Bess Truman (20 page)
They promptly got into a fight over a number of department-store bills that the senator sent her, asking if they were “all right.” He apologized for “having to talk money and bills and I wouldn’t if I were a millionaire.” Bess found this remark irritating.
Her wrath was compounded by a rumor she picked up from Emma Griggs, mother of John Griggs, one of the Senate office staff from Missouri. Johnnie had apparently told his mother that the senator was miserable without his wife and daughter and spent almost every evening on the town in search of consolation. Mrs. Griggs seemed to have wondered if this involved chorus girls or lady lobbyists. Bess added to these peeves a fierce rebuke because Harry had gone to the office picnic over the Fourth of July. She did not approve of him fraternizing in a bathing suit with his young secretaries while she was in Independence. She warned him that it could lead to damaging gossip of the sort Mrs. Griggs already was spreading.
Money was a frequent source of irritation between them at the time. In mid-July, Bess suggested that instead of renting another apartment, they build a house. Harry said he’d “like very much” to build but the cost daunted him. Bess thought they could do it for $8,500, but he thought $10,000 was more likely to be the figure; then there would be another $2,500 for a lot and at least $2,500 for furniture. “You can see how it piles up,” he wrote. There was no need to remind her that his salary was only $10,000 a year.
Their chronic cash shortage made him feel guilty: “Maybe I can make a gamble [in some investment] next fall and hit a pot of gold.” He tormented himself for failing to take a chance on an investment opportunity that had come his way in the previous fall: “If I’d played my hunch last fall we’d have enough to build two houses.”
Meanwhile, Congress stayed in session. There was a veritable parade of major bills on the agenda from the Social Security Act to the controversial soak-the-rich Wealth Tax Act, which boosted income taxes for the upper brackets and took a big bite out of inheritances. The brawl over this bill alone made the idea of an early adjournment laughable.
There was some truth to Mrs. Griggs’ gossip about Senator Truman going out almost every night. It was practically unavoidable. Everyone who knew his bachelor status hurled invitations at him. Somewhat defensively, the senator sent his wife elaborate reports on the outings. One of the more interesting took place at the Virginia home of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph P. Kennedy: “The party last night was a real affair. . . . Bilbo [Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi], Burke [Senator Edward R. Burke of Nebraska], and I were the only new ones [new senators] there. It is the finest home I’ve ever seen. Out west of Washington on the Potomac, 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. There is a motion picture theater in the sub-basement. It was built by a young Chicago millionaire at a cost of $600,000, then he drank himself to death in two years, and his chorus-girl widow is trying to borrow $40,000 on it and can’t. Kennedy has it leased, furniture and all. . . .”
Senator Truman seldom enjoyed himself at these parties. Once, in exasperation, he exclaimed that he was “sick and tired of going out to dinner.” He wished they could “get enough ahead to go into business in some quiet country seat and get out of the whirl. But I know that will never happen.”
If the ordeal was doing nothing for the Truman marriage, it was providing yet another glimpse, this time on a national level, of their intense partnership, even when half the continent separated them. There are hitherto unrevealed glimpses of how Harry Truman was quietly, but steadily acquiring a perspective on the Senate. In the following letter, we also get a look at the supercharged political atmosphere of mid-1935, when Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin cast ominous shadows on America’s future: “The Senate convenes at eleven o’clock today to consider the Banking Bill. Senator Nye of North Dakota spoke for four hours after he’d introduced Father Coughlin’s bill as an amendment. The priest’s campaign manager and the president of the American Bankers Association sat side by side in the gallery. Neither of course knew who the other was. Most of us thought Coughlin wrote Nye’s speech. Nye is one of the good-looking egotistical boys who play to the gallery all the time. . . . He never comes to the Senate except to make a speech or introduce a bill to abolish the army and navy or to get more money for more investigations and more publicity. Several so-called people’s friends in the Senate would be in a hell of a fix if there were not some good old work-horses here who really cause the Senate to function. . . . There isn’t a so-called progressive who does anything but talk.”
