In Nicaragua on the return route, President Somoza impressed him as “a regular fellow.” In Mexico City, he tried to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. But it was arriving at San Francisco and stopping at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill that he enjoyed most. He loved San Francisco. “This, you know, is one of the world’s great cities and it is San Francisco—not Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma retired farmers as the city in southern California is,” he wrote, referring to Los Angeles, a city he disliked. When others in the party went out on the town, on a “slumming expedition” in search of female companionship, he bowed out. “I guess I’m not built right,” he told Bess. “I don’t enjoy ’em—never did, even in Paris, and I was twenty years younger then.”
At a first campaign strategy meeting in St. Louis, at the Hotel Statler in January 1940, fewer than half of those invited appeared and some only to explain sheepishly why they would be unable to take an active part. The few with serious interest included his old friend Mayor Roger Sermon of Independence, Harry Vaughan, John Snyder, and James K. Vardaman, who, like Snyder, was a St. Louis banker. They would support Harry no matter what, they said, though Roger Sermon, who was known as “a plodder” and “all business,” thought Harry should understand the outlook was extremely bleak. “Harry, I don’t think you can win and that’s not merely my personal opinion but after inquiring around.” Having heard several more comparably discouraging forecasts, Harry said only that he would appreciate a little talk about electing Senator Truman.
Jim Pendergast, who was unable to attend, had asked Vic Messall earlier to tell the senator that “if he gets only two votes in the primary one will be mine and the other will be my wife’s.” Jim Aylward decided to sit the campaign out. Congressman Joe Shannon wanted time to make up his mind. But Jim Pendergast, as surviving head of what was left of the organization, would work as few men ever did for Harry and produce considerably more than two votes.
On February 3, 1940, Truman announced formally that he was filing his declaration of candidacy for reelection to the United States Senate, and said further that he was both opposed to President Roosevelt’s seeking a third term and that his own choice for President was Bennett Clark.
Seldom had he appeared more the politician, in the least complimentary understanding of the term. That he, Harry Truman, could honestly propose conservative, isolationist, alcoholic Bennett Clark for the presidency at any time, let alone now, with the world as it was, seemed so blatantly hypocritical and expedient as to be laughable. Nor did his promise, “as a faithful Democrat,” to support Roosevelt, should he become the nominee, take any of the edge off the announcement. Clearly, it was Clark’s support in eastern Missouri that he was after, that and a little satisfaction perhaps in letting Roosevelt know how he felt and that he too could play the game.
His opposition to a third term, however, was entirely sincere. The idea went against his fundamental political faith. “There is no indispensable man in a democracy,” he wrote privately. “When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend upon the life or health or welfare of any one man.”
To no one’s surprise, the Bennett Clark presidential boom came to nothing.
Vaughan and Snyder raised what little money there was to begin with and set up headquarters in a “borrowed” room in the Ambassador Building in St. Louis. “We borrowed clerks, we borrowed furniture, we borrowed everything we could,” Snyder recalled. Almost no one seemed willing to give money. Mildred Dryden, who had left the Washington office to help with the campaign, remembered having trouble finding money enough to buy stamps. One mailing of eight hundred letters asking for donations of a dollar produced about $200, hardly worth the effort. According to Rufus Burrus, an Independence lawyer and another of Harry’s Army reserve friends, funds were so low at one point that there was not money enough for a hotel room, so the candidate slept in his car. “A United States Senator…sleeping in his car!”
The first of Harry’s Senate friends to lend a hand was Lewis Schwellenbach, who arrived in time for the official opening of the campaign at Sedalia, in the heart of the state, the night of Saturday, June 15, 1940, one day after German troops occupied Paris. A crowd of several thousand turned out, which was fewer than expected, but having Schwellenbach there counted heavily with the candidate. Mary Jane and Mamma Truman were in front-row seats on the lawn. Bess and Margaret were seated on the platform. “At sixteen,” Margaret later wrote, “I was able to feel for the first time the essential excitement of American politics—the struggle to reach those people ‘out there’ with ideas and emotions that will put them on your side.” Mamma Truman, who was nearly eighty-eight, shook hands among the crowd, a campaign aide at her side to help with names. Probably, as one of her generation, she never thought of the people as “out there.”
