Harry Truman (12 page)

During these early depression years, my father had to cope with another political disappointment. Missouri, like many other states, redistricted after the census of 1930. My father journeyed to the state capital in Jefferson City and played a leading role in cajoling the legislators into creating a congressional district out of eastern Jackson County and seven eastern wards of Kansas City. His dream was to represent that district in Congress. With his solid backing in the rural part of the county, he was convinced he could be elected easily. But Tom Pendergast decided that Jasper Bell, a Kansas City councilman whose vote had given the Goats control of the city in 1926, deserved the plum more than Judge Truman. Once more Pendergast had made it brutally clear he had no burning affection for my father.

But things were happening in Missouri beyond the boundaries of Jackson County, and in the United States beyond the boundaries of Missouri, that severely threatened Boss Tom’s political power. In Missouri Bennett Clark, son of one of the state’s greatest congressmen, had won a very big victory in his bid for the Senate and was openly challenging Pendergast’s political control of the state. In Washington, D.C., a new Democratic administration, headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was seeking and obtaining unprecedented powers to deal with the Great Depression that was stifling the country. Some naive political historians have given Roosevelt credit for destroying Tom Pendergast and thus implied a basic hostility - or at least a difference in political morality - between my father and FDR.

Almost every biographer of my father and every historian of Kansas City and Missouri politics has maintained that Tom Pendergast hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and backed Jim Reed as his presidential candidate in the 1932 Democratic Convention. But insiders in the Jackson County organization knew Boss Tom was backing Reed for much the same reason he ran Francis Wilson for governor. Pendergast was enormously loyal to the friends of his youth, and Reed, vain, egotistic, and utterly isolated from what was happening politically and economically in the country, wanted to run for President and solicited Tom’s support. Behind the scenes, however, Pendergast was assuring the Roosevelt forces they had his wholehearted admiration. Boss Tom told Ike B. Dunlap of Kansas City, a former Roosevelt classmate who was working for FDR’s nomination: “If Senator Reed decides to enter the campaign, I would be required to support him. Secondly, and unless something unforeseen occurs, I will be for Governor Roosevelt, whom I greatly admire.”

When Jim Farley visited Kansas City on a delegate-hunting tour, state chairman Jim Aylward organized a magnificent luncheon at the Hotel Muehlebach which gave FDR’s field general a chance to meet practically every influential Democrat in that part of Missouri. Even after Pendergast took over the state nominating convention and secured Missouri’s delegation for Jim Reed, Ike B. Dunlap was writing to the Roosevelt forces, “Pendergast can be relied on.” Late in May, Tom Pendergast visited FDR in Albany and worked out an arrangement which guaranteed Roosevelt Missouri’s support, any time he needed it, after the first ballot at the convention. Boss Tom followed this procedure to the letter. After the first ballot, he released the Missouri delegation to Roosevelt little by little on succeeding ballots, so Reed did not get his feelings hurt while the organization did not alienate the man whom Boss Tom regarded as a sure winner.

Roosevelt’s gratitude was demonstrated almost immediately after the election. One of Boss Tom’s closest supporters, although he was a Republican, was Conrad Mann, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Kansas City, and a key figure in persuading the citizens to vote into being the Pendergast-Truman $40 million Ten Year Plan. In 1932, Mann was sent to prison for running an illegal lottery. Pendergast went to Washington personally to intercede for him, and Mann received a presidential pardon in a matter of weeks. When Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins appointed a Republican, Martin Lewis, as state director of federal reemployment, Boss Tom had him fired, and Judge Harry Truman was given the job. My father, with his usual strictness about money matters, refused to accept the $300-a-month salary but took the job, which required twice-a-week trips to the state capital in Jefferson City.

With the Roosevelt Administration in his corner, Boss Tom now turned his attention to Bennett Clark. This was in many ways a thornier problem. Senator Clark had trounced Pendergast’s nominee in the Democratic primary in 1932. Now it was 1934, and the Democrats were facing another senatorial contest for the seat of Republican Roscoe Patterson. Bennett Clark, backed by the aggressive Democratic organization in St. Louis, made it clear he intended to challenge the Kansas City Democrats again.

