Bess Truman (22 page)

Reading Dad’s letters from Philadelphia, I found myself wishing we had gone with him instead of traipsing home. Although I was only twelve, I would have loved to have been there at Franklin Field to hear FDR’s acceptance speech. Historians agree with Dad’s contemporary estimate that it was a masterpiece. The president called on his fellow Americans to accept the fact that “there is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” Marquis Childs wrote that the huge crowd cheered “as though the roar out of the warm sticky night came from a single throat.”

Madge Wallace and the pull of 219 North Delaware were not the only reasons Mother and I stayed home. Money also was a problem, as Dad’s remarks about income and outgo make clear. Bess’ replies to all these letters have been lost, but I’m sure she told Dad she had no regrets about him putting honor above a fast buck. She also may have reminded him that the word obey was not in the Episcopal wedding service.

Back in Missouri, Senator Truman went to reserve officers’ camp, largely to stay out of sight until the Democratic primary in August. He wanted to avoid intramural brawls at political picnics with the temperature more than 100 degrees. Thereafter, virtually all Missourians above the age of seven hurled themselves into the presidential election campaign, which pitted Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas against FDR. The mere thought of a Kansan in the White House was enough to raise hackles on the necks of Missouri Democrats.

They had nothing to worry about. FDR won an enormous victory, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont. Lloyd Stark won handsomely in his race for the governor’s mansion, and for a month or two, it was bliss to be a Democrat. But events soon revived the truth of comedian Will Rogers’ witticism, “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

Before we get into that disaster, the Trumans had to cope with the renewed travails of Washington versus Independence, husband versus mother in Bess’ psyche. Once more, Senator Truman came to Washington without his wife. They had decided they could not afford another move and another round of rent payments. But this decision came unglued within a week of the senator’s arrival in the capital.

On January 5, an invitation to a White House luncheon with Mrs. Roosevelt arrived in the mail for Bess. “You are supposed to be there on January 13, I
want you to be
present,” Dad wrote. “I’m going out with Vic [Victor Messall, one of his Senate office staff] tonight to get an apartment. . . . I just can’t stand it without you. If we are poorer than church mice, what difference does it make? There is only one thing on earth that counts with me and that is you and Margie.”

Bess responded with a telegram abjuring him not to rent an apartment under any circumstances. They simply could not afford it. “Your telegram rather unseated me,” Harry wrote. “I was under the impression that if I found a bargain in a place to stay, you would still come.” He then told a story about a fellow senator whose wife said he was away so much, she was beginning to prefer the company of a jackass she had just bought for her grandchild. “Maybe I’m in the jackass class,” Senator Truman wrote.

The next day, he took an even tougher line. “I am terribly distressed that you are not here and getting more so all the time.” He was going to keep on looking for a bargain apartment and “if I find one
you are coming.”

Bess rushed a special delivery letter to her husband, informing him that the real reason she did not want to come was my health. I was succumbing to the chilblain palace again, and it probably would have done me some good to get out of it and into a warm Washington apartment, but that is hindsight. Mother could find no fault with dear old 219 North Delaware Street. I was simply a germ factory, in her opinion.

I now think the real reason for Bess’ adherence to 219 North Delaware Street in these early months of 1937 was never stated, at least in their letters. She may have been sincere about blaming my health - people can easily use one legitimate reason to conceal another one perhaps not quite as legitimate or acceptable. Christine, Fred Wallace’s wife, was pregnant with her second child, and Bess felt she would be needed when she gave birth. She was not sure how Fred would handle the tension and was even more worried about her mother.

The senator accepted my health as an explanation for the delayed departure. “I guess I’ll have to quit being a baby and go to work,” he wrote. “But it’s hell, I tell you.” He once more found himself socially adrift. He went to another party given by Senator Guffey and wore a “hickory” shirt when everyone else was in evening clothes. With malice aforethought, I suspect, he reported that Miriam Clark, Bennett’s wife, offered to chaperone him until Bess arrived. Bess did not particularly like Mrs. Clark, who had almost as many pretensions as her husband.

