Truman’s Faith, Niebuhr’s Doubt

By Liam Salcuni,

Published May 16, 2026 at 6:00 PM PDT

A photocollage of Harry Truman and Reinhold Niebhur — Harry Truman and Reinhold Niebhur

The Harry Truman-Reinhold Niebuhr crossover lore.

Welcome back to SNAFUBAR! In this week's episode, we’re focusing on President Harry Truman. We take a look at his pre-presidential life, including his time as a soldier during World War I. We’ll examine his presidency, highlighting the moral urgency that he brought to questions of global responsibility and interventionism. We’ll introduce the Truman Doctrine and then we’ll spend some time digging into his State of the Union addresses.

We'll also look at the work of American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and how his philosophy provides alternative approaches and ways of thinking to Truman's own thoughts on America's role in the world.

Today's episode is co-hosted by Sara and our writer/researcher Roman Sotomayor, an alum of Cal Poly Humboldt who has worked closely with Sara on different research projects and on engaging with the local veterans community here in Humboldt. SNAFUBAR is regularly hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sara Hart⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, who teaches Religious Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jeff Crane ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor (who also hosted today's episode)

SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Works Cited:

TRANSCRIPT:

[Music]

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.

>>JFK (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.

>> Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.

>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory.

[Music]

>> Sara Hart: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the SNAFUBAR. This is a show about American military history, American military snafus, about the ways that the nation's vaunted ideals and its deeply ingrained militarism have gone toe to toe. I'm Sara Hart. I teach classes on America and its myths here at Cal Poly Humboldt, and I work with the local veteran community on projects and programs in support of veterans' reintegration to civilian life and in support of their continued service.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And I'm Roman Sotomayor. I'm a writer and researcher here in the SNAFUBAR, a graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt. I've spent the last seven or eight years, I guess, yeah working with Sara on public history projects on American war, American myth, and the experience of American veterans, and work closely with the American Legion Arcata Post 274 as a civilian volunteer.

>> Sara Hart: In today's episode, we're going to focus our attention on President Harry Truman. We're going to look a little bit at his pre-presidential life of military service, and then we're going to turn to his presidency, highlighting the moral urgency that he brought to questions of global responsibility and interventionism. We'll introduce the Truman Doctrine, and we'll spend some time digging into his State of the Union addresses.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And finally, you know, we're getting to Truman in a focused way. We've alluded to this historical moment in a few of our other episodes, and here we are at last, tiptoeing into the Cold War as we look at Truman's military experience, the 1947 Truman Doctrine, and his State of the Union addresses, eight of them, to be specific, given from 1946 to 1953. As we look at this, we're going to try to adopt the perspective of an American citizen alive and navigating the challenging geopolitical reality at the time. Truman and his administration had an enormous impact on U.S. foreign policy and our understanding of how we engage in war, and we'll try to get a vision of that as it's happening, to read the situation as it might have been read at the time. And before we leave you all today, we'll look into it also from our present vantage. We'll ask ourselves, in what ways do we understand Truman's actions to be a closing out of World War II? And in what way do we see this early Cold War moment as setting us up as a culture and a society for perpetual war and increased militarism?

>> Sara Hart: Right. I mean, that's a lot, right.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And it's just a, just a spoonful.

>> Sara Hart: We're not going to get to the whole story, so be ready for that. We'll highlight some things that, you know, and sort of peg some things that we'll pick up in later episodes, but right now we're going to do what we can to get into the, just the beginnings of this really complex issue. And of course it's going to be sort of all of that you've just said, Roman. It's going to, it's, this moment with Truman is a finish line that's also a beginning, and it, you know, it makes us just trip out a little bit on time, right. That that precipice of the present that we're always sort of perched on, closing one moment as we hurdle forward to the next, you know, like beginnings are notoriously difficult to isolate, right. So the start of the Cold War, that's Truman's moment. And here as historians like in our present moment, like analysts in his contemporary moment, we're always sort of rushing toward an analysis of the present with like just enough time to kind of turn around and hand the baton of history off to the next person. It's like an extended and maybe slightly mixed metaphor for you all. But in Truman's moments, you know, his moment in history, just like the ones we all know, it was complex. He was doing both things. He was ending World War II, and he was facing the as yet unknown challenges of the future. The choices that he had and those working with him made these choices, you know, they've played an immeasurable role in leading us to where we are now. What we're doing today is a little bit like an autopsy of these choices. You know, we're going to lay them out on the slab and dig around a little bit.

^M00:05:02

>> Roman Sotomayor: We're not trying to take those choices for granted like they were foreordained or inescapable, right. We do that a lot when we look at history. I think we've got a tendency to frame things as, well, that's just, you know, how things were at the time. But that doesn't really do justice to the hard and painful choices of the time, the self-determination, or the skill, or, you know, the blood, the sweat, and the tears of people involved. And it doesn't really honor our own agency.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, it doesn't, our own agency either, right. We wouldn't want future historians to look back at our peak moments and think, well, couldn't really have been any other way. You know, because then what's the point of choosing or of acting in good faith and with intentional effort? Truman painted a picture of the world for Americans. He defined a path for the American martial future, and it wasn't the only picture or the only path that was available to him. Our pattern-seeking brains might crave a tidy narrative, and that's nothing new, right. Mid-century post-war Americans liked tidy narratives as much as we do. But the tidy narrative of American egress from World War II, the good war, right, and then immediate entry into the role of global superpower defending against the existential threat of communism, that wasn't the only narrative available to Americans at the time, isn't that right?

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, you know, every era has its own contemporary writers and thinkers who are engaging in real-time criticism, expressing concerns, and warning about potential outcomes. And in the long arc of history, those critics are often lost to us, right. They're sort of secondary to the governing narrative. They don't always fit in with the dominant story, and we don't hear about them as often. They twist things up. They make us confront the idea that history is written by the winners, you know, the zeitgeist, right. That the experience of the time of any time is various and complicated. And so to kind of look at this we're going to bring in a friend of the podcast Reinhold Niebuhr to help us with an alternative contemporary reading of the circumstances that Truman's actions were responding to.

>> Sara Hart: I love Reinhold Niebuhr.

