THE PRESIDENCY: The Hired Man

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In depots and on porches, at crossings and atop boxcars, people gathered in little clots to watch the train roll through. When it stopped in the tank towns of Nebraska and Iowa, in the farming centers of Idaho and Washington, in the mining towns in Montana, the crowds swarmed around the rear platform yelling “Hi, Harry.” Harry Truman, President of the U.S. and crack politician, was on tour.

“I am talking to you as your hired man,” Harry Truman told them. “I have come out here to tell you just exactly what I am trying to do, and I am telling it to you firsthand so it can’t be garbled. There is no way for me to get the truth to you but to come out and tell it to you.”

Back in Washington, he had left a party uneasy about the effect of Senator Joe McCarthy’s assault on the State Department and slow to come to his Administration’s defense, a Democratic Congress that had flatly refused to enact most of his

Fair Deal program. His legislative leaders were rebellious, disgruntled by his failure to consult them, annoyed by his disregard for their views. Congress spent the week ignoring, disregarding or repudiating several of his proposals.

Glowing Vision. But Harry Truman, on tour, radiated confidence and wellbeing. In no position to berate a Congress controlled by his own party, he lumped all opponents of his policy with all the opponents of 17 years of Democratic rule and happily thumped away at them as “reactionaries,” “timid men,” “calamity howlers” and “greed boys.” He wanted, he made it clear, what “the common man” wanted. If he didn’t get it, that was not Harry Truman’s fault—he was always trying. He was the buoyant salesman of good intentions.

And what he intended was a glowing vision of “prosperity, cooperation, expansion.” Harry Truman wanted the best for everybody—workers, businessmen and farmers. Keeping them all prosperous meant more Government services, more welfare programs, more dams, more irrigation canals, an expanding economy.

In his flat, homey, Western Missouri twang, Harry Truman made it all sound as easy as gathering eggs, and about as familiar. Those who raised objections were just old fogies.

Old as the Hills. At one Wyoming whistle stop, he reminded a little crowd that Wyoming was the first state to give the women the right to vote. Said Truman: “Can you imagine what some of the stuffy reactionary Easterners had to say? Listen—listen to this—you will like this, you will want to remember it. The editor of a prominent magazine* published in New York said: ‘This unblushing female socialism defies alike the Apostles and the Prophets.’ The editor said: ‘Nothing could be more anti-biblical than letting women vote.’ So you see that the cry of socialism is as old as the hills. They used it against woman suffrage, against the federal reserve, against social security . . . [But] I am going to keep right on working for better houses, better schools . . . and I don’t intend to be scared away by anybody who calls that program socialism.”

Fighting a Slump. As his train clanked westward, the single word “POTUS”—railroad code for President of the U.S.—flashed from dispatcher to dispatcher clearing the tracks. A pilot train rolled ten minutes ahead of him as a safety precaution and special guards were posted at crossings.

Truman was trying to do what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had failed to do—to plead for his policies over the head of Congress to the people, fighting the traditional off-year slump for the party in power. Harry Truman, too, had lost ground. The burst of post-election affection and admiration had subsided, and his popularity, according to polls, had sagged badly.

But Harry Truman was supremely confident of the political effectiveness of the character he had so successfully created in his 1948 whistle-stop campaign. So, apparently, were the Democratic politicians, who hustled aboard at every stop to shake the presidential hand. It was a sharp contrast to 1946, when a harassed Harry Truman was under orders of Democratic leaders to stay out of sight. Some still remembered a 1946 stop at Jefferson City, Mo., the capital of his home state, when Truman grinned at a crowd, clamped his hand over his mouth, and wagged his head dolefully.

Caps & Spurs. Nobody—not even Truman—bothered to take seriously the ”non-political” side of last week’s trip, if there was one. The President, who had begun by defending the trip as “a report to the nation” which was “my privilege and my duty,” soon was saying slyly: “This is a non-political trip but I may come back later and be a little more interested in politics”—sticking his tongue under his lower lip and grinning as the crowd laughed.

There was no disputing it; Harry Truman did well. Like mythical Antaeus, he seemed to draw strength from fresh contact with the earth. He had an enormous talent for identifying himself with people at each stop. At Galesburg, Illl., he remarked that a great-aunt of Mrs. Truman’s came from there, and recalled his first “sashay” into politics, when as a little boy he wore a white campaign cap to school. “Well, some big Republican boys took my cap away from me and tore it up,” said Truman, “and the Republican boys have been trying to do that to me ever since.” Such familiar little yarns sounded wonderfully casual, but they were not as casual as they seemed: the President had been fitted out with a thick loose-leaf notebook full of homey facts about every place he was to visit; he read it over before he reached each town, usually worked in some happy local reference.

