by Roy Jenkins
Truman’s extensive journeying in 1931 was probably not only a mark of his diligence in planning the new courthouse but also a sign that he was becoming bored with his routine county tasks. He wanted a change and wider horizons. In the reorganization of district boundaries which followed the census of 1930, he had worked hard to secure the creation of a new congressional seat comprised of the eastern wards of Kansas City and the western part of rural Jackson County. ‘His dream was to represent that district in Congress,’ his daughter tells us.5 Pendergast however decided otherwise. He had his own candidate. Truman accepted the decision.
Then as the 1932 elections began to approach a substantial ‘Truman for Governor’ movement built up. His name had become fairly well known outside Jackson County. In 1930 he had been elected President of the Greater Kansas City Planning Association, which embraced three Missouri counties as well as another three across the state line in Kansas. He was also a familiar figure in the State House at Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. But St Louis, the metropolis to the east, remained alien territory to him. He would have been very much the candidate of the western part of the state. But, again, this did not fit in with Pendergast’s ideas. He wanted to run his elderly candidate (Francis M. Wilson) of 1928. And once again Truman submitted and withdrew. The elderly candidate then died a month before polling day and a rushed replacement had to be found. Pendergast, even then, did not turn to Truman.
Altogether, during this period, Pendergast did not do much for Truman. Perhaps he was more resentful of Truman’s stubbornness about the contracts than the latter realized. In the summer of 1932 there was a further irritant for Truman. He went to Chicago as part of the Missouri delegation to the Democratic Convention. He was for Roosevelt. But Pendergast was playing a more complicated game. He persuaded James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s man of business before the election, his Postmaster-General after it, and ultimately his dedicated enemy, that he wanted to see Roosevelt nominated. Probably he was realistically for Roosevelt. At the same time he was nostalgically committed to the candidature of James Reed, an old-style Missouri ex-senator, who had nominated Speaker Champ Clark against Woodrow Wilson as long ago as the Baltimore Convention of 1912. He kept Reed in until the third ballot, when he got him 27½ votes, and then did not so much deliver to Roosevelt the Missouri delegation, which had never been unanimous, as let it slip away to him. Truman had to vote for Reed. Worse still, he had to applaud a post-nomination speech of his which opposed every tenet of the New Deal, and would have seemed backward looking if delivered in 1900.
In spite of this 1932 was a good year for Pendergast. He got his second candidate for Governor elected. The re-districting had not gone through, so all the Missouri candidates for the House of Representatives had to run on a state list, which involved making their obeisance to the controller of the Kansas City vote. His only setback was that Bennett Clark, the former Speaker’s son, was elected Senator against his wishes. Pendergast’s disintegration did not come until later: in 1934 he was seized with a continuing and destructive gambling fever; in 1936 he stuffed the ballot box of Kansas City with false votes on a scale that was unacceptable even in that wide-open town; in that same year his bull-like body suddenly collapsed in New York; in 1939 he was indicted and gaoled.
Truman could sustain the personal vicissitudes of 1932 with reasonable equanimity. As a partisan Democrat and instinctive if not doctrinaire New Dealer, he rejoiced in his party’s great national victory. He still had two years of his term to run, and he had his courthouse project to bring to fruition. And, a year later, he got a part time Federal appointment as Re-employment Director for Missouri, under Harry Hopkins.
1934 was necessarily to be the test year for him. He was 50 that May. He could not run for a third term as County Judge, even had he wished to do so. By early 1935 he would either have to return to one of his precarious business enterprises or find some other, preferably higher, political office. Although he always attached great importance to not looking eager for his own political advancement, there is no doubt about which alternative he wanted. But he could not command it. Whether another door was to be opened to him depended upon Pendergast.
