Truman by Roy Jenkins

some fruit. Previously his hard work had been somewhat undirected. He just read whatever document came to hand, rather as, when a boy, he had read almost any book which he picked up in the Independence public library. The second prop was that he began to be accepted as a sort of junior member of the core of the Senate. This came from a combination of straight-dealing, willingness to work, and ‘regular guy’ folksiness. In itself it had little to do with the highest qualities of statesmanship. Few of the most lastingly well-known senators of the past 150 years qualified: not Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, neither La Follette, Wagner, Fulbright, Lehman, nor any Kennedy, with the possible but doubtful exception of Edward. To try to recollect those over a century or more who it did include would be a contradiction in terms.
    In the thirties, the core centred around John Nance Garner (never a member of the Senate as such but its presiding officer as Vice-President after 30 years as a Congressman from Texas), Barkley of Kentucky, Harrison of Mississippi, Wheeler of Montana and Vandenberg of Michigan (a Republican), with Sam Rayburn of Texas, already a Congressman of 24 years’ standing and later to be Speaker, providing a buttress from the House of Representatives. All of these, and as a result, a number of others too, approved of Truman. So, a different and perhaps more astringent test, did most of his freshmen contemporaries of the 1934 election: certainly Minton of Indiana, Schwellenbach of Washington State and Hatch of New Mexico, who were amongst the best of them, did so. By the autumn of 1936 he had developed a base of friendly acquaintances and potential allies. They nearly all came from west of the Alleghenies. They would nearly all have been surprised,two years earlier, to have been told how good they would find Truman to be.
    His committee success was partly luck and partly work. From the beginning he was pleased with his major committee assignments—Appropriations (under Glass of Virginia) and Interstate Commerce (under Wheeler). The latter, with Wheeler’s encouragement, he was able to make into something substantial. Wheeler put him on a sub-committee of three to enquire into civil aviation. The other and senior Democrat hardly attended. Truman conducted the hearings with acumen and energy, and from them there emerged the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1937.
    Wheeler set up another sub-committee to investigate railroad finances. The prosperity of the system was already past its peak, but financial interests were still taking a lot of money out of the companies. Wheeler himself took the chair of this sub-committee and began hearings in December 1936. Truman at first was not even a member. But he sat in at meetings assiduously, out of interest. When a member fell out, he was added. He quickly showed himself the best briefed. Then, after Roosevelt’s defeat on the Supreme Court issue, Wheeler, who had been one of the President’s most determined opponents,decided that he needed an autumn rest in Montana. Truman took over as chairman for some of the most crucial hearings. The first company on which he led the investigation was right in his back yard, the Missouri Pacific. Indeed its tracks had literally run at the bottom of one of his childhood gardens, in South Crysler Street, where he lived from 1890 to 1896. There were fears that he would pull his punches against such an intimate
vis-à-vis.
They were misplaced. Truman resisted a lot of home state pressure in a way that surprised and impressed the staff of the sub-committee. He also played the dominant role throughout 1938 and 1939 in preparing what, after several setbacks, became the Transportation Act of 1940 and is sometimes known as the Wheeler-Truman Act. He therefore ended his first Senate term with a good record of legislative achievement.
    His Senate floor speeches were less distinguished. For the first two years they were almost