Harry S. Truman Papers White House Central Files: Public Opinion Mail File

The Public Opinion Mail File consists of bulk letters, telegrams, petitions, form postcards, and correspondence from the public on a variety of issues and policies during the Truman Administration.

Size: 8 linear feet, 9 linear inches.
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor gave to the U.S. government the copyrights in this material and in any other material received by the U.S. government and maintained in a depository administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. Documents created by U.S. government officials in the course of their official duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Harry Clark (1964); Tammy K. Williams (2019).

The White House Central Files staff would sometimes remove public opinion mail from the Official File and President's Personal File and retire it to a segregated location. Most commonly, this material was voluminous and composed of very strong statements for or against certain policies or points of view. The staff of the White House Central Files disposed of most of this material, but they retained the sample that constitutes this collection.

The material in the collection includes telegrams, printed petitions, form postcards, and also some correspondence. About half the material relates to Palestine and Israel. The rest concerns such topics as the Taft-Hartley law, a proposed national day of prayer, the execution of the “Martinsville Seven,” the Fair Employment Practices Committee, civil rights, the 1951 railroad strike, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The “Ingram Family” file unit pertains to the case of Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American widowed mother of twelve children, imprisoned and sentenced to death for killing a white sharecropper who attacked her. The “Puerto Rican Pledges of Support” file unit pertains to support given to President Harry S. Truman in the wake of an assassination attempt by two Puerto Rican nationalists in 1950. The “Regulation ‘W’” file unit pertains to down payments and consumer credit used to purchase items restricted during the war effort, such as automobiles, small appliances, and furniture. The “Waltham Watch Company” file unit contains letters and petitions related to the importation of Swiss-manufactured watch movements, which caused problems for the American watch industry.