Unmoved by Tariff Threats, Mexican GM Workers Win a Double-Digit Wage Hike

By Natascha Elena Uhlmann

April 21, 2025

Members of SINTTIA's salary revision committee pose in front of the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration. Photo credit: SINTTIA

Mexican General Motors workers in the Silao, Guanajuato, factory complex clinched record raises after staring down company scaremongering about tariff threats.

“They said, well, we’re offering 6 percent,” said Norma Leticia Cabrera Vasquez about management’s offer at bargaining.

“We knew they were going to show up with that, but we said, ‘We still have weeks to negotiate, so we won’t let that intimidate us,’” said Cabrera Vasquez, who worked at the plant for 15 years, and now serves as a leader of the union’s Women’s Department.

In spite of the company’s efforts to stoke uncertainty, auto workers stood their ground, garnering wage increases of 10 percent on average.

Workers in tiers making up 60 percent of the workforce will receive a raise of 10.25%; the other 40 percent will see a 9.25 percent increase. They also eliminated the lowest tier in the workforce—as such, the plant’s starting wage jumped up by 33.95 percent, to about $3 per hour. This is the second time the union has won double-digit increases, bringing GM Silao workers to the top edge of Mexico’s auto industry, with the plant’s highest-paid earners bringing in about $7 per hour.

If they continue their double-digit winning streak, workers could approach parity with some U.S. autoworkers within a decade: within nine years, the highest-earning workers could reach $16 an hour.

The new wage scale lifts two-thirds of the workforce above Mexico’s family poverty line, and well above Mexico’s minimum wage of about $1.71 per hour. The minimum itself has been raised sharply since 2018, between 12 and 22 percent each year under Mexico’s left-wing MORENA party. A proposed nationwide shift to a 40-hour workweek without a reduction in pay (Mexico’s workweek is currently capped at 48 hours) would also mark a significant advance.

Their union, SINTTIA (the National Auto Workers Union), emerged from workers’ efforts to oust their previous corrupt “charro” union, a Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) affiliate notorious for arranging pro-employer “protection contracts”, which lock in low wages and keep workers from forming a legitimate union, at the plant.

RELOCATION THREATS

Union leadership said they didn’t let the uncertainty around tariffs scare them into a conciliatory posture. “It would take years to transfer production,” said Alejandra Morales Reynoso, General Secretary of SINTTIA. “They’d need an installation like GM [Silao], a complex made up of six or seven plants, which would be a multi-million dollar expense.”

Knowing that, Reynoso and the bargaining committee weren’t moved by what-ifs: “They’ve always threatened to relocate, like back during the global economic crisis,” she said, but it was more profitable to leave GM Silao in operation.”

GM has indicated that it could shift some production to the United States in response to Trump’s tariffs, but little is certain in the midst of Trump’s mercurial trade policy. They may simply opt to shuffle vehicle destinations—that is, put Mexican-made pickups on the non-U.S. market, Odracir Barquera, General Director of Mexican Automotive Industry Association, told Mexico Business News.

“The cost of production of different models varies,” said SINTTIA advisor Dr. Willebaldo Gómez Zuppa, “but in terms of SUVs and trucks, labor costs [in Mexico] are really low with respect to the overall cost of vehicle production, so 25 percent wouldn’t alter that equation—it would just reduce the company’s profit margins.”

HARD DATA

“I learned a lot of interesting things about negotiation strategy,” said Alberto, a maintenance worker. While tariffs were front of mind for just about everyone during negotiations, “the most important thing for us was being grounded in reality with hard data,” he said.

Alberto, who requested we only use his first name, troubleshoots the facility’s robots and other technical issues to prevent assembly line outages. Sometimes several critical failures will occur at once—workers joke that “the devil got loose”—sending Alberto and his team on a high stakes triage. “We have to evaluate which is most critical, and go from there,” he said.