>> Roman Sotomayor: I like him, saying he's a friend of the pod. He's going to come talk to us. He's talking to us from the past. Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian. We've mentioned him before here in the SNAFUBAR, and I'm sure we'll see him again. He's a big figure in the world of Christian theology and U.S. political commentary. And his political commentary is really responsive to the kind of questions that motivate theologians, questions of meaning, value, and purpose.

>> Sara Hart: Right. And Niebuhr is going to help us to frame the snafu today, but not till the end. We're going to make it through some history first. First, we'll look at Truman the man, then Truman the president, the Truman Doctrine, maybe a nod to what's known as the Long Telegram or then the X article, brief nod. And a little nod to the Marshall Plan, brief nod. We will come back to these in later episodes, and we'll kind of frame our discussion around Truman's State of the Union speeches. But let's jump into the start of our episode with a little background on President Truman, life before the presidency. So before he was president, He was just Harry, you know, a kid from a Missouri farm. Missouri, I think they say Missouri. Born in 1884, the oldest of three, he didn't go to college. He bounced around between administrative and clerical jobs before returning to help his father on the farm. From 1905 to 1911, Harry Truman served in the National Guard. When the First World War broke out, Harry couldn't, he totally could have stayed home with the other exempt farmers. He didn't have to go to war. And he was 33 years old, which for war fighters is kind of like ancient. Older than the draft age, right. So he volunteered anyway. So this is pretty significant. He volunteered in 1917 at age 33, at a time when the army traditionally grouped people together by their locations of origin, by where they're from, as a way to ensure closer bonds. And not only did he volunteer, he was elected by his unit to serve as their lieutenant. Within a year, he'd become the captain of Battery D, a battery of 200 men known for chewing through officers. But then came Truman. He didn't look the part, you know, but he did win them over.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, he looked like he should be digging for dinosaur bones or something.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, paleontologist. We'd all be like, this is a paleontologist and sometimes accountant. And you'd be like, yeah, that tracks.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right, yeah. And he did, you know, he did more than win them over. He led them through the Meuse-Argonne campaign, one of the bloodiest operations of the war. And after the fighting stopped, he didn't just hang it up. He stayed in the reserves and eventually made colonel.

^M00:10:05

>> Sara Hart: Right. He's got this whole background pre-presidency. After the battlefield, then, came public service, which, yeah, like Roman just said, like you said, Roman, he retains a connection to the reserves even as he moves into other modes of public service. He becomes a county judge, which was more of an administrative role than anything else. Then he goes on to become a Democratic U.S. Senator from Missouri. In 1944, he was tapped to run as vice president with FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Three months after Truman becomes vice president in 1945, Roosevelt died. Yeah, so suddenly Truman's president, tough, right. He's just no easing into the role. He might not have been totally prepared for it.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, we don't know, and I mean, just look at that timing, spring of '45, right. The Second World War is still raging, Berlin hadn't fallen, Mussolini would be killed, Hitler would take his own life. Truman steps into the storm.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, and it's the storm, it didn't let up. I mean, this was a real trial by fire into the presidency. Jump into the deep end of the presidency. That summer, so he's been president for a few months, he's at the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin. Days after it ends, the bombs drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that's Truman's call. You know, it's his signature. I think for a lot of us, it's like the one thing we know about Truman. He sort of, you ask people, what do you know about Truman? And I think he dropped the bombs is, that's the high point, right. You know, it kind of becomes his signature in history. His presidency begins with the dawn of the nuclear age. There's life before the bombs, and there's life after. And at a closed-door dinner that December, Truman reportedly said, quote, a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, but I couldn't help but think of the necessity of blotting out women and children and non-combatants. You know, this is him looking back on the choice that he would carry into history of dropping those bombs. And that phrase, the flower of our young manhood, that was his way of saying, you know, American lives came first. They came first for him. That through line is going to run from his days in the field as captain. He didn't want to lose a single man. As president, he carries that same logic forward even when he's aware of and thinking about and not keen on what he calls blotting out women and children and non-combatants.

>> Roman Sotomayor: The bombs end what would come to be known as World War II. But behind that ending comes the Cold War, wars on wars. The Great War becomes World War I. Imagine living through all of it. World War I, World War II, the Cold War. Some folks must have been so fed up, they just skipped the front page altogether. They're like, give me the funnies.

>> Sara Hart: Give me the funnies. Give me the Sunday funnies. I'll take any day's funnies. Yeah, we know a little bit of that these days. Okay, so World War II ends. The war that comes to be known as World War II ends, and Truman is left facing rising tensions with our former Soviet allies. At home, people are still recovering from the war. This is a huge mobilization, a huge effort, completely transformed our domestic economic field. But they're about to be flung into something new, which will later come to be known as the Cold War.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And just to illustrate, you know, the breakneck speed of this thing, because I just watched this the other night. You know, there's this great moment in the movie, Good Night and Good Luck.

>> Sara Hart: Oh, I love that movie.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, a film about, I've never seen that until the other day. A film about Edward Murrow, where when accused of being a communist sympathizer because of dealings with Russians in the past, a character responds, you know, they were our allies then.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, they were our allies. I mean, it was like a blink of an eye. World War II without Russia.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right.

>> Sara Hart: Unimaginable, right. Like you start looking at the numbers, the Russians sacrificed by orders of magnitude more than the Americans, more than anybody, right. They were absolutely our allies. Americans and Russians faced down Germany together. They won, they celebrated. Maybe they even hugged in victory. And then there's this pause. They kind of look each other up and down and realize how different their worlds are, how different their worldviews are. The war is won. And reality pivots again so fast, right. The Cold War, which isn't called the Cold War yet, people are sort of like, what's going on? The Cold War starts, that's that. That shift crystallized for the American public in 1947, when Truman delivered what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. In it, he lays out a policy to support any nation resisting communism, with U.S. funding and weapons. So any nation resisting communism is going to get the guns and the money from Americans. That's the Truman Doctrine. This is the foundation for what would come to be called the domino theory and a whole new era of U.S. foreign policy.

