David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Some days that summer, they covered several hundred miles, stopping for food and gas and speeches at a dozen or more places. Some towns were good-sized, like Hannibal on the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s town, which had grown to twenty thousand people, or Poplar Bluff, seat of Butler County, on the bright, clear, misnamed Black River, in the southeastern corner of the state. Poplar Bluff had a population of ten thousand. More often the candidate spoke in places like Laddadonia, Elmo, Liberty, or Benton, towns of six hundred people or less. At Benton, seat of Scott County, population four hundred and known for its chicken-calling contest on Neighbor Day each October, bobcats were still a sufficient menace in the 1930s to require an organized “drive” on them. At Liberty, just north of the Missouri River from Independence in Clay County, the little, two-story bank building on the northeast corner of the courthouse square looked no different from the day in 1866 when it was held up by Jesse James.

  The crowds that turned out to hear Judge Truman were seldom large, no more usually than a cluster of a few hundred people standing quietly, attentively in the shade of a courthouse lawn, while in his rapid-fire fashion he spoke from the courthouse steps. A good part of his usual audience was composed of courthouse loafers, old-timers with nothing better to do, and, invariably, small boys free from school for the summer. The atmosphere was old-fashioned and neighborly, and though the response to him was rarely demonstrative, he seemed always to leave his crowds feeling better.

  For a scrapbook of the campaign, Fred Canfil kept clipping the local papers along the way. One item dated August 3, from an unidentified paper, acknowledged that Judge Truman was no orator, but then this was an argument in his favor since there was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.

  At a banquet in his honor at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City the week before the primary, Tuck Milligan brought seven hundred people to their feet cheering when, without mentioning Tom Pendergast by name, he said that anyone who perpetrated vote fraud in America ought to be treated as a common criminal. As for his opponent Harry Truman, who was still campaigning at the other end of the state, Milligan joked, “Why, if Harry ever goes to the Senate, he will grow calluses on his ears, listening on the long-distance telephone to the orders of his boss.”

  Milligan by now was clearly falling behind, while Cochran and Truman appeared to be neck and neck.

  On the day of the primary, August 7, once the smoke blew away, as Harry said, he had won by 40,000 votes. The final tally was Truman, 276,850; Cochran, 236,105. Milligan, who ran a poor third, received 147,614.

  Harry had done well with the farmers, but so had Cochran, carrying as many counties as Truman. The big margin of victory after all was in Jackson County, where a grand total of 137,000 votes had been rolled up for Truman, nearly half of all he received. Two years before, with Pendergast support in his race for Congress, Cochran had carried Jackson County by an overwhelming 95,000 votes. This time, with the organization against them, Cochran and Milligan together received all of 11,000 votes. In some Kansas City precincts Cochran failed to get a single vote.

  Cochran felt his big mistake in the race had been to predict he would get 125,000 votes in St. Louis. This, he thought, had only made the Pendergast people work harder. As it was, Cochran’s margin in St. Louis (and St. Louis County) was 112,000–25,000 votes less than what had been achieved by the machine at the other end of the state.

  The Kansas City Star called it a Pendergast triumph pure and simple. The one consolation was that western Missouri would now have representation in the Senate. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expressed the view that the winning of the Democratic nomination for United States Senator by Judge Harry S. Truman of Independence was “without significance.”

  No one seemed to think that Truman himself had had a thing to do with his victory, and he himself was quoted saying only how much he appreciated all that his friends had done for him.

  As expected, the general election in the fall was a “pushover.” Harry’s Republican opponent was the incumbent who proudly carried the name of an infamous New York Republican of the Grant era, Roscoe Conkling. He was Roscoe Conkling Patterson. Harry’s expenses in the primary had come to $12,286. In the general election they were $785.

  Afterward, he and Jim Aylward made a flying visit to Washington to call on Bennett Clark, who had been the biggest loser in the primary fight and who now, looking to his own reelection a few years hence, preferred to forget all he had ever said against his “good friend” Harry Truman and the Kansas City organization.

  In a talk before the Kansas City Elks Club, Harry said he hoped to keep his feet on the ground in Washington.

  By December, the final touches were being added to the handsome new, twenty-one-story courthouse in Kansas City. On the day of its dedication, after Christmas, as her father beamed with pleasure, ten-year-old Margaret Truman helped pull the string to unveil Charles Keck’s equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson. Margaret had grown tall for her age, “skinny and all one color—faded blonde,” a friend would remember, and clearly she enjoyed being her father’s daughter.

  As a reward for faithful service, Fred Canfil was made Building Director of Jackson County, a kind of glorified custodian or janitor for the new courthouse, and would, according to later testimony, prove “very energetic” and “very noisy and loudmouthed,” and run things better than any other previous custodian.

  They were exciting days for the Trumans. The week after, on January 3, 1935, Bess and Margaret, with Jim Pendergast, watched from the visitors’ gallery in the United States Senate as Harry, “barely recognizable” in morning coat and striped pants, walked with Senator Clark down the blue-carpeted aisle to the dais, to take the oath of office from Vice President John Nance Garner.

