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  • 2015-04-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Harry S. Truman on Political Correctness (en)
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  • The below-quoted exchange of telegrams purportedly took place between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur in the wake of the Japanese surrender ending World War II in August 1945, and offers the tidbit of the blunt-speaking Truman's describing a new doctrine of political correctness as something fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by clean end. Although World War II has been one of the most influential and well-studied events of modern history, evidence of this purported telegraph exchange between Truman and MacArthur was virtually non-existent on the Internet prior to 2015. The description of political correctness attributed to Truman therein weren't spread in earnest until April 2015, although iterations of this item had been circulated a few weeks earlier. By Internet standards, this quip about political correctness is nearly ancient. Versions of it dating to 2006 and 2007 are easily located, attributed at least twice to students of Texas A&M University. It surfaced again in a 2012 Townhall column that lauded it while also describing it as an old Internet joke. Although the joke's origins may be murky, the anachronisms involved in attributing it to President Truman are obvious. In one portion of the telegram exchange, Truman supposedly referenced the mainstream media, a marked neologism. During Truman's political career (and for many decades thereafter), the news media consisted largely of radio and local newspapers; alternative news sources were not prominent enough in the 1940's for the predominant news sources to be tabbed as a politically polarizing entity with the pejorative mainstream media. Also telling is the use of the term political correctness in the purported exchange. It's true that the phrase politically correct was first employed as far back as 1793, but not in any way resembling the modern application of the term. The current usage was popularized on a large scale in the 1980s and 1990s, decades after Truman's supposed condemnation of the concept, as described in the 2009 book Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture by Geoffrey Hughes: And yes, it is correct to render Harry S. Truman's name with a period after the middle initial. (en)
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