^M00:15:08

And there's sort of two key ideas here. One, if one country falls to communism, others will follow. That's domino theory. Though it wouldn't be called that for another seven years until Eisenhower calls it that in 1954. But named or not, that's what it is, right. One country falls, others will follow. And point two, the U.S. should support any, quote, free people resisting subjugation. We have a national policy of supporting these proxy wars against a singular enemy, the Communists. And at this point, that means the Soviet Union, right. The People's Republic of China wouldn't be founded until 1949, a couple years later. And Truman goes on to say, quote, the seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

>> Roman Sotomayor: They look to us. It's that shining city on a hill idea, right. America as a beacon of freedom with the burden of defending it everywhere.

>> Sara Hart: And this is where the phrase Cold War really takes hold. George Orwell uses it in 1945 to describe what he calls, quote, a peace that is no peace. But it's really Bernard Baruch in 1947 who says it plainly. He says, quote, we are today in the midst of a Cold War. He's his own complicated fellow, but we're not going to pick up that thread right now. It's really journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, who lands the phrase Cold War in the American vernacular. In September 1947, he started publishing a series of articles on the Cold War, which he published together in a book later that fall called Cold War: A Study in American Foreign Policy, I think. In it, Lippmann argues against the X article, which, again, is also known as the Long Telegram. This is written by George Kennan. It comes out first as a Long Telegram, and then he publishes it anonymously in Foreign Policy under the pseudonym X, hence the name X article. But the official name is, quote, The Sources of Soviet Conduct. So when Lippmann, when Walter Lippmann writes his series on the Cold War for the public, the phrase Cold War takes off, right, as a framing device that Americans use to understand increasing militarization during what's supposed to be peacetime, right. How do we square those things? This is a peacetime mobilization. America is a model for behavior for the world. How do we square this, right. Within weeks of Lippmann's first Cold War article being published, the phrase Cold War appears for the first time in the New York Times, the London Times, the Wall Street Journal, and several other major newspapers, right, so this is how we sort of track. He lit the fire on this one. Within months, it's everywhere. Like the policy that it would soon come to define itself by, the phrase served early on as a buffer in the American conscience, right. And for those of us for whom this is new, Kennan's X article really is going to talk about buffer states, about this notion that you have to buffer freedom from communism. And that's going to pick up again in National Security Council Document 68 or NSC 68, which we will turn to in a different episode, classified until 1975, not known to the American public at this time. But this notion of buffering, this will become increasingly popular. If you've got a communist state and you've got a freedom-loving capitalist state, you've got to put a buffer zone between. It's nice to have buffers, right. So this notion, like, and what we want to say here, Roman and I, we've been talking about this, like the phrase the Cold War itself served as something like a buffer, right. Yeah, it's like in the American conscience between, on the one hand, a commitment to peacetime economics, peacetime politics, peacetime self-understanding, right. And then on the other, a steadily increasing militarization. Cold War helped us to explain and to understand the dissonance. Cold War eased the tension somehow.

>> Roman Sotomayor: In 1947, right. Two years after the end of World War II, war is cold now. Did we crash here? Did we crash land here? Is there any real difference when the feeling on the way down is essentially the same, right. At this moment, you're talking about the U.S. is facing down the barrel of a 44-year war, and the landing is going to be rough on the other side of it, too.

>> Sara Hart: Right, 44 years, official Cold War. That's what we're saying.

>> Roman Sotomayor: That's where we're living in, baby.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And we don't even know it's coming, right. This is 1947. We are entering peace, that's what we're doing. But at the same time, we've got to really militarize, we've got to develop armaments, we've got to do all, you know, and so this buildup of rhetoric, from the Truman Doctrine to the Long Telegram, is what lays the foundation for those 44 years of war. It's not war, war. I mean, it lays the foundation for our American understandings of it, like that's the part we're focusing on. This isn't, we don't understand this to be war, war exactly, but we are mobilizing, not with rations and scrap drives and everyone's in it together, but with consumption and production and like suburban life, right.

^M00:20:29

The idea was prove capitalism and democracy are better than communism. Win, not just on the battlefield, and maybe at this moment not primarily on the battlefield, we've kind of left the battlefield for a hot minute, but in the marketplace, let's win in the marketplace.

>> Sara Hart: That's our easy out. We're paying attention to American consciousness precisely, right. Today what we're looking at is what people did know, what they were told, how they understood it, and how they framed this sudden shift in the world. We're going to use Truman's State of the Union addresses as a way into that very public, official, national self-understanding. And if we trace Truman's State of the Union addresses from this time, we can get a better sense for how people at the time first understood the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1953, President Truman gave eight State of the Union addresses. That's two full terms of trying to articulate the stakes of a new kind of global struggle. From the very start, these carry a deep moral urgency, and that's kind of who Truman is as a guy. You know, not everybody speaks with the kind of deep gravitas, rhetorically, morally charged kind of thing going on. Truman does. His first address in 1946 focused on the transition from wartime to peacetime, and it doubled as his annual budget message, which means it's like super long. If you want to read it, like you set aside some time.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It's pretty long.

>> Sara Hart: It's really long. He pushed for, in it, he pushed for, quote, a full employment economy. He called the post-war effort a truly national one. He urged Americans to move forward with, quote, foresight and balance.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It was time for great optimism, right. But also time for great caution. This was a new world unmade by war that would have to somehow reform itself. Nothing would be the same, and how did he suggest we'd get there?

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, he wanted American industry to keep booming. I mean, nothing was going to be the same because we just had this massive mobilization. World War II was at this point still, people were actively calling this the good war. This had reshaped American consciousness and our sense of ownership and patriotism when it came to military engagement. There was a very high level of percentage of Americans actually serving in the forces, so almost everyone knew somebody, their neighbor, their dad, their cousin, their brother, their husband, right. And it was, industrially speaking, just enormous, right. So he wanted that industry to keep booming. He called for, quote, industrial peace, which is, right, that's a great phrase, industrial peace between labor and management. And he insisted that business itself was a public trust.

