U.S. At War: The Man from Missouri

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What the U.S. has always liked, and usually got, is a Vice President who raises neither fuss nor feathers, who serves his term and then sinks back into comfortable anonymity. There have been some 20th-century exceptions, men like Garner and Wallace who made news while in office. But Vice Presidents are mainly remembered, when they are, for irrelevancies, like Thomas Marshall for his catch phrase: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”*

A Vice President’s chief duty is to be there in case the President dies in office—as six in U.S. history have died. As old as the Republic itself is the platitude that but a single heartbeat stands between the Vice President and the Presidency.

But in 1944 the people are also voting for a Vice President. The Democrats admitted as much by staging, a free-for-all battle for the nomination at Chicago. The electorate knows it too. It is a sizable political fact of 1944.

For this reason the spotlight has shone hard and hot on Democratic Candidate Harry S. Truman, the junior Senator from Missouri. Anti-New Deal newspapers have examined the Truman record and background with the zeal of ballistics experts, the energy of crime reporters.

Before this scrutiny began, the people had known two main and contradictory facts about Harry Truman: 1) that he was once the beholden creature of Kansas City’s behemoth boss, Tom Pendergast, as corrupt a machine politician as the U.S. has seen in this century; 2) that Truman has done an excellent job as chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee.

The people wanted to know more. They wanted to know: what manner of man is Harry Truman?

A Modest Man. Harry Truman is the man in the grey suit, usually double-breasted. His college education consists of a brief spell at the Kansas City School of Law. He is an inconspicuous man with thin lips, steel-rimmed glasses, flatly combed grey hair, and a flat, not unpleasant Missouri twang.

He is modest. He spent most of his first 33 years on his father’s farm, then rose to prominence in politics through rubber-stamp party regularity, a lot of luck and a sharp eye for the main chance. He has none of the flowing pretensions that many Senators wear like togas. After his nomination in Chicago he reiterated: “I’m a Jackson County Democrat, and proud of it.”

He is homespun and plain as an old shoe; his shrewd and educated political sense guards him against assuming any more sophisticated manner. On his campaign train he joined newsmen at poker almost every night, dressed in pajamas and an old flowered dressing gown, the kind that can be bought on any Main Street. When the waiter brought in a deep-dish pie. Harry Truman exclaimed: “My, the crust is as good as Mummy used to make.” He drinks his bourbon with ginger ale.

He is a hearty eater. Yet he can still get into his World War I major’s uniform. His measurements: 5 ft., 10 in.; 167 Ibs.; 33-in. waist.

With the ingrained habits of a farm boy, he still rises early; but his years in the city have made him hate to go to bed at night. His reading habits run to volumes on the Civil War, of which he has devoured thousands. His specialty: the Battle of Chancellorsville. He married his boyhood sweetheart, Bess Wallace, whom he met in Sunday School when he was seven and she six. He is still a member of the First Baptist Church of Grandview. Mo., although he says he has never been “a very active churchgoer.” The Christian Century called him “a religious man.” For a while he skipped around on the fringes of Dr. Frank Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament movement.

A Straight Row. On that November day in 1884 when Grover Cleveland reversed 2-4 years of Republican rule to win the Presidency for the Democrats, John Truman, owner of a mule barn in Lamar, Mo., raised a flag over his white frame house and vowed it would stay there as long as Democracy remained in power. Six months earlier, John Truman had tacked a mule shoe above his front door to celebrate the birth of his first son, Harry.

The Trumans were plain people of Scotch, Irish and Dutch stock. (Harry said: “We’re a little of everything. If you shook the family tree anything might fall out.”)

The Trumans moved to a farm near Independence when Harry was four. Harry’s boyhood was not much fun. He did the farm chores. He never had a bicycle, he did not play ball and he did not hunt (he did not like it). Harry Truman was the one boy in Independence who never ducked his piano lessons and, worst of all, never seemed to mind being seen with his music roll under his arm. He had to wear glasses at an early age, and the Independence toughs marked him down as a sissy.

