Harry fears that someone from the eastern part of Missouri may undertake to set up as boss. Harry Truman fears a boss in Missouri—God save the mark! Harry places the intelligence of the Democrats of Missouri so low and estimates their credulity so high that he actually went into great length in promising people that if elected to the Senate he would not set up as a boss or undertake to dictate to anybody. Why, bless Harry’s good kind heart—no one has ever accused him of being a boss or wanting to be a boss and nobody will ever suspect him of trying to dictate to anybody in his own right as long as a certain eminent citizen of Jackson County remains alive and in possession of his health and faculties…. In view of the judge’s record of subserviency in Jackson County it would seem that his assurances against any assumption of boss-ship are a trifle gratuitous to say the least.
When all three candidates, plus Bennett Clark and Governor Guy B. Park, appeared at a huge picnic in Clay County, north of Kansas City, an annual affair sponsored by St. Munchins Catholic Church, Harry was clearly outclassed. Bennett Clark held the crowd spellbound, though it was Milligan who got the biggest applause. Ten thousand people sat resolutely through four hours of political oratory, as the sun beat down. “Deeply interested in the array of political lights that paraded across the rough board rostrum,” wrote a reporter, “the perspiring crowd held its ground throughout.”
The president of the Missouri Farmers’ Association, William Hirth, joined the Cochran campaign and began referring to Truman as “Tom Pendergast’s bellhop.” “For this bellhop of Pendergast’s to aspire to make a jump from the obscure bench of a county judge to the United States Senate is without precedent. When one contemplates the giants of the past who have represented Missouri this spectacle is not only grotesque, it is sheer buffoonery.”
Striking back, Harry charged Milligan with padding the government payroll with relatives, but saved his harshest invective for Bennett Clark. The senator, said Harry, ran for office on his father’s reputation, but his record proved there was nothing in heredity.
Many who thought they knew Judge Truman were astonished by the different man he became now, under attack. “Judge Truman is unobtrusive in his work,” wrote a correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “His decisions are made in low tones; there is no braggadocio about him. He sees his job and does it quietly. But in a fight, this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire….”
Truman, said Bennett Clark, was conducting a campaign of “mendacity and imbecility” unmatched in Missouri history. “What Harry is really trying to do is to secure a good county job for himself on his retirement from the county court of Jackson County next January…. Harry himself told me of his hopes.” Perhaps the heat was affecting Harry Truman, Clark surmised, because ordinarily he was neither vicious nor inventive enough to tell such lies. Further, Clark charged that seven or eight thousand state employees were out campaigning for Truman, all at the taxpayers’ expense—but then such, alas, was the Pendergast way.
T.J., demonstrating that he still knew a few things about bringing politicians down to size, invited a reporter into his office and in the course of an affable, soft-spoken conversation remarked, “Why, Senator Clark is a friend of mine. He was in here just the other day.”
Jack Cochran, to his credit, tried to keep the debate on a serious level. Mud slinging, Cochran said, was a luxury for prosperous times and had no place when conditions were so desperate and so many were suffering. In a speech in front of the Capitol at Jefferson City, Harry Truman, too, talked of his sadness over so much that he had seen traveling the countryside.
Farm prices, in steady decline since the Coolidge years, had gone from bad to worse. Eggs that normally sold for 25 cents a dozen were bringing 5 cents. Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand Missouri farms had been foreclosed. Abandoned houses, their windows boarded, fences falling, dotted the landscape. Sharecroppers were living in two-room, dirt-floor shacks, walls insulated with old newspapers. The look of the land, and in the faces of farm families in this summer of 1934, was as bleak as in anyone’s memory. Certainly, Harry Truman had never seen anything comparable. It was both the worst of the Depression and the year dust storms on the western plains began making headlines. With no rain and the fierce heat continuing, crops were burning up all over Missouri. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assumed a biblical cadence in its description of the tragedy: “Under merciless summer suns the fields ached, and the corn withered, and the cattle perished, and the rivers became as scars of dust, as the drought droned its hymn of hate.”
Conditions, said Truman in one speech, were “such as to make any human with a heart anxious to alleviate them.”
He presented himself as a common-sense country boy. He was the good Baptist farmer from Grandview, repeatedly poking fun at his rivals as “city farmers.” And he looked the part, deeply tanned from days in the sun, lean, fit, “hard as nails” by one account. He was fifty now and there was considerably more gray in his hair, yet he seemed much younger. He smiled constantly—a big politician’s grin, his even, white teeth looking whiter than usual because of the tan, his eyes flashing behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Joe Shannon, among others, thought he smiled entirely too much.
One blistering day, on a road near Mexico, Missouri, seeing a farmer in a field having trouble with his binder, Harry stopped the car, climbed the fence, introduced himself, took off his coat, “and proceeded to set up the binder under a hot sun for his new found friend,” as reported in the local paper in a story that did him no harm with the local farmers.
Truman and Cochran were both battling for the farm vote, knowing it could decide the election. Neither of them had a chance without the support of their respective big-city machines, but if the votes for Cochran in St. Louis and those for Truman in Kansas City proved equal, then it would be the farmers who named the winner. Jim Pendergast worried that the farmers were more concerned about the prospects for rain than about politics.
