October is a month for ghosts. President Donald Trump spoke Friday night in Syracuse, traveling here with the immediate goal of helping Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman in his uphill campaign to unseat Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul.
Yet a powerful and coincidental anniversary in this community underlined the truth offered by the great novelist William Faulkner, long ago: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Seventy-four years ago this weekend, on Oct. 10, 1952, another American president traveled into Syracuse to offer last-ditch campaign support as November loomed for many candidates within his party. This was Harry Truman, the Democratic president when Trump was born in 1946.
While Truman’s name was never uttered Friday by Trump, who was far more preoccupied with predecessors named Biden and Obama, it was almost as if — considering both men’s words, even across this gap of time — Trump went head-to-head in Syracuse with a flinty president who took office upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 80 years ago.
To say that Trump’s presidency often represents a direct rejection of longstanding policies envisioned, born and enacted during Truman’s postwar time in office “is a totally valid thesis,” said William Hitchcock, a University of Virginia professor and a presidential historian who wrote “The Age of Eisenhower,” a New York Times best-seller about America in the 1950s.
Speaking by phone from Abilene, Kansas, where Hitchcock is speaking this weekend at the Eisenhower Home and Museum, the nationally distinguished historian reaffirmed a basic point:
Those two men, across so many years, laid out living visions for America that in many ways go to the heart of wrenching national debate in 2026.
Trump, in his speech at the Oncenter in Syracuse, talked about stopping “radical left Democrat communist(s)” in New York. He contended Hochul had turned New York into a “sanctuary state … to protect criminals” and that both the state and New York City are now “dirty, filthy places.” He said his administration — with its accelerated nationwide enforcement, with sweeping and aggressive cutbacks in providing access for asylum-seekers and refugees — had enacted policies that prevented millions of “illegal aliens” from entering the country.
The president described a call with French president Emmanuel Macron, in which Trump said he brandished the threat of tariffs as a cudgel to reshape aspects of trade policy between the nations. Trump claimed the U.S. for too long had been “subsidizing” France. He said he used the same change-or-else approach with other traditional allies — specifically mentioning Germany and the United Kingdom.
He reinforced that thought with his upset reaction to this year’s announcement about the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, awarded to South African lawyer Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Trump said he was baffled by that decision, and wondered why the Nobel committee — despite the tense and volatile conflict between the U.S. and Iran — is not impressed by what his administration has done.
It is “just another sign,” Trump said, “of how Norway and all these others are ripping off our country.”
Still, if if you walked out the doors of that building and headed south, past the blocked-off streets and thousands of local protesters — when one protester was removed from the hall, Trump insisted those rallying against him were “losers” and paid actors — you would eventually reach an impressive old Erie Boulevard landmark that is now utilized by Spectrum.
That structure was originally the New York Central train station, in Syracuse. And if you stopped for a moment in the evening quiet, maybe you could imagine how Harry Truman – doing a “whistle stop” train tour across Upstate New York — stopped to speak there on Oct. 10, 1952.
In that talk, through words that endure historically generations later, he offered affirmation for a much different America than what Trump described last night.
In certain ways, parallels exist between Truman and Trump at the moment they made those stops in Syracuse, despite all the intervening years. As with Trump and Iran, Truman’s approval ratings were swamped in 1952 by an unpopular war — in his case, the long and brutal conflict that eventually ended in stalemate in Korea.
Truman had already announced he had decided against seeking another term as president. Like Trump — in his case, constitutionally constrained by term limits from running again as he faces his last two years in the White House — Truman was on the stump not for reelection, but more so for his party and his legacy.
Speaking in Syracuse in support of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Truman was trying to rekindle the magic that had led to his own upset victory in 1948 over New York’s Republican Gov. Tom Dewey — though Stevenson would soon lose in a race against American general and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower.
Even so, as Hitchcock said, the change in the White House from Democratic to Republican in 1952 did not mean some vast philosophical swing: Eisenhower hardly dismantled many of the policies Truman inherited and reinforced after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Instead, Eisenhower took such steps as expanding Social Security coverage for everyday Americans.
Internationally, Eisenhower inherited and supported a negotiated tapestry that Truman helped to craft. It was centered around a postwar America that Trump now portrays as soft, as easily exploited by other democratic nations — and the polar opposite of the way Truman measured strength. For his part, Truman saw the American future, domestically and globally, as amplified and reinforced by the many alliances that he helped nurture.
Closest to home, for instance, Trump has ripped Canada as “one of the worst countries in the entire world.” He has often said Canada ought to merge into the U.S. and taunted Canadian leaders by changing federal maps to read “Lake America,” instead of Lake Ontario.
Truman, during the first formal state visit by a U.S. president to Canada in 1947, praised that nation as being “in the forefront of those who share these objectives and ideals. With such friends we face the future unafraid.”
In the years after World War II, amid the beginning of the fraught global chess match with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War, Truman presided over the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. It was Truman who initiated the Marshall Plan, granting millions upon millions of dollars for the postwar reconstruction of many devastated European nations — which Hitchcock said helped lead to generations of stability.
As archivist Randy Stowell noted in a phone call from the Truman Library in Missouri, it was also Truman who signed the National Security Act of 1947, forging a Department of Defense from the Army, Navy and newly formed Air Force and retiring the longtime name “Department of War.” The idea, Stowell said, was that national vigilance and readiness would deter aggression.
In September of last year, Trump directly undid that decision and went back to the earlier name, contending “Department of War” now “demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend.”
Their immigration views, too, represent wild opposites, as Trump made clear with his words at the Oncenter. In Buffalo, on the October day before his Syracuse stop, Truman used a speech that detailed his own fierce philosophy: He spoke with revulsion of the “national origins quota system,” a set of immigration laws passed in the 1920s that he described as based on a “discredited and un-American theory of racial superiority.”
That approach, he said, “breathes prejudice against the foreign born-alien and naturalized citizen alike. It establishes a cruel and restrictive procedure against aliens, and a second-class status, before the law, for naturalized citizens. And that, my friends, is an outrage of the worst sort.”
Then Truman traveled by train to a series of quick October stops across Upstate, all supporting Stevenson and other Democratic candidates. In Buffalo, in an era nationally when accusations of Communist sympathies were destroying lives and reputations, he spoke with passion of protecting the Bill of Rights, “the spirit of mutual tolerance and fair play that we must have to hold this nation together.”
While he made a point in that speech of ripping into what he called “the Godless forces of communist aggression,” much of what he said a day later in Syracuse was typical stumping material, in which he maintained the Democrats offered the best means toward prosperity.
But he also offered some enduring thoughts while he was in this city — when he reflected on how Democratic policies that he saw as empathetic were often attacked as subversive — that have taken on a new 21st century life, generations later, on the Internet.
In Syracuse, Truman said:
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
Following those remarks, Truman’s train pulled away from the Erie Boulevard station — almost 74 years to the day before President Donald Trump flew into greater Syracuse, ready to put his weight behind Blakeman’s campaign for governor. At distant points, across the arc of time, both presidents were engulfed in their own political struggles, their minds focused on the elections and political adversaries of the moment.
Philosophically, though, their words still represent a direct American collision.
Hitchcock, the presidential historian, said one fundamental truth serves as the bridge that ties together where we were and where we are:
With our national identity at a pivot, about to be determined by whatever path we take, Truman and Trump might have invoked other names, other faces, other events while they were here.
But in Syracuse, in a time of ghosts, they campaigned against each other.
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