Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  He was talking about Brigham Young, whom he has always admired.

  “I was a great admirer of old D. H. Burnham, who organized the Chicago regional planning,” Dad continued, “and he had a motto over his mantel, ‘Make No Little Plans.’ You can always amend a big plan, but you never can expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now. Back in 1900, we had about 75 million people. In the 1930s, we had about 125 million people. It is our business to at least anticipate a population of 300 million, maybe in the next hundred or hundred and fifty years. Maybe it won’t take that long.”

  To drive this point home, Dad told the story of an engineer who submitted a report to the Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate in the middle of the nineteenth century. “It stated that if a bridge could be built in St. Louis over the Mississippi River, St. Louis now being a thriving village of 300, it was absolutely certain that in fifty years St. Louis would have at least 1,500 people. Well, they built that bridge and St. Louis has got a million people in it. The engineer didn’t quite have his sights high enough. You can’t get them too high.”

  Judge Truman’s star quality soon had local newspapers suggesting him as gubernatorial timber. The Democrats had lost the governorship race in the Republican landslide of 1928. The Independence Examiner and another local paper, the Blue Valley Intercity News, both reported growing interest in Truman for governor. The Odessa Democrat, in adjoining Lafayette County, made similar remarks. On November 21, 1930, the Democrat ran a front page, two column story headlined: TRUMAN COULD BE NEXT GOVERNOR, JACKSON COUNTY JUDGE WOULD BE AN IDEAL DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE. Even the Kansas City Star was still saying nice things about him. “Efficient, unselfish public service is not so common that it shouldn’t be dispensed with merely for partisan reasons,” the Star said, announcing its support of my father for reelection in 1930.

  In the spring of 1931 a Truman-for-Governor Club was formed. The men behind it were several National Guard friends such as James E. Ruffin, a young Springfield lawyer who organized support in southwest Missouri. Another enthusiast was my father’s cousin, Colonel Ralph Truman. At a Springfield meeting in early May 1931, fifty-two Democrats from fifteen counties of southwest Missouri endorsed Dad and organized a Truman-for-Governor Club in their region. Ruffin proudly assured potential members that the club included “some of the oldest and most substantial Democratic leaders in southwest and south central Missouri.” Alas, the club was doomed from the start.

  Perhaps because Tom Pendergast had inherited the political organization from his older brother, Jim, the Big Boss had a penchant for backing older men, such as Senator James Reed, the reactionary who had led the Democratic opposition to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. His unsuccessful gubernatorial nominee in 1928, Francis M. Wilson, was sixty-four and in poor health, yet Pendergast showed strong signs of reendorsing him in 1932. My father appealed to the many Democrats who felt that a younger man, capable of an energetic campaign, was vital for victory.

  The Truman-for-governor boom picked up momentum in the spring of 1931. The Kansas City Star ran a profile of Dad in a Sunday issue, and plans were made for a major rally in Houston, county seat of Texas County in the southern Ozarks. The commander of the Missouri National Guard pledged his support and Dad began making out-of-county speeches in response to numerous invitations. The boom continued, even after Tom Pendergast, on the eve of departing for Europe, declared the organization would back Wilson once more. My father spoke at the meeting in Texas County and made, in the opinion of a Springfield Press reporter, “an exceptionally favorable impression” upon his audience. By this time, Dad had mastered a relaxed, down-home style in his extemporaneous speeches. Even more important, perhaps, he kept his speeches short - never more than twenty minutes. This was a rarity in Missouri during those days.

  The editor of another local paper, the Houston Herald, agreed with the Springfield Press about Judge Truman. He was obviously “a clean, conscientious businessman who would render unto the people a real business administration if chosen Governor.” Optimism soared in the Truman-for-Governor Club. “If you can get Wilson out of the way,” Ruffin wrote to my father, “I think you can win the nomination with very little difficulty.”