There was a very grand door available. It was the Democratic nomination for the second Missouri seat in the US Senate. The Republican incumbent, Roscoe Patterson, was up for re-election. With the Roosevelt tide running so strongly across the nation there was not likely to be much difficulty about beating him. Pendergast’s problem was the balance of Democratic power in Missouri. Bennett Clark of St Louis was installed in the other seat at least until 1938. In February 1934 Clark announced that he was supporting Congressman Jacob L. Milligan, of a rural county, to be his companion on Capitol Hill. Another congressman, John J. Cochran of St Louis itself, was also in the race. Neither was acceptable to Pendergast. They would have broken a rough convention that Missouri should have one senator from the Kansas City area. More important, they would have relegated him and his machine to a manifestly secondary position in the politics of the state. He had to beat Cochran and Milligan, and Cochran at least was a formidable challenger. This has led Truman apologists to claim that Pendergast needed Truman in this election at least as much as Truman needed Pendergast. Unfortunately for this theory, Pendergast did not appear to feel the need. He tried three other candidates before, as late as May, he came round to Truman. He then offered him the nomination and the promise of wholehearted backing. Truman hesitated for a day or so, partly because he did not wish to appear too available, and partly because he feared that he did not command the money for a hard-fought primary. But there is no doubt that he greatly welcomed the opportunity.
He campaigned with vigour, but with small resources and decreasing enjoyment. His expenses amounted to $12,280. $1,400 came from the Pendergast family. There were a few other substantial donations, mostly from very respectable sources. There were debts of just over $3,000 at the end. Truman’s disaffection stemmed from the increasing attacks upon him as a tool of Pendergast. Milligan claimed that in Washington Truman would get ‘calluses on his ears listening on the long distance telephone to his boss’. The head of the Missouri farmers’ organization called him a ‘bellhop’. The St Louis Post-Dispatch stated retrospectively: ‘County Judge Truman is the nominee of the Democratic Party for the United States Senate because Tom Pendergast willed it so.’ Part of the trouble was that Pendergast was alleged (although Truman always refused to believe it) to have injudiciously boasted that he had decided to send his ‘office boy’ to the Senate. The jibe stuck.
Nevertheless Truman campaigned indefatigably if unjoyfully throughout one of the hottest Julys in the history of the Middle West. The temperature was over 100° F on 21 days. He visited 60 of the state’s 114 counties, making around ten short speeches a day. He declared himself‘heart and soul for Roosevelt’. He survived a motor car accident and two broken ribs.
Polling was on August 9th. Milligan had faded, but Cochran remained a strong opponent. The result was remarkable, not so much for its overall out-turn as for the breakdown of the figures. Truman had a majority of about 40,000 in a vote of over half a million. In St Louis he polled only 3,742 against Cochran’s 104,265 (Milligan got 6,670). Kansas City provided the mirror image. There Cochran got only 1,525, against Truman’s 137,529 and Milligan’s 8,912. The machines had shown their power, and not only Pendergast’s. But his had the edge. The smaller city polled substantially more votes. Neither Truman nor Cochran would have had a chance without their machine backing. But equally either could have won or lost in the rural counties, where half of the votes were cast. And here Truman (and indeed Cochran) were largely on their own, with only the help of their records and their campaigning merits. In these ‘outstate’ areas they ran about equal, with Truman five thousand or so ahead.
The November election was easy. Truman overwhelmed Patterson. On January 2nd, 1935 (in a cutaway coat, which suited him ill, for he was always natty rather than elegant) and escorted, ironically but inevi
tably, by the senior Senator from Missouri, Bennett Clark, he took the oath of office before Vice-President Garner. He was nearly 51 years old. He was one of 96 members (69 of them Democrats) of what was on the way to becoming the most powerful elected chamber in the world. He was in a metropolis (if the Washington of those days, in uneasy transition between Southern swamp town and world capital, could be given such a name) which he had hardly visited before. He was a committed supporter of the Administration, but apart from Harry Hopkins, he hardly knew anyone in its inner circle. He had a modest record of local achievement behind him, but insofar as he had any national repute it was that of being thickly tarred with the Pendergast brush.
3
JUNIOR SENATOR FROM MISSOURI
Truman came to Washington as one of thirteen new Democrats in the Senate. It was too many for any of them automatically to be the centre of attention. And, because of Pendergast, Truman started with about the lowest reputation of the lot. He was also inherently one of the least superficially adaptable, with an uxorious devotion but a wife for whom neither the political nor the social life of the capital was ever likely to have much attraction. He was in addition one of the poorest senators and self-consciously so. He had no profession on which to fall back, he was exceptionally unwilling to earn even the most honest of additional money, and he found the increase from his $6,000 as County Judge to the 1930s senatorial salary of $10,000 insufficient to compensate for his Washington expenses. The result was to put him in a complaining mood which was for him unusual.