I mean, it's great. Reading him today, like it's hard to see it today, but people at the time accused him for being a socialist for this kind of talk. And he really was. He could sort of read the details. He's not arguing for big business so much as he is arguing for the capacity that industrialization might have to increase the standard of living broadly, right. He'd comment later in 1953 that, quote, socialism is their name for almost anything that helps the people.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, and he didn't, he didn't talk of himself like he was a radical. He was a moderate for a Democrat at the time. He wanted to trim wartime excess, unify the executive budget, invest in public health, education, housing, support veterans and war refugees. He was really just trying to dig us out of this wartime economy.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, and to do it in a way that supported the broad base of Americans. I mean, that investment in public health, he argued really like specifically for a nationalized health insurance. And he gave great logical, anecdotal, experiential, emotional backing for that. And he keeps doing it, right. So in 1947, his address took on a kind of new urgency. He delivered it at a joint session, which hadn't been done since Wilson was president, so at the time it was pretty rare. Truman's still focused on the post-war economic transition. He's interested in raising wages, shared economic responsibility. He wants to put rent caps and price caps. He's big on all this stuff. He said, quote, all of us must advance together, right. He recommended a cost of living tax credit, making up for the cost of that credit by increasing taxes on corporations.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, it's kind of a, you know, it's like a beautiful post-war vision had it all sort of worked out, right. A vision that also included the continuation of international aid and international intervention. That same year, he delivered the Truman Doctrine, so 1947, again announcing a policy to support, quote, any free peoples resisting subjugation. So this is where the containment ideology starts to take shape. Domino theory is creeping in. He frames America as a moral leader who, quote, the free peoples of the world look to, right, as we talked about that shining city on a hill earlier. It's an enormous responsibility, and he's trying to connect the dots. Economic recovery at home, refugee resettlement, civil rights. All while staring down the Soviets. Peacetime military mobilization.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, it's a lot to juggle. I mean, cognitively, it's a lot to juggle. And policy-wise, it's got to be, you know, inconceivable to folks like us. But 1947 is when we really start seeing the creep of the Cold War ideology into his addresses themselves, right. He maintained that the goal of the United States was, quote, to uphold the principles of international justice which have been embodied in the Charter of the United Nations. And he talks about the United Nations a lot.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It was brand new, right.

>> Sara Hart: It was brand new, and he was super into it, right. It was kind of what he was hanging a lot of his large scale or international policy motivations on. He wanted peace settlements to be made so that all nations could move forward into the next phase, and he was trying to figure out how to balance national security at home and abroad with his calls to cut down on excessive spending. Truman described Americans as having not only, quote, a strong moral fiber and spiritual stamina, but also a duty to, quote, the collective security for all mankind.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And by 1948 now, he's really firing on all cylinders, right. This is a year later. He doesn't name the Cold War or the Soviet Union directly in his State of the Union for '48, but they are there, just outside the frame, the foil for everything he celebrates. He emphasizes human dignity over economic utility, calls for tolerance and brotherhood, and reminds the nation of its wartime unity.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, and he's picking up on that unity, kind of trying to play it all ways, right. We have this incredible wartime unity, we want now peacetime unity, but wait, there's this like --

>> Roman Sotomayor: We want our cake and --

>> Sara Hart: We got to also, we want our cake, we want our ice cream, we want to eat it all. Okay, so this address is like peak post-war optimism, that's '48. He pushes for housing, health insurance, conservation, rural development. All was part of what would become known as the Fair Deal. In 1949, he gave it a name, saying, quote, every segment of our population has the right to expect a fair deal.

>> Roman Sotomayor: He's continuing that legacy of FDR's New Deal. And once again, he's trying to make economic reform at home copacetic with a peace that requires a strong military to maintain.

Despite these difficult to reconcile areas, as we've kind of been teasing at here, Gallup data from the time found that his approval rating jumped from 36% to 69% after the 1949 address. It was the high watermark for both his policy momentum and his popularity.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, and that momentum doesn't hold. By 1950, approval dropped to 45% and the tone shifted. There's pride in what's being accomplished, but now we're here in the atomic age, and the stakes are existential, and we have to make good choices. It's the first State of the Union where Truman openly frames American power as a moral counter to communism, a battle that will be won, quote, by an appeal to the minds and hearts of men. Of course, he meant women, too. Democracy can't defeat communism if it doesn't deliver on its promises at home. You know, Truman's Fair Deal efforts were part of the attempt to realize this promise for Americans. And he made real moves on that front. The Housing Act of 1949, desegregating the armed forces, admitting displaced persons from Europe, these weren't just rhetorical flourishes on his part. You know, he took action throughout.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Truman is dedicated to peace. We are peace-loving and principles-driven. And so we can't allow tyranny anywhere in the world. He's easy to believe, easy to rally behind during these State of the Union addresses, right. He closes his 1950 address with things like, quote, we seek to establish those material conditions of life in which, without exception, men may live in dignity, perform useful work, serve their communities, and worship God as they see fit. It's easy to be Team Truman at this point in the timeline.

>> Sara Hart: Right, and I just, I want to jump in to say it's also easy to be like, this is a moment where you can articulate the way that industrial capitalism is a good. It's easy to be critical of it, but we seek to establish those material conditions of life. That's like, that's an industrial claim right there.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And it's easy to believe and romanticize. I mean, you know, I don't mean to throw out the word romanticize to be a critic here. You know, I just, I imagine people craved those words after World War II. The world had been torn apart. Japan and other places were still smoldering. People were lost. They experienced a sort of apocalypse, right. From the Greek, apocalypsis, is that right, Sara?

>> Sara Hart: Apocalypsis.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Apocalypsis, meaning revelation or disclosure. The industrial violence of World War I and the revelation of how that industrial violence can be systematized to murder millions in World War II was a revelation, right. A revelation that if we so choose, we can truly destroy one another on a scale with a rapidity that was previously unimaginable. You know, hundreds of thousands a day, right. And looming over it sat, looming over it all sat the atomic bomb, just tempting everyone to use it again.

>> Sara Hart: Right, and that's kind of an immediate, that's an immediate game over in the minds of everyone, right. And still, the narrative is shifting, right. It's 1951, Truman's opening line to Congress is a far cry from previous optimism. He says, the actions you will take will be watched by the whole world. These actions will measure the ability of a free people acting through their chosen representatives and their free institution to meet a deadly challenge to their way of life. Like it's on you, folks. And the language and the visuals of war, they're all back on the scene. After a few years of just celebrating how good we've been doing and how our material conditions had been raised and how we'd really decreased unemployment and we'd increased the standard of living for a broad swath of Americans. That was what those first states of the Union started with. That's what they hemmed in on. Now all of a sudden, we're back to war, right. And we see that in the addresses. And at the time, what was referred to, the 1951 address is handled with what was referred to at the time as, quote, the tightest security guard in history. Yeah, Congress members couldn't enter without first going through a police cordon. Members of the third U.S. infantry stood present with fixed bayonets. That's like kind of scary.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right.