  But Wilson declined to get out of the way. In spite of the very precarious condition of his health, he sensed that 1932 was a Democratic year, and coolly refused to abandon his candidacy. With Tom Pendergast remaining equally immovable, my father, with his instinct for party loyalty, quietly advised his supporters he was withdrawing from the race. In December 1931, Dad told Wilson he could expect his “wholehearted support” for another try at the governorship.

  Ironically, everything my father’s supporters said about Wilson’s health turned out to be tragically true. On October 12, 1932, at the height of the fall campaign, he died, and the Democratic organization had to find a new, last-minute nominee. Although our loyal Independence Examiner urged my father as a logical choice, Pendergast had to contend with the growing power of the Democratic nominee for the Senate, Bennett Clark, and a compromise, non-Jackson County candidate was chosen, Guy B. Park.

  But the Truman-for-Governor Club had by no means wasted its time and money. It had awakened a great many Missourians outside Jackson County to my father’s name and record. Even Francis Wilson recognized Dad’s political potential. Not long after he heard my father was supporting him for governor, Wilson wrote to a friend: “Judge Truman is a mighty fine man. I hope someday to see him elevated to other offices of trust.”

  Dad had no time to fret over his gubernatorial aspirations. On May 26, 1931, the voters had approved another, even bigger bond issue, for $7.95 million. It was voted for more roads, a county hospital for the aged, and a new $4 million county courthouse in Kansas City. This time, instead of scoffing at Judge Truman’s improvement plans, Tom Pendergast used the county’s road-building record as the main argument to persuade voters in Kansas City and the rural parts of the county to approve another $31 million in building bonds for Kansas City as well. The proposal was put before the voters as “Kansas City’s Ten Year Plan.”

  By now my father had county road building rather well systematized. But the courthouse was a new challenge. He decided to make it not only the best built, but the best designed public building in the United States. Climbing into his car, he drove 24,000 miles to confer with architects and study county and municipal buildings from Canada to Louisiana. As he drove, he saw grim evidence of the deepening economic depression spreading like a stain across the land.

  In Shreveport, Louisiana, he found a courthouse which satisfied him, designed by Edward F. Neild. Dad hired Neild to design the Kansas City courthouse. (There was another courthouse in Independence which he also rebuilt at this time.) While Neild was designing his graceful, twenty-two-story building, Dad went off on another automobile journey. This time it was to hire Charles Keck, sculptor of the equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dad asked Keck to create an equestrian statue of his greatest hero, Andrew Jackson. Together he and the artist journeyed to Jackson’s Tennessee home, the Hermitage, to get the exact measurements of Old Andy’s dress uniform. The money for the statue, and an identical statue before the courthouse in Independence, was surplus cash which my father had saved from the bond issue, thanks to his tough economy.

  He also demonstrated at this early stage in his career that, while he was a wholehearted backer of the union movement and the rights of the working man, he did not intend to let union leaders push him around. Early in 1934, the construction unions building the Jackson County courthouse in Kansas City went on strike. Dad sent them an ultimatum. Either they went back to work or he would replace every one of them with men from the relief rolls. “I have 3,000 applications for work on my desk,” he said. The men went back to work.

  During these early depression years, my father had to cope with another political di
sappointment. Missouri, like many other states, redistricted after the census of 1930. My father journeyed to the state capital in Jefferson City and played a leading role in cajoling the legislators into creating a congressional district out of eastern Jackson County and seven eastern wards of Kansas City. His dream was to represent that district in Congress. With his solid backing in the rural part of the county, he was convinced he could be elected easily. But Tom Pendergast decided that Jasper Bell, a Kansas City councilman whose vote had given the Goats control of the city in 1926, deserved the plum more than Judge Truman. Once more Pendergast had made it brutally clear he had no burning affection for my father.