Alberto was drawn to engineering from a young age. His father worked as a mechanic, and he has fond memories of building and disassembling motors to get a sense of how they worked.

He applied this scientific inclination to this round of salary negotiations: “There’s a whole process of information-gathering: on inflation, the plant’s productivity and profits generated, the poverty threshold and family wage calculations,” he said. Being grounded in these numbers reduced the pressure to settle for scraps.

The numbers the union based their calculations on were concrete, where any talk of tariffs was based on “pure speculation,” Alberto said. “It’d be like if I told you, ‘I can’t build here because tomorrow there could be a meteorite storm and it’ll topple my construction.’ Yeah, that could happen, but it could also not,” he said. “We went in with a solid, well conceived strategy, with hard data, and as a result we were able to pressure the company.”

WAKING UP THE CTM

SINTTIA’s winning streak is raising standards across Mexico’s auto industry and forcing the CTM to seek more for the workers they represent in an effort to hold onto their positions. Days after SINTTIA’s announcement, workers at a GM plant represented by a CTM affiliate in Ramos Arizpe, Coahuila, won a 10.8 percent raise, in what Gomez Zuppa characterized as a way to stave off a challenge from SINTTIA.

Gomez Zuppa said that previously at the Ramos Arizpe plant, raises were much lower, with 5.5 percent being the record. Of the 10.8 percent raise, he said, “Effectively, it’s an anti-union practice, and a direct confrontation with SINTTIA to prevent it from expanding its reach in the auto sector.”

Workers at the Ramos Arizpe facility received news of the deal in late March, though the contract at the plant expired on February 1st, signalling that the CTM waited to match whatever SINTTIA members earned.

A NEW UNION CULTURE

SINTTIA is pressing on with multiple organizing campaigns. Among them is the fight at Tritech Autoparts, also in Silao. Here again, the union seeks to oust the CTM, which SINTTIA alleges is intimidating workers into affiliating with the company union or get fired. A date will be set for a union election in the coming days.

At GM Silao, too, the organizing continues: workers already have their sights set on next year’s contract negotiations. “There are a lot of things people would like to see improved,” said Vasquez, including pay and more paid holidays like Mother’s Day, “so we’re collecting all of the proposals the workers have.”

Vasquez worked for six years on the production line, before moving to quality control. There, she inspected paint quality in twelve-hour long shifts, searching for defects in the paint’s cure and adherence. The work requires immense precision: some defects, like a stray hair or fiber, are visible to a trained eye, but others can only be detected with a microscope.

Vasquez has seen firsthand how a fighting union can transform conditions at work: before, she says, workers didn’t feel comfortable raising issues on the job. “We didn’t have [the previous] union’s support. Now, workers are seeing that SINTTIA will support them, and they’re speaking up,” she said.

Before, under the CTM affiliate, “The line they liked to say when you’d ask for support was: ‘Why are you complaining? Be grateful you have work,’” said Alberto. “You’d see [union leadership] with the year’s latest car, things that’d make you ask, ‘Where are our union dues going?’” Anyone who raised too many questions would see themselves fired within two to three months, he said.

Some workers are still wary after witnessing years of union corruption. “They have a mentality of, ‘Well, everyone steals, but hopefully you guys steal less,” he said. But by being transparent and fulfilling promises, he said, a new union culture is being built. He said that the union provides a clear accounting of its spending each year.

In preparation for this wage increase, Alberto has been making the rounds through the complex to talk to workers, including some still affiliated with the former union. Many, he says, have asked to shift their affiliation to SINTTIA after learning more. “It’s about generating that sense of ownership,” he said, “of feeling represented by a union that supports you.”

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Tens of Thousands Take to the Streets to Defy Austerity and Authoritarianism

The massive protests against Trump’s xenophobic and authoritarian agenda shows a glimpse of the immense power we have when we take to the streets. This energy must be turned into sustained organization from below.

