To make sure everybody got the point, Dad put through a call to Steve Early, the press secretary at the White House. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got a message for the President. Tell him to stop treating me like an office boy.”
WHILE NATIONAL POLITICS and legislative investigations absorbed my father in Washington, he was also deeply involved in Missouri politics. People who wanted jobs or favors sought his help constantly. This was how he came to meet a man who was to give him many a bad hour - Lloyd Stark. One of the owners of Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards Company, reputedly the largest apple producers in the nation, Stark was a millionaire with very strong political ambitions. He had served with distinction in World War I and as early as 1932 had sought the support of Jackson County Democrats for the nomination for governor. But Tom Pendergast had turned him down. Undiscouraged, Stark continued to woo Boss Tom by mail and through every friend who had access to him.
A man of considerable charm, Stark came to Washington and soon convinced both my father and Bennett Clark to support his bid for Jackson County’s votes. Late in 1935, Dad and Senator Clark escorted Stark to New York where Tom Pendergast was staying, en route to a European vacation. They urged Tom to support Stark for governor in the 1936 election. Looking back, my father has always ruefully admitted this was one of the greatest political mistakes he ever made. After much cajoling from Missouri’s two senators, Boss Tom reluctantly agreed to back Stark if he could prove he had “out-state” - that is, rural - support.
This seemed at first glance an easy thing for Stark to do. Farmers had been buying Stark’s Delicious apple trees from the Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards Company for decades. But selling people apples and apple trees and getting their votes are not quite the same thing. Stark could never have gotten the nomination without the help of Harry S. Truman. Dad sent him a personal list he had compiled, containing the names of the key men in each county who had worked for him in 1934. Stark was soon sending Pendergast a list of out-state names, all of whom were carefully primed to assure Boss Tom that Stark was strong in their section of Missouri. By October, Pendergast capitulated and guaranteed Stark Jackson County’s Democratic votes. Both Dad and Bennett Clark campaigned vigorously for Stark in the primary and general election, and he swept to an enormous victory in 1936.
Meanwhile, another Democrat had entered the Jackson County political scene. He was Maurice Milligan, brother of Jacob (“Tuck”) Milligan, the congressman whom Dad had defeated in 1934. Bennett Clark, an old friend of Tuck Milligan, had wangled the post of federal district attorney in Kansas City for his brother.
Maurice Milligan launched an investigation of the 1936 election in Kansas City. He was no friend of Jackson County Democrats, and he was emboldened by the absence of Tom Pendergast, who had suffered a physical breakdown in New York earlier in the year - a severe heart attack followed by a serious cancer operation. Soon Milligan was marching Democrats by the dozen into the federal court, where they were tried under a Reconstruction Era statute originally intended to protect black voting rights in the post-Civil War South. It permitted the federal government to intervene in state voting practices, if the right to vote was being denied to a substantial number of a state’s citizens. This was not the case in Kansas City; the defendants were prosecuted for padding the vote in their districts by using names of citizens long dead, or in some cases totally imaginary. The cases were tried before two ultra-Republican judges; the juries were composed exclusively of people from outside Jackson County.
For two years, the trials dragged on, and 259 Democrats were convicted. None of them had previous police records. They were all ordinary citizens, who, if they were guilty at all, had allowed their enthusiasm for the Democratic Party to run away with their judgment. Arthur Krock in The New York Times, pointing out that the extra votes had not even been necessary to win the election in Missouri, explained the phenomenon: “Any observer of city politics knows the real answer. Each party worker of the professional type is an office seeker. From him results are demanded in exchange for jobs. The better showing he makes, the higher his standing over rival precinct, ward or district workers. This competition has led the boys to be what the boss calls ‘overzealous.’”
