Truman(13)

It was principally for this that he needed ‘too much’ the dollars that he was reluctant to spend on the train fare home. It was an almost impossible dilemma. If he was to afford an apartment which might induce his wife and daughter to spend more time in Washington he could not afford to go and see them often when they were in Independence. Even with this abstinence he could not afford to pay more than about $150 a month. And nearly all available apartments under this price were either too small (there was always his mother-in-law to be accommodated) or too disagreeable.

It was a problem which he never solved, at least throughout his first term. He changed apartments every session, and sometimes more often, but it was mostly a change without a difference. Tilden Gardens, Warwick Apartments, Sedgwick Gardens, the castellated and Tudorized eight to ten storey 1920s apartment houses of the most anonymous part of north-west Washington were tried one after the other. None was much worse than the other, but none was much better either. ‘I knew every block of Connecticut Avenue before Dad’s senatorial career ended’, Margaret Truman wrote with more resignation than enthusiasm.2

The only significant changes were that in 1937 they were in the Carroll Arms, which presumably had apartments as well as rooms for ‘transients’ but which, on First Street, NE, was almost the ‘local’ of the Capitol and must have made for rather claustrophobic living, and that in 1941, at the beginning of his second term, he decided there was no point in movement without variety and settled in 1401, Connecticut Avenue, where, four years less eleven days later, he slept his first night as President of the United States.

It seemed about as likely in 1935 and 1936 that he would be Roosevelt’s successor as that he should be offered the Presidency of Harvard (or ‘Há vŭd’ as he liked to call it when imitating F.D.R.). Certainly Roosevelt did nothing to help him settle down as a new senator. Mostly, I suppose, he never thought about Truman, just knew his name and had difficulty attaching a face to it. He had him once to the White House after he had been in Washington for about six weeks, but Truman said that the meeting was not a success as he was so overawed as to be almost inarticulate; and there is no record of any further direct contact for nearly a year. Of more public importance was the fact that Roosevelt froze Truman out of Federal patronage in Missouri. He paid much more attention to Bennett Clark, who was admittedly the senior senator but who, apart from being lazy and often drunk, was a very doubtful supporter of the New Deal; Truman, on the other hand, continued to vote the ticket, on every issue except ‘the bonus’, with conviction and loyalty.

Worst of all was the only occasion when Roosevelt had to seek Truman’s support in a vote, and did it, not by a direct approach, but by getting Pendergast to telephone Truman. The occasion was the choice of a new majority leader in the Senate after the sudden death in July 1937, of Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas. Roosevelt wanted Alben Barkley of Kentucky, and got him, but by the somewhat slender margin of 38 votes to 37. Truman was in the New York before he could go home to Kansas City. And soon after his return there began the harrying investigations into both his ballot-rigging and his acceptance of a massive bribe from the insurance industry.

For Truman, on the other hand, it was the beginning of a better period. Jonathan Daniels considered that ‘his effective senatorial career began in the fall of 1936’.1 The improvement was based on two props. First his committee work became more purposeful and began to bear some fruit. Previously his hard work had been somewhat undirected. He just read whatever document came to hand, rather as, when a boy, he had read almost any book which he picked up in the Independence public library. The second prop was that he began to be accepted as a sort of junior member of the core of the Senate. This came from a combination of straight-dealing, willingness to work, and ‘regular guy’ folksiness. In itself it had little to do with the highest qualities of statesmanship. Few of the most lastingly well-known senators of the past 150 years qualified: not Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, neither La Follette, Wagner, Fulbright, Lehman, nor any Kennedy, with the possible but doubtful exception of Edward. To try to recollect those over a century or more who it did include would be a contradiction in terms.

In the thirties, the core centred around John Nance Garner (never a member of the Senate as such but its presiding officer as Vice-President after 30 years as a Congressman from Texas), Barkley of Kentucky, Harrison of Mississippi, Wheeler of Montana and Vandenberg of Michigan (a Republican), with Sam Rayburn of Texas, already a Congressman of 24 years’ standing and later to be Speaker, providing a buttress from the House of Representatives. All of these, and as a result, a number of others too, approved of Truman. So, a different and perhaps more astringent test, did most of his freshmen contemporaries of the 1934 election: certainly Minton of Indiana, Schwellenbach of Washington State and Hatch of New Mexico, who were amongst the best of them, did so. By the autumn of 1936 he had developed a base of friendly acquaintances and potential allies. They nearly all came from west of the Alleghenies. They would nearly all have been surprised, two years earlier, to have been told how good they would find Truman to be.