>> Sara Hart: You know.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, at this point, the Cold War is not creeping in. It's roaring, right. Truman describes communism as a quote, total threat. Domino Theory is fully operational. For Truman, if Asian or African nations fell, it's like the rest of the world would go right down with them.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, there's this clear us versus them language that emerges in public presentations through Truman at about this point. He's giving voice to the idea that, as he said before, free nations have an obligation to ensure freedom globally and that the ideals of democracy, of liberty and justice for all, bind together free nations into a community, a community of belief, a community of faith, of values. It's a community that, quote, if it should fall apart, the results would be fatal to human freedom. Like, the stakes are super high for him here. He championed the Marshall Plan, and, you know, we've mentioned this, we haven't talked a lot about it, this is the large-scale investment on the part of America into European nations decimated by World War II. It was a massive investment of aid to European countries, not in the interest of a loan or trying to get it back, but in the interest of swaying them to ensuring that European countries in the aftermath of war followed the tenets and dictates of capitalism and democracy as opposed to communism. And the Marshall Plan was a real example of this community of faith working together, succeeding together. But Truman wants to go further. He wants to send aid to Europe to start helping other countries build up their defenses, right, against communism. It's not just like the Marshall Plans, making sure that you have food to eat and that you can rebuild your buildings and repave your roads. Now it's the Truman Doctrine, making sure that if somebody comes in with a communist threat or even kind of sniffing of a communist threat, that you have guns and money to react against them militarily. He wants to send US military troops to countries that require defending.

>> Roman Sotomayor: This was a heavily military centered address, right. This one from '51. We don't see as much talk about the fair deal here. Instead, he describes the strength of the US military force, including new types of weapons we have, like the B-36, which he cites as being, you know, around 1,173% more than the cost of the B-17. I mean, I think it was, you know, B-17, 250,000, B-36, one point, three-point something million. I mean, this is a hard shift from trying to cut down on the post-war military budget to ramping up military production once again, fast, while saying things like, we do not know how long communist aggression will threaten the world. We could be in this battle, right, for years, and there's a logic that emerges here, right. Truman wanted to boost the economy at home to remain steady and competitive with the rest of the world. He wanted to see the industrial machine at home functioning as well as it did during World War II, right. There's that, it's like that romanticization again, like we did so great during the war, how can we do good after? And now here we go headfirst into another war and certain aspects of the fair deal were stalling, right. He's using his advocacy for a return to military spending and Soviet containment as kind of part of the newest push for how to get the fair deal cemented in.

>> Sara Hart: Right, but it's tricky. I mean, there's, so much of the fair deal has to do with social programs. So how do you argue for both social programs and also increased militarization in a time of peace that's not at peace? You know, you want to fund both military spending in really increased, like sharply increased levels, while also really championing the peace building qualities of industry, right, both military and industry, military industry.

>> Roman Sotomayor: I think there's a phrase for that.

>> Sara Hart: I think there was a phrase for that. We will not hear about the military industrial complex for some time, right. We're not at the point of calling it that yet, but we're starting to see it really strongly emerge. Like in some ways, World War II made it happen. With the Cold War, we start seeing industrialization or industrial peace separate from militarization but running parallel and sort of tethered to one another like tandem. You know, global U.S. military action will lead to peace at home and peace at home and peace abroad. We fight because we love peace and because we fight and because we love peace. We have stability and success at home too, and the more stability and success at home we have, the easier it is for us to fight abroad. It's really wrapped up in a little bit of a tangled situation here.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It's confusing, man.

>> Sara Hart: And what's interesting to us as we were writing this is the like how would the American public perceive the development of this narrative where the specificities of historical doctrines and policies were not at the forefront of mind but sort of understanding how you can be moving towards peace and also towards war is at the forefront of American's mind. Public opinion reflected a lot of what we're talking about here, right. After the 1951 address, Truman's approval rating dropped to 26%. And by 1952, Truman was fully immersed in this Cold War framing.

He's all in on the interconnection between our fundamental foundational ideals and our increased armament against an evil foe. It's almost like, again, here, we're looking just at the State of the Unions and how those kind of trace an arc, right, but it's almost like he didn't super believe in the Cold War when he announced the Truman Doctrine. Like he was way bigger into the Fair Deal for the American people and all of those quote/unquote socialist programs that that set of policies argued for, they weren't socialist programs, they were called socialist programs. They were programs for social, broad-based social uplift and support on the model of FDR. But it's almost like when he announced the Truman Doctrine, he didn't see the whole worldwide good versus evil struggle coming. Like somehow the Truman Doctrine wasn't answering to an international diplomatic need so much as like creating one.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Right, and then the Korean War kicks off and --

>> Sara Hart: Yes, right.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And he also had that going on in the background of this now, right.

>> Sara Hart: And you can't ignore that. That's really when everything shifts for him. So Truman uses statements like, quote, the United States and the whole free world are passing through a period of grave danger. And perhaps responding to criticism, he calls for the country to focus on navigating differences without, quote, destroying our free institutions, without abandoning our bipartisan foreign policy for peace, right. How do you do that? Peace, war, peace, war.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, that's the kind of dissonance here, right. Where, you know, he's talking about disarmament, mutual reduction of weapons. But when the Soviets don't bite, he doubled down on U.S. defense, right. He's basically saying because they won't disarm, join us in this disarmament campaign, here we go, you know. Still, he's insisting on progress being made and that his path to him is, quote, the right road to peace, end quote. And his closing arguments in '52 are moral ones. They remind us that, to him, war is necessary to protect freedom, and freedom is a moral imperative. He reminds Americans that their national ideals are under threat and therefore worth defending everywhere to protect.