After high school he tried for West Point, but his weak eyes cost him the appointment. He was a timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad in Kansas City, wrapped papers for the Star, clerked in a bank and rose to bookkeeper at $115 a month. Suddenly he returned to his father’s farm, and stayed there for ten years. His mother, now 91, says he could plow the straightest row of corn she ever saw.

Truman had soldiered in the Missouri National Guard since 1905; World War I made him a second lieutenant and he rose to captain. In France he disciplined a panicky company in combat; he was directing artillery fire in the Meuse-Argonne until one minute before the Armistice. On the way home, he rose to major.

Back in Kansas City, with a war buddy, he opened a haberdashery on Kansas City’s Twelfth Street, across from the Muehlebach Hotel. This sole business venture crashed resoundingly, leaving Truman with $15,000 in debts, which he was still paying off 14 years later.

Broke and dispirited, Harry Truman turned to politics. With the backing of American Legionnaires, who had made his haberdashery their hangout, he won the nod of Boss Pendergast for county judge. Faithful, efficient, unimaginative, never one to make trouble, he stayed in this administrative post for ten years.

A Roaring City. In the ’20s and ’30s, Kansas City under Boss Pendergast was the widest-open city in the U.S. Silver dollars clinked on the tables of drab gambling dens up & down Twelfth Street; saloons were open all night; the tapping of prostitutes along the windows of Fourteenth Street was like hail on a greenhouse roof; the bellboys in even the best hotels were pimps. Stripteasers were everywhere, and in the ill-yet far-famed Chesterfield Club the waitresses trolled around naked even at lunch. It was a roaring city, beloved of the salesmen and particularly the drovers who poured in from the West and Southwest. Pendergast defenders said: “It’s good for business.”

Everybody bought Tom Pendergast’s White Seal bourbon; contractors soon found Pendergast’s Ready-Mixed Concrete the only one to use. At every election ghosts were voted by the carloads. Tom himself, the very embodiment of the cartoonists’ boss, shunned night life, rose betimes, appeared early at his famed second-floor office at 1908 Main Street, gave audience to hundreds of supplicants, and in between time played the ponies (in one year he bet $2,000,000, lost $600,000).

He began to slip in the late ’30s, when an energetic federal district attorney named Maurice Milligan moved in on the vote frauds. The real crash came when Boss Tom was caught red-handed with a $400,000 bribe from fire-insurance companies. Tom went to jail—for income-tax evasion.

Through all the years of vice, graft and vote frauds, Harry Truman remained clean. The worst that could be said of him was that he remained slavishly faithful to the corrupt machine, and that he had a strong stomach or an insensitive nose.

As presiding judge of the county court he had 64 road supervisors (the present administration has but 16); he laid $10,000,000 worth of roads, rigorously insisting on a South Dakota contractor who had the low bid. And when he built Jackson County’s $3,000,000 skyscraper courthouse, he had $36,000 left out of the appropriation (he used the surplus for a statue of Andy Jackson).

“The Best I Can Do.” How Harry Truman got to the Senate in 1934 is now a famed anecdote of U.S. politics. Restless in his $6,300 county job, he had his eyes on the collectorship, which—with fees—paid $25,000. He sought Tom’s help, but Tom had promised the collectorship to another. Said Pendergast: “The best I can do right now, Harry, is a U.S. Senatorship.” With the help of Tom Pendergast’s ghost voters, Harry won the election.

In his first Senate term, he kept his mouth closed and voted 99% New Deal. He also did his final two errands for the Boss. He got the Missouri WPAdministratorship for a Pendergast henchman named Matt Murray, who later went to prison for income-tax evasion. And he tried to block the reappointment of Maurice Milligan as U.S. district attorney—after the Pendergast vote-fraud trials had begun. This was the low point in Harry Truman’s career. He fought Milligan tooth & nail, rising to make a violent speech on the Senate floor in which he even questioned Milligan’s “public morals.” But the Senate confirmed Milligan overwhelmingly. In 1940, but for a turn of the wheel, Truman would probably have been beaten in the Democratic primary by Missouri’s forthright Governor Lloyd Stark. Milligan entered the race and split the anti-Pendergast vote. Truman won with a 7,000 margin.

