The Washington Post

The Washington Post is presented as a contemporary newspaper witness to two contrasting features of Harry S. Truman’s early presidency: his deliberately informal, energetic public appearances and the growing political intensity of anti-Communist feeling. Its reported observations place the President’s personal style and the national political climate within the same account, without suggesting that the paper’s two appearances represented a single editorial campaign.

Reporting Truman’s public persona

During a visit to Caruthersville, Missouri, Truman paused on his morning walk to spit into the Mississippi River, explaining that it was a local rite. He also played piano in a hotel dining room, held court in a drugstore, attended the races, signed napkins and blank checks, and posed with American Legion members on a mock locomotive. The Washington Post summarized the performance by saying he did everything except have himself shot from the mouth of a cannon. The observation captured how his informal engagement with a crowd could become a spectacle in its own right.

Reporting the anti-Communist climate

In a separate account of the rising Red scare, The Washington Post reporter Edward T. Folliard described hatred of Communism as rampant wherever he traveled. The newspaper’s presence here records the breadth of the mood as perceived on the road, amid Republican charges that Truman was appeasing the Soviet Union abroad and encouraging Communism at home. The passage distinguishes that broader public climate from Truman’s own private anxieties about Communists and fellow travelers; it does not establish that the newspaper endorsed those accusations.