Truman(18)

It was a famous victory given his starting point, and the buoyancy and determination which were required to pull out of that valley of hopelessness. In that sense it was a foretaste of the qualities he was to show in 1948. But in other respects it was not a foretaste of the Truman presidency. It was fought during two of the most critical months in the history of the Western world. But it was not won because the Democrats of Missouri looked to Truman as a potential world figure who might help steer them through the shoals of international danger. As Hitler swept to victory, as France surrendered, as Britain prepared for invasion, Truman was pre-occupied containing the Pendergast curse and sundering the alliance between Stark and Hannegan.

Nor was it a ringing endorsement of a senator of six years’ standing against a governor who had neither judgment nor sparkle. Truman had polled little more than 35% of the total vote. It was however a result which gave great pleasure on Capitol Hill. ‘It certainly is gratifying (to put it mildly),’ Truman wrote from Washington on August 9th, ‘when every employee in the building–elevator boys, policemen, waiters, cooks, negro cleanup women, and all—were interested in what would happen to me. Biffle, (Clerk to the Senate) told me last night … that no race in his stay here had created such universal interest in the Senate. He’s having lunch for me today. I guess it will be a dandy. It almost gives me the swell head–but I mustn’t get that disease at this late date.’ The senators themselves were no less enthusiastic. ‘You should have been in the Senate yesterday,’ he wrote the next day, ‘when I slipped in at the back door. Hiram Johnson was making a speech and he had to call for order. Both floor leaders and all the Democrats made a great rush … I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me. Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stodart, and Harry Swartz almost beat me to death.’

In the White House there was less enthusiasm but a full recognition of reality. Henceforward Truman was treated as the plenipotentiary of Missouri. Stark wrote to Roosevelt complaining that he had been defeated by a low vote occasioned by the drought. Roosevelt replied with political elegance. ‘Pure Roosevelt’ was how Jonathan Daniels described it:

‘Dear Lloyd,

Your letter enclosing the clipping has been received and I was interested to hear the analysis of the recent Primary fight. I am sure you understand my personal feeling towards you. I can only say that we will all have to get behind the ticket and work for a Democrat victory.

With all good wishes.

Your friend,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.’9

At the beginning of 1941 Roosevelt proposed giving Stark a Federal appointment on a new Labor Mediation Board. Truman was not pleased, but not anxious to block the move himself. Instead ex-Senator Minton of Indiana wrote on his behalf. Roosevelt promptly desisted. On the other hand Truman himself wrote to Roosevelt in September urging that Milligan, who had had to resign to contend the primary, should be re-instated as District Attorney. He even went so far as to say ‘he has made a good District Attorney’. This however was a matter of politics and not of conviction, as he made clear in two letters to his wife.10 Five years later, as President, he reverted to his earlier position and declined to give him a further term.

Unlike 1934, the 1940 election proper (as opposed to the primary) was not a walk-over for Truman. He won satisfactorily, but only by about 40,000 votes, which was less than half the majority by which Roosevelt carried Missouri. However, the Democratic candidate for Governor, whose needs had been crucial to the primary outcome in St Louis, lost to a Republican, so that Truman could not be held to have got a notably bad result.

In the three months between the primary and the general election Truman received one agreeable accolade and suffered one major (and somewhat mysterious) family misfortune. The accolade was his election as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Masons of Missouri. He had been an active Mason since his pre-World War I days on the farm at Grandview, and was a natural member of the ‘brotherhood’. But it was an odd time for his installation in the Scottish Rite Temple in St Louis. Most of those involved in inducting him were Republicans, it was in the middle of a fairly vicious campaign, and it marginally helped his re-election.

The other event was much odder and wholly disagreeable. The Grandview house and farms had a mortgage of $35,000 upon them. The money had somewhat mysteriously been advanced not by a bank or other financial institution but by the Jackson County School Board. Interest payments had got into arrears. On August 22nd, 16 days after the primary triumph, the County moved in, got a court order for default, sold up the whole property, deprived Truman’s brother of his occupation, and forced his mother (then aged 88) and his sister to move out and set up a new house in the town of Grandview. No sooner had they done this than his mother fell and broke her hip, largely due to the disagreeable unfamiliarity of the new surroundings, so Truman always maintained.