>> Sara Hart: Our national ideals are under attack. Therefore we have a moral imperative to fight in this war for peace. You know, so there's that, right. Truman also didn't give up on his domestic ideals like civil rights, healthcare, education, housing, fair taxation, right, these were all still in his addresses. They just, as the war rhetoric kind of ramps up, these domestic ideals get a little dimmer, right. They get a little lost in the shadow of war and congressional entanglements.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And that's the tension that I think really gets me and that interests me about the State of the Union addresses when we were reading through them is that we're ready to send troops around the world to defend values that still aren't fully realized at home. I mean, we're talking about how public opinion towards him is changing because of the Korean War, because Fair Deal, you know, isn't being realized. Conservatives are wary of him because where's this money going to come from, that sort of thing, right. But there's also that tension where people are seeing the paradox of this, right. They're feeling it.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah. Yeah, and the ideals that drove the Fair Deal were very popular with the American public. And to his credit, Truman didn't abandon those ideals. They're there till the end. He doesn't stop pressing for the Fair Deal. But at last, you know, we sort of come to Truman's final State of the Union in 1953, and we see kind of a culmination of this development we've been tracing. This is a self-consciously reflective address. It's his final one, he knows it. He talks about the increase in the national debt that World War II left America with. He provides a list-like celebration of all that America had accomplished during his two terms. Economic reconversion, that means like turning away from a military economy back to a peacetime economy. You know, natural resource protection, civil rights advances, improved defenses, and so on. He's giving this at a time when approval ratings, you know, for him hovered somewhere around 20 or 25%. This is, yeah, it's low, you know. He quotes the Declaration leaning hard into America's foundational values, and he remained all in on the Cold War. He reminds readers that, or his listeners that, quote, the world is divided, not through our fault or failure, but by Soviet design.

It's just too much all at once, I think, is what we keep seeing, that all of the domestic improvements we're going for, and all of the social programs we're going for, and all of the us v them, and the evil in the world, and it's not our fault, and we have to fight for our values, and we need to uplift our working people, and it's just how to navigate that fullness is something that Truman's presidency gives us a kind of a really interesting test case for, right. But the world is divided. In case anyone's wondering who did this, it's not through our fault or failure, but by Soviet design. Truman goes on to outline the many faults and many failures he sees within the Soviets and their allies. He referred to the challenges as, quote, the communist menace. He reiterated the moral nature of the struggle. There's even a point where he addresses Stalin directly. I mean, this is truly an anti-communist speech through and through. Again, 1953. For Truman, quote, our ultimate strength lies not alone in arms, but in the sense of moral values and moral truths that give meaning and vitality to the purposes of free people. These values, he goes on to say, are our faith, our inspiration, the source of our strength, and our indomitable determination.

>> Roman Sotomayor: It feels like a story, right. You know, he's tying the arc of his presidency into a bow and reflecting on his actions and his mistakes. He's passing the presidential baton to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower, despite his criticisms of Truman, will have his own moment like this when he leaves the presidency as well. Truman's final approval rating in the winter of 1952 was 32% approving, with 56% disapproving. You know, and then there's that other remainder who is neutral or whatever, in case anyone's doing math at home.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah. Math does not add up to 100, so people don't want to decide.

>> Roman Sotomayor: But today, he's often seen in lists of top 10 greatest US presidents with close levels of favor across political lines. And maybe that's hindsight, right. As time passes, we see things differently. We gain new ways to understand what these speeches meant, what they tried to do, and what they actually did.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah. And I think folks at the time would have been looking at a really stark change from FDR style New Deal social programs to back to war, really fast back to war, like the public.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Armed troops and the --

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, we're just like, it's like whiplash, right. And so we have, Truman comes in, he drops the bomb, he ends the war, he starts arguing for like rent caps and, you know, taxing corporations and making sure everyone has healthcare and a job and industrial production is going to make our lives easier and then all of a sudden we're back in it and our military spending is skyrocketing. We're doing peacetime mobilization with it. Must have felt very disorienting. And across all of his addresses, you know, we kind of read through him like we were Americans at the time watching his annual States of the Union, right. And we do see persistent themes, power and conscience, global responsibility, economic freedom, civil rights, and the strain of trying to do it all at once. We also watch the tone shift from pride and optimism to fatigue and fear. Truman ends not just with a record, but with a real reckoning, a nation, quote, strong, but burdened, as he put it. So we want to turn now and like, yeah, okay, so that was Truman's presidency. We want to take a minute to invite American theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr to help us think about what all of this meant and what it might still mean for us today.

We've seen now how Truman regularly turned to moralizing language to define the Cold War and U.S. engagement with the Soviets and communists of the world. It's the godless commies versus the freedom-loving U.S. and our allies. And we're familiar with this, right. That's where we tap into today's SNAFUBAR, Cold War rhetoric and its ultimate ends. We presented our story today through Truman's State of the Union addresses, but we know they didn't happen in a vacuum. During this time, the Second Red Scare, also known as McCarthyism, was starting to take hold. So Truman's 1947 Federal Employees Loyalty Program created review boards that assessed the quote Americanism levels of federal employees. California would establish a similar Loyalty Oath Act in 1950. McCarthy began asserting that the U.S. was being overrun by communist spies. This is all happening.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Yeah, fear is rife in U.S. society. And again, if you want to just get a snapshot of it, watch Good Night and Good Luck, because that's centered around this whole situation. And everyone had the potential to be a suspect. Neighbors were reporting on each other, right. Truman didn't always agree with the policies that would be born from the Red Scare, such as the McCarran Act, but there is a degree to which he's responsible for stirring the pot, I think, right. You know, you can't make an anti-communist state without breaking a few eggs.

>> Sara Hart: Okay, it all does sort of get a little 1984, right. And we've got Orwell again, Orwell who introduced the phrase Cold War, right. War is peace, mass surveillance, censorship. Did we become something we claim to hate in our frenzy to go to war with that very thing?

>> Roman Sotomayor: And this is where we pull in Niebuhr to help frame today's SNAFUBAR. Niebuhr wrote The Irony of American History in 1952. He was living in and responding to this moment. An American theologian and public intellectual, Niebuhr was wary about the position the United States was taking during this time, a position where a nation is both powerful and morally pure. In this sense, our military might would contain the Soviets and our cause would be just. We saw a move toward preventative violence cloaked in moral religious language. A global police force operating under a halo of freedom. In doing so, we drove ourselves toward what Niebuhr referred to as the tragic mode.