Watching this performance from Washington, D.C., my father did a slow burn. He had no love for Maurice Milligan in the first place. Every big city machine in those days padded its voting rolls. The Grundy Republican machine did it in Philadelphia, and the Hague Democratic machine did it in Jersey City. No one was investigating them under a Reconstruction statute, and that brought all the latent Southern sympathies in the Truman bloodstream to a simmering boil. Then Dad discovered Milligan himself was not simon-pure; he had been accepting fees in bankruptcy proceedings in the Federal Court of Western Missouri, something no federal attorney should have done. In 1938, when Milligan’s term as federal attorney expired, Dad felt strongly that he should not be reappointed. He was wrecking the Democratic Party in Missouri for his own aggrandizement.
When the Roosevelt Administration, with the support of Bennett Clark, reappointed Milligan, my father made his most controversial Senate speech:
My opposition to Mr. Milligan began long before vote frauds were brought to light in Kansas City. His morals and political thinking never did appeal to me.
The President has appointed him and the President wants him confirmed because of a situation in Kansas City due to vote fraud prosecutions in the Federal Court. Mr. Milligan has been made a hero by the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch because of these prosecutions.
My father went on to castigate Milligan for accepting bankruptcy fees, pointing out he had received more money in fees in one case than his federal salary totaled in an entire year.
The Republican federal judges had smiled sweetly on this practice. Dad also accused these gentlemen of intimidating defending lawyers in the vote fraud cases. Above all, Dad deplored the refusal to let a single person from Jackson County - a community of 600,000 people - sit on a jury. Even petit jury panels, he said, were investigated by the Secret Service, and if a man was found to have acquaintances in Jackson County he was barred from service. “I say to this Senate,” Dad declared, “a Jackson County Missouri Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin. . . .”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a Daniel Fitzpatrick cartoon showing a Charlie McCarthy dummy on a knee saying, “Milligan and those judges are railroading the Democrats.” The caption reads: “Charlie McTruman does his stuff.” The Kansas City Star’s comments were, of course, equally caustic, and even the Journal-Post said my father had “done his cause no particular good” by attacking the high-riding Milligan. No one bothered to listen to the facts in Dad’s speech. Everyone assumed he was simply trying to protect the Pendergast machine. Dad owed Tom Pendergast political loyalty, and he always gave it to him, but never at the expense of his own conscience. In fact, my father recommended to President Roosevelt that Milligan be given a special appointment to continue his prosecution of the vote fraud cases, but some other deserving attorney, more acceptable to Jackson County Democrats, be given the district attorney’s job. Nobody except those closest to him shared Dad’s point of view or appreciated the courage it took to express it in the teeth of the inevitable disapproval of the two most powerful newspapers in Missouri.
The Senate reconfirmed Milligan. Meanwhile, Governor Lloyd Stark, sensing Tom Pendergast’s weakness, entered the battle on Milligan’s side. He cut off all patronage for Jackson County Democrats and challenged Boss Tom in a battle for the choice of a Supreme Court justice. Stark won and, together with Milligan, journeyed to Washington and asked President Roosevelt to assign a federal task force to make an exhaustive investigation of Tom Pendergast and his organization. A team composed of FBI and Treasury agents and special investigators from the Attorney General’s office soon descended on Kansas City, with
shattering results. Tom Pendergast pleaded guilty to evading more than $1 million in income taxes over the preceding decade, and was sentenced to fifteen months in jail and five years’ probation. City Manager Henry McElroy resigned and died shortly before he was to be brought to trial for juggling Kansas City’s municipal books to conceal huge deficits. Several other high-ranking members of the Jackson County political organization went to jail.
I find it hard to describe how stunned my father was by these developments. He knew Tom Pendergast gambled on the horses. But he had no conception of the fantastic mania which eventually obsessed and destroyed the man. Tom reached the point where he gambled on every horse race that was run in the entire United States on a single day. By the mid-30s his losses were staggering, and he had been forced to indulge in massive fraud to sustain this destructive compulsion.
