Bess Truman Read online

  For Bess, the president’s unpredictability was underscored by his announcement on October 12, 1937, that he was calling a special session of Congress on November 15. This wrecked her expectation of three months at home with her husband. It produced one of the angriest explosions she ever permitted herself, at least in her letters. Dad left for Washington on October 15 to prepare his railroad subcommittee to hold hearings during the session. “We sure missed you last night,” Bess wrote. “I never did hate so to see you leave. It’s a h - of a way to live - the way we do.”

  Alone in Washington, D.C., again, Senator Truman agreed wholeheartedly with his wife’s unladylike epithet. He tried to be philosophic about it. “It is a most unsatisfactory way to live but nearly everyone has some sort of difficulty and all life is.” The trick lay in “beating the difficulties and making things as pleasant as possible. Perhaps if we were rich we would be crazy or some other handicap would obtain.”

  The senator immediately began looking at apartments. This time, his wife all but cheered his search. She also reported rather acerbically on the situation in Kansas City, where the papers printed columns about Federal Attorney Milligan and ignored what Senator Truman was doing in Washington. Dad remarked that the Washington papers “all noted my arrival in town and the why of it.” From Independence, Bess reported more alarming news. Tom Pendergast was showing signs of radical instability. He was firing old and trusted members of the organization. “Mr. P. certainly has gone completely loco,” Bess wrote, after lunching with the wife of one of the victims.

  Bess enclosed a clipping from the St. Louis Star indicating that the St. Louis Democrats could not resist relishing the ruin of the Kansas City Democracy and were rallying behind Maurice Milligan’s reappointment. Dad somehow found time to search for an apartment while launching his railroad investigation. Thanks to his painstaking preparation, he took on the best brains Wall Street could find and dissected their fraudulent finances in session after scathing session. It won him headlines in newspapers across the country - and barely a line in the Kansas City Star. Their Washington reporter, Duke Shoop, was not even in the capital. He was in Kansas helping Governor Alfred Landon write a speech.

  During this hectic fall of 1937, Bess began to be troubled by a physical problem that was to plague her for the rest of her life. She developed arthritis in her right hand. It was extremely painful. She told Dad it was giving her “Hail Columbia” day and night. He urged her to consult a doctor, but she had grown very distrustful of the family physician, because when he called early in the previous week, he had been “tight.”

  Dad suggested consulting her old school chum, Dr. Elmer Twyman, but Bess demurred. She was afraid he would want to take out her tonsils or her teeth. This gives us a glimpse of the medical practice of the thirties, when doctors believed in a “locus of infection” and took out all sorts of organs believing that would cure the patient’s ills. Bess’ common sense stood her in good stead here. The theory has long since been discredited.

  Bess reported there was a rumor sweeping Missouri that Governor Stark was developing senatorial ambitions and was thinking of running against Bennett Clark. Senator Truman became so worried about the Missouri Democratic Party that he rushed to St. Louis to confer with trusted friends there, such as bankers John Snyder and Jake Vardaman. Typical of his ability to do (or think) two things at once, he rode the Chesapeake and Ohio, one of the railroads he was investigating. He wrote to Bess on the way back, and she replied that if she had known he was in St. Louis, she would have taken a train down there immediately.

  Bess continued to keep a sharp (and then some) eye on local politics. She reported that gossipy Emma Griggs finally had wangled a government job, and someone else was taking the credit for it, after all Senator Truman’s efforts on her behalf. “She didn’t say who,” Bess wrote, “but I’d let whoever it is take care of her in the future, too, because you know darn well that twenty-four hours after she goes to work the complaints are going to start coming in.”

  Still worried about the Missouri situation, Senator Truman rushed to New York to see Tom Pendergast, who was under medical treatment there. He returned, furious with Governor Stark. He told Bess that Jim Pendergast had gone to Jefferson City and personally given Stark names of Kansas City Democrats who deserved appointment to state offices under the governor’s control. Stark had not appointed one of them. It virtually was a declaration of war.

