|
The Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was a United States Congressional investigative body headed by Senator Harry S. Truman.〔McCullough 1992, p. 259〕 The bipartisan special committee was formed in March 1941 to find and correct problems in US war production—problems with waste, inefficiency and war profiteering. The Truman Committee proved to be one of the most successful investigative efforts ever mounted by the US government: an initial budget of $15,000 was expanded over three years to $360,000 to save an estimated in military spending, and thousands of lives of US servicemen.〔 For comparison, the entire cost of the Manhattan Project was $2 billion, at the time.〔https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/history-of-nuclear-testing/manhattan-project/〕 Chairing the committee helped Truman make a name for himself beyond his political machine origins, and was a major factor in the decision to nominate him as vice president, which would propel him to the presidency following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=March 1, 1941 – The Truman Committee )〕 Truman stepped down from leadership of the committee in August 1944, to concentrate on running for vice president in that year's presidential election. From 1941 until its official end in 1948, the Truman Committee held 432 public hearings, listened to 1,798 witnesses and published almost 2,000 pages of reports.〔 Every committee report was unanimous, with bipartisan support.〔McCullough 1992, p. 318〕 ==Background== The war production efforts of the US had previously been subject to congressional oversight during the Civil War (1861–1865) and following the Great War (1914–1918), but each of these were considered accusatory and negative. During the Civil War, the United States Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War hounded President Abraham Lincoln regarding his moderate stance on the prosecution of the war; the committee members wanted a more aggressive war policy. The many secret meetings calling officers away from their duties, caused rancor among the Union's military leaders, and delayed military initiatives. Confederate General Robert E. Lee said that the harm caused to the Union effort by the Union's own Joint Committee was worth two divisions to the rebel cause.〔McCullough 1992, p. 304〕 Two decades after the Great War, the Nye Committee found that heavy US investments in the United Kingdom had predisposed US bankers and arms manufacturers to back the UK rather than Germany. The 1934–1936 investigation, led by Senator Gerald Nye, caused a noninterventionist backlash against any US involvement in European wars, and resulted in a much lower level of American military preparedness when European conflict erupted again in 1939.〔McCullough 1992, p. 258〕 In 1940, Truman was reelected to the Senate as a Democratic politician who was not endorsed by, and who did not back, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman heard about needless waste and profiteering from construction of Fort Leonard Wood in his home state of Missouri, and he determined to see for himself what was going on. He traveled in his personal Dodge car not only to Missouri but to various military installations from Florida through the Midwest; approximately 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of driving. Everywhere he went he saw hard-luck poverty among the working people contrasted with millions of government dollars going to military contractors. Too many of the contractors were reaping excess profits from cost-plus contracts, without being held accountable for the poor quality of goods delivered. He saw that too many contracts were held by a small number of contractors based in the East rather than distributed fairly around the nation. Returning to Washington, D.C., Truman met with the president who appeared sympathetic to Truman's wish for corrective action; the president did not, however, want Truman to reveal to the nation the wasteful nature of Roosevelt's own federal programs.〔Riddle 1964, p. 14〕 In early 1941, Representative Eugene Cox, a vocal anti-New Deal Democrat, proposed an investigative committee run by the House of Representatives, intending to expose federal waste in military spending. Learning of this likely source of embarrassment, Roosevelt joined with Senator James F. Byrnes to back a more friendly committee run by the Senate, one with the same stated purpose but with Truman as leader. Truman was seen by Roosevelt as less ideological and accusatory, more practical.〔 On February 10, 1941, Truman spoke to the Senate about the problems he had seen on his long drive, and he put forward the idea to have a special oversight committee on military contracts. This was the first new idea that Truman presented to the nation, and he received a positive reaction. Other senators were favorable to the notion that their views about spending would be heard, that valuable military contracts would be distributed more evenly to each state.〔McCullough 1992, pp. 256–257〕 Truman also talked to John W. Snyder and other attorneys of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Defense Plant Corporation about how to avoid the problems of lost paperwork, wasted time in investigation and lost productivity experienced during the Great War. He was advised that a swift-acting oversight committee would be a great benefit to the nation's war production.〔 Military leaders were apprehensive of Truman's plan—they pointed to the Civil War committee which had such a negative effect on war production.〔 Truman said he was not going to take that committee as his model, and he spent time in the Library of Congress researching the Civil War-era Joint Committee so that he would better understand what were its flaws, what made it harmful to war production. Among army and navy leaders, General George Marshall was the lone voice of support for Truman; Marshall said to his peers that it "must be assumed that members of Congress are just as patriotic as we are."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Truman Committee」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|