Traditionally, Missouri had one senator from the eastern or St. Louis part of the state and one from the western or Kansas City part. If the Clark-St. Louis Democrats could elect two U.S. senators in a row from their bailiwick, they would be able to say with considerable authority that they and not Tom Pendergast controlled Missouri. The 1934 election was thus crucial for the Jackson County Democratic organization. Control not only of a swelling tide of federal patronage, but the Missouri State House was at stake. These facts should make it clear that Tom Pendergast did not, as some writers have claimed, nominate Harry S. Truman as an arrogant display of his political muscle. He was desperately in need of a winning candidate.

Two formidable opponents had already entered the race. John J. Cochran, a veteran congressman from St. Louis, announced he was a candidate and promptly received the backing of the city’s mayor, Bernard F. Dickmann. On Cochran’s heels came Congressman Jacob L. (“Tuck”) Milligan, a much-decorated World War I veteran who represented a rural constituency around Richmond, Missouri. Cochran billed himself as the most popular congressman in Missouri. In 1932, when all the congressmen in the state had to run at large because the legislature’s redistricting had been vetoed by the governor, he led the Democratic ticket. Milligan called himself the rural candidate, although his home base was only fifty miles from Kansas City.

Meanwhile, my father had been stumping the state on a completely different mission. The governor of Missouri had appointed him chairman of a committee sponsoring a bond issue to rebuild or replace dilapidated state hospitals, prisons, and other public institutions. Dad had already visited thirty-five counties, and was in Warsaw, Missouri, when he got a phone call from Jim Pendergast, his old army buddy, who asked him to join him and state chairman Jim Aylward in the Bothwell Hotel for a totally unexpected political powwow.

As my father candidly admits, never had his optimism sunk so low as it had in the weeks before he received this call. His term as county judge was on the point of expiring, and by an agreed tradition two terms were a limit in this office. No one in the Jackson County Democratic organization, especially Tom Pendergast, was showing the slightest interest in his future. “I thought that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me,” he said. When he walked into the hotel room in Warsaw and found out he was being offered the nomination for senator, he was astounded. But he was also shrewd enough to see that the Jackson County Democratic organization needed him, just as much as he needed them. It was a repetition, on a statewide basis, of his first contact with the Pendergasts, when he ran for county judge. Before my father agreed to run, he made it clear he wanted and expected wholehearted support from the organization. Knowing that Jim Pendergast was speaking for Boss Tom, Dad extracted a declaration that guaranteed him “98 percent of the Democratic support in Kansas City.” Satisfied that he had a chance, at least, to win, he decided to make the race.

On May 14, in the Pickwick Hotel in Kansas City, he paced the floor, unable to sleep. He sat down at the desk and wrote another of those intimate letters to himself. “Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4:00 a.m., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age.” He was fifty years old. What interests me most about this memorandum is its frank implication that he was planning to reach for greatness, with all the strength that was in him. He did not feel in the least unqualified to be a senator of the United States. “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves . . . self-discipline with all of them came first. I found that most of the really great ones never thought they were great. . . .” Dad seemed to sense he was launching himself in a new direction and concluded, “Now I am a candidate for the United States Senate. If the Almighty God decides that I go there, I am going to pray, as King Solomon did, for wisdom to do the job.”

Until this point in his political career, my father had been relatively immune from partisan attacks. The Klan had flung mud at him, but not much of it had gotten into the newspapers. His record, his public reputation as discussed in the press, was spotless. Now he found himself being smeared by one of the oldest canards in politics, guilt by association. Bennett Clark solemnly declared: “The fear that lurks in everybody’s mind is that if elected to the Senate, Harry would not be able to have any more independent control of his own vote than he had as presiding judge of the county court of Jackson County.” One of Cochran’s supporters called him a bellboy and someone else called him Pendergast’s “office boy.” Congressman Milligan said Dad would get “callouses on his ears listening on the long-distance telephone to his boss” if he went to Washington.

Candidate Truman struck back at these accusations, hard. He pointed out that in 1932, when all the congressmen in Missouri had run at large, Cochran and Milligan had both appeared hat in hand to seek the endorsement of Tom Pendergast and the Jackson County Democrats. Now they were alleging that Harry Truman, because he had that endorsement, was de facto corrupt. Milligan brazenly denied he had sought Pendergast’s support and attempted to portray Cochran and Truman as machine candidates. Bennett Clark joined him with a cry that Cochran backers were “beating down the ears of St. Louis employees to keep them in line for their candidate.”

