TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/44elect/44elect.003

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                -.3.                                                          ╚November 6, 1944

DEMOCRATS  

The Man From Missouri



     What the U.S. has always liked, and usually got, is a Vice
President who raises neither fuss nor feathers, who serves his
term and then sinks back into comfortable anonymity. There have
been some 20th-Century exceptions, men like Garner and Wallace
who made news while in office. But Vice Presidents are mainly
remembered, when they are, for irrelevancies, like Thomas
Marshall for his catch phrase: "What this country needs is a good
five-cent cigar." (In the tobacco-short autumn of 1944, gangsters
rephrased it: "What this country needs is a five-cent cigar.")

     A Vice President's chief duty is to be there in case the
President dies in office -- as six in U.S. history have died. As
old as the Republic itself is the platitude that but a single
heartbeat stands between the Vice President and the Presidency.

     But in 1944 the people are also voting for a Vice President.
The Democrats admitted as much by staging a free-for-all battle
for the nomination at Chicago. The electorate knows it too. It is
a sizable political fact of 1944.

     For this reason the spotlight has shone hard and hot on
Democratic Candidate Harry S Truman, the junior Senator from
Missouri. Anti-New Deal newspapers have examined the Truman
record and background with the zeal of ballistics experts, the
energy of crime reporters.

     Before this scrutiny began, the people had known two main
and contradictory facts about Harry Truman: 1) that he was once
the beholden creature of Kansas City's behemoth boss, Tom
Pendergast, as corrupt a machine politician as the U.S. has seen
in this century; 2) that Truman has done an excellent job as
chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee.

     The people wanted to know more. They wanted to know: what
manner of man is Harry Truman?

     A Modest Man.  Harry Truman is the man in the grey suit,
usually double-breasted. His college education consists of a
brief spell at the Kansas City School of Law. He is an
inconspicuous man with thin lips, steel-rimmed glasses, flatly
combed grey hair, and a flat, not unpleasant Missouri twang.

     He is modest. He spent most of his first 33 years on his
father's farm, then rose to prominence in politics through
rubber-stamp party regularity, a lot of luck and a sharp eye for
the main chance. He has none of the flowing pretensions that many
Senators wear like togas. After his nomination in Chicago he
reiterated: "I'm a Jackson County Democrat, and proud of it."

     He is homespun and plain as an old shoe; his shrewd and
educated political sense guards him against assuming any more
sophisticated manner. On his campaign train he joined newsmen at
poker almost every night, dressed in pajamas and an old flowered
dressing gown, the kind that can be bought on any Main Street.
When the waiter brought in a deep-dish pie, Harry Truman
exclaimed: "My, the crust is as good as Mummy used to make." He
drinks his bourbon with ginger ale.

     He is a hearty eater. Yet he can still get into his World
war I major's uniform. His measurements: 5 ft., 10 in.; 167 lbs.;
33-inch waist.

     With the ingrained habits of a farm boy, he still rises
early; but his years in the city have made him hate to go to bed
at night. His reading habits run to volumes on the Civil War, of
which he has devoured thousands. His specialty: the Battle of
Chancellorsville. He married his boyhood sweetheart, Bess
Wallace, whom he met in Sunday School when he was seven and she
six. He is still a member of the First Baptist Church of
Grandview, Mo., although he says he has never been "a very active
churchgoer." The Christian Century called him "a religious man."
For a while he skipped around on the fringes of Dr. Frank
Buchman's Moral Re-Armament movement.

     A Straight Row.  On that November day in 1884 when Grover
Cleveland reversed 24 years of Republican rule to win the
Presidency for the Democrats, John Truman, owner of a mule barn
in Lamar, Mo., raised a flag over his white frame house and vowed
it would stay there as long as Democracy remained in power. Six
months earlier, John Truman had tacked a mule shoe above his
front door to celebrate the birth of his first son, Harry.

     The Trumans were plain people of Scotch, Irish and Dutch
stock. (Harry said: "We're a little of everything. If you shook
the family tree anything might fall out.")

     The Trumans moved to a farm near Independence when Harry was
four. Harry's boyhood was not much fun. He did the farm chores.
He never had a bicycle, he did not play ball and he did not hunt
(he did not like it). Harry Truman was the one boy in
Independence who never ducked his piano lessons and, worst of
all, never seemed to mind being seen with his music roll under
his arm. He had to wear glasses at an early age, and the
Independence toughs marked him down as a sissy.

