“No government is perfect,” President Harry Truman once observed. “One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.”

Truman knew all about visible defects. His thick eyeglasses made him self-conscious as a boy. “Why, no, I was never popular,” he later confessed to a crowd of schoolchildren. He was raised, he wrote, “amidst some violently prejudiced Southerners,” in the former slave-state of Missouri, and he learned to share their bigotries. He failed as a farmer, mine operator, oilman, and haberdasher. And he first won office with the aid of a corrupt political machine. 

When Truman was thrust unexpectedly into the presidency, he first had to end a war. (He explained his decision to use atomic weapons in a 1947 Atlantic article.) He was also confronted by civil rights activists pointing to the country’s most glaring defect. Alongside his prejudices sat a strong commitment to fairness. He was particularly outraged by the lynchings and beatings of Black veterans. In 1947, he became the first president to address the NAACP: “Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright,” he said. “There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry, or religion, or race, or color.” 

A year later, he signed orders desegregating the military and federal workforce. The move helped fragment the Democratic Party, but Truman stood firm despite the backlash. He saw correcting the America’s defects as the surest way to secure democracy—a lesson as true then as today.