But when he went to see T.J., he was told the choice was no longer his. Pendergast had picked another man, a circuit court judge named Jasper Bell (who would win handily in the primary, and again in November, and go on to serve six terms in Congress). Crestfallen, Harry found himself out in the cold again, “maneuvered out,” as he said.
Weeks went by. Nothing more was mentioned, no further offer made. His spirits fell to a new low.
Then, in early May 1934, without warning, everything changed. Stopping at Warsaw, Missouri, on a speaking tour, he received a call from Jim Pendergast asking him to meet as soon as possible at the Bothwell Hotel in Sedalia. It was a matter of importance.
The drive to Sedalia took about half an hour. Pendergast had Jim Aylward with him and the three of them drew up chairs in a corner of the hotel lobby. Harry had no idea what was coming.
There had been a meeting, he was told. T.J. wanted him to run for the United States Senate. Harry was incredulous, almost speechless.
“The Boss is 95 percent for you,” Aylward assured him.
“What’s wrong with the other five percent?” Truman asked.
“Oh you know what I mean,” Aylward said. “The Boss is for you.”
He needed time to think, Truman said. They told him he had to do it for the good of the party, and this apparently settled the issue. He agreed to run but said he was broke. In another day or so, Aylward and Jim Pendergast each gave him $500 to get started.
As Harry learned soon enough, he was anything but T.J.’s first choice for the Senate. T.J. had asked at least three others to run, only to be turned down by all three. Jim Reed had been asked first, largely as a courtesy. (The New York Times had predicted Reed would be the choice.) When Reed said no, T.J. turned to Joe Shannon, who professed feeling too out of sympathy with the New Deal and said that at his age he preferred to remain in the House. The third and most serious choice was Aylward, who, everyone agreed, would have made a strong candidate and a first-rate senator if elected. His name had been mentioned repeatedly in the papers as a prime possibility. But Aylward had no longing for the life in Washington, he told T.J., no wish to give up time with his family or leave his law practice.
Other names came up. When Jim Pendergast suggested Harry Truman, whose name to this moment had never been on anyone’s list, Aylward enthusiastically agreed. T.J. was skeptical. “Do you mean to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be elected to the United States Senate,” Aylward would remember Pendergast exclaiming. But Aylward and Jim persisted until T.J. agreed.
Joe Shannon, when consulted, said he thought T.J.’s initial reaction had been the right one. Truman was “too light,” Shannon thought. “A very pleasant sort of fellow,” Shannon would later explain to a reporter. “And he’s clean…. On the other hand…I don’t think he’s heavy enough for the Senate. I can’t imagine him there….” But, added Shannon, “Tom hasn’t got a field of world-beaters to pick from.”
The Truman candidacy was announced on May 14, 1934. Before dawn that morning, alone in a room at the Pickwick Hotel, he had written:
Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4 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 and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me.
II
The state of Missouri comprises nearly 70,000 square miles, an area larger than all New England. The population in 1934 was 3.7 million, with more than 1 million people, roughly a third, concentrated in the two largest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, some 260 miles apart at opposite ends of the state.
The landscape varied enormously, from the low alluvial cottonlands of the southeastern “Boot Heel,” along the Mississippi, to the rugged Ozark Hills in the south-central section, to the prairie farmlands along the Kansas border. A dozen railroads crisscrossed the state and a half-dozen airlines flew in and out of St. Louis and Kansas City, while charter plane service was available for such smaller cities as St. Joseph, Springfield, and Joplin. But it was by automobile that Missouri Democrats waged their primary battles for Congress that summer of 1934, with candidates and campaign workers, hundreds of soldiers in the ranks, fanning out over the state, traveling many thousands of miles. And though the two major highways between Kansas City and St. Louis—Route 40 through Columbia, and Route 50 by way of Jefferson City—were the fastest, main-traveled roads, there was hardly a road anywhere, hardtop or dirt, that went untraveled, as each faction tried to win the courthouse towns in a state where there were a total of 114 county seats. And it was a task made no easier by the fact that the summer of 1934 in Missouri was the hottest on record.