By Sou Mi

April 21, 2025

Source: Left Voice

Pierre Kattar/NPR (Washington, DC)

The massive protests against Trump’s xenophobic and authoritarian agenda shows a glimpse of the immense power we have when we take to the streets. This energy must be turned into sustained organization from below.

Tens of thousands took to the streets across the United States on Saturday in a scathing indictment of Donald Trump’s mounting pile of attacks. These protests came just two weeks following the “Hands Off” protests that brought out millions of people across the country to the streets in coordinated actions, denouncing the administration’s attacks on social programs, such as Social Security and Medicaid, as well as its anti-immigrant measures, attacks on free speech, and continued repression of students and protesters.

Organized under the banner of “50501”— standing for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”— the demonstrations coincided with the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War. From outside the White House to Tesla dealerships to major city centers, protesters rallied in 700 different events across the country to show they aren’t backing down. 

While organizers explicitly called for a “day of action” and “community events” rather than another day of protest  in an effort to contain and demobilize after April 5, the scale of participation reveals the deep-seated anger of the masses that goes well beyond the maneuvers of the movement’s leadership. From New York to Cincinnati to Jacksonville, tens of thousands mobilized for the second time this month, signaling a continued resistance to Trump’s attacks on federal programs, democratic rights, and immigrant communities. The turnout was not just a show of opposition, but a declaration of defiance — proof that people are ready to fight back.

In New York City, an estimated 50,000 people took to the streets in Manhattan, filling Madison Avenue. This protest was larger than the mobilization on April 5, drawing tens of thousands of more people to the streets to denounce Trump’s attacks on the climate, as well as on democratic rights, including the wrongful detention of student activists such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. There were also calls to demand the return and release of Kilmar Abrego García who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last week.

Indeed, in addition to the slew of attacks that Trump has advanced in the first 100 days of his second term — from attacks on federal jobs and programs to those on immigration and free speech — the mistaken deportation of Abrego García and his continued detention in the country’s notorious mega-prison CECOT has become a rallying cry. Like in other key cities, in Washington DC, protesters marched down Constitution Avenue, chanting “Bring Kilmar home.”

In Chicago, thousands converged at Daley Plaza and filled the city’s streets. Protesters sent a clear message that now is the time to stand up to the administration’s attacks.

In Boston, protesters rebuked Trump’s proclamation that he was the “King of America.” Signs and chants filled the city’s major park with slogans and chants like “No kings!”

The outpouring of rage against Trump’s attacks takes place against a backdrop of growing discontent with the presidency. Since taking office, Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 43 percent, compared to 47 percent when he took office. A mere 37 percent approve of his handling of the economy, compared to 42 percent during inauguration.

The massive protests against Trump’s xenophobic and authoritarian agenda shows but a glimpse of the immense power we have when we take to the streets. That power is not derived from the Democratic Party or its proxies that want to defang our movements, but the rage of the millions of people who oppose the Far Right. Harnessing and expanding that anger to bring more people to the streets requires uniting our struggles against not only Trump, but the entire imperialist regime that engenders these attacks.

The energy of these protests must be turned into sustained organization from below. We need to take this struggle beyond the streets — into our schools, our workplaces, and our communities. Whether it’s walkouts against repression, strikes for immigrant rights, or mass mobilizations to stop deportations, the fight must be taken to where we are strongest: through independent working-class action, outside the control of capitalist politicians who will always sell us out.

Trump’s regime thrives on division and despair. Our answer must be unity and resistance. The protests of today can become the strikes and uprisings of tomorrow.

Sou Mi is an activist based in New York City.

The Truman Show: The Responsibility of Public Libraries

Margot Patterson

 April 22, 2025
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Image by Giammarco Boscaro.

On April 18, 2024 the Truman Presidential Library held its premier fund-raising event, an awards dinner called “Wild About Harry,” at a downtown Kansas City hotel.