Complicating the senator’s life even more, if possible, was the presidential inauguration on January 20. He was going to have to cope with swarms of Missourians who were heading for the capital on a special train with Governor Stark. Many of them were women, and he badly needed Bess on his welcoming committee. But she stayed home and watched me wheeze. The senator frantically rounded up extra tickets for the visitors, and then it rained, and no one went to the ceremony. But he enjoyed meeting the home folks.

Few words have more sharply defined the difference between Harry and Bess on this point than four sentences that he wrote in his letter of January 16, 1937: “It is just too bad you aren’t here. What a time you’d have!” Then, writing at top speed as always, he seemed to remember how she felt about such things. Without a break for a paragraph or even a phrase such as “On the other hand,” he added: “You should be glad you’re AWOL this week, I’m going to be a worn out dishrag by next Saturday but I guess I can take it.”

Meanwhile, he was being pestered at long range by Leighton Shields, who wrote to him asking for a $2,000 raise, after having barely landed in Shanghai. Bess had also persuaded him to get her brother Fred another job. Harry dutifully reported on his meetings with the head of a cement company, who offered Fred work in Chicago. But Fred did not want to go so far away from home and his mother, and the senator wearily tried to persuade the executive to get him into the company’s Kansas City offices.

Much more worrisome was the camaraderie that developed between Bennett Clark and Lloyd Stark during the inauguration festivities. Bess had gone to the governor’s own inauguration in Jefferson City, and Stark had been polite enough. But in Washington, he more or less ignored Senator Truman. There was a reason for this, aside from the man’s egotism. Federal Attorney Maurice Milligan was beginning to make headlines with his investigation of the Pendergast machine in Kansas City. Stark was already showing strong signs of joining him in this crusade.

Harry shared all these worries with Bess, but she continued to ignore the one thing he wanted her to notice. “I sure wish you were here but maybe you are happier where you are,” he wrote after reporting on another try to get Fred a job and noting the numerous women visitors he had met at a lunch given by the Missouri House delegation.

After the inauguration, Bennett Clark pulled a fast one on his fellow senator from Missouri. When Harry Truman went down to Union Station to see Governor Stark and his entourage off, he found Bennett ensconced in the governor’s car. He was going to ride home with him - and spend two days sweet-talking him into playing the St. Louis Democrats’ game. Senator Truman’s suspicions became facts when he made a hasty trip to St. Louis at the end of January to find out why Stark was not appointing any Democrats from Jackson County to jobs. He got nowhere with the governor and nowhere with Bess, whom he telephoned urging her to return to Washington with him.

The lonely senator went back to the capital, where the national Democratic Party soon began coming apart. When Congress reconvened on January 3 with huge Democratic majorities in both houses, the exultant president and his advisers announced that their primary political target was the U.S. Supreme Court. They were going to expand the number of justices to fifteen and give the president an opportunity to appoint men who would outvote the anti-New Deal coalition then in control. This core idea unfortunately was buried in the middle of a lot of verbiage about improving the Supreme Court’s efficiency and allowing the present justices to retire at seventy and adding fifty federal judges in the lower courts and requiring instantaneous hearings for New Deal laws.

“Packing the Court,” as Roosevelt’s critics called it, instantly split the Democratic Party’s conservatives and liberals, and created a personal nightmare for Senator Truman. After intense study of the history of the Court, he decided that there were numerous precedents for raising the number of justices - the size of the Court had fluctuated over the years - and he would vote for the bill. His mail soon revealed that his constituents were against it, but that only intensified Harry Truman’s commitment to it. What he disliked was Roosevelt’s devious approach to the problem. “There are plenty of good reasons for increasing the Court without going around the barn to do it,” he told Bess.

In Missouri, Bess was exposed to the mounting storm of hostility to Senator Truman’s stand on the Court. She warned him in several letters that the newspapers and critics were painting him as a tool of Roosevelt. They were saying that he had been opposed to the bill and then switched under pressure from the president. Bess wondered if Harry should try to explain his position to the home folks.

