Franklin Roosevelt
TrumanFranklin Roosevelt was the political force behind the New Deal and the dominant figure against whom Harry S. Truman’s public career took shape. In the book’s account, Roosevelt’s influence extended from the political calculations that brought Missouri Democrats behind his 1932 presidential campaign to the legislative program Truman supported in the Senate, the conflict over expanding the Supreme Court, and the fractured Democratic coalition Truman later tried to lead. Roosevelt’s legacy gave Truman both a governing inheritance and a standard against which allies and opponents judged him.
Political Strategy and the New Deal’s Rise
At the 1932 Democratic National Convention, the Missouri delegation’s public support for former senator James Reed concealed a more complicated strategy. Tom Pendergast had already traveled to Albany to confer with Roosevelt, while James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s influential adviser, had been welcomed at a Kansas City organization lunch. Pendergast nevertheless performed support for Reed in Chicago before gradually releasing votes to Roosevelt, allowing the latter’s tally to grow ballot by ballot as Farley wanted. Truman disliked Reed but followed the delegation’s lead; the Missouri group returned satisfied with the outcome. The episode showed Roosevelt’s rise taking shape through negotiation among national campaign managers and local political organizations, rather than through a simple contest of public loyalties.
By early 1933, Roosevelt’s victory and the prospect of the New Deal strengthened Pendergast’s position in Missouri. Governor Guy B. Park was in office, and the state capitol in Jefferson City was being associated with the reach of the Kansas City political organization. In Pendergast’s office at 1908 Main Street, a portrait of Roosevelt occupied the place of honor above the rolltop desk. The image registered a political alignment: the organization was looking toward the new administration in Washington, while Truman’s own prospects within the local organization expanded. Roosevelt’s national ascendancy thus formed part of the setting in which Truman gained political standing, even though the immediate choices were made by Missouri’s party leaders.
New Deal Legislation and Truman in the Senate
Truman entered national public life during the Second Hundred Days, when the New Deal’s emphasis shifted from economic recovery toward reform. He worked intensively on committee business, attended meetings, and seldom spoke in debate, but he repeatedly voted with the Democratic majority for major legislation. His votes supported the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Act, and rural electrification. The last had particular relevance to Missouri: in 1935, nine out of ten farms in the state lacked electricity. In the book’s portrayal, Roosevelt’s legislative program is not just a Washington agenda; it is a set of measures whose effects were expected to reach workplaces, farms, and households.
Roosevelt’s program also drew Truman into the detailed work of Senate oversight. Serving on the Interstate Commerce Committee, Truman worked on what became the Public Utility Holding Company Act, intended to challenge public-power cartels. The issue introduced him to powerful lobbyists and witnesses, including a lobbying operation based in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel. Truman’s approach was to hear people with different backgrounds and then make up his own mind. His support for the New Deal therefore coexisted with an insistence on gathering evidence and exercising independent judgment; party alignment did not mean that he believed every interested party should be denied a hearing.
That independence became more visible during the 1937 fight over Roosevelt’s plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. After the Court had ruled some New Deal programs unconstitutional, Roosevelt proposed increasing its membership from nine to fifteen if justices did not retire at seventy. He acted without first consulting congressional leaders. Opposition crossed party lines within the Democratic Senate, including among politicians who had previously supported Roosevelt. Truman and Alben W. Barkley were caught between pressure from the White House and resistance to the proposal among constituents and senators. The episode strained Roosevelt’s relationship with his own legislative supporters and demonstrated that his electoral strength could not automatically secure congressional agreement.
Independence, Loyalty, and Political Conflict
The court fight also became a personal test of how Roosevelt’s administration treated Truman. When White House figures approached Pendergast rather than Truman, the senator felt that they still regarded him as subordinate to the Missouri organization. He saw this as an insult to his office and told Roosevelt’s press secretary that he was tired of being pushed around and expected the courtesy due a senator. The conflict reveals a tension at the center of Truman’s relationship with Roosevelt: Truman had advanced within a political world shaped by Pendergast and had supported much of Roosevelt’s program, but he wanted his national office to carry authority in its own right.
A separate confrontation arose over the reappointment of federal prosecutor Maurice Milligan. When Roosevelt personally asked Truman not to block the appointment, Truman could have stayed silent. Instead, in February 1938, he delivered a bitter Senate attack on Milligan and on federal judges in Kansas City. The book records that the speech did little for Truman’s reputation and served no practical purpose beyond releasing his anger and possibly satisfying Pendergast. It also shows Roosevelt’s personal intervention failing to settle the matter. Truman’s response was not a straightforward break with Roosevelt’s policies; it was a collision among presidential influence, the senator’s sense of independence, and the local political conflict surrounding Milligan.
Even so, Truman later described Pendergast as a remarkably perceptive political operator, and his record in the Senate continued to include support for major New Deal measures. The relationship between Roosevelt’s leadership and Truman’s conduct is therefore presented as complicated rather than as simple allegiance or opposition. Roosevelt could set the national agenda and exert pressure, but Truman’s choices reflected his own reading of institutional responsibilities, political obligations, and personal standing.
Succession and the Inheritance of Roosevelt’s Record
Roosevelt’s death brought Truman abruptly into the presidency. At Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, Truman stood with Bess Wallace and Margaret at the graveside as Taps sounded. His first major public test was an address to Congress on April 16. He began before Speaker Sam Rayburn had introduced him, an awkward moment that became memorable, but the speech itself was well received: the chamber applauded repeatedly during its fifteen minutes. The transition placed Truman in the office Roosevelt had occupied and made the question of succession immediate. The book emphasizes both the personal solemnity of the graveside scene and the public test of whether the new president could command Congress and the listening public.
The inheritance included more than domestic legislation. In 1947, Truman’s advisers and congressional leaders confronted the crisis over aid to Greece and the wider danger of Soviet expansion. At a meeting with congressional leaders, Secretary of State George Marshall set out the stakes as a choice between action and losing by default. Dean Acheson argued for a more forceful presentation, and Arthur Vandenberg indicated that congressional support would depend on Truman making the case directly. Truman’s later account emphasized Marshall’s warning and his own agreement. The episode situates Truman’s foreign policy in an administration still working through the postwar order, while also showing the president relying on persuasion and congressional support rather than treating formal authority as sufficient by itself.
Roosevelt’s political legacy remained contested during Truman’s 1948 campaign. As the Democratic coalition fractured, liberal New Dealers and other party figures promoted Dwight D. Eisenhower as an alternative, although Eisenhower had said he did not want the nomination. Truman and his loyal supporters regarded the revolt as a betrayal of a record they believed had carried Roosevelt’s program forward. David Lilienthal defended Truman by comparing his positions on relations with the Soviet Union, civil rights, labor, and public power with Roosevelt’s own record. Such defenses made Roosevelt both an admired predecessor and a measure used in arguments over what counted as progressive leadership.
The campaign also turned the postwar record into a defense of the Democratic administration as a whole. Truman argued that the country had reconverted rapidly after the war, avoided a postwar recession, and absorbed returning service members through education and employment rather than the upheaval that had followed the earlier war. In his account, the Employment Act of 1946 and the country’s international leadership were achievements of a Democratic administration working with Congress. The contrast with Roosevelt’s earlier era was implicit: Truman claimed continuity with the New Deal while presenting the peaceful postwar transition as evidence that his own administration had met a distinct historical test. Roosevelt’s presence in the book therefore persists after his death—not only in the institutions and policies he left behind, but in the arguments through which Truman’s presidency sought legitimacy.
