Truman(12)

Nevertheless Truman campaigned indefatigably if unjoyfully throughout one of the hottest Julys in the history of the Middle West. The temperature was over 100° F on 21 days. He visited 60 of the state’s 114 counties, making around ten short speeches a day. He declared himself‘heart and soul for Roosevelt’. He survived a motor car accident and two broken ribs.

Polling was on August 9th. Milligan had faded, but Cochran remained a strong opponent. The result was remarkable, not so much for its overall out-turn as for the breakdown of the figures. Truman had a majority of about 40,000 in a vote of over half a million. In St Louis he polled only 3,742 against Cochran’s 104,265 (Milligan got 6,670). Kansas City provided the mirror image. There Cochran got only 1,525, against Truman’s 137,529 and Milligan’s 8,912. The machines had shown their power, and not only Pendergast’s. But his had the edge. The smaller city polled substantially more votes. Neither Truman nor Cochran would have had a chance without their machine backing. But equally either could have won or lost in the rural counties, where half of the votes were cast. And here Truman (and indeed Cochran) were largely on their own, with only the help of their records and their campaigning merits. In these ‘outstate’ areas they ran about equal, with Truman five thousand or so ahead.

The November election was easy. Truman overwhelmed Patterson. On January 2nd, 1935 (in a cutaway coat, which suited him ill, for he was always natty rather than elegant) and escorted, ironically but inevitably, by the senior Senator from Missouri, Bennett Clark, he took the oath of office before Vice-President Garner. He was nearly 51 years old. He was one of 96 members (69 of them Democrats) of what was on the way to becoming the most powerful elected chamber in the world. He was in a metropolis (if the Washington of those days, in uneasy transition between Southern swamp town and world capital, could be given such a name) which he had hardly visited before. He was a committed supporter of the Administration, but apart from Harry Hopkins, he hardly knew anyone in its inner circle. He had a modest record of local achievement behind him, but insofar as he had any national repute it was that of being thickly tarred with the Pendergast brush.





3

JUNIOR SENATOR FROM MISSOURI


Truman came to Washington as one of thirteen new Democrats in the Senate. It was too many for any of them automatically to be the centre of attention. And, because of Pendergast, Truman started with about the lowest reputation of the lot. He was also inherently one of the least superficially adaptable, with an uxorious devotion but a wife for whom neither the political nor the social life of the capital was ever likely to have much attraction. He was in addition one of the poorest senators and self-consciously so. He had no profession on which to fall back, he was exceptionally unwilling to earn even the most honest of additional money, and he found the increase from his $6,000 as County Judge to the 1930s senatorial salary of $10,000 insufficient to compensate for his Washington expenses. The result was to put him in a complaining mood which was for him unusual.

It also locked him in to an unsatisfactory pattern of life. He could not afford to establish a house in Washington in which Bess Truman would have liked to live. As a result there was always a danger of her spending substantial chunks of congressional sessions in Independence. Their daughter alternated between schools in both places, private in Washington, public in Independence.

Truman, left alone in Washington, was lonely and often miserable. He had nowhere agreeable to live. Sometimes he was reduced to a hotel room. At first he knew few people, and had little to do in the evenings, except apply himself to the minutiae of senatorial business. He was good at such painstaking homework, and it was to be one of the foundations of his later Senate success; but at the time it did not do much to raise his spirits.

Although his income was nominally three times greater, he was worse provided for in two respects than a roughly comparable British provincial Member of Parliament of the period operating in similar straightened and alien circumstances. These were no habitual Senate sessions and therefore no habitual Senate life in the evenings and, more unfortunately, he could not afford to go home. This was partly a function of distance, with air services already possible but rudimentary and slow. Still more however was it a function of there then being no unlimited free travel for members of Congress. ‘I almost came home …’ he wrote to his wife in February 1937. ‘I could have taken the train but the least I can do it for would be over one hundred dollars and we need those dollars too much.’1

When he went he mostly went by motor car. This was because it was cheaper. (The train was only seriously considered in 1937 because of a freeze-up in Missouri.) But it was a formidable journey. He could do it by leaving early one morning and getting to the other end late on the evening of the second day, but without pressing it had to be spread over three. It only began to be sensible for a week and not for a weekend. During his first Washington session, for instance, when Bess Truman left by June 15th and the Senate did not adjourn until the end of August, he only got home once during the intervening ten weeks. For the rest he spent his weekends as his weeks in the Washington summer (fortunately he was always almost totally impervious to heat), occasionally going to New York, sometimes being asked out of town to parties with people he did not know very well, but mostly working, or searching for an apartment which would make the District slightly more enticing to his wife during the next session.