>> Sara Hart: That's right. Powerful and morally pure. That's a great line, Roman. Tragedy, for Niebuhr, is the unavoidable clash between human freedom and moral limitation. It's that idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, sort of, right. We might cause unintended suffering when trying to pursue righteous actions. For Niebuhr, the constant threat of using nuclear weapons against one another as a way to create peace was an example of this kind of tragedy in action. It, quote, combines nobility with guilt. For Niebuhr, like the tragic mode was really this notion like to participate in tragedy was to do an evil thing for the sake of a good thing. That was kind of his vision, right. So if you could, if you could in the interest of world peace, that's a good thing. You have this constant threat of using nuclear weapons, that's a bad thing. But you keep the nuclear weapons going on and the threat of them and all the scariness of them, that's a bad thing, in order to get to the peace, that's a good thing, then you're tragic, right. Americans reading and hearing Truman's various State of the Unions would have felt this tragedy. Some, like Niebuhr, likely also had other thoughts, but in general, it's clear that the language is meant to elicit this feeling. We do what we must because we must, not because it's good. And we're rather apologetic about it, actually, in a sort of general, moral, spiritual sense.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Which kind of lets us off the hook, doesn't it? I mean, we can hang our heads and say, I, you know, we did what we had to do and then move right along with things just like we did with the droppings of the atomic bombs. I mean, people wrote, you know, wrote and spoke out against the atomic bombs in the past. And today it's starting to become a more common narrative that we hear that maybe we didn't actually have to do this. But again, hindsight, right. So it's hard to grapple with, and we caused massive destruction while also feeling real sorry for ourselves about it. You know, there's a sort of shame and self-flagellation that's merely performative in nature.

>> Sara Hart: Sometimes it's performative, sometimes it's authentic, right. What would have been said at the time, and we do, as you said, we've had these counter-narratives and the possibility of difference, but at the time, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were horrible acts. But they were horrible acts in the interest of ending a horrible war, right. And that would have like, if insofar as people really live into that and believe it in themselves, like we can feel shame over the dropping of the bomb, but it ended the war and we needed to end the war. That's Niebuhr's tragedy. But that's sort of how we get to the irony as soon as it becomes that kind of performative thing that you're talking about, Roman. Irony for Niebuhr is when history punishes a nation, or an individual, not for its vices, but for its virtues taken too far. It's not the same as tragedy, because we aren't simply caught in a sad fate. Instead, we're undone by the overreach of our own virtue. Irony happens when a nation can no longer see the gap between its ideals and its actions. When it's blind to the cognitive dissonance that the two put together create. This is how Niebuhr puts it. Quote, if virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue, if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength might prompt the mighty man or nation, if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it, if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits, in all such cases, the situation is ironic.

>> Roman Sotomayor: This is the framing that Niebuhr uses when examining the concept that we're a peaceful nation drawn into war, which we've poked fun out a bit throughout the episode today. His reading of history doesn't provide him with any truth to this narrative. He points to the conquering of the West as proof of this, that claiming the colonization of the West, quote, against any sovereignty which may have stood in our way was not innocent, end quote. For him, the atomic bomb generated the, quote, ironic climax of US history. Here is the peaceful nation, right, now suddenly in possession of the atomic bomb. We detonate it because we have no other choice, and then we press the rest of the world to abolish it. We're like, oh, okay guys, get rid of it.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, we used it, we're done. Yeah, but that's really the big question here, right. The State of the Unions, we're kind of reading them as being tragic, or we're reading them as being ironic. Now that we have historical distance, can we still see them as tragic? Here's one thing I want to highlight about Niebuhr's sense of tragedy and irony, right, that tragedy really can be something we do in good faith. It can be a way of behaving that is really intentionally geared towards a good, and we know that we're accepting evils on the way to that good, but we hold that good so high that we're willing to say go to war to protect individual liberty, right, we're willing to do that. Irony happens, as soon as you see the irony for Niebuhr, it dissolves. You can't possibly stay in good conscience while acting towards an evil in the interest of a good you know isn't going to be supported by your actions, right. It has to dissolve the irony. It becomes bad faith. So the question looking back is like, did he know, right. What would Niebuhr say about Truman, right. Can we read Truman's State of the Unions and the sort of public presentation, the American public presentation of that entry into the Cold War moment that they show us? Can we read these as ironic? Like Niebuhr, is it now easier for us on a whole to recognize that this moment we've been examining is an ironic one than it was at the time? As Niebuhr frames it, quote, a too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice. That's what he says. Here the U.S. is driven by its lofty ideals down a path that leads to global conflict, to chaos on the home front, all in the name of those sacred ideals. And due to this, we risk becoming not unlike our enemies, as, quote, there is a hidden kinship between the vices of even the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright. That's Niebuhr, he really does want to muddle our easy black and white, good and evil vision of things. In our quest to become so very different from our enemy, we may actually align ourselves with them more than we intend to. We might fly a different banner, we might call it a different name, but the principles, the ends we're willing to go to, they're not so different. That's what Niebuhr's going to point to. And if we're capable of seeing that, what comes next? Irony, once it's recognized, should dissipate from the force of its own self-awareness. And if it doesn't, then what are we looking at, willfully culpable ignorance and hypocrisy? Are we drunk on our own self-righteousness and deluded beyond reason?

>> Roman Sotomayor: Look, we can't speak for Truman for what he was thinking at the time, for what pressures he was facing. He saw both world wars. He knew the farthest ends of suffering. It's hard to generalize here and speculate. We don't want to lean too heavily on that. But it's useful to navigate this historical moment using Niebuhr's frame of tragedy and irony.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, Niebuhr provides a guide for making political choices that allows us to dig into the reasoning and the outcomes of that reasoning on a national scale, on a personal scale. It allows us to look back and to look ahead, to understand the past but also to try to understand the future. Our entry into the Cold War has laid the track for the militarized, antagonistic world that we're living in today. And we might ask ourselves, what would Niebuhr say about all this? What do you think of Iraq, Afghanistan, all the other wars that promised liberation but left devastation? What has this self-righteous formation of power done to us? Would Niebuhr even see it that way?