It was the 25th anniversary of “Wild About Harry,” which a press release by the Truman Library Institute says is “now a Kansas City tradition … known for bringing out our nation’s thought and opinion leaders to the site that once served as President Truman’s political headquarters.”

The gala dinner occurred 75 years after the founding of the state of Israel and the accompanying expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, an event Palestinians call the Nakba. Many of the descendants of those 1948 refugees live in Gaza, a fact that went unmentioned at the dinner as did the six-month-old war taking place there. Even before the war, the large protests spawned within Israel by the right-wing government’s proposed judicial overhaul might have curbed the fulsome accolades to President Truman for his decision not quite 76 years before to immediately recognize the new state. In 2024 the sole mention of Israel was a comment made by the recipient of the Harry S. Truman Legacy of Leadership award, Senator Roy Blunt. Recently retired from the U.S. Congress, Senator Blunt recounted that then-Secretary of State George Marshall had told Truman that he was so opposed to the United States recognizing Israel he would not vote for him in the upcoming presidential election if Truman did so. While Truman had great respect for General Marshall, a man recognized for both his wartime leadership and his integrity, Blunt added that Truman went ahead and “did the right thing.”

No one in the audience demurred, though at least some might have wondered if Truman did do the right thing or if the Middle East wouldn’t have been better-served if Truman had heeded his secretary of state’s counsel. But it was not that kind of evening nor that kind of crowd. Many dressed in evening wear, the 800 or so guests in the ballroom rose to their feet to applaud every speaker. It was up and down all all night, first to stand for the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner, then for the introduction of the sponsors of the evening, then for the honorary chairman, then for his conversation with Roy Blunt, then for Truman’s grandson, Clifton Daniels, who delivered some humorous slightly off-color remarks, then for writer Evan Thomas, who delivered the keynote address. The atmosphere was that of a political convention, with enthusiastic applause for all those onstage. It was an occasion where all the women were strong, all the men were good-looking, and all the politicians awarded or invoked principled, savvy and smart.

The allusion to Israel spoke to the troubles of the day and to the concerns of some of the Truman Library’s strong supporters. President Truman has long been lionized by many in the Jewish community for recognizing Israel, and the warm, symbiotic relations go both ways, with the library offering programs that cater to the community’s interest in Israel and the recently departed head of the Truman Library, Kurt Graham, sitting on the advisory board of the local Jewish Community Relations Bureau. The message telegraphed to the audience that evening was that whatever hot water Israel might currently be in, Truman’s support for it 75 years earlier had been an act of vision, good judgment and probity.

Other tricky moments were just as deftly finessed. Encomiums to the rules-based order set up after World War II elided the fact that the United States has been shredding international law for years, most flagrantly in Gaza where the Biden administration continued arming Israel’s deadly, plausibly genocidal campaign despite Israeli war crimes. This and the use of the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council to thwart efforts to end the war put U.S. hypocrisy in the spotlight, and in the views of many international-law scholars undermine the international system the United States helped to create after World War II.

But international law, the war in Gaza, any searching assessment of President Truman’s decisions in light of present circumstances were not what the evening was about. It was about raising money. This it did: more than $1 million dollars, it was announced during dinner. Wild applause, of course.

Are the benefits of the Truman Library and Museum worth the hype and the hoopla, the hagiographic depiction of a man known for Midwestern modesty and plain speaking? Would Truman approve? Presidential libraries are financed both publicly and privately. This, along with the bragging rights claimed by many presidential libraries, can wreak havoc with scholarly integrity. The curators and staff may be insulated from the need to pander to donors, but how many directors can be or are?

“Every single library is its own little universe,” says David Cross, a lawyer, history buff and author of Chasing History: One Man’s Road Trip through the Presidential Libraries. Cross visited 13 of them before writing his book and says each is different. Some have more information than others. Some are more candid than others in assessing the president they honor. The FDR Library is probably the most forthright as far as presenting what people didn’t or don’t like about Roosevelt, Cross says; the Reagan library the least.