Turning Point. World War II was the real turning point for Harry Truman. He wanted to stop Government waste. He made a 35,000-mile trip across country, at his own expense, inspected countless Army installations. Back in Washington, he said: “It doesn’t do any good to go around digging up dead horses after the war is over. The thing to do is dig this stuff up now and correct it.” The Senate agreed and the Truman Committee was born.

As his first act Harry Truman lured from the Justice Department able, hulking Hugh Fulton, an ex-Wall Street lawyer who had convicted Utility Tycoon Howard Hopson for mail fraud. A relentless investigator, Fulton proved to be more than just a sound investment, he became the brains and the workhorse of the committee, which numbered some of the Senate’s ablest members—Democrats Hatch and Kilgore, Republicans Burton, Ball and Ferguson.

The committee did more than dig up dead horses, it constituted itself a spur to the Administration, the Army & Navy. It pounded away at shortage after shortage —aluminum, rubber, zinc, lead, steel, manpower; helped force the President to abolish OPM, forced the Navy to abandon outmoded landing ships.

Truman eschewed sensational exposures. For one thing, he was eager to work with the men of his party in Washington to correct abuses before they became public. For another, he did not want to offend his new boss, Franklin Roosevelt, or to impede war production.

But as his fame grew, so did his self-confidence. He did not hesitate to lay blame on the highest quarters, as witness his colloquy with Senator Vandenberg in August 1941:

Vandenberg: Who is responsible for this situation [bad organization of the defense program]?

Truman: There is only one place where the responsibility can be put.

Vandenberg: Where is that—the White House?

Truman: Yes, sir.

In Character. The Truman Committee made Harry Truman a Vice Presidential candidate. He became by far the most palatable compromise in the range between Henry Wallace and Harry Byrd.

Harry Truman did not want the nomination ; he went to Chicago primed to promote Jimmy Byrnes; when his own boom began he was so worried that he had to be repeatedly told that he was Mr. Roosevelt’s real choice. Then he was “cleared with” Sidney Hillman’s P.A.C., which cheerfully took him as second choice, and the nomination was his.

On the stump Truman has remained very much himself, getting off homely remarks, standing at attention whenever bands play the Missouri Waltz (thus forcing the audience to do the same), plugging all local Democrats as a regular party man should. (In California he thus endorsed Hal Styles, Democratic candidate for Congress, who had been clearly exposed as a onetime member of the Ku Klux Klan.*)

Many Americans have now seen the man who might succeed to the Presidency. They know his standard answer to reporters who ask him if he feels qualified to be President: that newsmen of the Senate Press Gallery have voted him the civilian who, next to the President, “knows most about the war.”

What is his measure? He is modest, honest, healthy, simple, kindly, straightforward, with a pleasant sense of humor, the average level of Congressional intelligence—which is higher than U.S. voters often think. His defects are lacks: he is obviously not a man whose nobility of purpose, splendid idealism or farsighted vision of the American destiny has ever stirred or could ever stir the country. He is not known as the sponsor of any legislation of importance, let alone of any profound or seriously progressive measures; he has never notably participated in debate on taxes or economic measures. He is a small-town politician who has learned to conduct himself inoffensively on the national stage, and who has to his credit some good work honestly done; a man as neat and grey as his double-breasted suits. There is no reason to suspect that he would make a great President—and there is no reason to believe that he would be the worst.

In Los Angeles, Harry Truman, discussing his own vocation, said: “A politician is the ablest man in a government, and when he’s dead they call him a statesman.” At 60, Harry Truman is very much alive.

* In the tobacco-short autumn of 1944, gagsters rephrased it “What this country needs is a five-cent cigar.”

* Last week the Hearst press, moving up its 16-inch campaign smear guns, charged that Truman himself had once been a Klan member. The “evidence” was feeble stuff.