The heat came up from the highways in shimmering waves, like a mirage on the desert. “It was 104 yesterday and 102 today,” Kathleen Pendergast, the wife of Jim Pendergast, read in a letter from her husband, who had been on the road, “busy running hither and thither,” as he said, ever since Harry Truman made his announcement. Jim Pendergast and Jim Aylward had driven first to Jefferson City, to be sure Guy B. Park was “in line,” and to call on those state employees—a very great number indeed—who, like Governor Park, owed their jobs to the Kansas City organization. At the same time, some fifty others from Kansas City were traveling the state, dispatched to whichever county or small town they had originally come from, to drum up support for Judge Truman. Jim’s assignment for the moment was to call on local newspapers. Distressed by the weather, he longed for a storm to clear the air. But in all the temperature would register 100 degrees or above for twenty-one days in July. Only Harry Truman appeared untroubled by the heat, a peculiarity that would be noticed often in times ahead.
It was Aylward, now chairman of the state committee, who ran the campaign, and the opening Truman rally at Columbia was a model operation, as “Kansas City took over Columbia.” An estimated four thousand people filled the lawn in front of the Boone County Courthouse, close by the University of Missouri campus. Besides the busloads of people from Kansas City, a big Jefferson City turnout had been orchestrated—state employees from every department reportedly—and a “newfangled loud speaking truck” stood by to carry Judge Truman’s speech, a sure sign, said the papers, of politics brought up to date. With the noise and color of the gathering crowds and an American Legion band pumping away, the mood seemed more like that of a homecoming game.
Harry had two opponents in the race, Jacob L. (“Tuck”) Milligan from Richmond, and John J. (“Jack”) Cochran from St. Louis, both of whom were Missouri congressmen experienced in the ways of Washington and far better known than Harry. Cochran, a big, friendly, humorous, and honest man, was favored to win. He was “a congressman’s congressman,” someone known to understand the “wheels-within-wheels” intricacy of government, and who, importantly, also had the support of the St. Louis counterpart of the Pendergast machine, the so-called “Igoe-Dickmann organization.” Tuck Milligan, in his favor, was backed by Senator Bennett Clark—Milligan was seen as Clark’s way of again challenging Tom Pendergast and gaining a second seat for himself in the Senate—and like his father before him, Clark was a colorful, two-fisted stump speaker.
Opening their campaigns weeks earlier, Milligan and Cochran had both focused on Harry Truman’s one clear advantage in the race, the Pendergast power behind him, as his greatest liability, portraying him as a mere machine stooge. Their attacks, furthermore, came just as the excesses of the organization had again become lurid news, as violence in Kansas City’s municipal elections left dozens of people injured and four dead. So Harry was an easy mark.
Now, at Columbia, in a speech carried statewide by radio, he lashed back. “It will be remembered that Mr. Milligan and Mr. Cochran journeyed to Kansas City two years ago and sought and received the endorsement of the Kansas City organization for their races for the nomination as congressman at large for Missouri.” As for Bennett Clark, he only wanted more power, to make himself boss.
&
nbsp; In days following, in Saline County and at Boonville, Harry tried to change the tone and subject. The Depression was the issue, he insisted, declaring his all-out faith in the New Deal. (“A New Deal for Missouri” said a placard in the window of the “newfangled loud speaking truck.”) He talked of the capitalist domination of government in bygone Republican times, praised the determination of FDR to end the “rule of the rich” and give the average American a chance. Ninety percent of the wealth of the country was in the hands of 4 percent of the population, he said at Springfield. Roosevelt was “the man of the hour” to chase the moneychangers from the temple, “so that the common people of the country could have a chance at the good things of life.” The party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was the party “for the everyday man just like you and me.” He called for shorter working hours, higher pay, old-age pensions, payment of the soldiers’ bonus. He also called his opponents in the primary his friends and said any remarks he might make about them would be of a purely political nature.
But the Pendergast issue would not go away. And since Milligan and Cochran were both stressing their own all-out support for Roosevelt, Pendergast was in practicality the only issue.
