Truman

by Roy Jenkins

  His Senate floor speeches were less distinguished. For the first two years they were almost non-existent. For the next two they were infrequent, strident and often ill-judged. They were populist in tone and a little out of date, William Jennings Bryan without the oratory or the imagery. The railroad companies in the early years of the century, he claimed, had been far bigger robbers than Jesse James and his hold-up gang who occasionally got away with a few tens of thousands of dollars from express cars. The Carnegie libraries were ‘steeped in the blood of the Homestead steel workers’. The Rockefeller Foundation was built ‘on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and a dozen other similar performances’. More interestingly, and under the influence of Justice Brandeis,3 who had taken him up, he launched an attack on bigness: ‘I believe that a thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with $4,000 million in assets … I also say that a thousand county seat towns of 7,000 people each are a thousand times more important to this Republic than one city of 7 million people.’

  The occasion of remarkable ill-judgment came in February 1938. Maurice Milligan, the brother of the Milligan who had opposed Truman in the 1934 primary, was at the end of his first term as District Attorney for the Kansas City area. Roosevelt, supported by his Attorney-General, was resolved to re-appoint him. This commanded the strong support of Governor Stark and the agreement of Senator Clark. It did not however command the agreement of Senator Truman, whose acquiescence might have been considered essential, on grounds of senatorial courtesy, in view of the location in the state of Milligan’s field of operation and the fact that Truman had previously done badly for patronage in comparison with Clark. The issue was now however not one of simple senatorial courtesy. Milligan, with Stark’s encouragement, was deeply involved in an investigation into Kansas City vote frauds at the 1936 elections. Pendergast was not directly involved for he had been ill in New York City at the time, but his machine most certainly was, and 259 over-eager supporters of it were convicted. It was also thought to be Truman’s machine. In addition, Federal agents, working with Milligan’s knowledge, were investigating Pendergast’s non-payment of income tax on his $750,000 insurance companies’ bribe.

  In these circumstances Roosevelt’s circumnavigation of Truman was understandable. Truman could have taken one of two courses, either of which, without being glorious, would have had something to be said for it. He could have rolled with the punch and quietly accepted Milligan, hoping that Roosevelt would compensate him on some future occasion. Or he could simply have blocked Milligan in the Senate, by saying, without reasons, that his re-appointment was unacceptable to him. The Senate would have drawn its own conclusions but it would almost certainly, for the sake of the prerogatives of other senators, not have overruled him.

  He did neither. He waived his right to formal objection, but launched a most violent attack on the whole administration of justice in Jackson County. Of course, he said, he did not defend voting frauds. (He could hardly have said otherwise.) Those responsible should be prosecuted. But not by the methods employed. Milligan was corrupt because he accepted bankruptcy fees outside his salary. His witch hunting made him the cheap hero of the Kansas City Star and the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He was supported both in his corruption and in his prosecutions by two Republican judges, the strength of who’s impartiality could be deduced from the facts that one was appointed by President Harding and the other by President Coolidge. Milligan and they could only get convictions by excluding inhabitants of Jackson County from juries in federal cases in the district. His conclusion was as extreme as it could be: ‘I say to this Senate that 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.’

  Truman’s speech was hardly designed to make friends, either in Missouri or on Capitol Hill. It did not. It was heard with impatience by his opponents and with embarrassment by his normal allies. No one voted with him. He cast a single ‘nay’ vote. What was his motive? To support Pendergast, most people said. To revive the humiliating label of being his ‘office boy’ after three years of working to rub it off? And to do so at a time when Pendergast was manifestly no longer in a position to do anything more for Truman? The explanation does not begin to make sense.

  Was it then just spleen against Roosevelt’s disregard of him? Probably he was offended at the time. But nineteen months later he was writing to his wife with a remarkable calm wisdom about his relations with the President on exactly this type of issue. And this was when it was becoming depressingly clear to him that F.D.R. was probably for Stark, and certainly not ringingly for Truman, for renomination in 1940. ‘I am most happy you are back in line,’ he wrote on September 24th, 1939. ‘You should not have gotten out seriously. [Presumably Mrs Truman had not unnaturally gone a little cool on Roosevelt.] My patronage troubles were the result of the rotten situation in Kansas City and also the jealous disposition of my colleague. While the President is unreliable, the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country, and jobs should not interfere with general principles. With most people they do.’3

  More probably Truman just acted almost on impulse, although he must have prepared his speech over at least a few hours, without advice or any clearly worked-out objective. He was irritated, he was frustrated, he hated to trim, he could stand isolation and disapproval, so he lashed out without much thought of the consequences. It was a similar reaction to that which he exhibited in the letters of expostulation, a few privately posted but the majority fortunately not sent, with which he relieved his feelings during his presidency. However this speech was neither suppressed nor privately posted, but indelibly inscribed in the records of the Senate and impressed, although fortunately not indelibly, upon the memories of many of those who heard it. If the qualities he exhibited on this occasion, rashness, ill-judgment, pig-headed lack of concern for his own immediate interest, had to be weighed against each other and the balance measured as a test of fitness for the highest office the result would have been an almost unanimous adverse view.

