Harry S. Truman–Lloyd C. Stark political rivalry

The political rivalry between Harry S. Truman and Lloyd C. Stark came to a head in the 1940 contest for Truman’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Stark entered the race as a governor who had once accepted support from the Pendergast organization and now sought to defeat the senator associated with it. Truman, facing what he considered the hardest campaign of his career, chose not to meet Stark’s personal attacks on their own terms. His eventual victory was close, but it preserved his place in the Senate and left Stark’s political ambitions unfulfilled.

From allies of the same organization to opponents

In September, Stark announced that he would run for Truman’s Senate seat. The contest carried a pointed contrast: Stark had accepted Pendergast support in 1936, but was now positioning himself against the political organization that had helped elect him. That reversal was not unprecedented in American politics, and Stark’s national ambitions were also apparent. He wanted to be president, while Truman’s immediate aim was to retain his Senate office.

Truman publicly projected confidence, saying that if Stark ran against him he would defeat him. Privately, however, he understood the odds were unfavorable. Stark’s governorship and standing gave him an early advantage, and Truman could not count on the most influential Democrat in the country to come to his aid. Franklin D. Roosevelt talked Missouri politics with Truman at the White House and criticized Stark’s character and liberal credentials, but offered neither an endorsement nor meaningful campaign help. Instead, he let Truman know indirectly that he might be appointed to a well-paid position on the Interstate Commerce Commission if he lost. Truman rejected that prospect: he wanted to return as a senator, not accept another office as consolation.

The campaign’s changing balance

At the outset, Stark led, Maurice Milligan was second, and Truman was a distant third. Milligan, the district attorney who had prosecuted Tom Pendergast, had entered the race believing that his role in bringing down the political boss entitled him to the Senate seat. Some later speculated that Truman’s allies had maneuvered Milligan into the contest to divide Stark’s support, but that theory was never substantiated. Whatever the reason for Milligan’s candidacy, his support soon faded, turning the primary into a direct contest between Stark and Truman.

Truman expected that Stark would attack him personally. Before the campaign began, he told friends over dinner at the Willard Hotel that he would avoid mentioning Stark and allow his opponent’s own mistakes to create an opening. Stark soon supplied one by denouncing Truman as a Pendergast dependent, an ineffective senator, and a fraud. In a speech at Joplin, he accused Truman of having been elected through fraudulent votes and charged that the senator’s public career served the corrupt political figure who had put him in office.

Truman possessed a direct answer to Stark’s claim of political independence: a letter in his files in which Stark thanked him for introducing him to Tom Pendergast. Members of Truman’s campaign staff urged him to release it, believing it could settle the contest at once. Truman refused. Rather than expose the letter, he let Stark continue his attacks, trusting that the governor’s conduct would damage his own standing. The decision made restraint an active campaign strategy: Truman withheld a damaging piece of evidence instead of turning the race into a contest of reciprocal personal accusations.

Stark’s own behavior and ambitions also became campaign material. Attention turned to small signs of self-importance, including the requirement that his chauffeur salute him. Then, only weeks before the primary, Stark went to the national convention in Chicago as a candidate not only for the Senate but also for the vice-presidential nomination. Bennett Clark, who had finally decided Truman deserved his support, mocked the breadth of Stark’s political aspirations in comments to a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The episode sharpened the contrast between Stark’s pursuit of several offices and Truman’s insistence that he wanted only to return to the Senate.

Support, votes, and a narrow victory

Truman’s coalition extended beyond the old political organization with which he was identified. At the National Colored Democratic Association convention in Chicago that summer, he told a Black audience that greater educational opportunity for Black Americans would benefit the whole country. He also argued for legal equality as a right belonging to people as human beings and native-born Americans. In the primary, Black voters supported him, and he did better among farmers than he had in 1934.

On election night, Truman was heard to wonder whether he had been beaten, while his friend Edgar Hinde urged him to remember that the night was not over. Margaret Truman later recalled a different sign of her father’s confidence: after listening to the returns with his family, he calmly said he would win and went to bed. At eleven o’clock, Stark was ahead by 11,000 votes. Bess Truman and Margaret were in tears. When a campaign worker called in the middle of the night to congratulate Bess, she initially thought the call was a cruel joke and hung up. The caller tried again with the news that Truman was carrying St. Louis.

Truman won by fewer than 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast. His margin over Stark in St. Louis was 8,411 votes, where Robert E. Hannegan had done last-minute work with Bennett Clark’s help. Truman also carried Jackson County by 20,000 votes. That was only a fifth of his margin there in 1934, but it mattered because the scandals and accusations surrounding the Pendergast organization had led opponents to portray political association with it as fatal. In the end, Truman’s personal standing, Jim Pendergast’s work, and what remained of the organization outweighed the scandals, Stark’s charges, and the sustained opposition of The Kansas City Star.

Aftermath and significance

Milligan congratulated Truman and promised to support him in the fall election. Stark said nothing publicly, but privately blamed his defeat on the machine vote, Clark’s efforts, federal appointees and workers, and a rural vote weakened, in his account, by severe drought. These explanations reflected the competing interpretations of the result: Stark emphasized organized political support and adverse conditions, while Truman’s victory demonstrated that his association with the Pendergast organization had not erased his own appeal among voters.

The contest’s consequences continued after the primary. Because Milligan had resigned as district attorney to run, Truman wrote to Roosevelt that fairness required restoring him to the job. When Stark’s term as governor later expired and Truman learned that Roosevelt was considering Stark for the Labor Mediation Board, Truman acted to prevent the appointment. Stark withdrew from politics in disgust and never again held public office. Truman, by contrast, won the general election against Republican Manvel Davis by 44,000 votes and returned to the Senate.

The rivalry turned on more than the question of whether Truman could survive his association with a fallen political organization. Stark tried to make that association the entire meaning of Truman’s career; Truman declined to expose Stark’s earlier connection to the same organization and instead relied on the contrast between Stark’s attacks and his own measured response. The narrow primary result showed that the Pendergast connection remained politically consequential, but it did not wholly define Truman. His standing among Black voters, farmers, and Jackson County voters, alongside the work of political allies, carried him through a race that he had privately recognized as exceptionally difficult.