     After high school he tried for West Point, but his weak eyes
cost him the appointment. He was timekeeper for the Santa Fe
Railroad in Kansas City, wrapped papers for the Star, clerked in
a bank and rose to bookkeeper at $115 a month. Suddenly he
returned to his father's farm, and stayed there for ten years.
His mother, now 91, says he could plow the straightest row of
corn she ever saw.

     Truman had soldiered in the Missouri National guard since
1905; World War I mad him a second lieutenant and he rose to
captain. In France he disciplined a panicky company in combat; he
was directing artillery fire in the Meuse-Argonne until one
minute before the Armistice. On the way home, he rose to major.

     Back in Kansas City, with a war buddy, he opened a
haberdashery on Kansas City's Twelfth Street, across from the
Muehbach Hotel. This sole business venture crashed resoundingly,
leaving Truman with $15,000 in debts, which he was still paying
off 14 years later.

     Broke and dispirited, Harry Truman turned to politics. With
the backing of American Legionnaires, who had made his
haberdashery their hangout, he won the nod of Boss Pendergast for
county judge. Faithful, efficient, unimaginative, never one to
make trouble, he stayed in this administrative post for ten
years.

     A Roaring City.  In the '20s and '30s, Kansas City under
Boss Pendergast was the widest-open city in the U.S. Silver
dollars clinked on the tables of drab gambling dens up & down
Twelfth Street; saloons were open all night; the tapping of
prostitutes along the windows of Fourteenth Street was like hail
on a greenhouse roof; the bellboys in even the best hotels were
pimps. Stripteasers were everywhere, and in the ill -- yet far-
famed Chesterfield Club the waitresses trolled around naked even
at lunch. It was a roaring city, beloved of the salesmen and
particularly the drovers who poured in from the West and South-
west. Pendergast defenders said: "It's good for business."

     Everybody bought Tom Pendergast's White Seal bourbon;
contractors soon found Pendergast's Ready-Mixed Concrete the only
one to use. At every election ghosts were voted by the carloads.
Tom himself, the very embodiment of the cartoonists' boss,
shunned night life, rose betimes, appeared early at his famed
second-floor office at 1908 Main Street, gave audience to
hundreds of supplicants, and in between time played the ponies
(in one year he be $2,000,000, lost $600,000).

     He began to slip in the late '30s, when an energetic federal
district attorney named Maurice Milligan moved in on the vote
frauds. The real crash came when Boss Tom was caught red-handed
with a $400,000 bribe from fire insurance companies. Tom went to
jail -- for income-tax evasion.

     Through all the years of vice, graft and vote frauds, Harry
Truman remained clean. The worst that could be said of him was
that he remained slavishly faithful to the corrupt machine, and
that he had a strong stomach or an insensitive nose.

     As presiding judge of the county court he had 64 road
supervisors (the present administration has but 16); he laid
$10,000,000 worth of roads, rigorously insisting on a South
Dakota contractor who had the low bid. And when he built Jackson
County's $3,000,000 skyscraper courthouse, he had $36,000 left
out of the appropriation (he used the surplus for a statue of
Andy Jackson).

     "The Best I Can Do."  How Harry Truman got to the Senate in
1934 is now a famed anecdote of U.S. politics. Restless in his
$6,300 county job, he had his eyes on the collectorship, which --
with fees -- paid $25,000. He sought Tom's help, but Tom had
promised the collectorship to another. Said Pendergast: "The best
I can do right now, Harry, is a U.S. Senatorship." With the help
of Tom Pendergast's ghost voters, Harry won the election.

     In his first Senate term, he kept his mouth closed and voted
99% New Deal. He also did his final two errands for the Boss. He
got the Missouri WPAdministratorship for a Pendergast henchman
named Matt Murray, who later went to prison for income-tax
evasion. And he tried to block the reappointment of Maurice
Milligan as U.S. district attorney -- after the Pendergast vote-
fraud trials had begun.