Then, on Tuesday, July 10, with Harry’s campaign not yet a week old, the quiet of night in Kansas City exploded with machine-gun fire. It happened at 3:00 A.M. The victim this time was Johnny Lazia, cut down as he was about to open a car door for his wife in front of the Park Central Hotel. Two unknown assailants had been waiting in the dark. Lazia was hit eight times. “Why to me, to Johnny Lazia, who has been a friend to everybody?” he moaned to a doctor at the hospital. According to the account spread across the front page of the early morning edition of the Kansas City Journal-Post, he then delivered what were very nearly his last words: “If anything happens, notify Mr. Pendergast…my best friend, and tell him I love him.”
Tom Pendergast and City Manager McElroy were prominent among the mourners at Holy Rosary Catholic Church for Lazia’s funeral, the biggest ever seen in Kansas City, despite a temperature of 106 degrees. “There were at least ten thousand people down around the church who couldn’t get in,” Jim Pendergast recorded. “Of course a lot of them were simply curiosity seekers, but Johnny did have a world of friends.”
The next night, across the state near St. Louis, at Washington, Missouri, Senator Bennett Clark, in support of Tuck Milligan, pulled off his tie, loosened his collar, and tore into Harry Truman as no one ever had until then. It was Missouri politics “with the bark off,” the style Missouri loved.
It seems my old friend Judge Harry S. Truman finds it easier to abuse me than to set forth his own qualifications [the senator began slowly]. His opening speech at Columbia, which was attended almost exclusively by a mob from Kansas City—in fact I am informed the natives looked over the crowd to see if Dillinger was there—by a lot of state employees ordered out by their superiors as a condition to holding their jobs and herded over in buses like trucks carrying cattle to market, was largely an attack on me.
Harry fears that someone from the eastern part of Missouri may undertake to set up as boss. Harry Truman fears a boss in Missouri—God save the mark! Harry places the intelligence of the Democrats of Missouri so low and estimates their credulity so high that he actually went into great length in promising people that if elected to the Senate he would not set up as a boss or undertake to dictate to anybody. Why, bless Harry’s good kind heart—no one has ever accused him of being a boss or wanting to be a boss and nobody will ever suspect him of trying to dictate to anybody in his own right as long as a certain eminent citizen of Jackson County remains alive and in possession of his health and faculties…. In view of the judge’s record of subserviency in Jackson County it would seem that his assurances against any assumption of boss-ship are a trifle gratuitous to say the least.
When all three candidates, plus Bennett Clark and Governor Guy B. Park, appeared at a huge picnic in Clay County, north of Kansas City, an annual affair sponsored by St. Munchins Catholic Church, Harry was clearly outclassed. Bennett Clark held the crowd spellbound, though it was Milligan who got the biggest applause. Ten thousand people sat resolutely through four hours of political oratory, as the sun beat down. “Deeply interested in the array of political lights that paraded across the rough board rostrum,” wrote a reporter, “the perspiring crowd held its ground throughout.”
The president of the Missouri Farmers’ Association, William Hirth, joined the Cochran campaign and began referring to Truman as “Tom Pendergast’s bellhop.” “For this bellhop of Pendergast’s to aspire to make a jump from the obscure bench of a county judge to the United States Senate is without precedent. When one contemplates the giants of the past who have represented Missouri this spectacle is not only grotesque, it is sheer buffoonery.”
Striking back, Harry charged Milligan with padding the government payroll with relatives, but saved his harshest invective for Bennett Clark. The senator, said Harry, ran for office on his father’s reputation, but his record proved there was nothing in heredity.
Many who thought they knew Judge Truman were astonished by the different man he became now, under attack. “Judge Truman is unobtrusive in his work,” wrote a correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “His decisions are made in low tones; there is no braggadocio about him. He sees his job and does it quietly. But in a fight, this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire….”
