Truman asked for Hillman’s support for Byrnes. Hillman declined and refused to be budged. He was working hard for Henry Wallace, Hillman said. If it could not be Wallace, then he wanted either William O. Douglas or Harry Truman.
Truman said he was going to nominate Byrnes. Hillman said that would be a mistake.
Truman reported directly to Byrnes all that Hillman had said, but Byrnes seemed not to care, and with reason. By reliable reports he had already lined up more than 400 of the 589 votes needed to nominate.
When Ed Flynn arrived in Chicago later that morning, Tuesday the 18th, Hannegan rushed him into a corner to say it was all over. “It’s Byrnes!” Flynn said it was no such thing and demanded a meeting of the select committee, the same group as the night before, which convened again in the same secret North Side apartment, except that this time Sidney Hillman was included and Jimmy Byrnes was not.
There was only one man to nominate, Flynn insisted, and that was Harry Truman, because Harry Truman was what they had agreed to with the President.
Flynn was extremely angry. “I browbeat the committee, I talked, I argued, I swore,” he later wrote. Hillman declared Byrnes unacceptable to organized labor. Flynn said Byrnes would cost no less than 200,000 Negro votes in New York alone. Byrnes was a “political liability.” Roosevelt could lose the election. Everyone agreed—Hannegan, the party’s chairman, Pauley, Walker, Allen, Hillman for labor, Kelly the big-city boss. Reporters were to call them “the Harmony Boys.”
Flynn put through a call to Roosevelt in San Diego and one by one each man got on the line. In the end Roosevelt agreed it should be Truman.
Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: Within a short time that evening Byrnes and Truman were individually told what the President had said. Truman heard it from Hannegan, who came to his room at the Stevens, and also showed him a longhand note from the President saying, as Truman remembered, “Bob, it’s Truman, F.D.R.,” a different wording from what Roosevelt had supposedly scrawled for Hannegan the night of the 11th at the White House. Also, by Truman’s recollection, the note he was now shown was written on scratch paper, not an envelope. Truman doubted Roosevelt had written it. “I still could not be sure this was Roosevelt’s intent,” he would recall.
An hour or so later Truman went alone to the Royal Skyway to square things with Byrnes. He asked to be released from his promise of support. Byrnes said he understood perfectly, given the circumstances. Whether he would stay in the race, Byrnes said, was a question he would have to sleep on. When Byrnes tried to get through to Roosevelt by phone, he was told the President was unavailable.
Word of the sudden turn in events spread fast. Ed Flynn had been in town less than a day and everything had changed. In a long account by Turner Catledge in The New York Times the next morning, Wednesday, July 19, opening day for the convention, was a revealing paragraph:
Reports that Senator Truman was to be the choice of the anti-Wallace forces were heard in the New York state delegation…. Edward J. Flynn, New York national committeeman, in a conference with leaders, informed them that the decision of the Wallace opponents was to back Senator Truman, and that the New York delegation might be voting for him at least after the first ballot. The group agreed to accede to this decision.
Byrnes dropped out of the race and the talk everywhere was that the bosses killed his candidacy. In a release to the press, Byrnes said he was withdrawing “in deference to the wishes of the President.” He then left for home in a fury, feeling he had been betrayed by Roosevelt. In a parting conversation with Alben Barkley, who was scheduled to nominate the President, Byrnes remarked sourly, “If I were you I wouldn’t say anything too complimentary about him.”
Barkley was as upset as Byrnes, furious over Roosevelt and his games at their expense. He was sick and tired of trying to determine which shell the pea was under, Barkley told a reporter, and threatened to tear up his nominating speech and be done with the whole affair.
For Truman, events were out of hand. These were three or four of the most critical days of his life and they were beyond his control, his destiny being decided for him by others once again. Speculation now centered on him. But as his stock rose, so did objections to him, because of the Pendergast connection. Jim Pendergast was prominent in the Missouri delegation, which was the first to name Truman its choice for Vice President, quite against his wishes. Running into his old high school classmate Charlie Ross, now a contributing editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Truman said, “Feel sorry for me. I’m in a terrible fix.”
How much faith he had in Hannegan at this point, he never said, but to many it looked as though the young party head was out of line in taking such an overtly partisan role. He appeared to be constantly improvising, seldom sure of his ground. To prove he really did have something in writing from Roosevelt about Truman, he at last released the much-talked-of letter. But this only produced more grumbling and controversy. Why hadn’t he said it mentioned Truman and Douglas? His claim of an endorsement for Truman was only half true and wasn’t a half-truth as good as a lie? And how much credence should be given to a letter released on July 18 that was supposedly written on July 19?
Among those most surprised by the letter when he later saw accounts of it in the papers was William O. Douglas, who at the time of the convention was in Oregon hiking in the mountains. No one had told him he was being considered.
Meantime, Henry Wallace had arrived in Chicago, and at a packed press conference at the Sherman Hotel, sitting on a table with his long legs swinging, Wallace said he was there to fight to the finish. His supporters were claiming 400 votes on the first ballot. In a secret caucus of the political action committee at the Sherman, CIO president Phil Murray shook his fist and said in his deep Scottish burr, “Wallace…Wallace…Wallace. That’s it. Just keep pounding.”
A sluggish, entirely routine first session of the convention opened just before noon inside Chicago Stadium, the same giant arena where Roosevelt had been nominated in 1932 and again in 1940. From steel girders overhead hung a huge Roosevelt portrait used in 1940, only retouched a little to make him look a bit less pale. There was a prayer. There were speeches. The real business continued at the hotels.
III
Only narrow Balbo Street separated the Stevens from the Blackstone, and it was to the Blackstone, to Hannegan’s seventh-floor suite, that Truman was “summoned” that afternoon, Wednesday, July 19. Hannegan, collar open, his shirt damp with perspiration, had assembled the inner core—Pauley, Walker, Kelly, Flynn—plus, for the first time, Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, who had never cared particularly for Senator Truman and who until now had been telling delegates that he didn’t want Truman because his nomination would only stir up the whole boss issue.
It was clearly a gathering arranged for effect, for Truman’s benefit. (Barkley would later refer to Hannegan as “the stage manager” at Chicago.) The time had come for a decision from the senator. They were placing a call to San Diego.
Truman sat on one twin bed. Hannegan, phone in hand, sat on the other. “Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone,” Truman remembered, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.”
“Bob,” Roosevelt’s voice boomed, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”
“No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”
“Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” With that Roosevelt banged down the phone.
Truman said later that he was completely stunned. “I was floored, I was sunk.” Reportedly his first words were “Oh, shit!” He himself recalled saying, “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”
Tha
t evening Henry Wallace made a surprise appearance on the floor of the convention, and the roar of approval from the galleries astonished everyone, including, noticeably, Henry Wallace.
“Ye gods!” wrote Margaret Truman in her diary. “The Missouri delegation has decided to nominate Dad for V-P. Vice President Wallace is very strong so I doubt if we win, although the South doesn’t want Wallace at all.”
To judge by her use of the word “we,” Bess, too, had resigned herself to the decision.
On Thursday, July 20, an immense crowd filling the hall, the convention became a thundering, old-fashioned political circus. Alben Barkley, bathed in spotlights on the podium, his broad face streaming with perspiration, his anger at Roosevelt forgotten for the moment, delivered a fulsome tribute to the great leader that set off a demonstration lasting forty minutes. In seconding the nomination, Henry Wallace gave one of the strongest speeches of his career, an impassioned, straight-from-the-shoulder declaration of liberal principles that brought the huge, roaring audience to its feet time after time. The only chance for the Democratic Party, he said, was to keep on its liberal course.
In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race….
By evening, as time for the President’s address approached, the crowd had grown far beyond what the arena was built to hold. It was packed to the roof with perhaps forty thousand people. Reportedly fifteen thousand counterfeit tickets had been printed and distributed with the blessing of Mayor Kelly, who for all his apparent Truman fervor was secretly hoping for a Truman-Wallace deadlock, so the prize would go to his own candidate, Illinois’s favorite son, Senator Scott Lucas. But the ticket ploy resulted in thousands of additional Wallace supporters, many supplied by the CIO, who jammed the galleries and worked their way onto the convention floor, while thousands more milled about in the corridors. The Wallace people were determined to see the nomination decided there in the hall and not by the “big boys” in a smoke-filled room. The idea was to stampede the convention.
Nominations for the vice presidency were scheduled for the next day, but as the evening wore on, with more speeches and fanfare for Roosevelt, the surge for Wallace kept growing. The heat inside the hall was nearly unbearable.
At the Blackstone, Hannegan told Truman he might have to be nominated that night, depending whether they had the votes. They would have to be ready to move fast. Bennett Clark was supposed to nominate Truman, but no one knew where he was. Clark, whose wife had died the year before, had been drinking more than usual. Truman went to look for him. Hannegan started for the convention hall.
When the speeches and roll call ended, and the President was swiftly renominated, the delegates settled down to hear his speech. The familiar voice came booming from a cluster of amplifiers, as the huge crowd sat watching the empty podium. Absolute silence hung over the darkened hall, even during the President’s pauses. With no one on stage, the effect was eerie. Roosevelt was speaking from his railroad car in San Diego.
“What is the job before us in 1944?” the great, disembodied voice asked. “First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible…. "
No sooner was the speech over than a Wallace demonstration erupted. From every corner of the stadium came a chant of “We want Wallace!” The organist, catching the spirit, began pumping away at the Wallace theme song, “Iowa, Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” over and over. Ed Pauley, livid with rage, threatened to chop the wires to the amplifiers unless the tune was changed.
Bob Hannegan was seen hurriedly conferring with Mayor Kelly in the Illinois delegation. Then they were both up on the podium, heads together with Chairman Jackson. To several of the Wallace floor leaders it looked suddenly as if the time to nominate their man was then, that night, and the quicker the better.
“I sat there and watched the demonstration and I saw it growing in volume,” remembered Claude Pepper, who, as head of the Florida delegation, was positioned on the aisle. “I stood up on my seat, and I could see the whole convention hall then. And I said [to myself], ‘You know, that’s a real demonstration….’ So after it got into full speed and steam, I said, ‘If we could bring this nomination up right now, we could nominate Henry Wallace.’ ”
At the rear of the hall now, Hannegan had started throwing open the outer doors to let more people in, while, at the same time, Ed Kelly kept shouting about fire rules.
Desperate to get the chairman’s eye, Pepper tried hopping up and down on his chair, waving the Florida banner, but to no avail. His floor microphone had been turned off.
He jumped down and started up the aisle, fighting his way through the crowd. Reporters, hundreds of delegates, and spectators saw him and knew at once what he was trying to do. If he could get to the podium, he would make the nominating speech himself with no more delay.
And then when I got to the little gate [remembered Pepper], the little fence around the podium where the Chairman presided…well, fortunately, there was a railroad labor man that was minding the gate. He was a friend of mine, so he opened the gate and let me in…I got up to about the second step from the top going just as hard as I could to get up that stairway, and I saw the Chairman look over there. He had seen me coming up the aisle. And so, immediately—by this time I got about nearly to the first step—the Chairman said, “Motion made. The convention adjourned. All in favor of the motion, let me know by saying ‘Aye, aye.’ ” And, “That’s it.” And, “The convention’s adjourned.” And I by that time was just about to the top step. And they started roaring, “No, no, no, no.”
Jackson later told Pepper he had hated to do what he did, but that he had promised the newspaper and radio people to hold the vice-presidential decision until the next day when they would be better prepared. Jackson admitted he had seen Pepper trying to get his attention, that he had an eye on him the whole time he was heading for the podium, and knew perfectly well why he was coming. What he did not tell Pepper was that he and Bob Hannegan had already made an agreement to shut things down that night before the Wallace people could start the nominations. The public explanation was that the decision was a matter of necessity, because of fire laws.
Harry Truman had witnessed none of this. He had spent the night in search of Bennett Clark, finding him finally in a room where he was not supposed to be, at the Sherman, and too drunk to say much more than hello. By then it was past midnight. “So I called Bob [Hannegan],” Truman remembered, “and said, ‘I found your boy. He’s cockeyed. I don’t know whether I can get him ready or not, and I hope to Christ I can’t.’ ”
Of all those in Missouri who had kept track of Harry Truman’s activities and accomplishments in the Senate over the past nine years, none had been so attentive, appraising his every move, as his mother Martha Ellen Truman, who remained a close reader of the Congressional Record and a more partisan Democrat than almost anyone he knew. Once, introducing her to a political friend, Truman told her the man had grown up in Mississippi and had never seen a Republican until he was twelve. “He didn’t miss much,” she replied.
For days now, in her small parlor at Grandview, she had been sitting close to the radio, following the convention. Interviewed by reporters, she said she did not want her son to become Vice President. He should stay in the Senate, she said emphatically.
“I listened to all the Republican Convention, too. They keep predicting that Roosevelt will die in office if he’s elected. The Republicans hope he will. They keep saying that I’ll die, too, and I’m almost 92.1 hope Roosevelt fools ’em.”
The final session inside the stadium, Friday, July 21, lasted nine hours and would be described as the strangest, most bitter conclusion to a national convention in a very long time.
Nor were the seconding speakers much of an improvement. A labor leader from Pennsylvania said that while he did not know the senator personally, he thought Truman would make the strongest possible running mate for the reason that he was a Democrat and an American.
By contrast, a vigorous speech for Henry Wallace, delivered by an Iowa judge named Richard Mitchell, touched off another noisy demonstration, and Claude Pepper, given a turn at the podium at last, made a moving plea to the Democratic Party not to repudiate the man who more than any other symbolized the democracy of Franklin Roosevelt. Wallace’s delegate strength for the first ballot appeared to be gaining.
But Hannegan, Flynn, Kelly, and the others had been working through the night, talking to delegates and applying “a good deal of pressure” to help them see the sense in selecting Harry Truman. No one knows how many deals were cut, how many ambassadorships or postmaster jobs were promised, but reportedly, by the time morning came, Postmaster General Frank Walker had telephoned every chairman of every delegation.
The strategy of the Truman forces was to organize as many favorite-son nominations as possible and thereby keep Wallace from winning on the first ballot. The result was a total of sixteen nominations for Vice President, and as the speeches continued through the long afternoon, delegates in groups of twos and threes were seen going to and from a private air-conditioned room beneath the platform, Room H, at the end of a narrow, dark hall, where, for hours, Senator Truman stood shaking hands. Only later did he emerge to join Bess and Margaret in a box just behind the podium. Henry Wallace was waiting out the session in his hotel room, in keeping with custom, but Truman sat in full view munching on a hot dog and enjoying the spectacle.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 453