The Truman Library steers a path somewhere in-between. Its museum was recently renovated, with new, updated exhibits and interactive features. It’s an impressive re-do with a fine overview of Truman’s presidency. One can easily spend several absorbing hours learning more about Truman’s time in office and the era he presided over. Cross had visited the museum before its renovation and was impressed by its inclusion of dissenting views regarding Truman’s decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan.

“There are some very compelling examples of us not color coding history and hiding things that were objectionable from President Truman’s past,” said Alex Burden, director of the Truman Library Institute, the foundation that raises funds for the library. A case in point is the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, which Burden said is more controversial today than it was in Truman’s time. The renovated museum is straightforward in its presentation of that dispute but glides over Truman’s decision to recognize Israel, noting he called it the most difficult decision he had to make as president without explaining why or its impact. References are made to Jewish refugees but not to Palestinian refugees created by Zionist forces during Israel’s establishment. A short film narrated by Judy Woodruff on the “Question of a Jewish Homeland” concludes “Since the founding of Israel, peace in the region has remained elusive. But Truman never regretted his decision.”

The library has also never provided programming that examines that decision in any depth, Truman’s subsequent policies towards Israel, or the conditions of Palestinian refugees in 1948 or after. Burden acknowledged that but said programming seeks to present history as it unfolded at the time and as President Truman absorbed the information that he had available to him. Inside the library the White House Decision Center offers students an opportunity to experience for themselves the challenges facing Truman and his advisors, to read the documents they read, to discuss and decide what they would do in those same circumstances. There’s a lot to like about the Truman Museum and Library, one explanation for why the annual benefit draws a big crowd.

And yet Wild About Harry seemed surreal. Removed from reality, both the one Truman lived in and our own. Throughout the evening, big issues were invoked: democracy, NATO, the Marshall Plan, civil rights and the desegregation of the military. Key initiatives in the Truman administration, they have as much if not more salience now than they ever did. The Cold War begun under Truman has been revived, the threat posed by nuclear weapons greater and more explicit today than it’s been in decades.

Then there’s Israel. Devastating Gaza, displacing close to two million Palestinians while killing and injuring more than 170,000, the majority of them women and children, Israel has become the eight hundred-pound gorilla in the room that Americans continue either to indulge or ignore. Chiefly the young have had the courage and honesty to speak out against Israel’s deadly war in Gaza, which the United States has armed and enabled. The silence of the churches is deafening. Libraries, civic organizations, international relations groups are no more outspoken. Those charged with upholding free speech do so reluctantly if at all.

Squeezed by well-heeled donors enraged by student protests against Israel and politicians exploiting concerns about anti-Semitism to harass, threaten and bully them, college presidents have used concerns about “disruptions” to campus life as their justification for calling in the police to remove student encampments, arrest demonstrators and shut down protests, the overwhelming majority of which (97 percent, according to a study cited in The Guardian newspaper) have been non-violent. Charges of anti-Semitism get more attention in the U.S. press than the awful facts that inspired the protests and continue.

The focus of the 25th anniversary of Wild about Harry was democracy and leadership, but the absence of any serious discussion of U.S. foreign policy, of what the United States is doing and has become in the world, of the war in Gaza, the protests against it and the effect of the war on U.S. standing made the over-enthusiastic crowd bobbing up and down at the Muehlebach Hotel seem more a claque than a gathering of thoughtful citizens. Partygoers energetically celebrating a previous president mindless of the ship of state sinking beneath them.

Truman’s swift recognition in 1948 of the new state of Israel over the vehement objections of his State Department has been attributed to a variety of factors — sympathy for the remnant of European Jews who survived the Holocaust, the popularity of the idea of a Jewish homeland with the U.S. public, his own evangelical upbringing, the entreaties of Jewish friends, the lobbying of Zionists, including one, Abraham Feinberg, who stepped up to provide Truman’s strapped campaign with $100,000 to fund Truman’s1948 whistle-stop tour.

