Truman (7 page)

The interesting sentence is the third one. Truman, not unreasonably at that stage, two months before the outbreak of the war in Europe, was not contemplating a third term for Roosevelt. Retrospectively, however, his idea of possible successors does suggest a remarkable inwardness of senatorial approach. ‘Old Jack' was Garner, already 71 and about to retire from the strains of the vice-presidency to his Texas ranch, from which he hardly ever subsequently emerged, and, perhaps for this reason, lived to the
age of 99. Wheeler became one of the most isolationist of senators. Truman was not an early prophet of the imperial presidency.

Indeed, even when the European War had started and Roosevelt had begun to nibble at staying on, Truman remained opposed to a break with tradition. So was Bennett Clark, who even thought of himself for the nomination, an idea to which Truman gave some support. This had the unfortunate effect of further improving the position with Roosevelt of Governor Stark, who was unequivocally for a third term from the beginning. Quite how well the President thought of Stark is not clear. He delivered some disparaging
non sequiturs
('I do not think your governor is a real liberal … He has no sense of humour … He has a large ego …') about him to Truman in August 1939, which the latter gratefully recorded to his wife. But this may just have been playing a little politics with Truman. He certainly did not discourage Stark, he blandly declined to endorse Truman, and by January 1940, he regarded him as sufficiently unlikely to win that he offered him a well-paid appointment to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Truman himself at this stage probably took little better a view of his own chances than did Roosevelt. His daughter recorded: ‘Never before or since can I recall my father being so gloomy as he was in those latter months of 1939, after Tom Pendergast went to prison. Nothing seemed to be going right.'
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Nevertheless he became determined to run. It was not particularly his love of the Senate. Much more it was his contrariness, his good appetite for a fight against the odds, and an inherent optimism in adversity. When things were going well he was sceptical and self-critical. His good opinion of himself mostly surfaced when he was up against a wall. Life could not be as bad as it looked. Apart from anything else he deserved that it should be better. An almost equal resistance to both euphoria and despair was one of his most considerable qualities. He was not particularly magnanimous in victory, but he was certainly defiant in the face of defeat. It was the spirit which had given him control over D Battery in 1918, and which was to get him through in 1948. Perhaps, as has been ingeniously suggested by one of his later biographers, it was due to his abnormally slow heart-beat.
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It sounds as good an explanation as any other.

The early stages of the 1940 campaign were about as discouraging as it is possible to imagine. There was practically no money, little apparent support on the ground, and a nearly universal conviction
that the fight was hopeless. The Jackson County machine, his base in 1934, was in ruins. The press was not merely hostile but often derisory. Milligan declared as a third candidate in March, and while this somewhat weakened Stark it also made Truman's base seem even more exiguous, and in particular gave Bennett Clark, whose half-promised support Truman desperately wanted, a reason for further equivocation. Clark by this time was bitterly hostile to Stark, but really preferred Milligan to Truman.

There were only a few people in Missouri who remained wholly loyal and worked devotedly from the beginning, but even they did so without any conviction of victory. One was Jim Pendergast, but the name had become useless. Others were John Snyder, a St Louis banker, whom Truman was to make an undistinguished Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel (of the reserve) Harry Vaughan, who as General Vaughan was to become Truman's not wholly impeccable military aide, and a core crony in the White House. Truman's gratitude to those who were staunch during the months of apparent hopelessness remained intense.

How, out of this impossible beginning, did he snatch victory? His dogged determination was an essential basis. He also had good pockets of hidden support, which responded well to his vigorous, hard hitting but intimate, face-to-face campaigning. And the luck suddenly began to run with him. Stark, who was far enough ahead to prevent the more effective Milligan looking a serious challenger, began to defeat himself.