“Is he our friend?” she would ask about those she met.
More fellow Democrats from the Senate arrived in Missouri to lend a hand, an unusual gesture in a primary campaign and a very real measure of their regard and affection for Harry Truman. Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton, and Lewis Schwellenbach, three old friends, came to give vocal support. However pointedly Roosevelt ignored him, Truman was running hard on his New Deal record. “While the President is unreliable,” he confided to Bess, “the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country….” Senator Jimmy Byrnes, hearing of Truman’s financial troubles, talked the New York financier Bernard Baruch into contributing a desperately needed $4,000 to the campaign. And at the last, Alben Barkley, too, would appear for speeches in St. Louis and Kansas City. But Bennett Clark appeared determined to do nothing. What had Harry Truman ever done for him, Clark is said to have remarked in Washington.
In full-page newspaper ads, the president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, A. F. Whitney, called for help for “our good friend” Harry Truman, and in another few weeks the railroad unions provided the only big money behind the senator, some $17,000. Harry, as always in his political life, refused to handle any money, leaving that to the others. Eventually, however, to meet expenses he had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance policy.
Four years of investigations into railroad finances had resulted in the Truman-Wheeler Bill, still to be passed, providing protection for the railroads as a mainstay of the nation’s transportation system. He had supported the Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, and after passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, giving farmers price supports, he had said on the floor of the Senate that until the farmer got his fair share of the national income there could be no real agricultural progress. In 1939 he had voted for expanding the low-cost housing program, for increased funds for public works, increased federal contributions to old-age pensions. Particularly was he proud of his part in the Civil Aeronautics Act (1938), to bring uniform rules to the burgeoning new aviation industry.
On the issues of national defense and how the country should meet the crises in Europe, he was adamant. America “ought to sell all the planes and materials possible to the British Empire,” he said in a radio address on June 30.
It was the record he ran on, and tirelessly. Through July he crisscrossed the state in his own car, a ’38 Dodge, again with Fred Canfil along to share the driving, or Vic Messall or his old Kansas City friend Tom Evans. When Harry drove, he drove fast—too fast, the others thought.
Between times he was traveling back and forth to Washington, where, because of the war in Europe, Congress was still in session. Yet he seemed to thrive on it all, just as in the last campaign. Tom Evans, who was twelve years younger, had to give up and go home, no longer able to keep the pace.
Truman’s speeches were without charm. He made no attempt at eloquence or the kind of slowly building, tall-tale exaggeration and pleasure in words for their own sake that Missouri audiences traditionally adored. His voice was both flat and high-pitched—and the larger the crowd, the higher the pitch. In normal conversa
tion he spoke in rather low, pleasing tones, but something happened as soon as he stepped to a podium. Trying to emphasize a point, he would chop the air rapidly, up and down, with both hands, palms inward, while at the same time, and in the same rhythm, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet, a style some of his detractors loved to imitate.
He had little skill for making politics a good show. It was a talent he greatly admired in others, but that he did not have now any more than before. The Senate had taught him little in that respect. Compared to someone like Bennett Clark, who after half an hour on the stump was only warming up, he was a flat failure. Yet in his own face-to-face way of campaigning he could be very effective. Once, in the course of the campaign, he told a friend how to do it: “Cut your speech to twenty-five minutes, shake hands with as many people as you can for a little while. Afterward, even if you have time left, leave. If you have no place to go, you can always pull off the road and take a nap.”
Moving among country crowds, pumping hands, he would say, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I’m from Jackson County.”
He also took a stand on civil rights, and while by later standards what he said would seem hardly daring or sufficient, for Missouri in 1940 it was radical. He stated his position at the very start, in Sedalia, to a nearly all-white audience:
I believe in the brotherhood of man; not merely the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men before the law…. If any class or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we count our safety….