>> Roman Sotomayor: Well, Niebuhr believed that wars leave spiritual scars on the soul of a nation. In his earlier 1944 work, Children of Light and Children of Darkness, great title, by the way.

>> Sara Hart: Yeah, great title.

>> Roman Sotomayor: He stated, you just know what it's going to be about, right. He stated, quote, the self-deception of nations is far more devastating than their conscious hypocrisy, end quote. We can do something, for Niebuhr, with conscious hypocrisy because we can decide to wake up at any moment, but we can't do anything with self-deception.

>> Sara Hart: And that's really where the, like, irony dissipates when we see it as conscious hypocrisy, when we see the mismatch between our ideals and our actions,

It dissipates, right. But this self-deception, this like tool that we use to keep ourselves moving toward a path of destruction in the interest of some kind of heightened and global and moral and spiritual good, that Niebuhr was very, he was very worried about. Because we can't, we can't do anything with self-deception if we're committed to that. By its nature, it is elusive because it can't recognize itself. If a nation sees itself as good by nature, it can't reflect, it can't repent. That's the moral crisis of empire that Niebuhr pointed us towards, a crisis that wasn't new to the Cold War, it wasn't new to Niebuhr in his time, you know, but it was just taking another form, another enemy. The crisis isn't that we commit evil. The crisis is that we're unable to recognize when we do so.

Okay, so today we've gone through a brief background on Truman and a timeline of his State of the Union addresses. We explored a little deeper into the Cold War mindset, repercussions with Niebuhr as our guide. And, you know, this moment all makes sense when we think of it as the Cold War. And for me, that's capitalized. C-W, Cold War, it's capitalized, right. But without that frame, without that naming, that sense of a defined enemy and a clear purpose, what we have is some real moral and cognitive dissonance. It's a globally destructive arms race based on a vision of the world that divides people into the good and the evil, the truth and the lie based on their economic model. And this moment that we're looking through with Truman, this is the moment where this all starts. They don't have the name yet. They're not calling it this yet. It's an arm race that sits against the backdrop of American domestic life with its increasing consumption and its persistent inability to answer to the demands that would rise up in the coming decades through the Civil Rights Movement and through all the other movements for social justice that we saw in the coming decades.

>> Roman Sotomayor: That's right. The Cold War, as an idea, is like a device that eases the tension. It lets irony, in Niebuhr's sense, remain blind to itself, lets it continue to masquerade as tragedy, again, in Niebuhr's sense. And so any suffering that must be endured is endured for a cause that is greater than the evil of suffering.

>> Sara Hart: Right. The Cold War is this kind of device. It's a tool, right. But it isn't the only one. And there's no bright lines here among the living. It's all shades of gray. We get that, too. Maybe the war on terror is a similar tool, a similar device. Maybe any war named by something other than a place or a time, like the War of 1812 or the War of, you know, maybe they're all tools like this. But they're not the only kinds of tools we have. We've got Niebuhr too, folks like him, and maybe Niebuhr's tool, this distinction between tragedy and irony, maybe it can strengthen us and empower us as we look on the struggles of our own day, as we like to think it empowered him as he looked out on his own day, and as he witnessed the very beginnings of the Cold War. Niebuhr had this other element that he outlined in The Irony of American History, and that was, you know, that he called pathos, right. Pathos is that sympathetic sorrow, a deep compassion for the limits and the burdens of the human condition. It tempers our judgment. It keeps us from rushing towards sanctimony or utopianism. It invites mercy. It lives in the gray, right. It's comfortable there. It's the notion that the height of our wisdom is often the depth of our sorrow. So we're only as wise as we are compassionate. This is the emotional posture that Niebuhr suggests we take towards the, for the fractured world that we're living in.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And pathos here is not weakness, right, it's wisdom. It invites the idea that our enemies are human, that even the righteous are flawed, and that even we can cause harm. It reminds us that those who we target with our policies are not abstract variables. They are souls, and so are we, for Niebuhr, right. And yet, here we are, locked together in this tragic existence where we have to make decisions that may harm one another.

>> Sara Hart: Right, sometimes we do, and again, here in the SNAFUBAR, we are not idealists, we're not utopians, we're functionalists if we're anything, but we really are trying to understand history. And this tragic element for Niebuhr runs through American history.

We are perpetually fighting for an ideal that we believe war will bring to bear, right. Like, we will reach peace through bloodshed, like it's going to happen, you know. And there's, right, give me liberty or give me death. And there is something ideal about that tragedy, right. But what Niebuhr invites us to do is to bring a little pathos to it, to remind ourselves like, that we can move forward in a complicated world without losing the sense of humanity that comes with a recognition that the good and the evil, whatever those are for us, are muddled a little bit in this mortal frame, right. What does this all mean for a nation like ours? It means that it may be that repentance isn't humiliation. It means maybe it's clarity. It's an escape from self-deception. Niebuhr believes in humility, not despair. And he put a real Christian frame on this, but I don't think we need that. We're kind of trying to look at it in a nationalist frame. He was also big into American history and American politics. That's the angle we're looking at. He wasn't a cynic, he was a realist. He hoped that a nation might be able to remember its limits without losing its soul. He was deeply democratic, and he held that, quote, man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

>> Roman Sotomayor: And like Niebuhr, we can all hope that the nation might find within its scars some truth, which is what we're trying to do here at the SNAFUBAR, right. Might tilt toward mercy, might wake up to itself. And through Niebuhr's pathos, we might find our way there by challenging ourselves to think deeper and see clearer. Like Sara said, repentance doesn't have to mean humiliation. Awakenings can be fitful, but awakening to reality is far better than the alternative.

>> Sara Hart: All right, folks, we've given you a lot to think about today. This is President Truman. This is the very beginning of the Cold War, America's entry into an as yet unnamed, decades-long, positioning of itself towards the rest of the world. We've looked at Niebuhr and how Niebuhr might help us to understand this time and also our own. We've got some details that'll come in future episodes that are more politically and historically policy-driven oriented in SC68. We're going to come back to it. All right folks, well thanks for joining us today in the SNAFUBAR. We're excited to see you again soon.

>> Sara Hart: You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.

>> Jeff Crane: And me.

>> Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.

>> Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.

>> Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.

>> Abigail Smithson: Check out our show notes for a list of works cited from the podcast, and thanks for listening.

Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.