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Cake day: March 10th, 2025

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  • Truman’s campaign against the “Do Nothing” Republicans is not the cause, but it’s when these huge majorities for Democrats got cemented in place for decades:

    Isolationism is not dead. Far from it. Even if the Republicans get a presidential candidate with a good record in foreign affairs, he will not be able to drown out the raucous isolationist outcries of the rest of the party. And that prospect is beginning to scare the voters–and it ought to scare them.

    Now, we can always rely on the Republicans to help us in an election year, but we can’t count on them to do the whole job for us. We have got to go out and do some of it ourselves, if we expect to win.

    The first rule in my book is that we have to stick by the liberal principles of the Democratic Party. We are not going to get anywhere by trimming or appeasing. And we don’t need to try it.

    The record the Democratic Party has made in the last 20 years is the greatest political asset any party ever had in the history of the world. We would be foolish to throw it away. There is nothing our enemies would like better and nothing that would do more to help them win an election.

    I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

    But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are–when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people–then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

    -Harry Truman, Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action, May 17, 1952

    https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/129/address-national-convention-banquet-americans-democratic-action