Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
John Garner and he had been friends “a long, long time,” and they were going to be friends as long as they lived, Truman said. “I’m coming back for another visit sometime. I fished around for another invitation and got it.”
Old friendships, old loyalties would hold, in other words, not only now for the sake of politics, but later, too, whatever changes were in the wind. The crowd understood what he meant and the crowd applauded.
So pleased was Bess Truman by the warmth of the reception that she broke precedent and stepped forward to the microphone to say thank you, proving thereby “beyond all doubt,” reported Robert Donovan in the New York
Herald-Tribune,
“what an extraordinary occasion it was.”
At San Antonio later the same day, Sunday, September 26, an estimated 200,000 people filled the streets, and at a dinner that night at the Gunter Hotel, speaking spontaneously and simply of his feeling for people and his wish for peace, Truman achieved what Jonathan Daniels called “an eloquence close to presidential poetry.”
Our government is made up of the people. You are the government, I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that….
I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, “Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,” eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.
We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction.
That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for.
That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.
“Truman Gains Texas Votes by ‘Human Touch’ Method,” read the headline in the San Antonio
Express.
When a reporter for the
Express
polled the correspondents on board the train, he found nearly all now thought Truman had at least “a fighting chance.”
In not quite four days in Texas, he made twenty-four stops, spoke twenty-five times. He had perfect weather and enthusiastic crowds the whole way. Monday, September 27, the biggest day, began with a rear platform talk at San Marcos at 6:40 in the morning. As the day wore on he spoke at Austin, Georgetown, Temple, Waco, Hillsboro, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Dallas, Greenville, and the little rail stop of Bells, where he told the crowd, “I am going over to Bonham…and make the speech…. It’s only 12 miles—why don’t you just get in the car and come on over to Bonham, and I will give the Republicans the gun over there. I think you will like it!” The Bonham speech, last of the day, was carried by radio nationwide.
On board with him through the day were Rayburn, Governor Jester, and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, candidate for the Senate, who had just been certified by the Democratic State Convention as having defeated his rival in the primary, former Governor Coke Stevenson, by a total of 87 votes out of roughly 1 million cast.
At Waco a boy waved a Confederate flag and there were scattered boos from the crowd when Truman shook hands with a black woman. Otherwise, all was harmonious. But then neither did he mention civil rights.
At Rebel Stadium in Dallas, where authorities quietly did away with segregation for the day and blacks and whites were mingled in the cheering crowd as never before, Truman, for the first time, hit hard at the Republicans for the hypocrisy of their “high-level” campaign—the Dewey speeches:
So in making their speeches they put them on a very high level, so high they are above discussing the specific and serious problems which confront the people…. Republican candidates are apparently trying to sing the American voters to sleep with a lullaby about unity…. They want the kind of unity that benefits the National Association of Manufacturers…the real estate trusts…[the] selfish interests…. They don’t want unity. They want surrender. And I am here to tell you people that I will not surrender….
Bonham, in the fertile Blackland Prairie, was Sam Rayburn’s hometown, and at Bonham Truman went after Dewey again, saying Republican unity meant unity of the Tafts and the Martins of Congress—“unity in giving tax relief to the rich…unity in letting prices go sky high…unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.” Was that really what they wanted, he asked the crowd.
Some things are worth fighting for…. We must fight isolationists and reactionaries, the profiteers and the privileged class…. Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves…. It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal…. Ask Sam Rayburn how many of the big money boys helped when he was sweating blood to get electricity for farmers and the people in small towns….
It was all language his audiences understood. He was truly, as Rayburn said, “one of the folks” and they let him know how much they approved.
At a reception later, at Rayburn’s white frame house west of town, hundreds of people waited in a long line across the front lawn. “They came in droves and kept coming,” remembered Margaret. When Truman’s Secret Service detail, worried for his safety, refused to let him stand in the receiving line unless the names of all the guests were provided Rayburn exploded, “I know every man, woman, and child here.” They were all his friends, every one, Rayburn said; he would vouch for them personally.
So while Truman stood at the door shaking hands, and sipping now and then on a surreptitious bourbon-and-water, Rayburn called out each name. But then Rayburn exclaimed to the governor, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’by twice.”
For the Republicans money was never a problem. Talk of the big money behind Dewey was another sign supposedly of just how far out in front Dewey was, how certain his victory—on the theory that big money never followed a loser. But to find backing for Truman was nearly impossible. At small White House receptions for Democrats that spring and summer, Truman himself had had to ask for financial help, something he detested, just to get his campaign under way. At one such gathering in the Red Room in early September he had stood on a chair to say, in effect, that while he knew most people thought he was going to lose, he thought the President of the United States should have sufficient funds to take his case to the people, but that as things were he could not do that. There was no money to buy radio time. One of the most important parts of his speech in Detroit on Labor Day had to be cut, he said, because of insufficient funds to stay on the air. Now there was not money enough to get the train out of Union Station. His plea, reportedly, produced over $100,000.
When Truman asked Bernard Baruch to serve on the finance committee, Baruch refused, saying it was not his policy to play so partisan a role—an answer that infuriated Truman, who in sharp reply wrote, “A great many honors have passed your way…and it seems when the going is rough it is a one-way street.” Baruch, his pride hurt, spoke of the President as “a rude, ignorant, uncouth man.”
Others, too, turned him down, until finally he named for financial chairman Louis A. Johnson of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a former commander of the American Legion and Assistant Secretary of War who had headed the finance committee of the Democratic Party from 1936 to 1940. Johnson was a looming, bald-headed, headstrong corporation lawyer and millionaire who stood over six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. A subject of controversy in the past, he would be again in time to come, to Truman’s regret. But he took the job now when nobody else would, and he achieved amazing results, given the fact that no one other than Truman thought the ticket had the slightest chance.