Truman's campaign opened officially at the mid-state town of Sedalia on June 15th, 1940, the day after German troops entered Paris. He was supported on the platform by Senator Schwellenbach of Washington State. Aid from other senators became a strong feature of his campaign. Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Carl Hatch of New Mexico came to speak for him in St Louis (unfortunately attracting an audience of only 300 in a hall for 3,500, which at least gave great pleasure to the
Post-Dispatch),
as, elsewhere, did one or two others. And public messages of support poured in from a wide span of leading Democrats: Wagner of New York, Connally of Texas, Byrnes of South Carolina, Harrison of Mississippi, Wheeler of Montana.

In addition Truman got massive labour union support, particularly from the railroad brotherhoods, who remembered with favour his work on the Wheeler sub-committee. A. F. Whitney,
the president of the trainmen, with whom Truman was to have a very rough joust in 1946, was much to the fore. ‘Truman for Senator' clubs were set up at the main depôts, and half a million copies of a special union produced newspaper were distributed throughout the state. These were careful to stress his support for agriculture as well as his labour relations record.

Truman also did well with blacks: there were still relatively few in Kansas City, but more in St Louis, and a quarter of a million in the state as a whole. At Sedalia he made a firm civil rights pronouncement, certainly the strongest of his career until then. There has been some suggestion that this stemmed more from opportunism than from principle. He needed the votes. Stark was weak in the black constituency. And he therefore cast aside his traditional Missouri prejudices in a blatant piece of political angling.

The main argument for this view is that as a young man he had been full of racial prejudice, although no doubt no more so than most Missouri Democrats of his time. ‘I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman', he had written to Bess Wallace in June 1911. ‘Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America. ‘
⁷
And for several decades after that he used the word nigger without embarrassment both in private writing and speech. The arguments the other way are first that at Sedalia he desperately needed a warm response to the start to his campaign and that there were probably more in that summer's day country town audience to be alienated than won on the issue; and more significantly, that the line he there laid down was one to which he adhered increasingly strongly in his years power.

However the main force working on Truman's side during the campaign was Stark's humourless, megalomaniac ambition. It led him to alienate too many people, both amongst politicians and the public. He strutted around Missouri surrounded by uniformed colonels from the state troopers, which display, Margaret Truman wrote, ‘made him look like a South American dictator'. He misjudged the mood of audiences. But above all he ran for too many
offices at the same time. In April he was being talked about as Secretary of the Navy. In July, less than a month before the primary vote, he suddenly threw his hat into the vice-presidential ring, only to see it contemptuously thrown out within a day or so, both by Roosevelt, who wanted Henry Wallace, and by his own Missouri delegation which, under Clark's control, was for Bankhead, the Speaker of the House. Clark was not much good at positive support for Truman, a cause in which he never had his heart, but he was good at opposing Stark, who was threatening his own power base, and particularly at ridiculing his pretensions.

Truman also had the luck to achieve a last minute alliance of opportunism in St Louis, the city in which he had been annihilated in the 1934 primary. The Democratic machine there had been for Stark, but they were more committed to their own candidate to succeed Stark as Governor (under Missouri law he was ineligible for a second term or he might have run for that as well), and discovered late that they needed Truman's support for this candidate. Dickmann, the Mayor, probably remained with Stark, but the up and coming figure in St Louis politics, Robert Hannegan, switched and worked hard for Truman. Hannegan's efforts, even if late, were crucial. Truman beat Stark by 8,411 in St Louis, which was within 500 votes of his bare and unexpected majority throughout the state. Hannegan was to become Democratic National Chairman within four years.

The victory, while it had ceased to seem impossible during the campaign, remained unexpected up to the night of counting. Truman went to bed on August 6th with those around him still believing he had lost. He woke up to find he had probably won, but the needle flickered until 11.00 a.m. when it finally settled. He had overcome not merely a severe crisis of morale but the specific handicap of a major collapse of his Jackson County position. His majority there was down from 128,000 in 1934 to 20,000 and the total vote had shrunk to two-thirds of the nominally recorded 1934 figures. Pendergast's old strength was even more vividly displayed by his absence than it had been by his presence. In the outstate counties Truman ran just enough behind Stark to dissipate his Jackson County lead. This left the result to be settled by St Louis, where the favourable turn round in his position was as spectacular as the unfavourable one in Kansas City.