  With his ability to mingle the personal and the political, Dad shared another memory of his New York trip with Bess. He had turned on the radio and heard someone singing “They’ll Never Believe Me.” He was flooded with the memory of the day they had seen The Girl from Utah, just after Bess had told him she cared for him. “I hope you remember,” he wrote. Bess replied somewhat tartly that, of course, she remembered. “Why should I forget any more than you?” she asked.

  The railroad committee hearings ground on. By now, Dad was digging up a lot of dirt. Some of the steamiest emerged from the books of the Missouri Pacific. This great railroad system, which had no less than seventy-nine subsidiaries, had been taken over by a Cleveland holding company, the Alleghany Corporation, using money supplied by J. P. Morgan. The financiers proceeded to declare dividends out of capital instead of earnings and fired thousands of workers to cut the payroll and provide cash for still more dividends, most of which went into their pockets. They cut maintenance to near zero and put nothing into improvements. In a few years, the Missouri Pacific was bankrupt.

  The Alleghany Corporation had had to persuade the Missouri legislature to let them buy the Missouri Pacific. A lot of businessmen and politicians in the state wanted the details of this persuasion to remain as invisible as possible. Senator Truman was deluged with telegrams and telephone calls urging him to take it easy. His response was predictable for those who knew the man. He told Max Lowenthal, the general counsel of the committee: “I don’t want you to ease up on anything. You treat this investigation just as you do all the others.” Lowenthal later said he did not know a half dozen senators who could have withstood that kind of pressure from their home states.

  Dad did not let the so-called financial experts who appeared before his committee to defend the Alleghany Corporation get away with anything, either. George O. May, senior partner of Price Waterhouse and Company, the accounting firm, tried to defend the practice of carrying an uncollectible debt of $3.2 million on the books of the Missouri Pacific as an asset. This debt allowed the Alleghany swindlers to pretend the railroad was in the black when it was on the brink of financial collapse. May haughtily declared the practice was “misleading in effect but not misleading in intent.” Dad angrily told him it was misleading in both respects, and before the hearing ended, May, chastened by a stinging rebuke from the Interstate Commerce Commission, humbly agreed.

  What made Senator Truman’s performance remarkable was the mood of the country. Throughout 1937, business and labor were locked in alarming combat. The sit-down strike, in which workers seized plants, had enraged conservative executives and their supporters. Open warfare had erupted between police and strikers outside Republic Steel’s South Chicago plant, leaving ten dead and ninety wounded. Conservatives - and I will remind you again that most Missouri Democrats proudly wore that label - did not want to hear more bad news about the ethical lapses of American business. Even President Roosevelt was careful not to side with the workers. “A plague on both your houses,” was his response to the South Chicago massacre.

  Harry Truman went before the U.S. Senate and his colleagues and the American people with what he had found from his railroad investigation. He drew on his knowledge of Jackson County history for his text. He compared Jesse James and his gang, who used guns and horses to hold up trains, with the tactics of the holding companies, who used the slick accounting tactics condoned by Price Waterhouse. “Jesse James held up the Missouri Pacific in 1876 and took the paltry sum of $17,000 from the express car,” Dad said. Holding companies, such as the Allegha
ny Corporation, had looted railroads of sums in the neighborhood of $70 million. “Senators can see what pikers Mr. James and his crowd were alongside of some real artists.”

  Along with the railroad uproar, Dad was simultaneously conducting a less publicized but no less burdensome investigation into the aviation industry. This business was in chaos, not from financial corruption but from unrestrained, unregulated competition. He decided that this competition had to be regulated for a few decades in order to protect the industry until it was mature enough to operate as part of an integrated national transportation system. Only a few experts appreciated the care with which he and his staff drafted the bill that created a Civil Aeronautics Authority Board and gave the airline industry the stability it needed at that time.

  Mother worried about the strain of these multiple hearings and major speeches, but for the moment, she was absorbed by a major event closer to home. Mrs. Roosevelt was coming to Kansas City to give a lecture at the invitation of the St. Teresa’s College Guild. The head of the guild was the wife of an old Truman supporter, and Dad agreed to come home and introduce the First Lady. Governor Lloyd Stark hustled up from Jefferson City to horn in on the welcoming committee.

