Harry S. Truman–Bennett Clark political relationship

The political relationship between Harry S. Truman and Bennett Clark moved between tactical alliance and deep policy disagreement. Clark’s support helped Truman through a perilous 1940 reelection campaign, especially by bringing a key St. Louis organizer over to Truman’s side. Yet as the prospect of war sharpened their differences, Truman came to see Clark’s isolationism as both mistaken and politically ruinous. Their later cooperation at the 1944 convention showed that the alliance endured, though it could not restore the earlier convergence of interests.

A Calculated Alliance in 1940

In early 1940, Truman’s prospects looked bleak. At a January strategy meeting in St. Louis, fewer than half the invited supporters appeared; Mayor Roger Sermon warned that victory seemed unlikely. Tom Pendergast was in prison and the political organization that had once backed Truman was in disarray. Against that background, Clark’s promise to support Truman mattered. Truman had also recently encountered Franklin D. Roosevelt, who discussed Missouri politics but offered no endorsement, encouragement, or campaign help. Roosevelt instead let Truman know indirectly that he might appoint him to a well-paid position on the Interstate Commerce Commission. Truman rejected the prospect: he wanted to return as a senator or not return at all.

On February 3, Truman formally announced his candidacy for reelection and publicly named Clark as his choice for president, while opposing Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term. The announcement served several purposes. Truman was seeking Clark’s support among voters in eastern Missouri and signaling his displeasure with Roosevelt’s refusal to stand behind him. At the same time, his opposition to a third term was a sincere matter of political principle. He believed that no person should become indispensable to a republic, since that would make the nation’s fate depend on one individual’s life or health. His pledge to support Roosevelt if nominated did not remove the plainly tactical element of endorsing Clark, but neither did the tactic make his constitutional concern insincere.

Clark’s practical value became clearer as the campaign tightened. Governor Lloyd C. Stark attacked Truman as a dependent of the Pendergast organization and a fraudulent senator. Truman’s staff urged him to release a letter in which Stark had thanked Truman for introducing him to Tom Pendergast, but Truman declined, expecting Stark to discredit himself. Clark, meanwhile, turned his criticism on Stark’s political ambition. When Stark went to the national convention in Chicago seeking both the vice-presidential nomination and reelection to the Senate, Clark mocked the breadth of his ambitions to a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His intervention gave Truman a forceful ally in a campaign in which Stark was trying to define Truman as the machine’s candidate.

Clark’s Intervention and Truman’s Victory

Clark’s most consequential work came in the campaign’s final days. From a hotel room in St. Louis, he telephoned people across the state, continuing to press Truman’s case even after he ended up in a hospital. More importantly, Clark helped move Robert E. Hannegan, who had been working for Stark, into Truman’s camp. With only two days remaining before the primary, Hannegan switched sides and worked feverishly for Truman. Truman later regarded this late change as the campaign’s biggest break. The episode made the alliance concrete: Clark’s influence helped bring in an organizer whose last-minute work mattered in the city where the contest was closest.

The result was narrow but decisive. Truman won by fewer than 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast. In St. Louis, his margin over Stark was 8,411 votes, where Hannegan had worked after Clark helped bring him over. Truman also carried the Black vote, improved among farmers compared with 1934, and won Jackson County by 20,000 votes. That county margin was only a fifth of his 1934 margin, but it was significant in a place where association with the Pendergast organization was widely thought to be fatal. The victory rested on several supports, including Truman’s own standing, Jim Pendergast and what remained of the organization, and the late campaign work in St. Louis; Clark’s contribution belongs within that larger coalition rather than as its sole explanation.

The alliance also produced a complicated aftermath. Maurice Milligan congratulated Truman and offered support in the fall election. Truman, for his part, wrote to Roosevelt that fairness required Milligan to regain the district attorney’s job he had given up to run in the primary. Later, when Roosevelt considered Stark for a position on the Labor Mediation Board, Truman ensured he did not receive it. These developments show Truman continuing to act in the political world shaped by the primary, but they do not make Clark’s role the whole story: Clark’s clearest documented contribution was helping assemble the late campaign effort that carried Truman through.

The Foreign-Policy Divide

The partnership faced a more fundamental test as the war in Europe approached. Clark became a favorite of the America First movement, praised Charles A. Lindbergh, opposed aid to Britain, and argued against further American involvement. He maintained that the United States would be better off defending itself if Adolf Hitler conquered Europe than spending its supplies there. Truman judged these positions shortsighted and believed Clark was damaging his own political future. Their divergence was not merely a difference in campaign tactics: they disagreed about whether American security required support for countries resisting Nazi aggression.

Truman’s actions in the Senate made the disagreement plain. He repeatedly voted against amendments intended to restrict Roosevelt’s execution of the Lend-Lease program. The contrast was especially sharp because Clark had helped Truman in 1940, and Truman had publicly chosen him as his presidential preference. Political usefulness had not become policy agreement. Truman could value Clark’s assistance in a state campaign while rejecting his judgment about the country’s obligations abroad.

This split also marked a change in how Truman understood Clark’s political prospects. Truman believed Clark was destroying himself politically and noted his increasing difficulty staying sober. When Clark later appeared at the 1944 Democratic convention to speak for Truman, the speech was short and lacked its customary flair; it failed to move the audience. Within weeks, Clark lost his Missouri Democratic primary, ending a Senate career that Truman, among others, had once thought might lead to the White House. The contrast between Clark’s decisive usefulness in Truman’s 1940 campaign and his diminished presence at the convention captured the uneven course of their relationship.

A Renewed, Limited Partnership

The relationship nevertheless resurfaced at the 1944 convention. Clark appeared on the podium after black coffee, a shower, and food, with Hannegan’s help, to make a brief address supporting Truman. The speech did not produce the convention’s decisive movement. On the second ballot, Ed Flynn delivered 74 New York votes to Truman, and the subsequent shift of Alabama’s votes helped set off a broader stampede. Clark’s appearance was therefore a sign of continued political alignment, not the mechanism that secured the nomination.

Taken together, the two conventions reveal the relationship’s limits as well as its durability. In 1940, Clark’s calls and influence over Hannegan helped Truman withstand Stark’s challenge; Truman’s victory, in turn, vindicated a campaign effort made when many allies had stayed away. By 1944, Clark still lent his name and presence to Truman, but his speech could not command the room, and his own Senate career was nearing its end. The alliance survived as a political association even after the foreign-policy disagreement had become clear. Its significance lies in that distinction: Truman could accept Clark as an important ally in one contest without following him on the larger question of how the United States should respond to the war.