He worked exceedingly hard at his assignments. Indeed, his first years in the Senate were devoted almost exclusively to committee work. Seldom did he miss a meeting of the two major committees, where, it was also noted, “He speaks rarely, listens much.” He was getting acquainted with the way things were done, which most veteran senators and staff people knew to be an art in itself. He was acutely aware of his limited formal education, and in a determined effort to compensate for it, he never let up. Assigned by Senator Wheeler to a new Interstate Commerce subcommittee investigating railroad finances, he searched the Library of Congress for books on railroad management, railroad history, until more than fifty volumes were piled in his office. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he vowed privately. What surprised and disappointed him was to find how few others from Congress ever used the Library.
He had come into national public life at the start of “the Second Hundred Days,” the high tide of the New Deal. The crusade now was not just recovery from the Depression, but for reform, and he voted with the Democratic majority time after time, helping to pass some of the most far-reaching legislation in the history of Congress. He never once spoke for a measure, never took part in debate. He just voted—for the Wagner Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the right of workers to join unions and to bargain collectively; for establishment of the Works Progress Administration; for the Social Security Act; and for rural electrification, which may have changed the way people lived more than any other single measure of the Roosevelt years. In his own state in 1935, nine out often farms had no electricity.
As a member of the Interstate Commerce Committee, he worked intensively on what became the Public Utility Holding Company Act, designed as a blow against public power cartels, and in the process had his first brush with big-time lobbying and high-powered witnesses. The lobby set up headquarters in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.
He resolved to deny no one a hearing. “I’ll take all the dinners he has to put out,” he would later write of a lobbyist for a midwestern railroad, “and then do what I think is right.” A true son of Missouri, he wanted all the facts. “I can see no harm in talking to anyone—no matter what his background. In fact I think everyone has a right to be heard if you expect to get all the facts.”
At the hearings, witnesses for the public utilities included such prominent Wall Street figures as Wendell Willkie, president of the Commonwealth & Southern, and John W. Davis, the former Democratic presidential candidate. The “propaganda barrage,” as Truman attested, was such as no county judge in Missouri had ever experienced. Constituents with utility stocks sent thirty thousand letters and telegrams. (He burned them all, Harry claimed years later, though Mildred Dryden, his secretary, would remember no such conflagration.) The lobby also sent people to Kansas City to see Tom Pendergast, who apparently took their side. But that too failed, according to Harry. In June, the bill passed the Senate by a wide margin as expected, with Senator Truman paired in favor. Detained “on important business,” he had arranged to vote for the bill if the outcome looked close. (The important business was driving Bess and Margaret back to Independence for the summer. After five months, they had had enough of Washington.)
“I was a New Dealer from the start,” he would say firmly and proudly later, and the record showed that few in the Senate could match his record of support for Franklin Roosevelt. Senator Robert Wagner of New York, author of so much New Deal legislation, was to praise Senator Truman as extremely useful. Yet in manner, background, language, age, choice of companions, he bore no resemblance to the ardent young New Dealers portrayed by one historian as “trained in the law, economics, public administration, or new technical fields, brilliant and dedicated…nurtured on progressive ideals, schooled in the improved universities of the 1920’s.” Like so many things about Washington, liberals were a new experience for him, and generally speaking, he didn’t care for them, unless they were of the Burton Wheeler variety, western in style and a bit rough about the edges. The rest seemed lacking in common sense, for all their education. He was heart and soul an Andrew Jackson—William Jennings Bryan—T. J. Pendergast kind of Democrat. He loved politics in large part exactly because it meant time spent with men like Cactus Jack Garner (who would be remembered for observing that the vice presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss). Privately he enjoyed poking fun at “the boys with the ‘Hah-vud’ accents,” though never, as far as is known, at the Harvard man in the White House.
He voted with the President repeatedly because he genuinely wanted to do what was best for the common people at a time when so many were in desperate need of help. He considered himself one of them. He knew what they were suffering. But he knew also, of course, the value of voting with the President—the leader, “the Boss”—both as an article of faith and as a way ahead. Alben Barkley of Kentucky, assistant to the majority leader, would describe later how he had liked Harry Truman almost at once, instinctively. “As the old political saying goes, he ‘Voted right’.”
To many liberals in the Senate he was “go-along, get-along Harry,” a decent, sincere man whose company they often enjoyed—“I liked Harry Truman,” Claude Pepper of Florida remembered—but he was not someone to take seriously.
The President had told Congress it could not go home without passing his entire program. So Congress labored through the sweltering summer of 1935, the worst summer of the Dust Bowl, the summer when, for the benefit of the newsreel cameras, on a day the temperature hit 110 degrees, one Texas congressman fried an egg on the Capitol steps. Harry called it “a hot wave,” in a letter to Bess and Margaret, but he never complained about the heat or the work, only about their being so far from him.
He gave up the apartment, moved to a hotel to save money, and wrote to them constantly, from his room or the office, or at his desk in the Senate and particularly if someone like Huey Long were “spouting.” Long had begun calling the President a “faker” and predicting revolution if things didn’t soon change. Once he held the floor for fifteen and one-half hours, sometimes reading from the Bible or offering recipes for Roquefort salad dressing.
