‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge’ : President Truman, Apartheid, and the Early Cold War

Abstract

The year of 1948 witnessed two elections that pushed race relations in the United States and South Africa in dramatically opposite directions. In November, the victory of Harry S. Truman placed the White House on the side of domestic civil rights and against racial oppression and segregation. His was the first presidential administration to publicly and privately embrace the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Five months earlier in South Africa, the victory of the Nationalist-Afrikaner coalition heralded the onset of the apartheid era. In this paper I explore the rationale behind the decision of President Truman in developing closer ties with Pretoria during the later 1940s and early 1950s. I specifically highlight the fact that despite the radically different racial trajectories of the two nations, the White House developed a policy of closer relations with the practitioners of apartheid due to their vehement anti-communism, support for Western actions against during the early Cold War era and a willingness to provide enriched uranium for the US atomic programme.