In six weeks candidate Truman covered the greater part of Missouri by automobile, by main highways and winding back roads, until he had appeared before, shaken hands, and “visited” with courthouse crowds in more than half of the 114 county seats. It was hot, exhausting, throat-parching day-and-night work and he greatly enjoyed nearly every moment. He had always liked being on the road. “Fact is, I like roads,” he would say. “I like to move….” He felt as good as if he were on vacation, he told reporters, and he looked it.
Again, as on the earlier cross-country courthouse survey, he was accompanied by Fred Canfil, whose hulking, blustery presence left some people wondering. If a man could be judged by the company he kept, why on earth would Judge Truman choose such a companion? But Canfil was as hardworking, as willing to put in ten to fifteen hours a day as ever. Besides, Harry found him amusing, good company, if eccentric and at times exasperating. Arriving at a hotel, Canfil would immediately check Harry’s quarters to see that all was satisfactory—bathroom, sink, toilet, bathtub—and oblivious to the fact that he was scattering his cigarette ashes everywhere he went. Canfil and Truman were to be together for years, as things turned out, Truman refusing to abandon Canfil or to make apologies for him.
Some days that summer, they covered several hundred miles, stopping for food and gas and speeches at a dozen or more places. Some towns were good-sized, like Hannibal on the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s town, which had grown to twenty thousand people, or Poplar Bluff, seat of Butler County, on the bright, clear, misnamed Black River, in the southeastern corner of the state. Poplar Bluff had a population of ten thousand. More often the candidate spoke in places like Laddadonia, Elmo, Liberty, or Benton, towns of six hundred people or less. At Benton, seat of Scott County, population four hundred and known for its chicken-calling contest on Neighbor Day each October, bobcats were still a sufficient menace in the 1930s to require an organized “drive” on them. At Liberty, just north of the Missouri River from Independence in Clay County, the little, two-story bank building on the no
rtheast corner of the courthouse square looked no different from the day in 1866 when it was held up by Jesse James.
The crowds that turned out to hear Judge Truman were seldom large, no more usually than a cluster of a few hundred people standing quietly, attentively in the shade of a courthouse lawn, while in his rapid-fire fashion he spoke from the courthouse steps. A good part of his usual audience was composed of courthouse loafers, old-timers with nothing better to do, and, invariably, small boys free from school for the summer. The atmosphere was old-fashioned and neighborly, and though the response to him was rarely demonstrative, he seemed always to leave his crowds feeling better.
For a scrapbook of the campaign, Fred Canfil kept clipping the local papers along the way. One item dated August 3, from an unidentified paper, acknowledged that Judge Truman was no orator, but then this was an argument in his favor since there was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.
At a banquet in his honor at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City the week before the primary, Tuck Milligan brought seven hundred people to their feet cheering when, without mentioning Tom Pendergast by name, he said that anyone who perpetrated vote fraud in America ought to be treated as a common criminal. As for his opponent Harry Truman, who was still campaigning at the other end of the state, Milligan joked, “Why, if Harry ever goes to the Senate, he will grow calluses on his ears, listening on the long-distance telephone to the orders of his boss.”
Milligan by now was clearly falling behind, while Cochran and Truman appeared to be neck and neck.
On the day of the primary, August 7, once the smoke blew away, as Harry said, he had won by 40,000 votes. The final tally was Truman, 276,850; Cochran, 236,105. Milligan, who ran a poor third, received 147,614.
Harry had done well with the farmers, but so had Cochran, carrying as many counties as Truman. The big margin of victory after all was in Jackson County, where a grand total of 137,000 votes had been rolled up for Truman, nearly half of all he received. Two years before, with Pendergast support in his race for Congress, Cochran had carried Jackson County by an overwhelming 95,000 votes. This time, with the organization against them, Cochran and Milligan together received all of 11,000 votes. In some Kansas City precincts Cochran failed to get a single vote.
Cochran felt his big mistake in the race had been to predict he would get 125,000 votes in St. Louis. This, he thought, had only made the Pendergast people work harder. As it was, Cochran’s margin in St. Louis (and St. Louis County) was 112,000–25,000 votes less than what had been achieved by the machine at the other end of the state.
The Kansas City Star called it a Pendergast triumph pure and simple. The one consolation was that western Missouri would now have representation in the Senate. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expressed the view that the winning of the Democratic nomination for United States Senator by Judge Harry S. Truman of Independence was “without significance.”
No one seemed to think that Truman himself had had a thing to do with his victory, and he himself was quoted saying only how much he appreciated all that his friends had done for him.
As expected, the general election in the fall was a “pushover.” Harry’s Republican opponent was the incumbent who proudly carried the name of an infamous New York Republican of the Grant era, Roscoe Conkling. He was Roscoe Conkling Patterson. Harry’s expenses in the primary had come to $12,286. In the general election they were $785.
