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At home, Truman was less successful. He was heavily beset by postwar shortages, inflation, strikes and the mink-coat, deep-freezer hanky-panky of a few subordinates. In responding, Truman characteristically attacked rather than turned defensive. When the railroad workers struck, he threatened to seize the railroads. In early 1948, his popularity was at a low ebb. Panicky party strategists declared that if the Democrats did not appease the South, the party would vanish. Some seriously suggested that Truman should resign. Truman responded by proposing an elaborate series of civil rights measures that only further antagonized the South.
The Democratic Convention in Philadelphia kept him waiting until nearly 2 a.m. on a sweltering night in July 1948 before reluctantly nominating him for a full term. Harry Truman walked in, wearing an ice-cream suit that only a haberdasher from Missouri would choose for the occasion—and brought the dispirited convention cheering to its feet. He announced that he was calling a "Turnip Day" session of what he had labeled the "do-nothing" 80th Congress to give it a chance to enact its own Republican program.
The Congress predictably did nothing, and Harry Truman, without major money or major support, set out on a whistle-stop campaign across the country. He lambasted Congress for the higher cost of living, for blocking low-rent housing, for failing to vote grain-storage bins. "Give 'em hell, Harry!" the crowds cried. The Democratic left had deserted to the third-party candidate, Henry Wallace, the South to Strom Thurmond's States' Rights party. Republican Candidate Thomas E. Dewey was calm, self-confident, and spent much of his time discussing his future Cabinet. Not until midmorning on the day after election did an amazed nation learn that Truman had scored the greatest upset in U.S. electoral history.
Uproar. His second term soon turned frustrating. Scarcely a month went by without some congressional committee grilling one of his friends for some peccadillo or outright misfeasance. China had been taken over by Communists, contributing to the charge that the State Department was "soft on Communism." When the invasion of South Korea started, Truman reacted with typical dispatch. In a space of 60 hours, he ordered U.S. forces into battle and got U.N. endorsement. When General Douglas MacArthur tried to bully him from abroad and issued battlefront ukases challenging U.S. policy, Truman did not hesitate. He recalled the hero of World War II despite public and political uproar. Truman's reaction was characteristic: "General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That's all there was to it."
By 1952, the Korean War was bogged down in a seemingly endless stalemate. Senator Joe McCarthy was in full cry, charging that the State Department was infested with Communists. Nervous because of the discovery of some real spies, concerned that the Russians had developed an atom bomb of their own, dismayed by the course of events in Asia, the nation was all too ready to listen. Though he could have run for another term, Harry Truman decided that he had had enough. It was another sound decision.