MISSOURI: That Man Again

Missouri last week held a Senatorial primary as sizzling as the weather, as stubborn as a Missouri mule, as mixed-up as a mule’s parentage. Senator Bennett Champ Clark stuck his reddish nose into it by stumping for Senator Harry S. Truman, elected six years ago by Kansas City’s Boss Pendergast. It was evident that Bennett Clark did not enjoy backing Truman so much as he loved clapperclawing Truman’s rival—stiff, Roman-nosed Governor Lloyd Crow Stark. Also to the aid of New Dealer Truman went New Deal Wheelhorse Alben Barkley. At a St. Louis campaign rally attended by 300 party hacks and laborites, he conferred the Roosevelt blessing on Candidate Truman. But Alben Barkley was not happy to find himself in the same camp with Champ Clark. They are bitter enemies, for Clark, a shrewd parliamentarian, has consistently made the clumsy majority leader look ridiculous by outmaneuvering him in the Senate.

Meantime Governor Stark kept his end up. He denounced Truman for his link with Boss Pendergast; for playing politics he denounced the third candidate, former U. S. District Attorney Maurice Milligan, who last year sent Boss Pendergast to prison. Lincolnesque Mr. Milligan, in turn, blazed away at Truman, charged him with having won his Senate seat in 1934 with the help of 60,000 fraudulent votes dug up by Pendergast; at Stark for sticking with Pendergast until Milligan sent the boss to jail.

When the yelling had quieted down, Truman had beaten Stark by 8,000 votes, with Milligan a poor third, and Missouri voters found to their dismay that, in a year when Louisiana had kicked out the remnants of the Huey Long machine, they had voted to restore Pendergastery. Old Tom Pendergast was out of Leavenworth on probation, and under the lee of Mayor Bernard Dickmann’s St. Louis machine the Pendergasters in Kansas City could now mend their battered breeches. No one believed that Republican Candidate Manuel A. Davis would be strong enough to beat Truman in November. If Missourians cared, they had only themselves to blame. In St. Louis alone 169,000 registered voters had failed to go to the polls.