It also locked him in to an unsatisfactory pattern of life. He could not afford to establish a house in Washington in which Bess Truman would have liked to live. As a result there was always a danger of her spending substantial chunks of congressional sessions in Independence. Their daughter alternated between schools in both places, private in Washington, public in Independence.
Truman, left alone in Washington, was lonely and often miserable. He had nowhere agreeable to live. Sometimes he was reduced to a hotel room. At first he knew few people, and had little to do in the evenings, except apply himself to the minutiae of senatorial business. He was good at such painstaking homework, and it was to be one of the foundations of his later Senate success; but at the time it did not do much to raise his spirits.
Although his income was nominally three times greater, he was worse provided for in two respects than a roughly comparable British provincial Member of Parliament of the period operating in similar straightened and alien circumstances. These were no habitual Senate sessions and therefore no habitual Senate life in the evenings and, more unfortunately, he could not afford to go home. This was partly a function of distance, with air services already possible but rudimentary and slow. Still more however was it a function of there then being no unlimited free travel for members of Congress. ‘I almost came home …’ he wrote to his wife in February 1937. ‘I could have taken the train but the least I can do it for would be over one hundred dollars and we need those dollars too much.’1
When he went he mostly went by motor car. This was because it was cheaper. (The train was only seriously considered in 1937 because of a freeze-up in Missouri.) But it was a formidable journey. He could do it by leaving early one morning and getting to the other end late on the evening of the second day, but without pressing it had to be spread over three. It only began to be sensible for a week and not for a weekend. During his first Washington session, for instance, when Bess Truman left by June 15th and the Senate did not adjourn until the end of August, he only got home once during the intervening ten weeks. For the rest he spent his weekends as his weeks in the Washington summer (fortunately he was always almost totally impervious to heat), occasionally going to New York, sometimes being asked out of town to parties with people he did not know very well, but mostly working, or searching for an apartment which would make the District slightly more enticing to his wife during the next session.
It was principally for this that he needed ‘too much’ the dollars that he was reluctant to spend on the train fare home. It was an almost impossible dilemma. If he was to afford an apartment which might induce his wife and daughter to spend more time in Washington he could not afford to go and see them often when they were in Independence. Even with this abstinence he could not afford to pay more than about $150 a month. And nearly all available apartments under this price were either too small (there was always his mother-in-law to be accommodated) or too disagreeable.
It was a problem which he never solved, at least throughout his first term. He changed apartments every session, and sometimes more often, but it was mostly a change without a difference. Tilden Gardens, Warwick Apartments, Sedgwick Gardens, the castellated and Tudorized eight to ten storey 1920s apartment houses of the most anonymous part of north-west Washington were tried one after the other. None was much worse than the other, but none was much better either. ‘I knew every block of Connecticut Avenue before Dad’s senatorial career ended’, Margaret Truman wrote with more resignation than enthusiasm.2
The only significant changes were that in 1937 they were in the Carroll Arms, which presumably had apartments as well as rooms for ‘transients’ but which, on First Street, NE, was almost the ‘local’ of the Capitol and must have made for rather claustrophobic living, and that in 1941, at the beginning of his second term, he decided there was no point in movement without variety and settled in 1401, Connecticut Avenue, where, four years less eleven days later, he slept his first night as President of the United States.
It seemed about as likely in 1935 and 1936 that he would be Roosevelt’s successor as that he should be offered the Presidency of Harvard (or ‘Há vŭd’ as he liked to call it when imitating F.D.R.). Certainly Roosevelt did nothing to help him settle down as a new senator. Mostly, I suppose, he never thought about Truman, just knew his name and had difficulty attaching a face to it. He had him once to the White House after he had been in Washington for about six weeks, but Truman said that the meeting was not a success as he was so overawed as to be almost inarticulate; and there is no record of any further direct contact for nearly a year. Of more public importance was the fact that Roosevelt froze Truman out of Federal patronage in Missouri. He paid much more attention to Bennett Clark, who was admittedly the senior senator but who, apart from being lazy and often drunk, was a very doubtful supporter of the New Deal; Truman, on the other hand, continued to vote the ticket, on every issue except ‘the bonus’, with conviction and loyalty.
