New Deal

The New Deal was the central political and legislative context through which Harry S. Truman rose from Missouri politics to national prominence. It brought federal employment and reform into state and local life, gave Truman a record of support for major social and economic measures, and tested his loyalties when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies provoked resistance. For Truman, it was at once a program he believed could help ordinary people and a political alignment with the Democratic president whose leadership shaped his path.

The New Deal reaches Missouri

At the start of 1933, with Governor Guy B. Park in office, Thomas J. Pendergast’s organization was more powerful than ever. The state Capitol was being called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal seemed to open still greater prospects. At the office on Main Street, a portrait of Roosevelt took pride of place above Pendergast’s rolltop desk: a small but telling emblem of how closely Missouri’s political organization associated itself with the new national administration.

The federal program was also a source of employment on a scale that mattered to state politics. Within a few months, The Missouri Democrat, a newspaper controlled by the organization, reported that nearly 100,000 men and almost 10,000 women in Missouri had found work under the new federal program. The account presents the New Deal not only as an agenda issued from Washington, but as a stream of jobs that reached into the state and strengthened the political position of those able to claim a connection to it.

During campaigning in Saline County and Boonville, Truman tried to redirect attention toward the Depression and the New Deal. A loudspeaker truck carried a placard reading A New Deal for Missouri. In his speeches, he blamed the domination of government by capitalists in earlier Republican administrations and praised Roosevelt’s effort to challenge the rule of the rich and give ordinary Americans a fair chance. At Springfield, he argued that 4 percent of the population held 90 percent of the country’s wealth. His appeal joined a national reform program to a direct claim about who government should serve: the everyday person facing hard times.

Truman’s record as a New Dealer

Truman entered national public life as Congress took up the Second Hundred Days, a period in which the New Deal’s purpose extended from recovery toward reform. He repeatedly voted with the Democratic majority on consequential measures, including the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the creation of the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Act, and rural electrification. He did not speak in support of these bills or participate in their debates; his contribution was expressed through his votes. The importance of electrification was especially visible in Missouri, where nine out of ten farms still lacked electricity in 1935.

His work was not limited to casting votes. As a member of the Interstate Commerce Committee, he worked intensively on the Public Utility Holding Company Act, intended to challenge public-power cartels. The task brought him into contact with powerful witnesses and organized lobbying; opponents of the measure established a headquarters in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel. This was Truman’s first close encounter with high-pressure lobbying in Washington, and it placed him inside the institutional struggle over how far federal reform should reach into concentrated economic power.

Truman later described himself as a New Dealer from the beginning, and the record of his Senate votes supported that claim. Robert Wagner, a leading author of New Deal legislation, regarded him as an especially useful senator. Yet Truman did not resemble the young, technically trained liberals often associated with reform politics, and he generally found Washington liberals uncongenial unless they shared the rougher, more Western manner he appreciated in Burton K. Wheeler. His support for the program did not depend on belonging to a liberal social circle. He believed the measures could help people in need, and understood their suffering in terms that connected with his own sense of being one of them. Voting with Roosevelt also meant following the party’s leader, a political advantage as well as an expression of conviction.

Reform, loyalty, and political strain

The New Deal’s legislative momentum did not remove disagreement within the Democratic Party. Roosevelt’s proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court met fierce opposition in the Senate, including from Democrats who had previously supported him. Senators faced pressure from the White House and anger among constituents at home. Truman, like Alben Barkley, decided to support the president, reasoning that the size of the Court had been changed before. He took no part in the debate, however, and preferred to remain focused on the railroad investigations that had become a major part of his Senate work.

That separation proved difficult. Wheeler, occupied by the Court fight, left much of the railroad work to Truman and made him vice-chairman of the subcommittee. In June, amid the controversy, Truman delivered his longest and most daring Senate speech to that point: a preliminary report on the railroad investigations. Meanwhile, his declared position on the Court proposal brought angry mail and accusations that he was Roosevelt’s stooge. The dispute revived his headaches. The episode exposed a recurring tension in his New Deal allegiance: he could support the president’s purpose while disliking the political bind created when that support collided with opinion at home.

By the time of Truman’s later Senate campaign, the political climate had darkened. Public confidence in the New Deal was at a low ebb, Roosevelt was making little headway with Congress, and the Depression persisted; eight million people remained unemployed. Truman nevertheless campaigned on his New Deal record, even as Roosevelt pointedly ignored him. He told Bess Wallace that he distrusted the president’s reliability but believed the principles Roosevelt stood for were best for the country. Fellow senators Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton, and Lewis Schwellenbach came to Missouri to support him, an unusual intervention that reflected their regard for him. When Truman faced financial trouble, James F. Byrnes persuaded Bernard Baruch to contribute $4,000 to the campaign, and Barkley later appeared for speeches in St. Louis and Kansas City.

Policies and political legacy

Truman’s legislative record continued beyond the landmark measures of the Second Hundred Days. Four years of railroad investigations produced the Truman-Wheeler Bill, designed to protect the railroads as a central part of the nation’s transportation system. He supported the Farm Tenancy Act of 1937 and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which provided price supports for farmers. After the latter passed, he argued in the Senate that agriculture could not truly advance while farmers failed to receive a fair share of national income. In 1939, he voted to expand low-cost housing, increase public-works funding, and raise federal contributions to old-age pensions. He was particularly proud of his role in the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, which established uniform rules for a rapidly growing aviation industry.

The book places this record within a longer passage through American political life. Truman’s journey—from farm and small town, through war and financial failure, into machine politics and the New Deal years in Washington, and then into the demands of another world war—is presented as part of the country’s wider history. The New Deal is a pivotal stretch in that account: it made national reform a practical question in Missouri, furnished Truman with a durable policy record, and brought his convictions into conflict with both party pressures and public opposition.

When Truman became president after Roosevelt’s death, he told the Cabinet that he intended to carry on Roosevelt’s program and hoped its members would remain in office. He welcomed their advice while making clear that final decisions would be his. The promise captured both continuity and change: the New Deal remained his stated point of departure, but he claimed responsibility for governing in his own right. Soon, cabinet changes began; the eventual replacement of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius by James F. Byrnes brought the number of replacements to five, while only three of the old New Dealers remained. The program thus persisted as a political inheritance even as the people who had administered it began to give way.