Truman(17)

In addition Truman got massive labour union   support, particularly from the railroad brotherhoods, who remembered with favour his work on the Wheeler sub-committee. A. F. Whitney, the president of the trainmen, with whom Truman was to have a very rough joust in 1946, was much to the fore. ‘Truman for Senator’ clubs were set up at the main depôts, and half a million copies of a special union   produced newspaper were distributed throughout the state. These were careful to stress his support for agriculture as well as his labour relations record.

Truman also did well with blacks: there were still relatively few in Kansas City, but more in St Louis, and a quarter of a million in the state as a whole. At Sedalia he made a firm civil rights pronouncement, certainly the strongest of his career until then. There has been some suggestion that this stemmed more from opportunism than from principle. He needed the votes. Stark was weak in the black constituency. And he therefore cast aside his traditional Missouri prejudices in a blatant piece of political angling.

The main argument for this view is that as a young man he had been full of racial prejudice, although no doubt no more so than most Missouri Democrats of his time. ‘I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman’, he had written to Bess Wallace in June 1911. ‘Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America. ‘7 And for several decades after that he used the word nigger without embarrassment both in private writing and speech. The arguments the other way are first that at Sedalia he desperately needed a warm response to the start to his campaign and that there were probably more in that summer’s day country town audience to be alienated than won on the issue; and more significantly, that the line he there laid down was one to which he adhered increasingly strongly in his years power.

However the main force working on Truman’s side during the campaign was Stark’s humourless, megalomaniac ambition. It led him to alienate too many people, both amongst politicians and the public. He strutted around Missouri surrounded by uniformed colonels from the state troopers, which display, Margaret Truman wrote, ‘made him look like a South American dictator’. He misjudged the mood of audiences. But above all he ran for too many offices at the same time. In April he was being talked about as Secretary of the Navy. In July, less than a month before the primary vote, he suddenly threw his hat into the vice-presidential ring, only to see it contemptuously thrown out within a day or so, both by Roosevelt, who wanted Henry Wallace, and by his own Missouri delegation which, under Clark’s control, was for Bankhead, the Speaker of the House. Clark was not much good at positive support for Truman, a cause in which he never had his heart, but he was good at opposing Stark, who was threatening his own power base, and particularly at ridiculing his pretensions.

Truman also had the luck to achieve a last minute alliance of opportunism in St Louis, the city in which he had been annihilated in the 1934 primary. The Democratic machine there had been for Stark, but they were more committed to their own candidate to succeed Stark as Governor (under Missouri law he was ineligible for a second term or he might have run for that as well), and discovered late that they needed Truman’s support for this candidate. Dickmann, the Mayor, probably remained with Stark, but the up and coming figure in St Louis politics, Robert Hannegan, switched and worked hard for Truman. Hannegan’s efforts, even if late, were crucial. Truman beat Stark by 8,411 in St Louis, which was within 500 votes of his bare and unexpected majority throughout the state. Hannegan was to become Democratic National Chairman within four years.

The victory, while it had ceased to seem impossible during the campaign, remained unexpected up to the night of counting. Truman went to bed on August 6th with those around him still believing he had lost. He woke up to find he had probably won, but the needle flickered until 11.00 a.m. when it finally settled. He had overcome not merely a severe crisis of morale but the specific handicap of a major collapse of his Jackson County position. His majority there was down from 128,000 in 1934 to 20,000 and the total vote had shrunk to two-thirds of the nominally recorded 1934 figures. Pendergast’s old strength was even more vividly displayed by his absence than it had been by his presence. In the outstate counties Truman ran just enough behind Stark to dissipate his Jackson County lead. This left the result to be settled by St Louis, where the favourable turn round in his position was as spectacular as the unfavourable one in Kansas City.