  On the day Harry bid goodbye to Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Pendergast had told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”

  III

  Harry Truman had an unusually retentive mind. He remembered people—names, personal interests, family connections. He remembered things he had read or learned in school long before, often bringing them into conversation in a way that amazed others. He remembered every kindness he had ever been shown, the help given in hard times, and particularly would he remember those who treated him well when he first arrived in Washington, at age fifty, knowing almost no one and entirely without experience as a legislator. He would fondly recall Harry Hopkins, for example, because Hopkins had shown him kindness in this most difficult of times in his life. Another was William Helm, Washington correspondent for the Kansas City Journal-Post, to whom the new senator had gone for help at the start, confessing he was “green as grass” and in need of someone to show him around. At first, Helm took this as a joke. Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn’t take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.

  Two other new Democratic senators, Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington, went out of their way to be friendly. Hatch was self-effacing and bookish, Schwellenbach “a real guy” and “a wheel horse.” Among the older, veteran senators, Harry could count a half dozen from both sides of the aisle who gave encouragement, and like Hatch and Schwellenbach, they were all from the West, or were at least western in outlook.

  Extremely important to Harry, as events proved, was Burton K. Wheeler, a lanky, independent-minded Montana Democrat, something of a rogue, who smoked big cigars and ran the powerful Interstate Commerce Committee.

  Carl Hayden of Arizona, another Democrat, had come to Congress in 1911, as a territorial representative. “He took the trouble to explain some of the technicalities and customs of the Senate which appear pretty confusing to a newcomer,” Harry would write. Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and old William E. Borah, “the Lion of Idaho,” never treated him as anything but an equal. And most memorable was seventy-two-year-old J. Hamilton
(“Ham”) Lewis of Illinois, the majority whip, who wore pince-nez, wing collars, spats, and a wavy pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers and sweeping mustache, and who one day came and sat down in an empty seat beside Senator Truman.

  “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said kindly. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”

  He was liked also by the red-faced, hard-drinking Vice President, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, who still dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and striped pants, and who, echoing T.J.’s parting words, told Truman to study hard and keep quiet until he knew what he was talking about. It was advice Garner always gave beginners, but that not all heeded. He, too, was a man of little formal education and obscure background. Now and then as time passed, he would ask Truman to take the Vice President’s chair and preside over the Senate. On a day when Will Rogers came to Capitol Hill for lunch, Garner invited Harry to come along, a favor and an occasion Harry would never forget.

  Such gestures were the exception, however. “I was under a cloud,” he would say later. The Kansas City reputation had followed him to Washington. Bennett Clark was spoken of as the Senator from Missouri. Harry Truman was the Senator from Pendergast.

  Bronson Cutting of New Mexico had a way of looking through Truman as though he didn’t exist. Pat McCarran of Nevada later recalled, “I never considered him a Senator.” George W. Norris of Nebraska, the great voice of reform in the Senate, thought he was “poison,” and refused to speak to him.

  When a congressional aide named Victor Messall, a native Missourian and an experienced hand on the Hill, was offered a job on Senator Truman’s staff, he refused, fearing what the association might do to his career. “Here was a guy…sent up [to Washington] by gangsters,” he remembered. “I’d lose my reputation if I worked for him.”

  Messall only changed his mind after volunteering to help the senator hunt for an apartment, which they found on Connecticut Avenue—four rooms in the Tilden Gardens apartments for $150 a month. Later, they stopped at a piano store, where Truman sat down and played several before choosing one to rent for five dollars a month. From there they went to a bank. While Messall waited, the senator took out a loan for furniture.

  This, Messall decided, was an altogether different kind of man from what he imagined and one he now wanted very much to work for. A slim, snappy dresser, his hair slicked back Fred Astaire style, Messall became number one of a staff of five in Truman’s office. The reporter William Helm would describe him watching over the senator thereafter with “doglike devotion.”

  Making his first call at the White House in February, a nervous Senator Truman found Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and one or two others high up in the administration sitting about the waiting room, busily talking and paying no notice of him. Though scheduled for fifteen minutes with the President, his time was cut to seven, during which he remained tongue-tied before Roosevelt. “It was quite an event for a country boy to go calling on the President of the United States,” he remembered. His telephone calls to the White House in the months to follow often went unanswered.

  “He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex,” wrote his boyhood friend Charlie Ross, who had become a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He was a better man than he knew.”

  His diligence was noteworthy. Most mornings, he turned up at his office so early—about seven—and so in advance of everyone else in the building that it was decided he should have his own passkey, reportedly the first ever issued to a senator. Indeed, he would rise and be on his way so early in the morning that by mid-afternoon he would look in need of another shave. He carried himself straighter than a tall man would, walked considerably faster than customary in Washington. On good days he walked the several miles to the Capitol, moving-along at a steady military clip of 120 paces a minute and stopping usually at Childs restaurant for breakfast. When he didn’t walk, he took the trolley that ran down Connecticut Avenue, then swung east on Pennsylvania, past the White House, and on up to the Capitol.

