Truman (42 page)

But as so often in his life, he went ahead uncomplaining, determined to defeat the “double-crossing” Stark and return to the Senate, where, he knew, history was going to be made as never before. His back was up. He would find out who his real friends were.

Meantime, with five other senators, he flew off to Mexico and Central America on a so-called “fact-finding” trip—“a pleasure trip,” he was frank to admit. There was “too much poverty” in San Salvador, he thought, but Costa Rica from the air looked like a painting by one of the old masters: “Smoking volcanoes, blue lakes and the Pacific Ocean all in view at the same time from 134 miles in the air,” he wrote to Bess. In Panama, he toured the length of the Canal by plane, inspected the giant 16-inch defense guns, watched a ship pass through the Miraflores Locks, and found himself “treated royally” by everyone. One artillery officer whom he had known from summer camp at Fort Riley “treated me as if I were the President of the U.S.A.”

In Nicaragua on the return route, President Somoza impressed him as “a regular fellow.” In Mexico City, he tried to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. But it was arriving at San Francisco and stopping at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill that he enjoyed most. He loved San Francisco. “This, you know, is one of the world’s great cities and it is San Francisco—not Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma retired farmers as the city in southern California is,” he wrote, referring to Los Angeles, a city he disliked. When others in the party went out on the town, on a “slumming expedition” in search of female companionship, he bowed out. “I guess I’m not built right,” he told Bess. “I don’t enjoy ’em—never did, even in Paris, and I was twenty years younger then.”

At a first campaign strategy meeting in St. Louis, at the Hotel Statler in January 1940, fewer than half of those invited appeared and some only to explain sheepishly why they would be unable to take an active part. The few with serious interest included his old friend Mayor Roger Sermon of Independence, Harry Vaughan, John Snyder, and James K. Vardaman, who, like Snyder, was a St. Louis banker. They would support Harry no matter what, they said, though Roger Sermon, who was known as “a plodder” and “all business,” thought Harry should understand the outlook was extremely bleak. “Harry, I don’t think you can win and that’s not merely my personal opinion but after inquiring around.” Having heard several more comparably discouraging forecasts, Harry said only that he would appreciate a little talk about electing Senator Truman.

Jim Pendergast, who was unable to attend, had asked Vic Messall earlier to tell the senator that “if he gets only two votes in the primary one will be mine and the other will be my wife’s.” Jim Aylward decided to sit the campaign out. Congressman Joe Shannon wanted time to make up his mind. But Jim Pendergast, as surviving head of what was left of the organization, would work as few men ever did for Harry and produce considerably more than two votes.

On February 3, 1940, Truman announced formally that he was filing his declaration of candidacy for reelection to the United States Senate, and said further that he was both opposed to President Roosevelt’s seeking a third term and that his own choice for President was Bennett Clark.

Seldom had he appeared more the politician, in the least complimentary understanding of the term. That he, Harry Truman, could honestly propose conservative, isolationist, alcoholic Bennett Clark for the presidency at any time, let alone now, with the world as it was, seemed so blatantly hypocritical and expedient as to be laughable. Nor did his promise, “as a faithful Democrat,” to support Roosevelt, should he become the nominee, take any of the edge off the announcement. Clearly, it was Clark’s support in eastern Missouri that he was after, that and a little satisfaction perhaps in letting Roosevelt know how he felt and that he too could play the game.

His opposition to a third term, however, was entirely sincere. The idea went against his fundamental political faith. “There is no indispensable man in a democracy,” he wrote privately. “When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend upon the life or health or welfare of any one man.”

To no one’s surprise, the Bennett Clark presidential boom came to nothing.

Vaughan and Snyder raised what little money there was to begin with and set up headquarters in a “borrowed” room in the Ambassador Building in St. Louis. “We borrowed clerks, we borrowed furniture, we borrowed everything we could,” Snyder recalled. Almost no one seemed willing to give money. Mildred Dryden, who had left the Washington office to help with the campaign, remembered having trouble finding money enough to buy stamps. One mailing of eight hundred letters asking for donations of a dollar produced about $200, hardly worth the effort. According to Rufus Burrus, an Independence lawyer and another of Harry’s Army reserve friends, funds were so low at one point that there was not money enough for a hotel room, so the candidate slept in his car. “A United States Senator…sleeping in his car!”

The first of Harry’s Senate friends to lend a hand was Lewis Schwellenbach, who arrived in time for the official opening of the campaign at Sedalia, in the heart of the state, the night of Saturday, June 15, 1940, one day after German troops occupied Paris. A crowd of several thousand turned out, which was fewer than expected, but having Schwellenbach there counted heavily with the candidate. Mary Jane and Mamma Truman were in front-row seats on the lawn. Bess and Margaret were seated on the platform. “At sixteen,” Margaret later wrote, “I was able to feel for the first time the essential excitement of American politics—the struggle to reach those people ‘out there’ with ideas and emotions that will put them on your side.” Mamma Truman, who was nearly eighty-eight, shook hands among the crowd, a campaign aide at her side to help with names. Probably, as one of her generation, she never thought of the people as “out there.”