  However, in the second part of his first Senate term, the last thing that Truman himself, or anyone else, was thinking about was his fitness for the highest office. It began to seem increasingly unlikely that he would be able to continue in the Senate. The indictment of Pendergast in April 1939 was a major blow. Although Truman had slowly shaken off the slur of being the boss’s office boy, the gain was substantially offset by the boss turning out to be not merely a boss but a crook, who was sent to serve 15 months in Leavenworth, which had one of the most symbolic names of the Federal penitentiaries, as well as the disadvantage of sitting on the doorstep of Kansas City. There was no question of Truman being directly involved in the scandals, but apart from inevitable guilt by association the collapse of the Kansas City machine threatened him with a substantial loss of votes in any primary contest.

  From the early summer of 1939 it was obvious that there was going to be such a contest. Governor Stark previously had alerted Truman, so the latter always subsequently asserted, by assuring him that, although he might be pressed, he would never run against him. Soon after the Pendergast débâcle, Stark declared himself a candidate. (Later Milligan, the disputed US Attorney, came into the contest too.) A year or so before Truman had been doubtful about how much he wanted to continue in the Senate, with the dreary Washington apartment life that it involved for him. Stark’s emergence concentrated his mind. ‘I’m going to lick that double-crossing, lying governor if I can keep my health,’ he wrote to his wife from Washington on July 5th.3 ‘If I do then I can really do something here for Missouri. I know I could if old Jack or Wheeler should happen to be the fair-haired boy.’4

  The interesting sentence is the third one. Truman, not unreasonably at that stage, two months before the outbreak of the war in Europe, was not contempl
ating a third term for Roosevelt. Retrospectively, however, his idea of possible successors does suggest a remarkable inwardness of senatorial approach. ‘Old Jack’ was Garner, already 71 and about to retire from the strains of the vice-presidency to his Texas ranch, from which he hardly ever subsequently emerged, and, perhaps for this reason, lived to the age of 99. Wheeler became one of the most isolationist of senators. Truman was not an early prophet of the imperial presidency.

  Indeed, even when the European War had started and Roosevelt had begun to nibble at staying on, Truman remained opposed to a break with tradition. So was Bennett Clark, who even thought of himself for the nomination, an idea to which Truman gave some support. This had the unfortunate effect of further improving the position with Roosevelt of Governor Stark, who was unequivocally for a third term from the beginning. Quite how well the President thought of Stark is not clear. He delivered some disparaging non sequiturs (’I do not think your governor is a real liberal … He has no sense of humour … He has a large ego …’) about him to Truman in August 1939, which the latter gratefully recorded to his wife. But this may just have been playing a little politics with Truman. He certainly did not discourage Stark, he blandly declined to endorse Truman, and by January 1940, he regarded him as sufficiently unlikely to win that he offered him a well-paid appointment to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

  Truman himself at this stage probably took little better a view of his own chances than did Roosevelt. His daughter recorded: ‘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.’5 Nevertheless he became determined to run. It was not particularly his love of the Senate. Much more it was his contrariness, his good appetite for a fight against the odds, and an inherent optimism in adversity. When things were going well he was sceptical and self-critical. His good opinion of himself mostly surfaced when he was up against a wall. Life could not be as bad as it looked. Apart from anything else he deserved that it should be better. An almost equal resistance to both euphoria and despair was one of his most considerable qualities. He was not particularly magnanimous in victory, but he was certainly defiant in the face of defeat. It was the spirit which had given him control over D Battery in 1918, and which was to get him through in 1948. Perhaps, as has been ingeniously suggested by one of his later biographers, it was due to his abnormally slow heart-beat.6 It sounds as good an explanation as any other.

  The early stages of the 1940 campaign were about as discouraging as it is possible to imagine. There was practically no money, little apparent support on the ground, and a nearly universal conviction that the fight was hopeless. The Jackson County machine, his base in 1934, was in ruins. The press was not merely hostile but often derisory. Milligan declared as a third candidate in March, and while this somewhat weakened Stark it also made Truman’s base seem even more exiguous, and in particular gave Bennett Clark, whose half-promised support Truman desperately wanted, a reason for further equivocation. Clark by this time was bitterly hostile to Stark, but really preferred Milligan to Truman.

  There were only a few people in Missouri who remained wholly loyal and worked devotedly from the beginning, but even they did so without any conviction of victory. One was Jim Pendergast, but the name had become useless. Others were John Snyder, a St Louis banker, whom Truman was to make an undistinguished Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel (of the reserve) Harry Vaughan, who as General Vaughan was to become Truman’s not wholly impeccable military aide, and a core crony in the White House. Truman’s gratitude to those who were staunch during the months of apparent hopelessness remained intense.

