1949 was a stressful year. Three global crises placed an enormous amount of pressure on American leaders, and no one experienced the pressure more intensely than President Harry Truman.
World War Two had been over for more than three years, but a new menace had arisen to replace the threats of the Axis Powers: the Soviet Union. The genocidal tyrant Joseph Stalin was on the move to spread the infectious cancer of communism across as many borders as possible. America emerged from the war as the world’s strongest military and only nuclear power–humanity’s only hope to stymie the Marxist menace. Harry S. Truman was thrust into this global maelstrom and worked tirelessly to build a post-war world worth living in: one free of tyranny and built for peace. He joined the UN. He deployed millions of tons of food to the war-torn nations of Europe and Asia. He pursued the policy of containment: a commitment to prevent the spread of communism into free countries. And he restrained himself from using the atomic bomb on weaker enemy nations. Times were still uncertain, but 1948 brought with it a hope that the American world order was on the rise and the days of oppression were numbered.
Then came the Berlin Blockade. On June 24, 1948, Stalin ordered Soviet troops to surround the free city of West Berlin and block all roads, rails, and waterways into the city. The goal of this siege was to starve and cripple the millions of free citizens of West Berlin until they acquiesced to living under communist rule. Truman didn’t hesitate for a moment. American and British planes carried out the Berlin Airlift, a highly coordinated and large-scale rescue operation in which planes flew into West Berlin and delivered much-needed food, fuel, and supplies to the desperate people of the city every hour. Truman told Stalin in no uncertain terms that the US would never let West Berlin fall.
This brings us to 1949. The year began with the Berlin Blockade still in effect and American and British planes continuing to fly life-saving necessities into the city, without which the West Berliners wouldn’t have lasted the winter. This ongoing crisis was costing American and British taxpayers billions and occupying much of the countries’ military planes. It could not go on forever, yet Truman had vowed to do whatever it takes to protect the free people of the world from the claws of the Russian bear. An alliance was formed in order to share the financial and military burden of containing Russia. On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established. No more would the US and England be facing off with the USSR alone. One month later, Stalin lifted the siege. West Berlin was saved.
This great victory for the policy of containment brought relief to all Cold Warriors, especially to President Truman. It looked as if Russia had learned a painful lesson and would think twice before threatening the free world again. But this optimism exploded at the end of the summer when the USSR successfully obtained nuclear weaponry. After four years of the US being the world’s only nuclear power, the prospect of nuclear war was born. The first crisis of the Berlin Blockade had been successfully solved, but this second crisis of Soviet nuclear capacity seemed to hang like a dark, unsolvable cloud over humanity’s previously bright future.
But 1949 had one more crisis to heap upon the free world. On October 1, the Kuomintang lost the Chinese Civil War and Mao Zedong took over the largest nation on earth, placing 800 million people under the barbarous yoke of communism. Tens of millions of Chinese citizens would be butchered by their communist overlords in the decades that followed.
For Harry S. Truman, 1949 felt like a year marked with hard-fought victories and devastating, life-altering failures. That Christmas, he returned home to Missouri to get some desperately-needed rest from the geopolitical tumult that had plagued his life for the past year. One would expect someone crushed under this amount of pressure, guilt, stress, and anxiety to turn to alcohol, gluttony, or any other vice that could numb their senses from the painful reality of their lives. But rather than picking up a bottle of pills or liquor, President Truman picked up his family Bible. He flipped through the pages of Isaiah and Paul’s epistles and found comfort and hope in what the Word described as God’s plan for the redemption of humanity. Truman had been witness to the dastardly effects of sin on the masses; but in Scripture, he learned the truth about God’s goodness amidst all the tribulations of life. He read that the agonies of the innocent are not purposeless. And he learned to trust in God’s providence and timing. Moved by the perspective and peace this gave him, Truman included his epiphany in his Christmas radio address to the nation:
“Since returning home, I have been reading again in our family Bible some of the passages which foretold this night. It was that grand old seer Isaiah who prophesied in the Old Testament the sublime event which found fulfillment almost 2,000 years ago. Just as Isaiah foresaw the coming of Christ, so another battler for the Lord, St. Paul, summed up the law and the prophets in a glorification of love which he exalts even above both faith and hope… We miss the spirit of Christmas if we consider the Incarnation as an indistinct and doubtful, far-off event unrelated to our present problems. We miss the purport of Christ’s birth if we do not accept it as a living link which joins us together in spirit as children of the ever-living and true God. In love alone—the love of God and the love of man—will be found the solution of all the ills which afflict the world today.”
No matter what crises have unfolded in your life this year, let us never forget the place it all holds in God’s plan of salvation. All things work together for good, even the global calamities of 1949, and even the seemingly senseless sufferings that have befallen you this year.
Jonathan Kettler is a history teacher at Brandon High School.