Grand Island, Neb. was typical. The file had supplied the information that he had been presented with a pair of spurs there in 1948. Truman remarked: “I told you I was going to make good use of them, and I did. I used them on the 80th Congress.”

At the end, Truman turned around with the air of a man with a surprise, peered back into his special car. Then he came back to the microphone, looking pleased as all get-out. “Here’s Mrs. Truman,” he said. The crowd cheered. Then he peered back in again. “Margaret’s coming too,” he announced happily. More cheers.

Demanded one impressed newsman: “Could Taft have done that? Stassen? Dewey? No. Eisenhower? Maybe. A New York crowd would laugh—but these people thought it was wonderful.”

Along the Snake. As the presidential train rolled across the black-loam Iowa fields laced with corn stubble and patched with rain-fed lakes, it became clear that Harry Truman was concentrating much of his fire on the Republicans’ 1950 slogan: “Liberty against socialism.” Time after time he cited instances in the past when “calamity howlers” had hung a “socialist” label on programs that were now farmer gospel—rural electrification, soil conservation, public power, flood control.

Through the wide, empty Nebraska prairies, up into the gulch-seamed Wyoming plateaus where the snow still lay in the ditches, on up the old Oregon Trail along the Snake River canyon, Harry Truman unfurled his pattern for an expanding economy in a free world. Sure, he wanted to balance the budget and cut taxes, he said, “just as soon as we safely can. But I will not join in slashing Government expenses at the cost of our national security or national progress.” His programs were not really expenditures; they were investments in the future. Cried Truman: “Don’t let anyone tell you that the Government should retire to the sidelines while the national economy goes back to the days of boom & bust. The power of Government exists for the people to use. It would be folly for the people to be afraid to use their collective strength through the Government.”

In the best of all Democratic worlds he had something for everybody. For the businessman, he had his new program of Government loan insurance and other aids to small business. For the farmer and the consumer there was the Brannan Plan. In Nebraska, where he had once faced 8,000 empty seats in an Omaha auditorium, 30,000 people stood through a pouring rain in a public square at Lincoln. Though his own congressional leaders had refused any part of it and most organized agriculture opposed it, Politician Truman still seemed convinced that the Brannan formula would catch on.

Following Man. Everywhere there were the high-school bands, swarms of schoolchildren. In little towns where a President had never been seen, crowds were often bigger than the population. A large man with a speckled mustache appeared among them, listening intently. Reporters quickly spotted him. He was Vic Johnston, a hireling of the G.O.P. National Committee, sent to keep tabs on Truman. Johnston had chartered a private plane, was waiting on the platform at every major stop, issuing depreciatory statements. Truman was amused, genially invited him aboard. Johnston sheepishly declined.

Truman glowed with optimism. There was not going to be a war, the deficit would take care of itself, there were no problems that he could not solve. He made his opponents sound like common scolds. Only on the subject of the cold war was he soberly restrained. It “will be with us for a long, long time. There is no quick way, no easy way, to end it.”

At Laramie, in the University of Wyoming’s auditorium (“You know, I never had the opportunity to go to college,” Truman told the students), the President referred for the first time to the McCarthy vendetta aimed at his Secretary of State. Acheson, he noted, was now in Europe. “In this work that means so much to the peace of the world,” said Truman with indignant emphasis, “I know that he has the confidence and support of the vast majority of the American people.” His audience applauded.

“Men of Little Faith.” In Idaho, Truman declared that if Congress ‘had adopted the Brannan Plan, it would have “prevented all this talk about potatoes.” Booming, bustling Pendleton, Ore. was picked for his prediction of an average $4,000-a-year income for every family by 1960.

By the time the tour readied Coulee City, Harry Truman was in high good spirits. He motored across 27 miles of sagebrush, most of which will be under water in 15 months, to the Columbia River’s Upper Grand Coulee, where the dam, locked between bare hills, rises beside the desert. The formal purpose of his trip had been the dedication of the dam, Franklin Roosevelt Lake, and the whole Columbia Basin project. Above the roar of the huge torrent in the distant spillway, Harry Truman cried: “Thousands of family-sized farms will replace the sagebrush. Men of little faith . . . can’t tell the difference between a waste of funds and a sensible investment . . .”

