Fair Deal

I hope for cooperation from farmers, from labor, and from business.

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from our government a fair deal.

In nineteen forty-five when I came down before the Congress for the first time on April sixteenth, I quoted to you King Solomon's prayer that he wanted wisdom and the ability to govern his people as they should be governed.

I explained to you at that time that the task before me was one of the greatest in the history of the world, and that it was necessary to have the complete cooperation of the Congress and the people of the United States.

We have given more and more of our citizens a fair chance at decent, useful, productive lives.

That is the reason we are as strong as we are today.

This government of ours, the Congress and the Executive both, must keep on working to bring about a fair deal for all of the American people.

Some people say that we haven't the time or the money this year for measures for the welfare of the people.

Truman had come to office with an ambitious domestic program which included full employment, a program of public works and improvements to housing, healthcare, and education.

Truman revived the package and called it his Fair Deal in an effort to echo Roosevelt's New Deal.

With the backing of a Democratic Congress, Truman secured passage of the Social Security Act of 1950, which almost doubled the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour.

However, the majority of Truman's domestic program From agricultural reform to healthcare and education were voted down by Congress after pressure from lobbyists.

Nevertheless, after Kennedy won the nomination and became president, Truman rallied behind him, and he and Bess were glad to be invited to the White House during the winter of 1961.

Truman was shocked by Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.

His successor Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society reform agenda echoed much of Truman’s Fair Deal, and on the 30th of July 1965 Johnson went to Missouri to sign Medicare into law at the Truman Library, where he presented the former president Medicare card number one.

Truman’s own health was deteriorating by then after a fall in October 1964 and he no longer made regular appearances at the Library.

And that had really been a big problem for Harry Truman because Harry Truman had come back into office in 1949 as president.

He determined to implement a very bold package of liberal reforms called the Fair Deal, which were intended to extend and develop Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

They were intended to go further along the same kind of path.

And the

And one of the big issues of 1949 was that the NATO treaty had been signed, but NATO needed to be turned from being just a lot of ink on paper into being a genuine armed Western alliance against the Soviet Union.

And Walter George, like many congressmen at the time, congressmen and senators, actually was quite skeptical about whether NATO was feasible and whether it would become a drain on America's resources.

And Sam Rayburn, was he a player at first about this challenge of NATO and the fair deal?

Rayburn was much more of a loyalist to Truman.