Negroes have been preyed upon by all types of exploiters, from the installment salesman of clothing, pianos, and furniture to the vendors of vice. The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as freemen, they are entitled to something better than this.
Privately, like the country people whose votes he was courting, he still used the word “nigger” and enjoyed the kind of racial jokes commonly exchanged over drinks in Senate hideaways. He did not favor social equality for blacks and he said so. But he wanted fairness, equality before the law. He had been outraged by reports of black troops being discriminated against at Fort Leavenworth and used his office to put a stop to it.
At the National Colored Democratic Association Convention in Chicago that summer, he told a black audience that raising educational opportunities for Negro Americans could only benefit all Americans. “When we are honest enough to recognize each other’s rights and are good enough to respect them, we will come to a more Christian settlement of our difficulties.” Legal equality was the Negro’s right, Truman said, “because he is a human being and a natural born American.”
In one respect it was like 1934 all over again. There were three in the running and again one was named Milligan, for District Attorney Maurice Milligan had decided that he, not Lloyd Stark, was the one who had brought down Tom Pendergast and so deserved to be the next Senator from Missouri. Later speculation that Milligan was, in fact, cleverly maneuvered into the race by some of the Truman people—in order to divide the Stark vote—would never be substantiated, but that was what happened (just as Tuck Milligan had divided the vote for Cochran in 1934), and for Truman his entry into the contest could not have been more welcome.
In the first weeks the odds were heavily in favor of Stark, with Milligan second, Truman a very distant third. (A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the Post-Dispatch showed two heavy trucks marked “Stark” and “Milligan” in head-on collision high above a tiny toy truck marked “Truman.” “No place for a Kiddie car,” said the caption.) The Milligan candidacy rapidly faded, however. It soon became a race between Stark and Truman, and one of Truman’s chief advantages proved to be Stark himself, as Harry Truman seems to have known intuitively from the beginning. Over dinner at the Willard Hotel one evening in Washington, well before the campaign began, he had told friends he was sure Stark would attack him personally and that if he, Harry, were not even to mention Stark, then Stark would begin making mistakes—“enough errors to give me a definite opportunity.”
As predicted, Stark tore into Truman at first chance, calling him a Pendergast lackey, a rubber-stamp senator, and a fraud. “The decent, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of Missouri,” said Stark in a speech at Joplin, “know him for what he is—a fraudulent United States Senator, elected by ghost votes, whose entire record in public office has been devoted to one purpose alone, and that is to the service of the corrupt master who put him into power….”
In Truman’s files still was the letter from Stark thanking him for the introduction to Tom Pendergast. Learning of this, several on the campaign staff urged Harry to release it, certain it could settle the outcome of the election in one blow. But Harry refused, saying he would let Stark destroy himself.
Little things about Stark began to draw attention. It was noted, for example, that his chauffeur was required to give him a military salute. Then, with only weeks to go, Stark went to the national convention in Chicago as an announced candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, as well as for the Senate, and Bennett Clark, who had at last concluded that Harry Truman deserved his help, rose to the occasion in grand style. To a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Clark observed:
Lloyd’s ambitions seem to be like the gentle dew that falls from heaven and covers everything high or low. He is the first man in the history of the United States who has ever tried to run for President and Vice-President, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, Governor General of the Philippines, Ambassador to England and United States Senator all at one-and the same time…. I understand, too, that he is receiving favorable mention as Akhund of Swat and Emir of Afghanistan.
Stark was one of seventeen in a vice-presidential race that included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead, William O. Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, Henry A. Wallace, and Congressman Sam Rayburn. At Chicago, Stark passed out bushels of apples and wound up with 200 votes on the first ballot. The final decision, however, was made in Washington by Roosevelt, who had by then accepted the draft of the convention for a third term. He chose Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture, a former Republican from Iowa, a former editor of Wallace’s Farmer, which had been founded by his grandfather, and an ardent liberal.