Worst of all was the only occasion when Roosevelt had to seek Truman’s support in a vote, and did it, not by a direct approach, but by getting Pendergast to telephone Truman. The occasion was the choice of a new majority leader in the Senate after the sudden death in July 1937, of Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas. Roosevelt wanted Alben Barkley of Kentucky, and got him, but by the somewhat slender margin of 38 votes to 37. Truman was in the New York before he could go home to Kansas City. And soon after his return there began the harrying investigations into both his ballot-rigging and his acceptance of a massive bribe from the insurance industry.
For Truman, on the other hand, it was the beginning of a better period. Jonathan Daniels considered that ‘his effective senatorial career began in the fall of 1936’.1 The improvement was based on two props. First his committee work became more purposeful and began to bear some fruit. Previously his hard work had been somewhat undirected. He just read whatever document came to hand, rather as, when a boy, he had read almost any book which he picked up in the Independence public library. The second prop was that he began to be accepted as a sort of junior member of the core of the Senate. This came from a combination of straight-dealing, willingness to work, and ‘regular guy’ folksiness. In itself it had little to do with the highest qualities of statesmanship. Few of the most lastingly well-known senators of the past 150 years qualified: not Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, neither La Follette, Wagner, Fulbright, Lehman, nor any Kennedy, with the possible but doubtful exception of Edward. To try
to recollect those over a century or more who it did include would be a contradiction in terms.
In the thirties, the core centred around John Nance Garner (never a member of the Senate as such but its presiding officer as Vice-President after 30 years as a Congressman from Texas), Barkley of Kentucky, Harrison of Mississippi, Wheeler of Montana and Vandenberg of Michigan (a Republican), with Sam Rayburn of Texas, already a Congressman of 24 years’ standing and later to be Speaker, providing a buttress from the House of Representatives. All of these, and as a result, a number of others too, approved of Truman. So, a different and perhaps more astringent test, did most of his freshmen contemporaries of the 1934 election: certainly Minton of Indiana, Schwellenbach of Washington State and Hatch of New Mexico, who were amongst the best of them, did so. By the autumn of 1936 he had developed a base of friendly acquaintances and potential allies. They nearly all came from west of the Alleghenies. They would nearly all have been surprised, two years earlier, to have been told how good they would find Truman to be.
His committee success was partly luck and partly work. From the beginning he was pleased with his major committee assignments—Appropriations (under Glass of Virginia) and Interstate Commerce (under Wheeler). The latter, with Wheeler’s encouragement, he was able to make into something substantial. Wheeler put him on a sub-committee of three to enquire into civil aviation. The other and senior Democrat hardly attended. Truman conducted the hearings with acumen and energy, and from them there emerged the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1937.
Wheeler set up another sub-committee to investigate railroad finances. The prosperity of the system was already past its peak, but financial interests were still taking a lot of money out of the companies. Wheeler himself took the chair of this sub-committee and began hearings in December 1936. Truman at first was not even a member. But he sat in at meetings assiduously, out of interest. When a member fell out, he was added. He quickly showed himself the best briefed. Then, after Roosevelt’s defeat on the Supreme Court issue, Wheeler, who had been one of the President’s most determined opponents, decided that he needed an autumn rest in Montana. Truman took over as chairman for some of the most crucial hearings. The first company on which he led the investigation was right in his back yard, the Missouri Pacific. Indeed its tracks had literally run at the bottom of one of his childhood gardens, in South Crysler Street, where he lived from 1890 to 1896. There were fears that he would pull his punches against such an intimate vis-à-vis. They were misplaced. Truman resisted a lot of home state pressure in a way that surprised and impressed the staff of the sub-committee. He also played the dominant role throughout 1938 and 1939 in preparing what, after several setbacks, became the Transportation Act of 1940 and is sometimes known as the Wheeler-Truman Act. He therefore ended his first Senate term with a good record of legislative achievement.