  But things were happening in Missouri beyond the boundaries of Jackson County, and in the United States beyond the boundaries of Missouri, that severely threatened Boss Tom’s political power. In Missouri Bennett Clark, son of one of the state’s greatest congressmen, had won a very big victory in his bid for the Senate and was openly challenging Pendergast’s political control of the state. In Washington, D.C., a new Democratic administration, headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was seeking and obtaining unprecedented powers to deal with the Great Depression that was stifling the country. Some naive political historians have given Roosevelt credit for destroying Tom Pendergast and thus implied a basic hostility - or at least a difference in political morality - between my father and FDR.

  Almost every biographer of my father and every historian of Kansas City and Missouri politics has maintained that Tom Pendergast hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and backed Jim Reed as his presidential candidate in the 1932 Democratic Convention. But insiders in the Jackson County organization knew Boss Tom was backing Reed for much the same reason he ran Francis Wilson for governor. Pendergast was enormously loyal to the friends of his youth, and Reed, vain, egotistic, and utterly isolated from what was happening politically and economically in the country, wanted to run for President and solicited Tom’s support. Behind the scenes, however, Pendergast was assuring the Roosevelt forces they had his wholehearted admiration. Boss Tom told Ike B. Dunlap of Kansas City, a former Roosevelt classmate who was working for FDR’s nomination: “If Senator Reed decides to enter the campaign, I would be required to support him. Secondly, and unless something unforeseen occurs, I will be for Governor Roosevelt, whom I greatly admire.”

  When Jim Farley visited Kansas City on a delegate-hunting tour, state chairman Jim Aylward organized a magnificent luncheon at the Hotel Muehlebach which gave FDR’s field general a chance to meet practically every influential Democrat in that part of Missouri. Even after Pendergast took over the state nominating convention and secured Missouri’s delegation for Jim Reed, Ike B. Dunlap was writing to the Roosevelt forces, “Pendergast can be relied on.” Late in May, Tom Pendergast visited FDR in Albany and worked out an arrangement which guaranteed Roosevelt Missouri’s support, any time he needed it, after the first ballot at the convention. Boss Tom followed this procedure to the letter. After the first ballot, he released the Missouri delegation to Roosevelt little by little on succeeding ballots, so Reed did not get his feelings hurt while the organization did not alienate the man whom Boss Tom regarded as a sure winner.

  Roosevelt’s gratitude was demonstrated almost immediately after the election. One of Boss Tom’s closest supporters, although he was a Republican, was Conrad Mann, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Kansas City, and a key figure in persuading the citizens to vote into being the Pendergast-Truman $40 million Ten Year Plan. In 1932, Mann was sent to prison for running an illegal lottery. Pendergast went to Washington personally to intercede for him, and Mann received a presidential pardon in a matter of weeks. When Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins appointed a Republican, Martin Lewis, as state director of federal reemployment, Boss Tom had him fired, and Judge Harry Truman was given the job. My father, with his usual strictness about money matters, refused to accept the $300-a-month salary but took the job, which required twice-a-week trips to the state capital in Jefferson City.

  With the Roosevelt Administration in his corner, Boss Tom now turned his attention to Bennett Clark. This was in many ways a thornier problem. Senator Clark had trounced Pendergast’s nominee in the Democratic primary in 1932. Now it was 1934, and the Democrats were facing another senatorial contest for the seat of Republican Roscoe Patterson. Bennett Clark, backed by the aggressive Democratic organization in St. Louis, made it clear he intended to challenge the Kansas City Democrats again.

  Traditionally, Missouri had one senator from the eastern or St. Louis part of the state and one from the western or Kansas City part. If the Clark-St. Louis Democrats could elect two U.S. senators in a row from their bailiwick, they would be able to say with considerable authority that they and not Tom Pendergast controlled Missouri. The 1934 election was thus crucial for the Jackson County Democratic organization. Control not only of a swelling tide of federal patronage, but the Missouri State House was at stake. These facts should make it clear that Tom Pendergast did not, as some writers have claimed, nominate Harry S. Truman as an arrogant display of his political muscle. He was desperately in need of a winning candidate.