Harry’s spelling was not much improved from years past, for all he had advanced in station. He had trouble with words like “occasion,” which he wrote “occation.” He couldn’t spell “Hawaii” and wrote of Senator Byrnes as “Senator Burns.” He failed even with the spelling of his own home address, addressing envelopes repeatedly to Mrs. Harry S. Truman at 219 North “Deleware” Street.
In the month of July alone, he wrote thirty-four letters to her. To pass the evenings, he read Volume One of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Or he would work his way through The New York Times. Always an ardent reader of newspapers, like most politicians, he was now taking the Washington Star, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun, in addition to several Missouri papers, but he saved, The New York Times for the quiet of evening. It was the summer Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash in Alaska, news that left Harry feeling devastated. Rogers had been a second Mark Twain, he told Bess. “No one has done more to give us common sense.”
One evening, with a dozen others from the Senate, he crossed the Potomac to attend a party given by the chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph P. Kennedy, at Kennedy’s rented estate, Marwood, a thirty-three-room Renaissance château in the cool of the woods above the river. In a letter to Bess, Harry described it as “a grand big house a half mile from the road in virgin forest with a Brussels carpet lawn of five acres all around it, a swimming pool in the yard, and all the other trimmings.” He had never been in such a house. He was told it had cost $600,000 to build. He felt complimented to be included in such a party, but of his host he had nothing to relate.
He was trying to find an apartment they could afford for the year ahead:
Found a rather nice place at 1921 Kalorama Road. It was a northwest corner, fifth-floor apartment—two bedrooms, two baths, livi
ng room, small dining room, large hall, $125 per month. No garage. Then I looked at a house at 2218 Cathedral, a block north of Connecticut…. They were painting and papering it from cellar to attic. It had a two-car garage…. They wanted $90 per month. I then went down to the Highlands at California and Connecticut. They had a nice two-bedroom apartment on the southeast corner, fourth floor, at $125—better I think than 1921 Kalorama Road. Then I looked at the Westmoreland right behind the Highlands on California. They wanted $100 for a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor, and $79.50 for one on the fourth floor that had four rooms. It is an old place but the location and rooms were very nice…. I am going back to look at 2400 Sixteenth Street and the Jefferson tomorrow and a couple of houses. I bet I find something that’ll suit before I quit.
Not only was he the Senator from Pendergast, he was one of the poorest of senators, a point he felt acutely. He never ceased worrying about money and whether he could make ends meet in Washington on a salary of $10,000. In his letters to Bess he reported the amount of his bus fare (20 cents), the charge for six months of the Washington Post ($7.50), an old grocery bill ($9.53). Thinking he might go over to the Maryland seashore for the Fourth of July weekend, he was “extravagant” and bought a bathing suit, but then went to a public health dentist to have two teeth filled. He had always wanted to be able to buy house furnishings of his own choosing. He dreamed extravagant dreams, he told her—of paintings by Holbein and Frans Hals, of Bokhara carpets, Hepplewhite dining table and chairs, and mahogany beds (“big enough for two”). But she must have faith in him:
I am hoping to make a reputation as a Senator…if I live long enough that’ll make the money success look like cheese. But you’ll have to put up with a lot if I do it because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.
On three occasions in midsummer he traveled to New York to see Tom Pendergast, who was living like a potentate in a twenty-ninth-floor suite at the Waldorf-Astoria at a daily rate that would have covered Harry’s rent for a month. To his surprise and delight, T.J.’s welcome was the warmest ever. “Pendergast was as pleased to see me as if I’d been young Jim,” Harry reported to Bess after the first meeting. “We talked for three hours about everything under the sun.” On the second visit, two weeks later, T.J. was “as pleased to see me as a ten-year-old kid to see his lost pal.”
Hints of a huge insurance scandal were in the wind, involving a Pendergast man in the state government, R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch had been to the Waldorf to interview T.J. earlier in the spring, before T.J. sailed for France on the new Normandie, and in the course of the questioning, T.J. had said, “Yes, I told O’Malley to approve the insurance deal,” adding angrily, “And what’re you going to do about it?” which had been a mistake. (When Childs went to the ship later, to see T.J. off, he found him in a better mood. “Pendergast and the very blond Mrs. Pendergast were ensconced in the living room of their suite which was almost literally filled with flowers, orchids and lilies of the valley, expensive flowers. This was Pendergast, the Maharajah of Missouri, in all his glory.”) But apparently Harry’s conversations at the Waldorf included none of the truth of what was going on behind the scenes with O’Malley, even if to Harry it appeared as though he and T.J. had covered “everything under the sun.”
One topic they did take up was a replacement for Governor Park, who by Missouri law could serve only a single term. Harry thought perhaps it should be a wealthy Pike County apple grower named Lloyd C. Stark. Harry and Stark had met through the American Legion—Stark, too, had served as an artillery officer in France—and had compared notes as time went on, Stark confiding his own political ambitions. Harry had been a guest at Stark’s estate in Pike County, in northeastern Missouri, home of the Stark nursery, largest in the United States and famous for the Stark “Delicious” apple. At Stark’s urging, Harry had provided him with a list of key people throughout the state and put in a word for him at 1908 Main Street. “Confidentially, I had a fine visit with our mutual friend in Kansas City last Friday,” Stark had written Harry that spring of 1935, delighted by how things were shaping up.