  How, out of this impossible beginning, did he snatch victory? His dogged determination was an essential basis. He also had good pockets of hidden support, which responded well to his vigorous, hard hitting but intimate, face-to-face campaigning. And the luck suddenly began to run with him. Stark, who was far enough ahead to prevent the more effective Milligan looking a serious challenger, began to defeat himself.

  Truman’s campaign opened officially at the mid-state town of Sedalia on June 15th, 1940, the day after German troops entered Paris. He was supported on the platform by Senator Schwellenbach of Washington State. Aid from other senators became a strong feature of his campaign. Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Carl Hatch of New Mexico came to speak for him in St Louis (unfortunately attracting an audience of only 300 in a hall for 3,500, which at least gave great pleasure to the Post-Dispatch), as, elsewhere, did one or two others. And public messages of support poured in from a wide span of leading Democrats: Wagner of New York, Connally of Texas, Byrnes of South Carolina, Harrison of Mississippi, Wheeler of Montana.

  In addition Truman got massive labour union support, particularly from the railroad brotherhoods, who remembered with favour his work on the Wheeler sub-committee. A. F. Whitney, the president of the trainmen, with whom Truman was to have a very rough joust in 1946, was much to the fore. ‘Truman for Senator’ clubs were set up at the main depôts, and half a million copies of a special union produced newspaper were distributed throughout the state. These were careful to stress his support for agriculture as well as his labour relations record.

  Truman also did well with blacks: there were still relatively few in Kansas City, but more in St Louis, and a quarter of a million in the state as a whole. At Sedalia he made a firm civil rights pronouncement, certainly the strongest of his career until then. There has been some suggestion that this stemmed more from opportunism than from principle. He needed the votes. Stark was weak in the black constituency. And he therefore cast aside his traditional Missouri prejudices in a blatant piece of political angling.

  The main argument for this view is that as a young man he had been full of racial prejudice, although no doubt no more so than most Missouri Democrats of his time. ‘I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman’, he had written to Bess Wallace in June 1911. ‘Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America. ‘7 And for several decades after that he used the word nigger without embarrassment both in private writing and speech. The arguments the other way are first that at Sedalia he desperately needed a warm response to the start to his campaign and that there were probably more in that summer’s day country town audience to be alienated than won on the issue; and more significantly, that the line he there laid down was one to which he adhered increasingly strongly in his years power.

  However the main force working on Truman’s side during the campaign was Stark’s humourless, megalomaniac ambition. It led him to alienate too many people, both amongst politicians and the public. He strutted around Missouri surrounded by uniformed colonels from the state troopers, which display, Margaret Truman wrote, ‘made him look like a South American dictator’. He misjudged the mood of audiences. But above all he ran for too many offices at the same time. In April he was being talked about as Secretary of the Navy. In July, less than a month before the primary vote, he suddenly threw his hat into the vice-presidential ring, only to see it contemptuously thrown out within a day or so, both by Roosevelt, who wanted Henry Wallace, and by his own Missouri delegation which, under Clark’s control, was for Bankhead, the Speaker of the House. Clark was not much good at positive support for Truman, a cause in which he never had his heart, but he was good at opposing Stark, who was threatening his own power base, and particularly at ridiculing his pretensions.

  Truman also had the luck to achieve a last minute alliance of opportunism in St Louis, the city in which he had been annihilated in the 1934 primary. The Democratic machine there had been for Stark, but they were more committed to their own candidate to succeed Stark as Governor (under
Missouri law he was ineligible for a second term or he might have run for that as well), and discovered late that they needed Truman’s support for this candidate. Dickmann, the Mayor, probably remained with Stark, but the up and coming figure in St Louis politics, Robert Hannegan, switched and worked hard for Truman. Hannegan’s efforts, even if late, were crucial. Truman beat Stark by 8,411 in St Louis, which was within 500 votes of his bare and unexpected majority throughout the state. Hannegan was to become Democratic National Chairman within four years.

  The victory, while it had ceased to seem impossible during the campaign, remained unexpected up to the night of counting. Truman went to bed on August 6th with those around him still believing he had lost. He woke up to find he had probably won, but the needle flickered until 11.00 a.m. when it finally settled. He had overcome not merely a severe crisis of morale but the specific handicap of a major collapse of his Jackson County position. His majority there was down from 128,000 in 1934 to 20,000 and the total vote had shrunk to two-thirds of the nominally recorded 1934 figures. Pendergast’s old strength was even more vividly displayed by his absence than it had been by his presence. In the outstate counties Truman ran just enough behind Stark to dissipate his Jackson County lead. This left the result to be settled by St Louis, where the favourable turn round in his position was as spectacular as the unfavourable one in Kansas City.