece to counter communist threats. This began the Truman Doctrine, and Christian realists responded a month later.

We are told that a policy of firmness must inevitably lead to war, while conciliation could guarantee peace. In the Nazi days this was called appeasement.

Strikes by meat packers and mine workers in 1946 prompted Henry P. Van Dusen and Liston Pope to consider the ethics of strikes and how the church should respond.

With Ukraine languishing outside the safety of the NATO alliance, the consensus seems to be that there is little the alliance can do as Putin enforces his latter-day Brezhnev Doctrine. That consensus view is wrong.

“The resistance to Russian expansion in Europe is right. The spectacle of American progressives supporting Wallace in opposing that resistance brings dismay to most European democrats.”

Keynoting a “Beat Dewey” rally at Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace warned Americans against the Truman administration’s “get tough with Russia” policy. Reinhold Niebuhr responded.

“We are in danger of inflation because we do not have sufficient goods to meet the demands of the people despite the fact that we are producing more goods than any other nation on earth.”

In this article originally published by Christianity and Crisis on March 18, 1946, Charles W. Gilkey warns Americans not to worry that helping people abroad will make them “suckers.”