Bison & Birthdays. By this time reporters were exhausted, but 66-year-old Harry Truman was going strong. “This is a vacation for me,” he said. Harry Truman liked people, and obviously, people liked him in a way that included no awe and not necessarily admiration. “Come back again, Mr. President,” one woman called. “Thanks, I will,” said Harry Truman. A railroad conductor beamed delightedly: “I went right up and shook hands with him.” A reporter who had also traveled with Franklin Roosevelt noted the difference: Roosevelt had inspired worship, but from a distance. Harry Truman was one of the folks.

At nearly every stop there were banks of flowers for the Truman ladies, gifts for Harry. He got an Indian blanket in Pendleton, a miner’s outfit in Butte, gold cuff links, bronze bison, six birthday cakes, and a peace pipe from Chief Bill Buffalo Hide of Montana’s Blackfeet Indians. “You and Uncle Joe smoke that,” said Chief Buffalo Hide. “O.K.,” said Truman amiably but without conviction.

As the train, eastbound again, topped the Continental divide and swung down into the Missouri valley, the radio teletype clacked with queries to Washington on the Dakota floods for use in Dakota speeches. Truman spent a quiet Mother’s Day in Wisconsin. In Joe McCarthy’s home state, where the great vendetta might be a touchy subject, he talked only of world peace. But in Chicago, the greatest Democratic show in years was warming up.

Machine-Tooled Welcome. Truman might be plain Harry Truman at the whistle stops, but he was also a veteran machine politician who could appraise well-organized enthusiasm with a practiced eye. Chicago’s Democratic machine—an oldfashioned, well-oiled affair in whose disciplined ranks a precinct captain is a failure unless he can predict his total within a couple of votes—was supposed to organize it down to the last cheer.

The object was to “create a Democratic atmosphere” and to give aid to Majority Leader Scott Lucas, who badly needed it in his campaign against Republican Everett Dirksen (Lucas, no red-hot campaigner, agreed to run again only on Truman’s promise of active help). By the sort of happy chance that is possible in a machine-run city, the Democrats’ sho.w coincided with a civic “Jefferson Jubilee” celebrating the 150th anniversary of Jefferson’s election. A nonpartisan “host committee” was organized to raise $250,000, and Democratic wards briskly funneled contributions to it. Explained “Botchy” Connors, a cigar-smoking ward boss: “If there are any businessmen in the ward, we ask them to contribute a float or something.” The U.S. Treasury helpfully ruled that contributions for “floats or something” were deductible as business expense.

The Democrats gathered 10 governors, 56 Congressmen and assorted politicos for dinners, panels and conferences, topped off by “bringing the Government to the people,” a first-time-in-history meeting of the U.S. Cabinet in public (though Acheson, Johnson and Snyder were missing)—fully televised from the stage of the Civic Opera House.* Then came the big parade.

Headed by 6,750 national guardsmen and followed by 30 drum & bugle corps, herds of mechanized floats, Harry Truman rolled down Madison Street to Chicago Stadium. Each Cook County committeeman was instructed to provide 30 men holding giant-size flares. Some 25,000 balloons soared into the night (“You have to have something for the kids,” explained a committeeman).

Outside the stadium, bleachers were set for the overflow crowd. As the lights beat down on the stage, Harry Truman spoke the ritualized words of political benediction over Scott Lucas (“fine work … excellent manner in which he has measured up to that difficult task . . . entitled to gratitude of entire nation”).

Town-Site. How had Harry Truman made out? He had talked to 525,000 people in 15 states which would elect twelve Senators and 147 Congressmen this fall. Whether he had helped local Democrats much was debatable (except for Lucas in Illinois and Mike Mansfield in Montana, he had done little plugging of candidates). But there was no doubt that he had done himself a lot of good. He reduces the issues, said the New York Times correspondent admiringly, “to town-size so any dirt farmer can understand them.” There were no Republicans aboard to complain “Yes, but how about the deficit?” There were no Southern Democrats to point out how little he had accomplished. There had been only Harry Truman, the salesman of good intentions and the man with the common touch, wearing the aura of the presidency, doing what he did best—meeting the people. In the year 1950, there was still no one around who did it better.

*Harper’s magazine, in November 1853. Truman conveniently telescoped his dates: Wyoming did not approve woman suffrage until 1869.

*The show flopped; nobody remembered to turn out the people. The Cabinet faced a lonely 900 spectators in the 4,000-seat auditorium. The question period (“an unprecedented working of the democratic process”) consisted of careful answers to planted questions. Sample: “Is organized labor making any contribution to the fight on Communism?” Secretary of Labor Tobin: “A tremendous contribution.”