Then as now, the Zionist lobby was influential in both political parties, though not yet the juggernaut it’s become in the last 50 years, capable of steering an annual $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, securing a host of special perks unique to Israel, and regularly bending Congress and the executive branch to its will. Under the sway of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerhouse lobbying organization on Capitol Hill better known as AIPAC, U.S. politicians compete to outdo each other in who can more zealously demonstrate their allegiance to Israel.

Looking at the legislation that was introduced in the U.S Congress, one would never know that Congressional offices have been flooded with calls from citizens critical of the flow of U.S. arms for Israel’s war in Gaza. Bills were introduced in the previous Congress to send student protesters to Gaza, to revoke the visas of foreign students who protest the war in Gaza, to cancel student loans for students trespassing on institutional property, to provide veterans benefits to Americans who enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces. Though U.S. and Israeli officials have for years used death statistics furnished by the Gaza Health Ministry, the House of Representatives voted last June to prohibit the State Department from citing the agency’s statistics on the number of Palestinians killed in the Israel-Hamas war.

Among the most serious of the bills introduced in support of Israel, the Stop Terror Financing Bill gives the Secretary of the Treasury extraordinary power to strip non-profits of their tax-exempt status based on a single accusation of wrongdoing. The ACLU states that the bill provides inadequate due process for non-profits and prohibits activities already illegal under current law. Despite opposition by more than 150 organizations, the House of Representatives approved the bill in the fall of 2024. It did not come up for a Senate vote and will have to be re-introduced in the current Congress to pass. If it is, ACLU senior policy counsel Kia Hamadanchy said he expects the House will approve it again. Initiated to go after Palestinian non-profits, the bill could be used in a far wider set of contexts to suppress civil dissent, he warns.

AIPAC’s influence is so far-reaching and effective that few stand up to it. Even before Oct. 7, AIPAC had targeted the small group of pro-Palestine voices in the Congress elected in the last few years, vowing to spend $100 million to defeat them. In June, Rep. Jamal Bowman did not survive AIPAC’s $14.5 million campaign against him, the most expensive primary race on record. In August, another sitting Democratic, Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis, lost her primary after AIPAC spent $8 million to support the candidate enlisted to run against her. Hers was the second-most expensive primary election.

In the case of the United States’ Mideast policy, the politicization of policy is enabled not only by the hundreds of organizations that comprise the pro-Israel lobby but by a host of otherwise unaffiliated organizations that rarely challenge the talking points of the lobby, either from fear of alienating donors or simply reluctance to arouse controversy or conflict. The Truman Library is hardly alone in ignoring the Palestinian experience of dispossession, displacement, occupation and injustice committed by and on behalf of Israel; keeping mum is standard practice for most organizations.

One consequence of the silence is that Americans are, by and large, remarkably uninformed about the conflict, even though they have been barraged by news of it for years. Coverage by the mainstream media is sporadic, incidental and limited. Official statements are read; death counts are reported, images of “clashes” depicted, but efforts to contextualize the news and to provide viewers a sense of what is at stake are minimal. The fact that U.S. tax dollars are going to support a prosperous expansionist country intent on forcing the indigenous inhabitants off their land is seldom spelled out; neither is Israel’s decades-long disregard of international law and U.S. acquiescence to it.

The capture of U.S. politics by a small, zealous minority that regards the advancement and protection of Israeli interests akin to a sacred cause has made Israel the driver of U.S. policy in the Mideast. Suppressing honest discussion about what transpires in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the “special relationship” has corrupted U.S. politics and policies, undermining U.S. democracy and Americans’ own rights, interests and security. The disastrous consequences for Palestinians are evident both in Israel’s relentless, unchecked colonization of the West Bank, the 17-year Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip that preceded the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, a war seeded by the fecklessness of U.S. politicians and which few oppose despite what retired diplomat Chas Freeman Jr, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, calls “the most catastrophic collapse in U.S. influence in West Asia, the Middle East, within memory.”