  We chatted briefly with Mrs. Roosevelt before the lecture. By this time, Bess had been to several White House receptions and felt more relaxed with the First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt did most of the talking, as I recall it - mostly about the hectic schedule her lecture bureau had worked out for her. An obedient thirteen-year-old for once, I said nothing.

  Mother and I sat on the platform while Mrs. Roosevelt delivered her talk, which urged everyone to participate more vigorously in the life of their community. Bess gave me such a ferocious warning not to move, mug, or even blink while I was on display that I was virtually paralyzed. I concentrated so hard on not moving, I barely heard a word. After the speech, when I tried to stand up, I discovered my arms and legs had gone to sleep, and I had to be all but dragged off the platform.

  The Trumans were obviously hoping that by being extra nice to Mrs. Roosevelt, they might gain some leverage with the president. Neither they nor anyone else outside the White House circle in those days realized how estranged the Roosevelts were.

  Politics dominated the first letter Bess wrote to her husband after his return to Washington. “I hope you make a point of finding out exactly where Mr. R. and Mr. Farley stand on K. C. politicians if you can depend on what they say. Because if they think they can get along without us in ‘40 - we’ll show them a thing or two.”

  Getting even angrier, Bess pointed out the inconsistency of Roosevelt’s support of Milligan. “Is the Pres. trying to wreck Sen. Guffey too? It seems to me you are in the same boat, as far as bossed organizations are concerned.” Machine politics were pretty much the rule in both parties in Pennsylvania.

  Bess continued to follow the war between Milligan and Stark and the Pendergast machine, unqualifiedly rooting for the home folks. In November, she applauded when the Missouri state Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the governor to invalidate a ruling by a previous state insurance commissioner, who had been a Pendergast man. “I’m surprised the Star did not say they [the judges] were picked men,” she wrote to Dad, using an epithet designed by the paper to discredit any Pendergast loyalist.

  Bess’ partisanship proves one thing about the Trumans. Although she had warned her husband about Boss Tom’s growing instability, neither she nor Dad had any idea of the moral rot that was developing in Tom Pendergast’s troubled soul during these years. In particular, they did not realize that the brawl over the state insurance commissioner was connected to a huge bribe that the insurance companies had paid Boss Tom to get favorable rulings from his appointee.

  In Washington, D.C., Dad went back to grilling the railroad looters, garnering headlines by the dozen. Even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch praised him, which made him wonder, he wryly remarked to Bess, if “I’m doing right.” Meanwhile, he kept in close touch with the situation in Missouri. His old army buddy, Jim Pendergast, Tom’s nephew, told him he was sure Stark was planning to run against Bennett Clark. Dad went to Jim Farley and urged him not to support the governor, and Farley assured him that the president would stay out of the developing brawl. But in his next letter, the senator reported that he had heard that Roosevelt and Farley were “on the outs” because Farley had opposed the Court bill. So the suspense about the president’s position continued.

  Harry Truman was helping Bennett Clark in this imbroglio, and Bennett Clark was grateful. He began having second thoughts about Governor Stark. Senator Truman hastened this process by coming to Clark’s aid in an unrelated incident in the Senate. Tom Connally of Texas, one of the titans of the upper house, was filibustering against some Roosevelt bill when Clark tried to interrupt him. Connally turned on him like a lion about to swallow an antelope whole. Dad happened to be presiding at that moment - a chore Vice President Garner had begun handing him regularly. Senator Truman ruled Connally out of order, rescuing Clark from humiliation.

  Dad urged Bess to read the account in the Congressional Record, which he still was sending her. She loved it. “It certainly is something to squelch one of those old timers who have been at that game for twenty years or so. Connally probably thought more of you for doing it,” she wrote. (She was right.) Bess understood exactly what her husband was doing. Harry Truman was working to end the “Clark-Stark hookup,” as he called it. He was thereby strengthening his own position with the St. Louis wing of the Democratic Party in Missouri. He was soon telling Bess that he had pretty much succeeded. She was delighted and wrote: “I’m dying to know [the details of] how you broke up the Clark-Stark combination.”