Numerous Democrats around the state rushed to denounce the fallen leader and did their utmost to pretend they had always been independent of Tom Pendergast. My father remained silent. I remember one day in 1939, being in his office when he received a call from a reporter in Missouri who urged him to condemn Pendergast and point proudly to his record of independent achievement in Jackson County and in the Senate - something Dad could certainly have done. Instead, he became infuriated at the suggestion. “I’m not a rat who deserts a sinking ship,” he snapped.
Never before or since can I recall my father being so gloomy as he was in those latter months of 1939 after Tom Pendergast went to prison. Nothing seemed to be going right. The transportation bill, the product of his four years of enormous effort investigating the railroads, was being blocked in the Senate, with Bennett Clark doing not a little of the blocking. Early in 1940, he wrote a friend in St. Louis, “I feel as if my four years and a half hard work has been practically wasted.”
Reminiscing in later years about his Senate career, my father wryly remarked that when men first come to the Senate, “They have four years in which to be statesmen. I spent that period myself. Then they have a year in which to be politicians. And one of my good friends from the great State of Washington told me that the last year the senator had to be a demagogue if he expected to come back to the Senate. I never heard a statement that is truer than that.”
By instinct, Dad rejected the idea of being a demagogue. But he did recognize the kernel of truth in that remark - a senator had to make some kind of a splash in his last year to remind the voters he had not been wasting his time and their money in Washington. The transportation bill was Dad’s hoped-for triumph along this line, and it was heartbreaking to see it bogged down in a tangle of objections raised by other senators.
Then came an even more dismaying revelation. Lloyd Stark was in Washington again, visiting the White House. He and FDR had become quite chummy, exchanging notes on a “Dear Lloyd” basis. Stark had come whooping out for a third term for Roosevelt, and there was considerable talk, at least in Missouri, about him winning the vice presidential nomination. Vice President Garner had made it clear he was going to retire. He also made it clear he did not believe in more than two terms for a President - another Roosevelt innovation that was splitting the Democratic Party. My father, with his respect for American political tradition, felt the same way. He made a number of public statements disapproving a third term, but he added that if the Democratic Party nominated the President, he would support him. With this for background, you can imagine Dad’s anger when Lloyd Stark dropped in to see him in his Senate office and attempted to pull the cheapest of all cheap political tricks.
“Everybody keeps telling me that I ought to run for the Senate,” he said with a bland smile, “but don’t you worry about it, Harry, I wouldn’t dream of running against you.”
As a Machiavelli, Stark was almost laughably inept. Dad saw instantly that the governor was trying to lull him into a state of security, so he could catch him flat-footed with the announcement of his candidacy.
The moment Stark left the office, my father said to his secretary, Vic Messall, “That S.O.B. is going to run against me.”
The 1940 campaign had begun.
“I am going tο run for reelection, if the only vote I get is my own.”
That is what I remember my father saying early in 1940.
According to some reports from Missouri, that was about all the votes he could expect. In spite of the support Dad had given the Roosevelt Administration, Lloyd Stark seemed to have FDR’s blessing. The brisk correspondence between the President and the governor, the frequent White House visits, continued. The Jackson County Democrats were in sad disarray, cringing every time the name Pendergast was mentioned.
Late in January my father made a trip to Missouri to see what he could do about rallying some support. He wrote to some thirty friends who he was sure would stick with him and asked them to meet with him in the Statler Hotel in St. Louis to discuss his campaign Less than half of them showed up, and those who came spent most of their time telling Dad he did not have a chance. He could not even persuade anyone to take on the vital job of finance chairman for the campaign.
