It is very difficult to understand why Truman could not stop the foreclosure. $35,000 was a substantial amount of money in those days, but it was not vast, even if, which seems an unlikely assumption, he had to raise the whole sum to resist the process. Before the primary, certainly in the slough of despair at the beginning of the campaign, it might have been impossible. But in the flush of victory, particularly in view of his reception in the Senate, it is almost inconceivable that the money or any necessary part of it could not have been raised in Washington or Missouri. John Snyder, for instance, an almost constant companion of Truman’s at this stage, was moving up to be the President of the First National Bank of St Louis.
Yet Truman took it all curiously casually. Of course he minded greatly about his mother. But Merle Miller recorded him as saying: ‘Had an old squint-eyed guy that was head of the county government, and he thought that would be a good way to help in my defeat, but nearly everybody in Missouri had a mortgage, so it didn’t do me a bit of harm.’11
To complete the bizarreness of the incident there was the fact that Charles Ross, an old class-mate of Truman’s and a staff writer with the St Louis Post-Dispatch had probably sparked off the whole process by writing an article about the alleged impropriety of the mortgage. It was the sort of behaviour which could easily have led Truman to bear one of his relatively few but unrelenting grudges. On the contrary he made Ross his press secretary when he became President, in which office Ross matched his loyalty with the quality of his service, which was not always so in the Truman entourage, until he died at his desk in December 1950.
Eventually the Grandview house and two parcels of farm land returned to the ownership of the Trumans in 1946. It was arranged through the intervention and to some extent the generosity of a Kansas City real estate dealer who was an old acquaintance and was happy to have nothing more than a few White House invitations in return. Nevertheless, Truman’s acceptance of the assistance is inconsistent with a view that it was over-scrupulousness about any form of outside help which accounted for his paralysis in 1940. The mystery remains.
So did Truman’s money troubles as he began his second term. He assuaged them by taking Bess Truman on to his Senate office payroll, at a salary of $4,500 and in the capacity of a mixture of mail sorter and political advisor. Neither much liked the arrangement; at least it was public and unconcealed.
Truman’s work, during the three and a half years which he served as a second term senator, was almost wholly concentrated upon his chairmanship of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Mostly it was known as the Truman Committee. In consequence it gave him a national reputation and for the first time made his name known outside Missouri and the Senate. Time magazine put him on its cover in March 1943. About the same time Look conducted a poll of political correspondents which put him among the ten men in Washington most valuable to the war effort; no other member of the Congress was in the list.
It was loosely estimated that the Committee saved the nation $15 billion. It did so by methods that were non-partisan–all the reports were unanimous–and undemagogic because they were designed to achieve results and not to pillory individuals or create sensation. It also steered firmly away from trying to influence strategy or to make or unmake commanders. It investigated contracts and not battles. As a result it was tolerably acceptable to the White House. Roosevelt and those around him would probably have preferred no committee, but if they had to have one the Truman Committee was about the best for which they could have hoped. It operated (and consciously so in Truman’s case) in sharp contrast with the 1860’s Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, which tried to sack General McClellan, investigated the alleged anti-union activities of Mrs Lincoln, and generally infuriated the President. Except on one occasion when Truman put his name to an ill-judged article which he had not properly read and allowed it to appear close to the 1942 mid-term elections ton to Independence were mostly sent from all over the continent to Washington. They were no less constant, no less full, fluent and vivid, not often elegant, but no longer plaintive.
In Washington he was mostly engaged in hearings and the preparation and presentation of reports. He was throughout both firm and thorough. He had sub-committees under other senators, but he never allowed their reports to go out without having himself been carefully through them. He almost invariably presided over the hearings of the full Committee, and insisted that they be conducted in a calm, quasi-judicial atmosphere, although that was hardly his natural style. ‘And another thing I’m proud of,’ he told Merle Miller, ‘we didn’t give a hoot in hell about publicity.’12 They were not, of course, subject to the temptations of television cameras, but his claim was true so far as the raw material of the proceedings, as opposed to the finished product of the reports, was concerned. As a result there were no confrontations for the sake of headlines. But there were notable jousts with Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, as well as with two labour leaders: John L. Lewis, who although rough in controversy was relatively safe to take on because he was maverick and unpopular; and Sidney Hillman, who was much more redoubtable, because he was highly responsible and central to the administration’s relations with organized labour.