     This was the low point in Harry Truman's career. He fought
Milligan tooth & nail, rising to make a violent speech on the
Senate floor in which he even questioned Milligan's "public
morals." But the Senate confirmed Milligan overwhelmingly.

     In 1940, but for a turn of the wheel, Truman would probably
have been beaten in the Democratic primary by Missouri's
forthright Governor Lloyd Stark. Milligan entered the race and
split the anti-Pendergast vote. Truman won with a 7,000 margin.

     Turning Point.  World War II was the real turning point for
Harry Truman. He wanted to stop Government waste. He made a
35,000-mile trip across country, at his own expense, inspected
countless Army installations. Back in Washington, he said: "It
doesn't do any good to go around digging up dead horses after the
war is over. The thing to do is dig this stuff up now and correct
it." The Senate agreed and the Truman Committee was born.

     As his first act Harry Truman lured from the Justice
Department able, hulking Hugh Fulton, an ex-Wall Street lawyer
who had convicted Utility Tycoon Howard Hopson for mail fraud. A
relentless investigator, Fulton proved to be more than just a
sound investment, he became the brains and the workhorse of the
committee, which numbered some of the Senate's ablest members --
Democrats Hatch and Kilgore, Republicans Burton, Ball and
Ferguson.

     The committee did more than dig up dead horses, it
constituted itself a spur to the Administration, the Army & Navy.
It pounded away at shortage after shortage -- aluminum, rubber,
zinc, lead, steel, manpower; helped force the President to
abolish OPM, forced the Navy to abandon outmoded landing ships.

     Truman eschewed sensational exposures. For one thing, he was
eager to work with the men of his party in Washington to correct
abuses before they became public. For another, he did not want to
offend his new boss, Franklin Roosevelt, or to impede war
production.

     But as his fame grew, so did his self-confidence. He did not
hesitate to lay blame on the highest quarters, as witness his
colloquy with Senator Vandenberg in August 1941:

     Vandenberg:  Who is responsible for this situation (bad
organization of the defense program)?

     Truman: There is only one place where the responsibility can
be put.

     Vandenberg: Where is that -- the White House?

     Truman: Yes, sir.

     In Character.  The Truman Committee made Harry Truman a Vice
Presidential candidate. He became by far the most palatable
compromise in the range between Henry Wallace and Harry Byrd.

     Harry Truman did not want the nomination; he went to Chicago
primed to promote Jimmy Byrnes; when his own boom began he was so
worried that he had to be repeatedly told that he was Mr.
Roosevelt's real choice. Then he was "cleared with" Sidney
Hillman's P.A.C., which cheerfully took him as second choice, and
the nomination was his.

     On the stump Truman has remained very much himself, getting
off homely remarks, standing at attention whenever bands play the
Missouri Waltz (thus forcing the audience to do the same),
plugging all local Democrats as a regular party man should. (In
California he thus endorsed Hal Styles, Democratic candidate for
Congress, who had been clearly exposed as a onetime member of the
Ku Klux Klan. Last week the Hearst press, moving up its 16-inch
campaign smear guns, charged that Truman himself had once been a
Klan member. The "evidence" was feeble stuff.)

     Many Americans have now seen the man who might succeed to
the Presidency. they know his standard answer to reporters who
ask him if he feels qualified to be President: that newsmen of
the Senate Press Gallery have voted him the civilian who, next to
the President, "knows most about the war."

     What is his measure? He is modest, honest, healthy, simple,
kindly, straightforward, with a pleasant sense of humor, the
average level of Congressional intelligence -- which is higher
than U.S. voters often think. His defects are lacks: he is
obviously not a man whose nobility of purpose, splendid idealism
or farsighted vision of the American destiny has ever stirred or
could ever stir the country. He is not known as the sponsor of
any legislation of importance, let alone of any profound or
seriously progressive measures; he has never notably participated
in debate on taxes or economic measures. He is a small-town
politician who has learned to conduct himself inoffensively on
the national stage, and who has to his credit some good work
honestly done; a man as neat and grey as his double-breasted
suits. There is no reason to suspect that he would make a great
President -- and there is no reason to believe that he would be
the worst.

     In Lost Angeles, Harry Truman, discussing his own vocation,
said: "A politician is the ablest man in government, and when
he's dead they call him a statesman." At 60, Harry Truman is very
much alive.