One of the few who urged him to run was Harry Easley, an old friend from Webb City in southwest Missouri. He had known Dad since 1932, and he arrived in time to have breakfast with him and report that Senator Truman had a lot of support in his part of the state. Just after breakfast, while Easley was in one room of Dad’s suite and Dad was busy in another room, the phone rang. It was the White House calling. Easley hastily summoned Dad’s secretary, Vic Messall, who in turn asked my father if he wanted to come to the phone. Dad shook his head, and Vic took the message from FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early. It was an offer from the President. If Senator Truman would withdraw from the race, he could have a seat on the Interstate Commerce Commission, a life appointment at a salary that was a lot more than senators were paid. “Tell them to go to hell,” Dad said. “I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to run.”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found out about the discouraging meeting and chortled over Dad’s discomfiture: “Harry Truman, the erstwhile Ambassador in Washington of the defunct principality of Pendergastia, is back home, appraising his chances of being re-elected to the Senate. They are nil. He is a dead cock in the pit.”
My father went back to Washington, profoundly discouraged. John Snyder, who was working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, joined him in his Senate office for another conference. It was a very depressing talk. Snyder could do little for him, directly, because he was a government employee. The overwhelming problem was money. As Snyder recalls the meeting, “The thought came to me that we hadn’t even enough money to buy the postage stamps to write to anybody to help us.” Not long after he made this glum observation, the meeting started to break up on a note of complete despair. But as Snyder was leaving, Dad reiterated his determination to run: “I can’t walk out on the charges that have been made against me. For my own self-respect, if nothing else, I must run.”
Snyder promised to meet him for another conference on the following day. As he left the Senate Office Building, he met an old friend from St. Louis, Horace Deal. “John, what’s happened to you?” asked Deal. “You look like you’ve just been run through a wringer.”
“Well,” Snyder said, “that couldn’t be a better description of how I feel.” He told him about his meeting with Dad and their seemingly hopeless economic plight.
“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it,” Deal said.
“It is,” said Snyder.
“Well, maybe it’s not all that bad,” Deal said. Whereupon he took out his checkbook, opened it on the fender of a car, and wrote out a check for $1,000. “I didn’t even stop to thank him,” Snyder says. “I grabbed it and ran back into the building, and into Senator Truman’s office.” He waved the check in front of Dad and said, “Well, at least we can buy postage stamps.”
Less than a week later, on my father’s orders, Vic Messall drove to Jefferson City and filed the necessary papers to make Dad a candidate for reelecti
on. “I am filing for reelection to the United States Senate today. . . . I am asking the voters of the state of Missouri to renominate and reelect me on my record as a public official and United States Senator,” Dad said in a statement from Washington.
Governor Stark had already filed for the senatorial primary. He declared himself an all-out Roosevelt supporter and called for a third term. He also piously declared he was “not planning an attack on any other Democrat in order to win the nomination.” This lofty pose was based on his assumption he was so far ahead he could coast to victory.
For reasons I’ve already stated, Dad was not an enthusiastic backer of Roosevelt for a third term. In the statement announcing his candidacy, Dad reiterated this stand and declared himself ready to support Bennett Clark for President at the 1940 convention. By this time, Senator Clark had completely broken with Roosevelt and was edging toward the isolationists in Congress, severely criticizing the Roosevelt defense program. War had already begun in Europe, and Dad was a wholehearted backer of the defense program. He and Senator Clark simply did not see eye to eye on this and a host of other issues. But with loyalty to the Democratic Party and to Missouri as his cardinal virtue, my father was ready to offer Bennett his support if FDR withdrew or the convention was deadlocked.
Senator Clark did not reciprocate with any statement of support for Senator Truman. That was not his style. But he reacted savagely against Governor Stark’s attempt to take over the Democratic Party in Missouri and control the delegation to the 1940 national convention. Several voices had already been raised, suggesting Governor Stark as a presidential candidate in his own right. Others continued to say he would make an excellent vice president on the Roosevelt ticket. The governor did nothing to discourage either of these sentiments.
Even before my father filed for the Senate race, warfare had erupted between Senator Clark and Governor Stark. On January 4, 1940, Bennett, in his inimitably sarcastic style, told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter what he thought of Stark:
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