But T.J. didn’t like Stark and had already crossed him off as a possible governor at the time of Francis Wilson’s death. (At Wilson’s funeral, a news photographer happened to catch the massive Big Boss and the trim, elegantly tailored apple grower, each with cigarette in hand, deep in conversation among the parked cars.) Neither T.J. nor Jim Aylward thought Stark could be trusted and told Harry so.
“He won’t do,” said T.J. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch. He’s no good.”
Long afterward, Harry would remark to a friend, “The old man had better judgment than I did.”
However, as was said, the apple grower was also an accomplished apple polisher, and when Harry took both Stark and Bennett Clark with him on a third trip to the Waldorf that summer, T.J. at last consented. Stark was to have the organization’s full support—which meant Stark could count on being the next governor—and, of course, with the implicit understanding that the organization could in turn count on Stark.
On the train back to Washington, Stark, “the most grateful man alive,” promised to do anything to help Harry any time. He had only to say the word.
Relations with Bennett Clark, meanwhile, were also improving. Few in the Senate had been quite so contemptuous of Truman as Clark during Harry’s first several months, and Clark still did little to make Harry’s job any easier. Clark also seemed to go out of his way to annoy or embarrass the administration, and yet invariably it was Clark that Roosevelt worked with on federal appointments in Missouri, not Senator Truman, who voted consistently with the administration. It was Roosevelt’s way of trying to win Clark over, and Clark’s way of getting more than his share of patronage, all of which left Harry far out in the cold, trying to swallow his pride and resentment. Further, Clark had little time for what Harry called “the ordinary customers” from back home who had favors to ask or troubles to settle.
But Clark, as Harry recognized, was a man with an extraordinary mind, who knew the Constitution and parliamentary law as well as anyone in the Senate. He was hugely entertaining, a good host, a good cook—country ham with red-eye gravy and turnip greens his specialty—and like Cactus Jack Garner he enjoyed a sociable “libation” over lunch, or in mid-afternoon, or day’s end, or most any time. Harry adored the banter and storytelling that went with this side of senatorial life. It was closer to the comradeship of Army life than anything else he had known. He enjoyed Clark’s humor as they “took a little something to settle the nerves.” At a lunch for the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden, they regarded each other with long faces across the table. “Kind of hard on Bennett and me to attend a dry lunch in this town,” Harry noted.
In his office, for special guests like Clark, Harry kept a supply of T.J.’s best bourbon. (“And while I heard criticism aplenty of Pendergast himself,” recorded William Helm, “I have yet to hear a noble senator raise his voice against the quality of Pendergast liquor.”) Other “supplies for the thirsty” were kept by the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin Halsey (and later by his successor, Les Biffle), in an office only a short stroll across the hall from the chamber. Unlike Clark, Harry kept to a rule of one stroll, one drink only.
Though younger than Harry by six years, Clark was heavyset and jowly, and with his thinning hair looked both older and more senatorial. Clark’s biography in the Congressional Directory, written by Clark himself, took up nearly three-quarters of a page of fine print. Senator Truman’s, also self-penned, consisted of three lines.
A year later, in the summer of 1936, as the Democrats convened in Philadelphia to renominate Franklin Roosevelt for a second term, Harry was with T.J. again, and more conspicuously now than at any time in years past. Just back from still another European vacation—he had returned this time on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary—T.J. came down to Philade
lphia by train from New York, planning to commute back and forth every day from his suite at the Waldorf. He arrived Tuesday, June 23, the morning the convention opened. Jim Farley, chairman of the national committee, Jim Aylward, and Senator Truman clustered about him to pose for pictures on the convention floor, T.J. beaming as the flash cameras exploded.
All the big bosses of the Democratic Party were gathered in Philadelphia—Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite, the urbane, affable, extremely powerful Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx; tall, natty Frank Hague of Jersey City, who would be remembered by history for his comment, “I am the law” Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago; E. H. (“Boss Ed”) Crump of Memphis, former farm boy and noted bird lover; and T. J. Pendergast, a white carnation in his lapel, who the day before had celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday. At one time or other, Roosevelt had courted and worked with them all, depending on their help, and he would again. He called them all his friends. And all appreciated perfectly what wonders the Roosevelt magic had worked for them in four years. As Marquis Childs observed, “The vast expenditures of the New Deal had put into their hands power they had hitherto scarcely dreamed of.” Though no one could know it at the time, the day was to mark T.J.’s last big public appearance. So, as a gathering of the era’s big-city Democratic bosses, all figuratively on stage together, it was a final, historic moment.
Harry, who had driven up from Washington, had no real part to play. He had been named to no committees of importance. He was only a delegate-at-large. He was there really to be with Pendergast, and indeed the group photograph taken on the convention floor is the only known picture of him at the Boss’s side.
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