How can the Truman Commission report be read 75 years after its release? Why should anybody care about it? What is this thing, anyway? The most compelling way to read "Higher Education for American Democracy" is as a visionary and progressive statement of the public purposes of American higher education. In so many ways, the report reads like a blueprint for the values and policies of today's higher education system: multipurpose, globally relevant, socially and culturally responsive, nondiscriminatory, and broadly accessible. But to read it as such a blueprint is fundamentally teleological--bordering on the gravest historiographical sin, Whig history, in which events of the past are interpreted as deterministic steps on the road to a supposedly virtuous present. Doing so robs the reader of perhaps the most important thing about the Truman Commission: its function as a brilliantly crafted political document that helped set an immediate agenda for higher education policy in unexpected and innovative ways. Recognizing its authors not as prophets but as political agents operating in a specific historical context is the way to understand their project's full meaning and ultimate consequences.