Truman, said Bennett Clark, was conducting a campaign of “mendacity and imbecility” unmatched in Missouri history. “What Harry is really trying to do is to secure a good county job for himself on his retirement from the county court of Jackson County next January…. Harry himself told me of his hopes.” Perhaps the heat was affecting Harry Truman, Clark surmised, because ordinarily he was neither vicious nor inventive enough to tell such lies. Further, Clark charged that seven or eight thousand state employees were out campaigning for Truman, all at the taxpayers’ expense—but then such, alas, was the Pendergast way.
T.J., demonstrating that he still knew a few things about bringing politicians down to size, invited a reporter into his office and in the course of an affable, soft-spoken conversation remarked, “Why, Senator Clark is a friend of mine. He was in here just the other day.”
Jack Cochran, to his credit, tried to keep the debate on a serious level. Mud slinging, Cochran said, was a luxury for prosperous times and had no place when conditions were so desperate and so many were suffering. In a speech in front of the Capitol at Jefferson City, Harry Truman, too, talked of his sadness over so much that he had seen traveling the countryside.
Farm prices, in steady decline since the Coolidge years, had gone from bad to worse. Eggs that normally sold for 25 cents a dozen were bringing 5 cents. Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand Missouri farms had been foreclosed. Abandoned houses, their windows boarded, fences falling, dotted the landscape. Sharecroppers were living in two-room, dirt-floor shacks, walls insulated with old newspapers. The look of the land, and in the faces of farm families in this summer of 1934, was as bleak as in anyone’s memory. Certainly, Harry Truman had never seen anything comparable. It was both the worst of the Depression and the year dust storms on the western plains began making headlines. With no rain and the fierce heat continuing, crops were burning up all over Missouri. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assumed a biblical cadence in its description of the tragedy: “Under merciless summer suns the fields ached, and the corn withered, and the cattle perished, and the rivers became as scars of dust, as the drought droned its hymn of hate.”
Conditions, said Truman in one speech, were “such as to make any human with a heart anxious to alleviate them.”
He presented himself as a common-sense country boy. He was the good Baptist farmer from Grandview, repeatedly poking fun at his rivals as “city farmers.” And he looked the part, deeply tanned from days in the sun, lean, fit, “hard as nails” by one account. He was fifty now and there was considerably mor
e gray in his hair, yet he seemed much younger. He smiled constantly—a big politician’s grin, his even, white teeth looking whiter than usual because of the tan, his eyes flashing behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Joe Shannon, among others, thought he smiled entirely too much.
One blistering day, on a road near Mexico, Missouri, seeing a farmer in a field having trouble with his binder, Harry stopped the car, climbed the fence, introduced himself, took off his coat, “and proceeded to set up the binder under a hot sun for his new found friend,” as reported in the local paper in a story that did him no harm with the local farmers.
Truman and Cochran were both battling for the farm vote, knowing it could decide the election. Neither of them had a chance without the support of their respective big-city machines, but if the votes for Cochran in St. Louis and those for Truman in Kansas City proved equal, then it would be the farmers who named the winner. Jim Pendergast worried that the farmers were more concerned about the prospects for rain than about politics.
In six weeks candidate Truman covered the greater part of Missouri by automobile, by main highways and winding back roads, until he had appeared before, shaken hands, and “visited” with courthouse crowds in more than half of the 114 county seats. It was hot, exhausting, throat-parching day-and-night work and he greatly enjoyed nearly every moment. He had always liked being on the road. “Fact is, I like roads,” he would say. “I like to move….” He felt as good as if he were on vacation, he told reporters, and he looked it.
Again, as on the earlier cross-country courthouse survey, he was accompanied by Fred Canfil, whose hulking, blustery presence left some people wondering. If a man could be judged by the company he kept, why on earth would Judge Truman choose such a companion? But Canfil was as hardworking, as willing to put in ten to fifteen hours a day as ever. Besides, Harry found him amusing, good company, if eccentric and at times exasperating. Arriving at a hotel, Canfil would immediately check Harry’s quarters to see that all was satisfactory—bathroom, sink, toilet, bathtub—and oblivious to the fact that he was scattering his cigarette ashes everywhere he went. Canfil and Truman were to be together for years, as things turned out, Truman refusing to abandon Canfil or to make apologies for him.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 438