  In an answering letter, Dad gave her some juicy details. He had dinner with Bennett Clark, who told him that the last time he and Maurice Milligan met, they had almost come to blows over Clark’s refusal to condemn Pendergast. Clark said he had heard that the president was thinking of running Milligan against him, with Stark’s backing. “The governor and the president would like to be heroes and boss busters,” Dad observed. So far as he could see, “my position gets better all the time.”

  Fueled by this sort of inside information, Bess’ interest in national politics intensified during 1937. Apropos of the rift between Roosevelt and Postmaster Farley, the strategist behind the election victories in 1932 and 1936, she remarked: “The Pres. isn’t very smart if he thinks he can get along without James A. Farley. But he is about that ‘cocky.’”

  Senator Truman used this interest, and other means to lure his Proserpina to Washington. While Bess wrote him a guilty letter, worrying about the lonely Thanksgiving he would have, the senator used the four tickets he got by virtue of his seat on the Military Appropriations Committee to organize an expedition to the Army-Navy game. He took along two of his aides and one of his favorite Missouri characters, Fred Canfil, a bulky bearlike man with a foghorn voice. Fred was somewhat short on brains but had a superabundance of loyalty to Harry S. Truman. Dad sent Bess the following report on the outing.

  Well I had a grand wet day yesterday. . . . Canfil was on the train and as pleased as a ten year old boy to go to the game. He had a blanket, hunting jacket, muffler, rain coat, overcoat and overshoes. It was a spring day with April showers and fog so the raincoat was all that was needed. Took him around and introduced him to the V.P. [Vice President Garner] who made his usual hit. Sens. Guffey & daughter, Burke & wife, Schwellanbach and wife and Chavez and wife were on our car along with a lot of Senate employees. . . .

  The game was a soggy affair. Too wet for the parade and show. The Army outplayed the Navy though. The Navy’s mascot is a goat & the Army’s a mule. They have two mules, one a regular mule & the other a South American donkey given them by the Peruvian Ambassador, whose son is at the Point. They dressed the donkey up like a goat and unloaded him from an ambulance in front of the Navy stands, mounted an army man in an admiral’s uniform on him and had a fellow on the mule in army uniform chase him around
the area and shoot him. The “Admiral” and the donkey both fell in front of the Naval contingent much to the pleasure of the Army boys.

  It probably wouldn’t have been so funny if they hadn’t won afterwards. Canfil yelled himself hoarse. When the Army was about to score and failed he shouted: “More brutality Army - what are you being trained for any way.” He entertained the spectators for acres around. . . .

  I hope you can see one of those games someday but I hope it won’t be in the rain. I want to see one when they have all the trimmings. We’ll do it someday.

  This letter had a devastating effect on Bess. She sighed that she would “give my store teeth” to see an Army-Navy game. A few days later, she issued Senator Truman marching orders on their quarters for the coming winter in Washington. She did not want to rent a house. “I don’t want to spend the whole winter working, and I don’t want to have to have a maid and I don’t want an extra bedroom.”

  She underlined that last sentence, which made me wonder if this was the most important point. Back in Independence, Fred Wallace and his wife were thinking of moving out of 219 North Delaware Street. I suspect Bess was trying to avert the possibility of her mother joining us in Washington, D.C. At this point in the long struggle between mother and husband, Harry Truman was in the ascendancy.

  A few days later, Senator Truman rented an apartment. Bess began getting ready to end their two-and-a-half-month separation. She commissioned Harry to furnish the apartment, an assignment that made him nervous. He feared Bess would not approve of his extravagant tastes. “I’d like to have rugs and carpets from Bokhara and Samarkand, pictures by Frans Hals, Holbein and Whistler and maybe a Chandler pastel and a Howard Chandler Christy or two with Hepplewhite dining room, mahogany beds (big enough for two) etc.”