  “By the time his colleagues get down to work,” wrote William Helm, “Senator Truman has been through the morning mail, dictated several hundred letters, fixed up as many deserving Democrats with jobs as possible and is rarin’ to go.”

  That his ties to Tom Pendergast continued, he left no doubt. To one Kansas City job applicant who asked his support, he wrote, “If you will send us the endorsements from the Kansas City Democratic Organization, I shall be glad to do what I can for you.” This, in his view, was how the game had always been played, not by Tom Pendergast only, but in American politics overall, from the beginning, and he was never to view it differently. To the victors went the spoils.

  He saw to the appointment of hundreds of people to hundreds of different jobs in Missouri, including old friends and family. His brother Vivian would go to work for the Federal Housing Agency in Kansas City. Ted Marks was set up in a job with the Labor Department, in the Veterans Employment Service in Kansas City. Edgar Hinde became postmaster in Independence, a job he held for twenty-five years.

  In the reception area of his office, over the marble mantelpiece where no one could possibly miss it, Senator Truman put a framed portrait of T.J. Pendergast.

  His office was Number 248, on the second floor of the immense Senate Office Building (later named the Russell Building) northeast of the Capitol, his windows looking onto an interior courtyard. In the Senate Chamber he was assigned seat 94, one of seven newly installed behind the back row on the Democratic side to accommodate the disproportionate Democratic majority. To his right sat Sherman Minton of Indiana. The seat on the left remained empty until June when the newly elected Senator from West Virginia, Rush Holt, would turn thirty and thus be old enough, according to the Constitution, to take his place.

  Of the ninety-six senators in this the 74th Congress, there were, including Senator Holt, sixty-nine Democrats and twenty-seven Republicans. Bennett Clark sat almost directly ahead, two rows down. Beyond Clark, about midway in the second row, was Tom Connally of Texas, who still wore the black bow tie and old-fashioned stand-up collar of the classic southern statesman. Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Hugo Black of Alabama, two senators of great importance to the administration, were also in the second row, and Ellison DuRant (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina, who was known for his orations on King Cotton and Southern Womanhood and his near-perfect aim with tobacco juice. In the majority leader’s front-row seat on the aisle sat Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, while over near the other end of the first row, to Harry’s left, in seat 17, was the storm center of the chamber, the place of Huey Long of Louisiana, whose rampant outbursts against the administration lately included the charge that Franklin Roosevelt was personally trying to destroy him.

  The year before, Long had proclaimed his “National Share Our Wealth Program,” promising to make “Every man a king, every girl a queen,” and through Harry Truman’s first months in the Senate, Long dominated, upstaging everyone. In early February he opened an assault on Jim Farley, charging that Parley’s operations were steeped in corruption. Then, on February 20, calling Farley a “political monster,” Long inserted in the Congressional Record an article from the Post-Dispatch describing how T.J. Pendergast had arranged with Farley to call off Internal Revenue investigations of Johnny Lazia. Long afterward told Harry it was only a little politics to please the home folks.

  On the day of another Long tirade, when Harry was presiding in the Vice President’s chair, most of the Senate got up and walked out. Later, when he and Long found themselves crossing the street together, heading for the Senate Office Building, Long asked how Harry had liked the speech. He had stayed, Harry said, only because he was in the chair and had no choice. Thereafter Long refused to speak to him. In September in Louisiana, Long would be shot and killed by an a
ssassin.

  But if repelled by someone like Huey Long, Harry cared little more for other celebrated “speechifiers” in the Senate. Admittedly fearful of making a speech himself, he seemed to resent particularly those who could and who made their reputations that way. They were the “egotistical boys” whose specialty was talk.

  Watching Senator Truman from the press gallery, William Helm wrote, “He sits in the back row of the top-heavy Democratic side of the Senate at every session, listening, absorbing, learning…. His is the conventional way. He ruffles no oldster’s feathers, treads on no toes.”

  Four months passed before he dared introduce his first bill. It concerned a subject he knew about from experience–“A Bill to provide insurance by the Farm Credit Administration of mortgages on farm property”—and was sent by Vice President Garner to the Committee on Banking and Currency, where it promptly died.

  As customary for freshman senators, he was assigned to two major and several lesser committees. In former days, the Committee on Appropriations would have been a position of dignity, little work, and little significance, but in the New Deal Washington of 1935 it was the largest committee of all, its power unprecedented. The appropriation that January of $4.8 billion for work relief represented approximately half what the government spent. Interstate Commerce, the committee of which Burton K. Wheeler was chairman, seemed a natural place for Harry, with his background in roads and highways, his lifelong fascination with railroads. The smaller assignments included the Public Buildings and Grounds Committee, and the Printing Committee, headed by Carl Hayden and responsible primarily for the Congressional Record. (Mamma Truman had asked Harry to put her on the list for the Record and became a steadfast reader.) The one assignment he did not care for was the District of Columbia Committee, which eventually he quit. He thought the District ought to have self-government.