Afterward, he and Jim Aylward made a flying visit to Washington to call on Bennett Clark, who had been the biggest loser in the primary fight and who now, looking to his own reelection a few years hence, preferred to forget all he had ever said against his “good friend” Harry Truman and the Kansas City organization.
In a talk before the Kansas City Elks Club, Harry said he hoped to keep his feet on the ground in Washington.
By December, the final touches were being added to the handsome new, twenty-one-story courthouse in Kansas City. On the day of its dedication, after Christmas, as her father beamed with pleasure, ten-year-old Margaret Truman helped pull the string to unveil Charles Keck’s equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson. Margaret had grown tall for her age, “skinny and all one color—faded blonde,” a friend would remember, and clearly she enjoyed being her father’s daughter.
As a reward for faithful service, Fred Canfil was made Building Director of Jackson County, a kind of glorified custodian or janitor for the new courthouse, and would, according to later testimony, prove “very energetic” and “very noisy and loudmouthed,” and run things better than any other previous custodian.
They were exciting days for the Trumans. The week after, on January 3, 1935, Bess and Margaret, with Jim Pendergast, watched from the visitors’ gallery in the United States Senate as Harry, “barely recognizable” in morning coat and striped pants, walked with Senator Clark down the blue-carpeted aisle to the dais, to take the oath of office from Vice President John Nance Garner.
On the day Harry bid goodbye to Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Pendergast had told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”
III
Harry Truman had an unusually retentive mind. He remembered people—names, personal interests, family connections. He remembered things he had read or learned in school long before, often bringing them into conversation in a way that amazed others. He remembered every kindness he had ever been shown, the help given in hard times, and particularly would he remember those who treated him well when he first arrived in Washington, at age fifty, knowing almost no one and entirely without experience as a legislator. He would fondly recall Harry Hopkins, for example, because Hopkins had shown him kindness in this most difficult of times in his life. Another was William Helm, Washington correspondent for the Kansas City Journal-Post, to whom the new senator had gone for help at the start, confessing he was “green as grass” and in need of someone to show him around. At first, Helm took this as a joke. Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn’t take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.
Two other new Democratic senators, Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington, went out of their way to be friendly. Hatch was self-effacing and bookish, Schwellenbach “a real guy” and “a wheel horse.” Among the older, veteran senators, Harry could count a half dozen from both sides of the aisle who gave encouragement, and like Hatch and Schwellenbach, they were all from the West, or were at least western in outlook.
Extremely important to Harry, as events proved, was Burton K. Wheeler, a lanky, independent-minded Montana Democrat, something of a rogue, who smoked big cigars and ran the powerful Interstate Commerce Committee.
Carl Hayden of Arizona, another Democrat, had come to Congress in 1911, as a territorial representative. “He took the trouble to explain some of the technicalities and customs of the Senate which appear pretty confusing to a newcomer,” Harry would write. Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and old William E. Borah, “the Lion of Idaho,” never treated him as anything but an equal. And most memorable was seventy-two-year-old J. Hamilton (“Ham”) Lewis of Illinois, the majority whip, who wore pince-nez, wing collars, spats, and a wavy pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers and sweeping mustache, and who one day came and sat down in an empty seat beside Senator Truman.
“Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said kindly. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”
He was liked also by the red-faced, hard-drinking Vice President, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, who still dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and striped pants, and who, echoing T.J.’s parting words, told Truman to study hard and keep quiet until he knew what he was talking about. It was advice Garner always gave beginners, but that not all heeded. He, too, was a man of little formal education and obs
cure background. Now and then as time passed, he would ask Truman to take the Vice President’s chair and preside over the Senate. On a day when Will Rogers came to Capitol Hill for lunch, Garner invited Harry to come along, a favor and an occasion Harry would never forget.
Such gestures were the exception, however. “I was under a cloud,” he would say later. The Kansas City reputation had followed him to Washington. Bennett Clark was spoken of as the Senator from Missouri. Harry Truman was the Senator from Pendergast.
Bronson Cutting of New Mexico had a way of looking through Truman as though he didn’t exist. Pat McCarran of Nevada later recalled, “I never considered him a Senator.” George W. Norris of Nebraska, the great voice of reform in the Senate, thought he was “poison,” and refused to speak to him.
When a congressional aide named Victor Messall, a native Missourian and an experienced hand on the Hill, was offered a job on Senator Truman’s staff, he refused, fearing what the association might do to his career. “Here was a guy…sent up [to Washington] by gangsters,” he remembered. “I’d lose my reputation if I worked for him.”
Messall only changed his mind after volunteering to help the senator hunt for an apartment, which they found on Connecticut Avenue—four rooms in the Tilden Gardens apartments for $150 a month. Later, they stopped at a piano store, where Truman sat down and played several before choosing one to rent for five dollars a month. From there they went to a bank. While Messall waited, the senator took out a loan for furniture.
This, Messall decided, was an altogether different kind of man from what he imagined and one he now wanted very much to work for. A slim, snappy dresser, his hair slicked back Fred Astaire style, Messall became number one of a staff of five in Truman’s office. The reporter William Helm would describe him watching over the senator thereafter with “doglike devotion.”