“Is he our friend?” she would ask about those she met.

More fellow Democrats from the Senate arrived in Missouri to lend a hand, an unusual gesture in a primary campaign and a very real measure of their regard and affection for Harry Truman. Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton, and Lewis Schwellenbach, three old friends, came to give vocal support. However pointedly Roosevelt ignored him, Truman was running hard on his New Deal record. “While the President is unreliable,” he confided to Bess, “the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country….” Senator Jimmy Byrnes, hearing of Truman’s financial troubles, talked the New York financier Bernard Baruch into contributing a desperately needed $4,000 to the campaign. And at the last, Alben Barkley, too, would appear for speeches in St. Louis and Kansas City. But Bennett Clark appeared determined to do nothing. What had Harry Truman ever done for him, Clark is said to have remarked in Washington.

In full-page newspaper ads, the president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, A. F. Whitney, called for help for “our good friend” Harry Truman, and in another few weeks the railroad unions provided the only big money behind the senator, some $17,000. Harry, as always in his political life, refused to handle any money, leaving that to the others. Eventually, however, to meet expenses he had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance policy.

Four years of investigations into railroad finances had resulted in the Truman-Wheeler Bill, still to be passed, providing protection for the railroads as a mainstay of the nation’s transportation system. He had supported the Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, and after passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, giving farmers price supports, he had said on the floor of the Senate that until the farmer got his fair share of the national income there could be no real agricultural progress. In 1939 he had voted for expanding the low-cost housing program, for increased funds for public works, increased federal contributions to old-age pensions. Particularly was he proud of his part in the Civil Aeronautics Act (1938), to bring uniform rules to the burgeoning new aviation industry.

On the issues of national defense and how the country should meet the crises in Europe, he was adamant. America “ought to sell all the planes and materials possible to the British Empire,” he said in a radio address on June 30.

It was the record he ran on, and tirelessly. Through July he crisscrossed the state in his own car, a ’38 Dodge, again with Fred Canfil along to share the driving, or Vic Messall or his old Kansas City friend Tom Evans. When Harry drove, he drove fast—too fast, the others thought.

Between times he was traveling back and forth to Washington, where, because of the war in Europe, Congress was still in session. Yet he seemed to thrive on it all, just as in the last campaign. Tom Evans, who was twelve years younger, had to give up and go home, no longer able to keep the pace.

Truman’s speeches were without charm. He made no attempt at eloquence or the kind of slowly building, tall-tale exaggeration and pleasure in words for their own sake that Missouri audiences traditionally adored. His voice was both flat and high-pitched—and the larger the crowd, the higher the pitch. In normal conversation he spoke in rather low, pleasing tones, but something happened as soon as he stepped to a podium. Trying to emphasize a point, he would chop the air rapidly, up and down, with both hands, palms inward, while at the same time, and in the same rhythm, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet, a style some of his detractors loved to imitate.

He had little skill for making politics a good show. It was a talent he greatly admired in others, but that he did not have now any more than before. The Senate had taught him little in that respect. Compared to someone like Bennett Clark, who after half an hour on the stump was only warming up, he was a flat failure. Yet in his own face-to-face way of campaigning he could be very effective. Once, in the course of the campaign, he told a friend how to do it: “Cut your speech to twenty-five minutes, shake hands with as many people as you can for a little while. Afterward, even if you have time left, leave. If you have no place to go, you can always pull off the road and take a nap.”

Moving among country crowds, pumping hands, he would say, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I’m from Jackson County.”

He also took a stand on civil rights, and while by later standards what he said would seem hardly daring or sufficient, for Missouri in 1940 it was radical. He stated his position at the very start, in Sedalia, to a nearly all-white audience:

Privately, like the country people whose votes he was courting, he still used the word “nigger” and enjoyed the kind of racial jokes commonly exchanged over drinks in Senate hideaways. He did not favor social equality for blacks and he said so. But he wanted fairness, equality before the law. He had been outraged by reports of black troops being discriminated against at Fort Leavenworth and used his office to put a stop to it.

At the National Colored Democratic Association Convention in Chicago that summer, he told a black audience that raising educational opportunities for Negro Americans could only benefit all Americans. “When we are honest enough to recognize each other’s rights and are good enough to respect them, we will come to a more Christian settlement of our difficulties.” Legal equality was the Negro’s right, Truman said, “because he is a human being and a natural born American.”

In one respect it was like 1934 all over again. There were three in the running and again one was named Milligan, for District Attorney Maurice Milligan had decided that he, not Lloyd Stark, was the one who had brought down Tom Pendergast and so deserved to be the next Senator from Missouri. Later speculation that Milligan was, in fact, cleverly maneuvered into the race by some of the Truman people—in order to divide the Stark vote—would never be substantiated, but that was what happened (just as Tuck Milligan had divided the vote for Cochran in 1934), and for Truman his entry into the contest could not have been more welcome.