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 assassin.
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.
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 surpris
ed 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, living 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 w
as 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.”
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