Truman(14)

His committee success was partly luck and partly work. From the beginning he was pleased with his major committee assignments—Appropriations (under Glass of Virginia) and Interstate Commerce (under Wheeler). The latter, with Wheeler’s encouragement, he was able to make into something substantial. Wheeler put him on a sub-committee of three to enquire into civil aviation. The other and senior Democrat hardly attended. Truman conducted the hearings with acumen and energy, and from them there emerged the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1937.

Wheeler set up another sub-committee to investigate railroad finances. The prosperity of the system was already past its peak, but financial interests were still taking a lot of money out of the companies. Wheeler himself took the chair of this sub-committee and began hearings in December 1936. Truman at first was not even a member. But he sat in at meetings assiduously, out of interest. When a member fell out, he was added. He quickly showed himself the best briefed. Then, after Roosevelt’s defeat on the Supreme Court issue, Wheeler, who had been one of the President’s most determined opponents, decided that he needed an autumn rest in Montana. Truman took over as chairman for some of the most crucial hearings. The first company on which he led the investigation was right in his back yard, the Missouri Pacific. Indeed its tracks had literally run at the bottom of one of his childhood gardens, in South Crysler Street, where he lived from 1890 to 1896. There were fears that he would pull his punches against such an intimate vis-à-vis. They were misplaced. Truman resisted a lot of home state pressure in a way that surprised and impressed the staff of the sub-committee. He also played the dominant role throughout 1938 and 1939 in preparing what, after several setbacks, became the Transportation Act of 1940 and is sometimes known as the Wheeler-Truman Act. He therefore ended his first Senate term with a good record of legislative achievement.

His Senate floor speeches were less distinguished. For the first two years they were almost non-existent. For the next two they were infrequent, strident and often ill-judged. They were populist in tone and a little out of date, William Jennings Bryan without the oratory or the imagery. The railroad companies in the early years of the century, he claimed, had been far bigger robbers than Jesse James and his hold-up gang who occasionally got away with a few tens of thousands of dollars from express cars. The Carnegie libraries were ‘steeped in the blood of the Homestead steel workers’. The Rockefeller Foundation was built ‘on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and a dozen other similar performances’. More interestingly, and under the influence of Justice Brandeis,3 who had taken him up, he launched an attack on bigness: ‘I believe that a thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with $4,000 million in assets … I also say that a thousand county seat towns of 7,000 people each are a thousand times more important to this Republic than one city of 7 million people.’

The occasion of remarkable ill-judgment came in February 1938. Maurice Milligan, the brother of the Milligan who had opposed Truman in the 1934 primary, was at the end of his first term as District Attorney for the Kansas City area. Roosevelt, supported by his Attorney-General, was resolved to re-appoint him. This commanded the strong support of Governor Stark and the agreement of Senator Clark. It did not however command the agreement of Senator Truman, whose acquiescence might have been considered essential, on grounds of senatorial courtesy, in view of the location in the state of Milligan’s field of operation and the fact that Truman had previously done badly for patronage in comparison with Clark. The issue was now however not one of simple senatorial courtesy. Milligan, with Stark’s encouragement, was deeply involved in an investigation into Kansas City vote frauds at the 1936 elections. Pendergast was not directly involved for he had been ill in New York City at the time, but his machine most certainly was, and 259 over-eager supporters of it were convicted. It was also thought to be Truman’s machine. In addition, Federal agents, working with Milligan’s knowledge, were investigating Pendergast’s non-payment of income tax on his $750,000 insurance companies’ bribe.

In these circumstances Roosevelt’s circumnavigation of Truman was understandable. Truman could have taken one of two courses, either of which, without being glorious, would have had something to be said for it. He could have rolled with the punch and quietly accepted Milligan, hoping that Roosevelt would compensate him on some future occasion. Or he could simply have blocked Milligan in the Senate, by saying, without reasons, that his re-appointment was unacceptable to him. The Senate would have drawn its own conclusions but it would almost certainly, for the sake of the prerogatives of other senators, not have overruled him.