U.S. At War: The Missouri Compromise

On stage, a rake-voiced orator tripped through his garden of adjectives. The man he was describing sat amidst the delegates below, hunched forward in his chair, sneaking bites from a hot dog and sips from a paper cup of soda pop, paying no more attention to the routine speech than the rest of the audience did. The speech was about him, but neat, grey little Harry Shippe Truman, 60, has heard thousands of speeches in his years of politics.

Harry Truman is no man to be taken in by adjectives. To Party workers, after he became the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, he said simply: “I am a work horse.” The description was apt: it covered his principal virtues, which are industry and loyalty; and it covered his principal defect, which is a drab mediocrity.

Harry & Tom. In 1934 Boss Tom Pendergast, the corrupt Kansas City politico, was looking for a respectable name to sweeten up the noisome Pendergast ticket. Harry Truman, a likable plodder, had lived a clean life: he did not smoke, and did not like his womenfolk to smoke; he was a high Mason; he had married the girl he went to Sunday School with; he had been a World War I hero (an artillery captain, he saved his panicky battery from a German trap in the St. Mihiel fighting). He was a farm boy become county judge, with friends “in the sticks” to add to Pendergast’s slick Kansas City machine.

Harry Truman had also been utterly loyal for twelve years to Boss Pendergast—ever since he had lost all his money ($15,000) in a postwar Kansas City haberdashery venture, and Pendergast had started him off as a county road overseer. By 1934 Harry Truman had become presiding judge of Jackson County, Mo. (which in Missouri is actually the county’s administrative officer; as such he spent $25,000,000 on roads and buildings). He was ripe for another step up the ladder, and asked Pendergast for the county collectorship. Big Tom replied: “The best I can do now, Harry, is a United States Senatorship; how’s that?”

Truman, who had never aspired so high, was elected Senator, benefiting from the lists of dead people whom Tom Pendergast habitually voted every election. Five years later Pendergast was sent to the penitentiary for a $443,550 income tax evasion. Said Harry Truman: “I won’t desert a ship in distress.” Years later he added: “Tom Pendergast never asked me to do a dishonest deed. He knew I wouldn’t do it. When Tom Pendergast was down and out, a convicted man, [people] wanted me to denounce him. I refused. . . . I wouldn’t kick a friend.” Newsmen who battled the Pendergast dynasty agreed that Truman himself was untouched by scandal.

The Investigator. World War II lifted him from obscurity as a faithful, machine-run Senator who dutifully caught the 7:30 bus to his Senate office and dutifully voted 100% New Deal. (His mother, 91, reads the Congressional Record regularly back in Missouri, and reprimands him by mail if he misses a roll call.)

After Pearl Harbor, Truman requested active service, and was rejected for age. Then he conceived a genuine chance to serve: he asked for a special Senate Committee to investigate war expenditures. Harry Truman put his plodding talents to smoking out Army waste, business grabs and Government inefficiency. His Committee was not so quick to shoot its mouth off as Martin Dies’s; people gradually learned that Truman usually knew what he was talking about. The Truman Committee became the nation’s wartime watchdog.

The Committee’s fiercest blasts were directed at Administration mismanagement, but Truman steadfastly continued to vote the New Deal line. When it came to choosing a Vice President, this made him palatable to C.I.O. as a compromise choice. He has voted as a liberal on Negro measures, such as anti-polltax measures. He is halfway a Southerner (his Confederate parents were driven from their home in the Civil War), so the Southerners can swallow him. And he has been so consistently “regular” that the bosses know he can be trusted to godown the line. So last week in Chicago, the mousy-looking little man from Missouri was offered a chance at the nation’s No. 2 job, which has become the steppingstone to the No. 1 job six times in U.S. history upon the death of a President (see cut).