  Two formidable opponents had already entered the race. John J. Cochran, a veteran congressman from St. Louis, announced he was a candidate and promptly received the backing of the city’s mayor, Bernard F. Dickmann. On Cochran’s heels came Congressman Jacob L. (“Tuck”) Milligan, a much-decorated World War I veteran who represented a rural constituency around Richmond, Missouri. Cochran billed himself as the most popular congressman in Missouri. In 1932, when all the congressmen in the state had to run at large because the legislature’s redistricting had been vetoed by the governor, he led the Democratic ticket. Milligan called himself the rural candidate, although his home base was only fifty miles from Kansas City.

  Meanwhile, my father had been stumping the state on a completely different mission. The governor of Missouri had appointed him chairman of a committee sponsoring a bond issue to rebuild or replace dilapidated state hospitals, prisons, and other public institutions. Dad had already visited thirty-five counties, and was in Warsaw, Missouri, when he got a phone call from Jim Pendergast, his old army buddy, who asked him to join him and state chairman Jim Aylward in the Bothwell Hotel for a totally unexpected political powwow.

  As my father candidly admits, never had his optimism sunk so low as it had in the weeks before he received this call. His term as county judge was on the point of expiring, and by an agreed tradition two terms were a limit in this office. No one in the Jackson County Democratic organization, especially Tom Pendergast, was showing the slightest interest in his future. “I thought that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me,” he said. When he walked into the hotel room in Warsaw and found out he was being offered the nomination for senator, he was astounded. But he was also shrewd enough to see that the Jackson County Democratic organization needed him, just as much as he needed them. It was a repetition, on a statewide basis, of his first contact with the Pendergasts, when he ran for county judge. Before my father agreed to run, he made it clear he wanted and expected wholehearted support from the organization. Knowing that Jim Pendergast was speaking for Boss Tom, Dad extracted a declaration that guaranteed him “98 percent of the Democratic support in Kansas City.” Satisfied that he had a chance, at least, to win, he decided to make the race.

  On May 14, in the Pickwick Hotel in Kansas City, he paced the floor, unable to sleep. He sat down at the desk and wrote another of those intimate letters to himself. “Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4:00 a.m., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age.” He was fifty years old. What interests me most about this memorandum is its frank implication that he was planning to reach for greatness, with all the strength that was in him. He did not feel in the least unqualified to be a senator of the United States. “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over
themselves . . . self-discipline with all of them came first. I found that most of the really great ones never thought they were great. . . .” Dad seemed to sense he was launching himself in a new direction and concluded, “Now I am a candidate for the United States Senate. If the Almighty God decides that I go there, I am going to pray, as King Solomon did, for wisdom to do the job.”

  Until this point in his political career, my father had been relatively immune from partisan attacks. The Klan had flung mud at him, but not much of it had gotten into the newspapers. His record, his public reputation as discussed in the press, was spotless. Now he found himself being smeared by one of the oldest canards in politics, guilt by association. Bennett Clark solemnly declared: “The fear that lurks in everybody’s mind is that if elected to the Senate, Harry would not be able to have any more independent control of his own vote than he had as presiding judge of the county court of Jackson County.” One of Cochran’s supporters called him a bellboy and someone else called him Pendergast’s “office boy.” Congressman Milligan said Dad would get “callouses on his ears listening on the long-distance telephone to his boss” if he went to Washington.

  Candidate Truman struck back at these accusations, hard. He pointed out that in 1932, when all the congressmen in Missouri had run at large, Cochran and Milligan had both appeared hat in hand to seek the endorsement of Tom Pendergast and the Jackson County Democrats. Now they were alleging that Harry Truman, because he had that endorsement, was de facto corrupt. Milligan brazenly denied he had sought Pendergast’s support and attempted to portray Cochran and Truman as machine candidates. Bennett Clark joined him with a cry that Cochran backers were “beating down the ears of St. Louis employees to keep them in line for their candidate.”