Truman had come to Chicago with the Missouri delegation and held a seat on the resolutions committee, an important role. The convention opened on July 15. But in Kansas City the following day, an event took place that rocked him as very little ever had. The Republicans who controlled the county court had decided to foreclose the court-held mortgage on the homeplace at Grandview, and on Tuesday, July 16, 195 acres of the farm were sold at auction on the courthouse steps in Kansas City. The Star carried a front-page picture of the auction crowd and a caption explaining that the farm belonged to Martha E. Truman, mother of the Missouri senator. How much warning Harry had is unknown, but clearly he was helpless to find the money to save his mother from eviction. He was also certain it had been done for political reasons only, to humiliate him in the middle of the campaign, which seems to have been exactly the case.
Two days later at the convention, in the middle of the fight over the vice-presidential nomination, Harry felt suddenly so tired and weak he thought he was having a heart attack. Reaching out desperately, he clutched at a railing and hung on for ten or fifteen minutes, totally unable to move, until someone, seeing what was happening, helped him to a chair.
The homeplace on Blue Ridge was gone—though it would be recovered later. His mother and sister moved into a small, rented house in Grandview, where, not long afterward, Mamma Truman slipped on the unfamiliar steps and broke her hip. As broken hips were then often fatal, Harry thought it meant the end for her. But it was not, nor did she complain
about the new quarters.
In a letter home, he asked Bess to try to imagine the shame she would feel if her mother were evicted from 219 North Delaware.
Election day for the primary would be August 6; from Washington in late July, he wrote, “I’m thinking August 6 all the time.” Theodore Roosevelt had once written that “black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.” It seemed to be his own cure, too.
Will call you from Sedalia tomorrow night. Taking train to arrive there at 9:30 P.M. Will start out at Salisbury at 10:00 A.M. Thursday, Keytesville at 2:00 P.M., Brunswick 4:00, and Carrollton at 8:00 P.M., Hardin at 9:00 P.M. Next day Cuba and Cape Girardeau. Saturday, Sikeston, Maiden, and Poplar Bluff. Rest Sunday and start at Lamar, Nevada, Rich Hill, and Butler Monday. Harrisonville, Belton, and K.C. Tuesday. Will stay at home Tuesday night…and go to St. Louis, thirty-first. Barkley is coming to K.C. and St. Louis on thirtieth and thirty-first. Will stay in St. Louis until Saturday and then come home.
The night of the big speech with Barkley in St. Louis was a fiasco. In a hall big enough to seat more than three thousand people, a grand total of three hundred showed up.
And yet it was in St. Louis in the final week that events turned suddenly and unexpectedly in Harry’s favor. When the campaign was over and the results final, he would comment to Bess, “Anyway we found out who are our friends….”
As valuable as any, surprisingly, ironically, was Bennett Clark. From a hotel room in St. Louis, Clark began calling people all over the state. “He finally ended up in a hospital and we continued to push him even there,” remembered a Truman campaign worker, “and he kept his telephone busy.”
Still more important was Clark’s influence on a hale, broad-shouldered young Irish-American named Robert E. Hannegan about whom until now Truman knew nothing. A St. Louis police chief’s son, Hannegan had been a star athlete at St. Louis University and for a while, after law school, played semi-professional baseball. Since 1933, he had been extremely active in Democratic politics, in the rough school of the Dickmann organization, eventually becoming city chairman. But up to now, Hannegan had been working for Stark. Whatever it was that Bennett Clark said or promised to make him switch must have been extremely convincing, for with just two days to go before the primary, Hannegan suddenly deserted Stark and went to work feverishly for Truman. In hindsight, Harry would see it as the biggest break of the campaign, and thereafter the tall, good-looking young man in the loud neckties could do no wrong in Harry’s estimation, though had anyone ever walked out on him as Hannegan had on Stark, it would have been seen as rank betrayal.
Truman Page 33