Dad’s readiness to take on legislative chores soon qualified him to join the ranks of those workhorses, who constitute the inner circle of the Senate. A strong signal of acceptance came from Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. He began inviting Dad to his office, known as “the dog house,” to “strike a blow for liberty.” That was code for sharing some of Cactus Jack’s superb Kentucky bourbon. Dad also had won the vice president’s admiration by joining a group of freshmen senators led by Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington who declared their all-out support for the New Deal and their detestation of demagogues who were attacking it, in particular Senator Huey Long.
One day, Senator Long made one of his interminable speeches to a mostly empty Senate. Vice President Garner was among those who departed early. He asked Dad to preside in his absence. When Huey finally finished ranting, he asked Dad what he thought of his speech. “I had to listen to you because I was in the chair and couldn’t walk out,” Dad said. That was the last time Senator Long spoke to Senator Truman.
Senator Truman also was quietly but steadily informing people that he was not the senator from Pendergast. On June 26, for instance, he went to a dinner for the new senators at which Joe Guffey of Pennsylvania tried to twist everyone’s arm into voting for his coal bill, officially known as the Bituminous Coal Stabilization Act, which was aimed at shoring up the coal industry. Guffey, who had, Harry noted, “a desire to be a Senate boss,” had taken the precaution of calling Tom Pendergast to insure Senator Truman’s vote. “I think I’ll vote against it,” Harry told Bess, “although I was rather sold on it before that.”
On July 9, came another forlorn hint - he was hoping that Bess and Margaret Strickler, my future voice teacher, would drive east. He already had told Bess that he had framed and hung her picture in the Senate office. “You sort of dominate the office in that place,” he told her. He kept forgetting to send specials so that she would get a letter on Sunday. “It seems a year since I’ve been home and I guess it’ll be two before I get there,” he sighed on July 6.
A week later, he reported that Senator Borah of Idaho had told him that they would not adjourn until November. This drove the junior senator from Missouri to desperation. Along with endless Senate sessions and committee meetings and a daily deluge of visitors from home seeking favors, he added a search for a temporary apartment, which he would rent on August 1. On July 25, this idea produced two emotional letters. He was thinking of driving to Missouri over the weekend and bringing Bess and her daughter back. In the second letter, he became almost rhapsodic. “The more I think of that temporary apartment idea the more I like it,” he wrote.
In the next paragraph, realism took over. He noted the difficulties they faced: “What will you do about Margaret’s school? If she’s here when it opens she’d have to start here and then you couldn’t go home and I’ll have to be at home for at least a month after adjournment.”
Bess said no without qualifications or any attempt to work out a compromise. Senator Truman was left on his own in Washington, D.C. “I am somewhat disappointed that you don’t look with favor on coming back,” Harry wrote, surely the understatement of the decade. He admitted that a “sensible survey of the situation . . . would say that you are right. I’m not sensible about it. I couldn’t go to sleep until 1:30 thinking about you and home.”
Out of this tangle of frustration and disappointment emerged one of Harry Truman’s greatest political mistakes. Mother has to share part of the blame for it, I fear. On July 24, 1935, Harry mentioned to Bess that Senator Bennett Clark had told him he had just met three Missourians, all of whom wanted to be governor next year. One of them was Lloyd Stark, a millionaire owner of a vast apple nursery. Earlier in the month, Dad had noted the unexpected arrival of Tom Pendergast in New York. He had returned from Europe a full month early. Senator Truman suspected he was ill, which turned out to be the case.
Soon after the appearance of Lloyd Stark, Harry began to tell Bess that he was considering a trip to New York to see Pendergast. On July 28, after warning Bess to tell no one, he made the trip and told her why. He had found out that Charles Howell, who had run against Bennett Clark for the Senate in 1932 and had earned his enmity, was going to announce for governor, presuming on Boss Tom’s backing. Clark was certain to oppose him with a candidate of his own, and the Missouri Democratic Party would be in smithereens again. Dad proposed Stark as a compromise candidate. He was rich, he was honest, and he was begging for Pendergast’s support.