Averell Harriman and Will Clayton were among the larger contributors. Harriman gave $5,000; Clayton, $9,000. Others included Stuart Symington; David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers; Milton S. Kronheim, Sr., who controlled the wholesale liquor business in Washington; Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee; William Helis, a Louisiana oil man known as “the Golden Greek,” who had been Governor Earl Long’s biggest money backer; Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney; and Pearl Mesta, the Washington hostess who came on board the Truman train at Gainesville, Texas, for the ride across Oklahoma, where her first husband had made a fortune in oil.
Floyd B. Odlum, the head of Atlas Corporation, a Wall Street investment company, put in $3,000, then rounded up another $20,000 from his associates. But the largest contribution seems to have come from Truman’s old Kansas City friend Tom Evans, the drugstore king, who, after giving $3,000 himself, raised some $100,000 more in the Middle West.
As the train headed across Oklahoma, the weather remained ideal. Truman in “fine fettle,” spent much of the time out on the back platform waving at people as he sped along. If he was worried about campaign funds or anything else, no one would have known it. During a stop at Ardmore, having expressed his admiration for the Palamino horse of a cowboy who met the train, Truman examined the animal’s mouth and declared it was six years old. “Correct!” exclaimed the delighted cowboy and the story appeared across the country: “Truman Gets Right Dope from Horse’s Mouth.”
The crowd at Ardmore was somewhere near forty thousand, more even, it was said, than for Gene Autry. At remote stations where no stops were scheduled people waited just to see the train go through. At Paul’s Valley, Truman asked if it was true they grew taller corn than in Iowa and five thousand people happily roared yes. “Hello Harry,” came shouts from the throng at Norman.
At Oklahoma City 100,000 turned out; 20,000 were at the State Fair Grounds for his speech. He had chosen Oklahoma as the time and place to answer Republican charges of communism in government and he was “strictly on the offensive.” Such Republican tactics were only a “smoke sreen” to hide their failure to deal with housing, price controls, education—
real
problems. His own Loyalty Program, he claimed, had proven the loyalty of 99.7 percent of all federal workers. It was not Republican talk that checked the Communist tide, but programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that was “a plain and unanswerable fact.” The government was not endangered by Communist infiltration. Publicity-seeking, electioneering Republicans with their irresponsible charges were doing more to damage national security than to strengthen it.
The speech was considered so important that for the first time the Democratic National Committee had dipped into its slim resources to pay for nationwide radio time.
But by then the money had run out. There was not enough even to move the train out of the station.
The crisis was resolved when Governor Roy J. Turner of Oklahoma, and a businessman from Shawnee, W. Elmer Harber, organized an emergency collection party on board the
Ferdinand Magellan
and raised enough contributions—“a substantial sum”—to keep the train rolling for another several weeks. But even so, remembered Charlie Ross, the campaign was never more than “one jump ahead of the sheriff.”
The day following, Wednesday, September 29, was one of the biggest of the campaign. At Eufaula, Oklahoma, Truman gave his one hundredth speech. Before the day ended, he spoke sixteen times. There were crowds at Shawnee, Seminole, Wewoka, Muskogee, “tremendous” crowds at Tulsa. Crossing into Missouri, Truman told the throng at Neosho that he had already talked to 500,000 people that day—an understandable overstatement, given all he had seen. And so it went the rest of the journey through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. At Mount Vernon, Illinois, leaving his train to travel by motorcade, he stumped the down-state mining country for 140 miles, through five counties that had not gone Democratic in fifty years. “Mr. Truman [reported
The New York Times
] was the first Chief Executive to campaign in southern Illinois and the people turned out by the thousands, breaking through police lines, swarming around and through the procession of cars and yelling a noisy greeting.”
With his headlong lambasting of Wall Street and “the special interests,” the constant harkening to grim memories of the Depression, he sounded often as if he were running against Herbert Hoover. But at Carbondale, the sixth of nine stops in southern Illinois, he talked as he had not until now of the postwar era, of the “history” he himself felt responsible for and proud of, knowing how many in his audience remembered how differently things had gone after the first war.
A Democratic administration working with a Democratic Congress had seen to a swift reconversion in 1945, not only avoiding a postwar recession but achieving
a peak of more jobs, a higher civilization, and better standards of living than ever before.
There is nothing like that in the history of the world after a great war. Bear that in mind…. Not very much has been said about that, but we had no riots and no bloodshed. We didn’t have people crying for jobs. We didn’t have farmers marching on Washington. We didn’t have returning soldiers marching on Washington, because we took care of them in educational institutions and absorbing them back into the economy of the country without a debacle.
We enacted the Employment Act of 1946, pledging all our resources and efforts to the maintenance of prosperity.
We brought the United States to a position of unquestioned leadership in world affairs. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different.
A warm reception in Kentucky had been anticipated, if for no other reason than Alben Barkley’s presence on the ticket. But the crowds there surpassed all predictions. Truman was “never more human,” reported the Louisville
Courier-Journal.
“He got down to earth and talked the language of the people….” At Shelbyville, where a banner stretched ln front of a wood-frame depot said: “Welcome Home President Truman and Family, Grandchildren of Shelby County,” he talked of his grandfather, who had been married there. At Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass horse country, he reminded everyone that it didn’t matter which horse was ahead or behind at any given moment in the race—it If was the horse ahead at the finish that counted. To the several thousand gathered on the tracks at Morehead, Kentucky, pressing as close as possible to the rear platform of his car, he left no doubt what he expected of them: