Lloyd C. Stark

Lloyd C. Stark was the Missouri governor whose rise as an anti-machine reformer made him Harry S. Truman’s chief rival for a United States Senate seat in 1940. Celebrated as a possible national leader, Stark turned the break with the political organization that had supported his election into a public claim to independence; the contest with Truman tested that claim against the continuing strength of local loyalties and political organization.

Governor and Reform Image

Stark entered the governorship under the shadow of the Kansas City machine, having accepted its support in 1936. He could have kept the peace by accommodating its leader, Tom Pendergast, but instead chose to meet what the book describes as the obligations of his office and confront the suspicion that he remained a Pendergast man. In the favorable account later circulated about him, this break was presented as a difficult but principled choice—and contrasted, without needing to name him, with the path taken by Senator Truman.

The public rewards were considerable. In April 1939, Life devoted six pages to Stark’s rapid ascent, illustrating its account with photographs of the Pendergast scandal. It compared him to Republican racket-buster Thomas E. Dewey and suggested that the machine’s collapse might propel Stark toward the presidency or at least a Senate seat. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch praised his handling of office, and Stark sent its editorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The praise cast him as Missouri’s moral leader and a politician with a national future. Life also placed his break with the machine in a longer tradition of politicians who had turned against the organizations that helped elect them, pointing to Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Stark, the magazine reported, wanted the presidency quite definitely.

The Senate Contest Begins

In September, Stark announced that he would run for Truman’s Senate seat. The decision set his reformer’s reputation against Truman’s standing in Missouri, where the exposure of the Pendergast organization had made any association with it politically dangerous. Stark’s candidacy would soon become the central test of whether his public stature and attack on machine politics could overcome Truman’s support among voters and the organization that remained around the senator.

The Campaign Turns

At first, the numbers made Stark the clear favorite: Maurice Milligan was second, and Truman a distant third. A cartoon in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pictured Stark and Milligan’s trucks colliding while Truman’s tiny vehicle sat below them, with the caption, “No place for a Kiddie car.” Milligan’s candidacy soon faded, leaving a direct contest between Stark and Truman. Yet Truman had anticipated that Stark would attack him personally. Over dinner at the Willard Hotel, before the campaign began, Truman told friends that if he did not mention Stark, the governor would make enough errors to give him an opening.

Stark supplied that opening by denouncing Truman as a Pendergast lackey, a rubber-stamp senator, and a fraud. At Joplin, he accused Truman of having been elected through ghost votes and of serving the corrupt boss who had elevated him. Truman’s campaign staff knew of a letter Stark had once sent thanking Truman for an introduction to Tom Pendergast, and urged Truman to release it as a potentially decisive rebuttal. Truman declined. Rather than use the letter to answer Stark, he chose to let his opponent’s attacks and conduct speak for themselves. Attention turned to small details, including the report that Stark required his chauffeur to salute him, while Stark’s decision to seek the vice-presidential nomination as well as the Senate seat added to the impression that his ambitions had outrun the contest.

A Narrow Victory and Its Aftermath

The result overturned the campaign’s early arithmetic. Truman won the Democratic primary by fewer than 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast, and his margin over Stark in St. Louis was 8,411. Truman carried the Black vote and did better among farmers than he had in 1934; in Jackson County, where the scandals seemed to make any Pendergast association fatal, he still won by 20,000 votes. The county margin was only a fifth of his 1934 total there, but it showed that his local standing and the support of Jim Pendergast and the remnants of the organization could outweigh Stark’s reform image and attacks. Stark privately blamed his defeat on the machine vote, Bennett Clark’s support, federal appointees and WPA workers, and a rural vote weakened, he said, by severe drought. The book presents the outcome as an extraordinary victory precisely because Truman prevailed where the political damage appeared greatest.

The night of the count had seemed to point the other way. With Stark leading by 11,000 votes at eleven o’clock, Truman was reported to have gone to bed calmly predicting victory, while his daughter Margaret later remembered her parents in tears. When a campaign worker called Bess in the middle of the night to offer congratulations, she initially mistook the call for a cruel joke and hung up. The caller tried again with the news that Truman was carrying St. Louis. The reversal made the city’s returns decisive: its 8,411-vote margin for Truman matched the final scale of his advantage over Stark and helped secure the nomination.

Stark did not publicly comment on losing the primary. Truman, meanwhile, supported Maurice Milligan’s return to the district attorney’s office after Milligan had resigned to run. But when Stark’s gubernatorial term ended and Truman learned that Franklin D. Roosevelt was considering him for a place on the Labor Mediation Board, Truman intervened to ensure Stark did not receive the appointment. Stark, once promoted as a politician with a national future and a possible route to the presidency, withdrew from politics in disgust and never again held public office. His ascent as an anti-machine reformer and his defeat by Truman thus formed a sharp reversal: the reputation that had seemed to make Stark the natural beneficiary of Pendergast’s collapse could not displace Truman’s remaining political base, while the contest’s aftermath closed Stark’s path back to office.

A Reputation Built in Public

The portrait of Stark’s rise rests not only on newspaper praise but on the way favorable coverage turned his break with the political organization that had helped elect him into a test of character. A 1935 letter to Truman described a visit as a fine one, a small trace of cordiality before their rivalry hardened. By 1939, however, the public story had become much larger: Stark was cast as the reforming governor whose choices might carry him from Missouri to national office. That acclaim made his Senate defeat more than a lost primary. It marked the point where a celebrated reform reputation met the stubborn electoral force of Truman’s local support—and failed to replace it.