It was a famous victory given his starting point, and the buoyancy and determination which were required to pull out of that valley of hopelessness. In that sense it was a foretaste of the qualities he was to show in 1948. But in other respects it was not a foretaste of the Truman presidency. It was fought during two of the most critical months in the history of the Western world. But it was not won because the Democrats of Missouri looked to Truman as a potential world figure who might help steer them through the shoals of international danger. As Hitler swept to victory, as France surrendered, as Britain prepared for invasion, Truman was pre-occupied containing the Pendergast curse and sundering the alliance between Stark and Hannegan.

Nor was it a ringing endorsement of a senator of six years' standing against a governor who had neither judgment nor sparkle. Truman had polled little more than 35% of the total vote. It was however a result which gave great pleasure on Capitol Hill. ‘It certainly is gratifying (to put it mildly),' Truman wrote from Washington on August 9th, ‘when every employee in the building–elevator boys, policemen, waiters, cooks, negro cleanup women, and all—were interested in what would happen to me. Biffle, (Clerk to the Senate) told me last night … that no race in his stay here had created such universal interest in the Senate. He's having lunch for me today. I guess it will be a dandy. It almost gives me the swell head–but I mustn't get that disease at this late date.' The senators themselves were no less enthusiastic. ‘You should have been in the Senate yesterday,' he wrote the next day, ‘when I slipped in at the back door. Hiram Johnson was making a speech and he had to call for order. Both floor leaders and all the Democrats made a great rush … I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me. Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stodart, and Harry Swartz almost beat me to death.'

In the White House there was less enthusiasm but a full recognition of reality. Henceforward Truman was treated as the plenipotentiary of Missouri. Stark wrote to Roosevelt complaining that he had been defeated by a low vote occasioned by the drought. Roosevelt replied with political elegance. ‘Pure Roosevelt' was how Jonathan Daniels described it:

‘Dear Lloyd,

Your letter enclosing the clipping has been received and I was interested to hear the analysis of the recent Primary fight. I am sure you understand my personal feeling towards you. I can only say that we will all have to get behind the ticket and work for a Democrat victory.

          With all good wishes.

             Your friend,

                Franklin D. Roosevelt.'
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At the beginning of 1941 Roosevelt proposed giving Stark a Federal appointment on a new Labor Mediation Board. Truman was not pleased, but not anxious to block the move himself. Instead ex-Senator Minton of Indiana wrote on his behalf. Roosevelt promptly desisted. On the other hand Truman himself wrote to Roosevelt in September urging that Milligan, who had had to resign to contend the primary, should be re-instated as District Attorney. He even went so far as to say ‘he has made a good District Attorney'. This however was a matter of politics and not of conviction, as he made clear in two letters to his wife.
¹⁰
Five years later, as President, he reverted to his earlier position and declined to give him a further term.

Unlike 1934, the 1940 election proper (as opposed to the primary) was not a walk-over for Truman. He won satisfactorily, but only by about 40,000 votes, which was less than half the majority by which Roosevelt carried Missouri. However, the Democratic candidate for Governor, whose needs had been crucial to the primary outcome in St Louis, lost to a Republican, so that Truman could not be held to have got a notably bad result.

In the three months between the primary and the general election Truman received one agreeable accolade and suffered one major (and somewhat mysterious) family misfortune. The accolade was his election as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Masons of Missouri. He had been an active Mason since his pre-World War I days on the farm at Grandview, and was a natural member of the ‘brotherhood'. But it was an odd time for his installation in the Scottish Rite Temple in St Louis. Most of those involved in inducting him were Republicans, it was in the middle of a fairly vicious campaign, and it marginally helped his re-election.