Truman (6 page)

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'.
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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.

His Senate floor speeches were less distinguished. For the first two years they were almost non-existent. For the next two they
were infrequent, strident and often ill-judged. They were populist in tone and a little out of date, William Jennings Bryan without the oratory or the imagery. The railroad companies in the early years of the century, he claimed, had been far bigger robbers than Jesse James and his hold-up gang who occasionally got away with a few tens of thousands of dollars from express cars. The Carnegie libraries were ‘steeped in the blood of the Homestead steel workers'. The Rockefeller Foundation was built ‘on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and a dozen other similar performances'. More interestingly, and under the influence of Justice Brandeis,
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who had taken him up, he launched an attack on bigness: ‘I believe that a thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with $4,000 million in assets … I also say that a thousand county seat towns of 7,000 people each are a thousand times more important to this Republic than one city of 7 million people.'

The occasion of remarkable ill-judgment came in February 1938. Maurice Milligan, the brother of the Milligan who had opposed Truman in the 1934 primary, was at the end of his first term as District Attorney for the Kansas City area. Roosevelt, supported by his Attorney-General, was resolved to re-appoint him. This commanded the strong support of Governor Stark and the agreement of Senator Clark. It did not however command the agreement of Senator Truman, whose acquiescence might have been considered essential, on grounds of senatorial courtesy, in view of the location in the state of Milligan's field of operation and the fact that Truman had previously done badly for patronage in comparison with Clark. The issue was now however not one of simple senatorial courtesy. Milligan, with Stark's encouragement, was deeply involved in an investigation into Kansas City vote frauds at the 1936 elections. Pendergast was not directly involved for he had been ill in New York City at the time, but his machine most certainly was, and 259 over-eager supporters of it were convicted. It was also thought to be Truman's machine. In addition, Federal agents, working with Milligan's knowledge, were investigating Pendergast's non-payment of income tax on his $750,000 insurance companies' bribe.

In these circumstances Roosevelt's circumnavigation of Truman was understandable. Truman could have taken one of two courses, either of which, without being glorious, would have had something to be said for it. He could have rolled with the punch and quietly accepted Milligan, hoping that Roosevelt would compensate him on some future occasion. Or he could simply have blocked Milligan in the Senate, by saying, without reasons, that his re-appointment was unacceptable to him. The Senate would have drawn its own conclusions but it would almost certainly, for the sake of the prerogatives of other senators, not have overruled him.

He did neither. He waived his right to formal objection, but launched a most violent attack on the whole administration of justice in Jackson County. Of course, he said, he did not defend voting frauds. (He could hardly have said otherwise.) Those responsible should be prosecuted. But not by the methods employed. Milligan was corrupt because he accepted bankruptcy fees outside his salary. His witch hunting made him the cheap hero of the
Kansas City Star
and the
St Louis Post-Dispatch.
He was supported both in his corruption and in his prosecutions by two Republican judges, the strength of who's impartiality could be deduced from the facts that one was appointed by President Harding and the other by President Coolidge. Milligan and they could only get convictions by excluding inhabitants of Jackson County from juries in federal cases in the district. His conclusion was as extreme as it could be: ‘I say to this Senate that a Jackson County Missouri Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin.'

Truman's speech was hardly designed to make friends, either in Missouri or on Capitol Hill. It did not. It was heard with impatience by his opponents and with embarrassment by his normal allies. No one voted with him. He cast a single ‘nay' vote. What was his motive? To support Pendergast, most people said. To revive the humiliating label of being his ‘office boy' after three years of working to rub it off? And to do so at a time when Pendergast was manifestly no longer in a position to do anything more for Truman? The explanation does not begin to make sense.

Was it then just spleen against Roosevelt's disregard of him? Probably he was offended at the time. But nineteen months later he was writing to his wife with a remarkable calm wisdom about his relations with the President on exactly this type of issue. And this was when it was becoming depressingly clear to him that F.D.R. was probably for Stark, and certainly not ringingly for Truman, for renomination in 1940. ‘I am most happy you are back in line,' he wrote on September 24th, 1939. ‘You should not have gotten out seriously. [Presumably Mrs Truman had not unnaturally gone a little cool on Roosevelt.] My patronage troubles were the result of the rotten situation in Kansas City and also the jealous disposition of my colleague. While the President is unreliable, the things he's stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country, and jobs should not interfere with general principles. With most people they do.'
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More probably Truman just acted almost on impulse, although he must have prepared his speech over at least a few hours, without advice or any clearly worked-out objective. He was irritated, he was frustrated, he hated to trim, he could stand isolation and disapproval, so he lashed out without much thought of the consequences. It was a similar reaction to that which he exhibited in the letters of expostulation, a few privately posted but the majority fortunately not sent, with which he relieved his feelings during his presidency. However this speech was neither suppressed nor privately posted, but indelibly inscribed in the records of the Senate and impressed, although fortunately not indelibly, upon the memories of many of those who heard it. If the qualities he exhibited on this occasion, rashness, ill-judgment, pig-headed lack of concern for his own immediate interest, had to be weighed against each other and the balance measured as a test of fitness for the highest office the result would have been an almost unanimous adverse view.

However, in the second part of his first Senate term, the last thing that Truman himself, or anyone else, was thinking about was his fitness for the highest office. It began to seem increasingly unlikely that he would be able to continue in the Senate. The indictment of Pendergast in April 1939 was a major blow. Although Truman had slowly shaken off the slur of being the boss's office boy, the gain was substantially offset by the boss turning out to be not merely a boss but a crook, who was sent to
serve 15 months in Leavenworth, which had one of the most symbolic names of the Federal penitentiaries, as well as the disadvantage of sitting on the doorstep of Kansas City. There was no question of Truman being directly involved in the scandals, but apart from inevitable guilt by association the collapse of the Kansas City machine threatened him with a substantial loss of votes in any primary contest.

From the early summer of 1939 it was obvious that there was going to be such a contest. Governor Stark previously had alerted Truman, so the latter always subsequently asserted, by assuring him that, although he might be pressed, he would never run against him. Soon after the Pendergast
débâcle,
Stark declared himself a candidate. (Later Milligan, the disputed US Attorney, came into the contest too.) A year or so before Truman had been doubtful about how much he wanted to continue in the Senate, with the dreary Washington apartment life that it involved for him. Stark's emergence concentrated his mind. ‘I'm going to lick that double-crossing, lying governor if I can keep my health,' he wrote to his wife from Washington on July 5th.
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‘If I do then I can really do something here for Missouri. I know I could if old Jack or Wheeler should happen to be the fair-haired boy.'
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