On November 10, 1945, Truman told a meeting with U.S. diplomats from the Middle East why he was inclined to support a controversial U.N. partition plan that allocated more land to the smaller Jewish population in Palestine than to the Arab population twice its size. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

That calculus has guided generations of U.S. politicians ever since. It has gone unchallenged by almost the entirety of American society. Civil society groups are leery of running afoul of the boundaries of correct speech on Israel, and many are eager to profit from the fervor Israel arouses among its supporters. The Truman Library has used Truman’s swift recognition of Israel in 1948 to court Israel supporters, hosting talks by prominent U.S. Jewish leaders and Israeli officials that provide a one-sided view of Jews and Palestinians’ struggle over land and rights. In 2021 the Truman Library and the Jewish Agency of Israel reached an agreement to collaborate on educational programs. Established in 1929 by the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency has long served as an unofficial arm of the Israeli state.

In announcing the agreement between the library and the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog, the outgoing chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency and Israel’s current president, said, “Educating the public about the role of President Truman in the history of our nation’s founding and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence will serve to strengthen the important connection between Americans and Israelis.”

Democracy requires an informed electorate. But the aim of the collaboration between the Truman Library and the Jewish Agency is not to augment Americans’ understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or U.S. policy under President Truman. The intent is to shore up American support for Israel.

In this venture, the Truman Library is serving as a conduit for propaganda. Rather than educating Americans about an ongoing conflict, the claims of the two parties, their respective histories, the debates inside the Truman administration over Israel, and the realities of Israeli occupation and colonization, the library has sacrificed scholarly integrity, democratic duty and the public’s need to know if not to financial advantage than to convenience.

Hannah Arendt makes the point in her book A Report on the Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem that corruption permeated every level of society in the countries in which the Holocaust occurred. The same can be said of the United States, where politicians, the media, most organs of civil society have either echoed the talking points of the pro-Israel lobby or even when knowing better allowed them to stand without challenge. Acquiescing to the claims of a minority that suffered a devastating genocide, they have laid the grounds for another. These groups keep silent today as a cascade of atrocities unfold in Gaza and throughout Palestine, even though the system of international law created after World War II to prevent such horrific events is being violated by Israel on a daily basis.

David Cross says most presidential libraries reflect the presidents they honor. The Truman Library’s cultivation of ardent Israel supporters can be traced back to Truman himself, yet President Truman also upheld an arms embargo on belligerents in the months leading up the declaration of the state of Israel in May 1948. What would he say or do today if he were alive? Would he approve of the U.S. government’s unconditional flow of weapons to Israel to enable the carpet bombing of a tiny enclave less than half the size of Kansas City? Would his humanitarian sympathies extend to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank bombed and besieged by an occupying power seeking to take their land from them? The 33rd president of the United States would surely understand the self-interested motives of U.S. politicians in aiding Israel’s war. Would he endorse their policy choices?

The publicity for the 2024 Wild About Harry dinner referred to Truman’s desire that his presidential library be a classroom for democracy. Indeed it is. Students of history can learn a great deal about Truman’s presidency from its museum and archives. If they peruse the library’s programming, they can see how the library, like so many, many other civic groups and institutions, including universities, has prioritized public relations and fund-raising over education, side-stepping the complexities of history that lead to the abysmal present.

The 2025 “Wild About Harry” dinner is coming up April 24.. Will there be any mention of the Trump administration’s assault on democracy? The campaign to destroy free speech and academic freedom at universities? The ruination of Gaza and the deportation of foreign students and scholars for the crime of protesting it?

The Truman Institute has on its website a collection of statements that President Truman made. One in particular stands out: “The truth is all I want for history.”

That’s a fine adage for a presidential library. When if ever the Truman Library elects to live up to it is another story.