It was the hottest July in Missouri’s history. The temperature soared above 100 degrees on twenty-one days. But Dad operated at his usual killing pace. He drove through sixty of the state’s largest counties, making from six to sixteen speeches a day. Not even a collision that left him with two broken ribs and a badly bruised forehead slowed him down.

Toward the end of July, just at the climax of the campaign, Dad’s foes tried one final dirty trick. The bank which owned one of the notes he had signed when he went into bankruptcy - it had come into their hands at bargain rates, when the previous bank that had owned it collapsed - procured a judgment against him in the Circuit Court for the full amount, plus interest - $8,944. A newspaper clipping from the Kansas City
Star
for July 24, 1934, tells the story the way Dad would want it told - the facts and nothing but the facts: “Judge Truman was asked about the judgments while he rested here Sunday at Hotel Claridge from the rigors of his campaign. He was shirtless and trying to keep cool under an electric fan when the writer visited him in his room. As the subject was broached, the Senatorial candidate said in a soft voice, ‘I had been expecting this to be brought up during the campaign but I have nothing to conceal about it and shall be glad to discuss it with you.’”

He went on to tell the whole sad story of his bankruptcy, and then explained his many efforts to settle this particular claim. “I turned over to the Security State Bank the deed to 160 acres of land I own near Olaph in Johnson County, Kansas,” he said, “and felt that I had satisfied this claim. However, after suit was brought against me on the note, I offered to settle for $1,000 but my offer was refused and I have resisted the payment of any more than that and will continue to do so.”

None of my father’s political enemies seemed to perceive the potential boomerang effect of this smear tactic. The man who had expended some $14 million of public moneys on Jackson County roads and buildings and still did not have the money to pay an $8,944 debt was obviously honest. It was common knowledge that several presiding judges had left the court with half a million dollars in their pockets.

Like all Truman campaigns, this primary fight went steaming to a climax with victory in doubt. Nobody was betting more than even money on Truman, and the St. Louis Democratic machine was confidently predicting a landslide for Cochran. Only Tuck Milligan’s fate seemed determined. He was limping far behind, and finished, as predicted, a poor third. “In the whole of Missouri history there have been few such spirited contests within a party,” declared the Kansas City
Times.

On August 9 in St. Louis, it was 104 degrees in the shade, yet voters turned out as they had never done before in a Senate primary in Missouri. Cochran rolled up 104,265 votes while Dad received a mere 3,742. Yet the St. Louis papers, when they fulminated against bossism and the machine vote, always flung their vitriol at Tom Pendergast in Kansas City.

The Jackson County Democrats had a riposte to that mountain of St. Louis votes for Cochran. They reported 137,529 votes for Truman and 1,525 for Cochran. Although my father had a slight lead in this battle of the city machines, it is obvious now the real decision was made by Missouri’s rural voters. Outside St. Louis, Cochran garnered about 130,000 votes; my father collected 135,000. He had won his real victory out there, on the parched, dusty back roads and sunbaked steps of county courthouses where he was greeted as an old friend by local judges and clerks. He had struck hard at the failure of both Cochran and Milligan to support the best interests of farmers in bankruptcy legislation before Congress. Missouri’s farmers had listened and found him one of their own. As Richard Harkness, the United Press correspondent in Missouri, said, Truman had defeated Cochran and Milligan “in the creek forks and grass roots.”

But Kansas City had beaten St. Louis, and the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
one of the nation’s most prestigious papers, seethed with dubious moral indignation. The editors called the election a demonstration of “the power of machine politics” and went on to declare, “County Judge Truman is the nominee of the Democratic Party for the United States Senate because Tom Pendergast willed it so.” This was not an accurate statement of the facts, but the label of a boss-ruled senator stuck to Dad’s name for the rest of the decade. A few years later the
Post-Dispatch
embellished this theory by quoting Tom Pendergast as purportedly saying he had sent his office boy to the Senate, to demonstrate his political power. If Tom Pendergast ever said such a thing, it only proves that megalomania among other things distressed his later years.