It was clever politics at that time. It held the state party together when President Roosevelt was coming under increasingly fierce attack by conservative Democrats, who were numerous in Missouri. But we shall see that for Harry Truman personally, it was a horrendous mistake. If Bess had been in Washington, D.C., and had met Lloyd Stark, I think she might have persuaded her husband to be a bit more cautious about backing the man. I don’t attribute any superior ability to read character to her, but her general approach to life was warier, more pessimistic about human nature and the future than Harry Truman’s. She might have thought Lloyd Stark’s vows of eternal gratitude and warm tributes to Senator Truman’s political acumen were a little too good to be true.
Suddenly, she had a letter from her husband informing her he was coming home to line up the state for Lloyd Stark. He zoomed through Independence, spending only a single day with her, and then whirled around the state and back to New York a week later, where he told Tom Pendergast that everyone now agreed that Stark was an excellent candidate for governor. Harry Truman was acting as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party in Missouri - at a time when the newspapers were still calling him the Pendergast’s errand boy. In her letters, Bess cheered him on; she particularly enjoyed the way he was pulling the whole thing off without a line of it getting into the newspapers.
But the long separation continued to be a sore point. In his first letter after his return to Washington from his meteoric trip around Missouri, the senator noted that Bess had failed to kiss him goodbye when they went out to the car. He had wanted her to come back to Washington with him for the next few weeks, and she had refused. Bess heatedly reminded him that she had given him a very serious kiss in the house and was not in favor of public embraces in the first place. The lonely senator apologized, and for the last two weeks of the session, they debated where to go for a vacation.
The fifty-one-year-old senator was badly in need of one. Always proud of his ability to digest enormous amounts of facts and remember them, he was shocked by a late August lapse. He had gotten a bill on the Interstate Commerce Committee calendar for Senator McCarran of Nevada, and the day it came up, he forgot what it was all about. He had to read the original proceedings in the Senate to recall the whole business - it had to do with putting airlines under the commerce committee. “That ought not to happen and wouldn’t have ten years ago,” he wrote. “Maybe I need a holiday.”
Mother concurred. She was not finding 219 North Delaware restful. For the first time, she began criticizing some of her Wallace relatives. As we have seen, her sister-in-law Natalie chafed at living under her mother-in-law’s omnipresent eye. Natalie was difficult in other ways, too. On August 14, Bess wrote Harry: “Natalie and Frank are thinking about driving to Santa Fe about the 10th of September & asked if we would be interested in coming. I think
she
thinks the car would be too full tho’ with Marg along so I don’t see how we could go for I wouldn’t leave her here at home for that length of time.”
Bess concluded they had better do their own traveling: “It would probably be more satisfactory anyway. They are both of them so old & crotchety.”
As homecoming neared, Bess resumed her partnership role. She went down the list of the office staff and discussed with the senator who should come home with him and who should stay in Washington. She still maintained a proprietary interest in the staff. When John Griggs fell in love during the summer, Bess wanted to know all about it. She fretted, along with the senator, about secretary Mildred Latimer’s boyfriend, William Dryden, who was an alcoholic and went berserk on a bus in late August. The senator took the time to visit him in the hospital. He told Bess how expertly Dryden played on Millie’s sympathy, perhaps hoping that the message might be applied closer to home. “He’s like all alcoholics - undependable,” he wrote.
Bess preferred to discuss the legislative struggle in Washington, which she had been following closely. She thought it would be better if they did not pass the controversial wealth tax bill: “The Dem. party would probably profit considerably (& each one of you, personally) [she meant they would finally adjourn] if the thing doesn’t come to a vote this session.” Huey Long enlivened the closing days of the session by announcing that he was going to run for president in 1936. Bess wanted to know if he had “made any sort of stir” when he declared for the highest office, as if Franklin D. Roosevelt did not exist.
In the last week in August, the Senate passed a staggering number of major bills. The Banking Act reorganized the Federal Reserve System, the Public Utility Holding Act transformed that industry, the Guffey-Snyder Coal Act did likewise for the miners, and a modified version of the Wealth Tax Act passed on the last day. Senator Truman voted for the utility bill in spite of a plea from Tom Pendergast and a warning from the Kansas City
Journal Post
, the only local newspaper that regularly supported the Democrats. The paper happened to be owned by an oil magnate who violently opposed the bill. The
Journal
castigated the junior senator on its editorial page as a “tool of the Roosevelt administration.”