He declined to get into a ruinous debate. Instead, he calmly and coherently explained his position to her in a number of remarkable letters. “I have never changed my mind on the Court and have never made but one statement on it and that was to
The New York Times
. . . and they printed it as I sent it and the [Kansas City]
Star
copied it word for word,” he told her. “They’d like to make me out to be a know nothing but I don’t believe they can.”

Bennett Clark, seeing a chance to bank some credit for a presidential run in 1940, was one of Roosevelt’s most outspoken Senate opponents. With public opinion in Missouri so heavily on his side, many of Harry Truman’s friends warned him that he had “better line up with Bennett,” he told Bess in another letter. “What would you do if you believed the plan is right but the approach is wrong?” he asked Bess. He lamented Roosevelt’s deviousness. “He should have just said the court is fossilized on an 1884 basis and then said let’s give it some new blood by appointing two or three young men on it. That’s what the issue is and that’s all it ever will be. Harlan, Holmes, Stone - all the great dissenters warned of this very situation.”

Still worried, Bess reported that Harry was in danger of losing the support of such loyalists as the editor of the Independence
Examiner,
William Southern. He was angry at Roosevelt’s minimum wage laws and applauded the Supreme Court for striking them down. In one of his previous letters, Senator Truman had described how he had “burned to a cinder” one of his condescending critics, the president of a local power and light company. He now proceeded to give Colonel Southern the same treatment. If ever a letter showed Harry Truman shaking off the limitations of his Missouri background, this was it: “Mr. Southern is of course against the president. He always has been. Whenever labor and hours come up he’s against labor and for unlimited hours. My father was the same way. They honestly believe that every man ought to have to work from daylight to dark and that the boss ought to have all the profit. My sympathies have been all the other way, and that is the reason for my lack of worldly goods. I just can’t cheat in a trade or browbeat a worker. Maybe I’m crazy but so is the Sermon on the Mount.”

These letters are important because they show how intensely and completely Harry Truman shared his widening political horizons with Bess. She participated in this process by questioning him and forcing him to think out his positions on issues more thoroughly. Writing and talking to her, he could let off steam and say what he could not say publicly. To Bess’ eternal credit, she did not yield to her fears and join the “smart alecks” (as Dad called them), who were telling Harry Truman to line up with Bennett Clark to save his political skin.

In the midst of this upheaval, which dominated the headlines of the nation’s newspapers, Harry wrote Bess an interesting birthday letter. He told her she would be getting a small package from Julius Garfinckel along about Saturday, “your seventy-second birthday or maybe it’s your thirty-second - I haven’t kept very close count on it. It would make no difference if it was your one hundred and fifty-second [it was her fifty-second] - to me you’d still be the prettiest, sweetest, best and all the other adjectives girl on earth - in heaven or in the waters under the earth. You are not only Juno, Venus, Minerva all in one but perhaps Proserpina too. (You’d better look that one up.)”

Proserpina, for those who don’t have a classical dictionary handy, was a goddess who spent six months of each year with her husband in Hades, separated from her grieving mother. Was the senator suggesting a certain resemblance to their own situation? I can’t be absolutely certain, but he did not ask Bess to look up Juno, Venus, or Minerva.

Nevertheless, their political partnership continued to deepen. Dad began sending her weekly copies of the
Congressional Record
so she could follow the debates on the Court bill. As the argument raged in Congress and around the nation, Senator Truman began to think FDR wanted to split both the old parties. “He, you know, reads a lot of history and I think would like to be a Monroe, Jackson and Lincoln all in one - and is probably succeeding. Only history will tell.”

In the midst of the uproar, Harry Truman quietly began working on his first major task in the Senate. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee, was one of the most violent opponents of the Court bill. Before it appeared on the docket, he had begun an investigation of railroad finances, setting up a subcommittee with himself as chairman and Dad as vice chairman. The Court bill absorbed all Wheeler’s time, and Dad was left to conduct the railroad investigation pretty much on his own.