Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, was a person somewhat unappreciated in his own time -- and aren't we all, really. Among many great distinctions, he had some quirky ones.

He kept a sign that said "The buck stops here" on his desk. His middle initial "S." didn't stand for anything (maybe bought with one of the bucks that stopped at his desk).

He appeared in a famously wrong newspaper headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman," on the front page of the Chicago Tribune in 1948. This may be the biggest mistake made in a newspaper, quite a feat in an industry that has raised the correction/clarification to a high art with, not to boast, no small help from me.

I call Harry S. Truman today as my first and only witness in the case of selective national amnesia, the real source of all our problems. Americans have forgotten much of their own history. For many, whole sections of the past have passed into oblivion.

As the great man is not here to testify in person -- even allowing for inflation, a buck does not buy immortality -- a speech he made on Dec. 15, 1952, will have to suffice. President Truman was speaking at the National Archives to dedicate a new shrine holding the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Consider this passage from his remarks, which suggest that people were a whole lot smarter 60 years ago:

"The Constitution expresses an idea that belongs to the people -- the idea of the free man. What this idea means may vary from time to time. There was a time when people believed that the Constitution meant that men could not be prevented from exploiting child labor or paying sweatshop wages," Truman said.

"We no longer believe these things. We have discovered that the Constitution does not prevent us from correcting social injustice, or advancing the general welfare. The idea of freedom which is embodied in these great documents has overcome all attempts to turn them into a rigid set of rules to suppress freedom."

Not so fast, Mr. President. If you had lived in our brain-dead time, you would find that a host of people most definitely do believe that the Constitution can't be used to correct social injustice or advance the general welfare, as the opposition to universal health care makes clear.

These critics mostly remember the 18th century.

They make a fetish of studying it, but only to reinforce their idea that the Constitution is an ancient corset, with a rigid set of rules as its whalebone stays, and all for the purpose of keeping voluptuous outbreaks of justice and the general welfare from shocking the landed gentry.

As for the 19th and early 20th centuries, when monopolist-minded tycoons made many ordinary people feel that freedom was a choice between working for a pittance or starving, these Constitution zealots know nothing of that.

In Pittsburgh, we tend to remember these unpleasant truths because a lot of labor's battles were fought in this region. Also, some of our Democratic politicians are a bit dated. If you ask them what time it is, they say, "Half past the 19th century" -- which is ridiculous because every Republican diehard knows the correct time is half past the 18th century.

With everybody either forgetting history entirely or else editing it in their heads, committing to memory the useful bits and forgetting the rest, it is amazing what the nation has forgotten.

For example, the buck doesn't stop at the president's desk anymore. It no more stopped at George W. Bush's desk for wrecking the economy than it does at Barack Obama's desk for stimulating it without great success.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker's idea of history is apparently the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the idea that if you get tough with the union movement and also cut taxes, then deficits will disappear -- except in Reagan's case, they didn't.

In the governor's history, unions are not heirs to those who built the American middle class but dangerous budget-busting freeloaders such as public school teachers. And what could be more dangerous than someone forcing biology lessons upon children? (Maybe Wall Street bankers who give themselves bonuses after taking the public's money? Just a thought.)

In Congress, the people's mandate for fiscally responsible change has been extended to include wholesale attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency for daring to insist on clean air. Thus it seems that even the historic idea of America the Beautiful has become victim to selective ideological amnesia -- "O beautiful for spacious skies filled with pollution."

If only Harry were still around to give 'em hell.

First Published: February 23, 2011, 5:00 a.m.