A Senate Journal 1943-1945, page 1
“December 2, 1943. Today I was assigned to the Senate staff of the United Press and moved into the Senate Press Gallery; I hope to stay. Nothing could be a better break for a newspaperman and nothing could please me more. It is exactly what I wanted.”
—Allen Drury, from A Senate Journal
Allen Drury is perhaps the greatest political novelist of the 20th century. His masterpiece Advise and Consent won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the best-selling novels of the century. His other works, such as Decision, A Shade of Difference, A God Against the Gods, and That Summer showcase human politics from an intimate scale to a grand panorama.
In his seminal years, a young and idealistic Allen Drury was assigned as a reporter to the U.S. Senate for three years that were some of the most turbulent in our history. He was there as an eyewitness to World War II, FDR’s New Deal, vicious political in-fighting, attempts to pack the Supreme Court, and bitter partisan divides in the face of global war.
Drury’s astute observations, insights, and perspectives bring history and politics to life in this truly remarkable account, which has great relevance to today’s headlines.
“A panorama of 20th century U.S. history.”
—Paul Moreno, from his Foreword
A Senate Journal: 1943–1945
Allen Drury
A Senate Journal: 1943–1945
Copyright © 2021 Kenneth A. Killiany and Kevin D. Killiany
Originally published 1963 by McGraw-Hill Book Company
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Contents
Introduction
Paul Moreno
Foreword
First Impressions
OPA and GOP
Soldier Vote: Passage
Soldier Vote: Conference
“A Calculated and Deliberate Assault”
Soldier Vote: Home Stretch
A Feudin’ Son of Tennessee
The Lost Crusade
A Rising Wind
Butch and Others
Futility by Unanimous Consent
They All Come Up
Preconvention
Convention Recess
V.P. Fever
Back to Work
George Has the Votes
Surplus
“That’s How Your Government Works”
“It Is on The Main Issue”
Some Thoughts on Puffy the Pig
Somebody Must Be Wrong
Power
Six for State
“They’re Sick at Heart, That’s What They Are”
Newcomers
The Key Is Elbert
Something for Henry
The Drive Begins
The Pressure Grows
“We’d Better Count Ten”
“A Great Deal Depends”
If Newspapermen Ever Pray
“I Mean to Be the President”
Probably A Very Unwise Bill
Reciprocal Trade
So Far as I Am Concerned
Sentimental Journey
“Bob Can Have the Brains”
The Great Debate
Afterword
Those in Other Pursuits
Deceased
About the Author
If You Liked …
Other WordFire Press Titles by Allen Drury
Dedication
To the staffs of the Press, Periodical, Radio-TV, and Photographers’ Galleries of the United States Capitol, whose patient and skillful assistance is an indispensable part of Washington reporting
Introduction
Paul Moreno
Allen Drury was a journalist and novelist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Advise and Consent (1959), which became a Hollywood movie. He kept a diary as a UPI Senate correspondent toward the end of World War II and published it in 1963. It is a remarkable historical source.
We have just passed the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, which Americans have chosen to remember as “the good war.” This journal will help revise that view, which is already fading as the “greatest generation” that fought the war is passing away.
I grew up with this view of the war. My father (b. 1926) is about as young as you can be to be a WWII vet. Years ago I used to tell my students that those vets were passing away at the rate of one thousand per day. That number is now a lot lower, and my students will see the day when the last known veteran of the Good War passes on.
Drury’s account should give the impression that World War II was not a good war. No war can really be good, but we can say it was better than most considering our enemies. Nor was it a particularly tragic war, which early revisionists like George F. Kennan called it. It was more of a business-as-usual war. This is Drury’s “first impression”: “I am here … disillusioned like all Americans about their ruling heart, not too certain that it is taking us in any very worthwhile or consistent direction, yet possessed by some inner faith and certainty of its essential and ultimate purposes. We muddle, we blunder, we fall on our faces, and we survive; how, or by what peculiar grace, no man can say exactly.” As most GIs saw the war as a job to get done, and the business of the U.S. Senate carried on more or less as usual despite the war.
These (78th and 79th) Congresses were somewhat more gentlemanly (Hattie Carraway of Arkansas was the only woman—the first ever elected) and polite (racial billingsgate aside), and a lot more face-to-face, than today’s, but no less partisan. In fact, their partisanship was an asset—voters knew what their representatives stood for. The antagonism of Congress and President is one of the most prominent themes. These Congresses spanned Roosevelt’s 3rd and 4th terms (the latter mostly served by Harry S Truman). In FDR’s second term, his New Deal domestic program collapsed in the wake of his notorious proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court, to turn the federal bureaucracy (“downtown,” as they called it then) into a presidential phalanx, and to “purge” the Democratic party of those who resisted these schemes, as well as the sharp “Roosevelt recession” of 1937–38. A “conservative coalition” of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans came to hold the balance of power in Congress. Roosevelt then turned his attention to foreign affairs as he shed the isolationism that was required to get the nomination in 1932 and returned to the original internationalism of his days in the Wilson administration and for which he ran as Vice President in 1920. One of the most impressive takeaways from Drury’s account is that politics did not “stop at the water’s edge” during the war. It persisted as both parties used the war to advance their own agendas.
The journal is a panorama of 20th century U.S. history. There were plenty of old bulls in this Senate—Hiram Johnson and Bennett “Champ” Clark, as well as Secretary of War Henry Stimson from the Theodore Roosevelt administration. These are the equivalents of Joe Biden today, Washington fixtures for decades. The U.S. was on the verge of becoming the world’s dominant power and of becoming a permanent part of international organizations (the journal ends with the ratification of the UN charter). It was the midpoint or zenith in the power of organized labor in America—when the CIO formed the first “political action committee.” The last of the “Dixie Demagogues” (“Cotton Ed” Smith and Theodore “The Man” Bilbo) still roamed the Senate, in the last days of the acceptance of racist expression on the floor. Drury’s thumbnail sketch of the Supreme Court is an acute piece of writing.
In the midst of the journal are the 1944 elections, which were inconclusive and reflected the divided sentiments of the voting public. Drury reported mostly relief that we had elections, and that democracy was surviving the war. The country was caught between a growing reaction to wartime “regimentation” and liberal ambitions to complete the New Deal at home (the “economic bill of rights”) and to globalize it.
Drury sees the Soviet betrayal of the wartime alliance unfolding, but probably few fell for the Atlantic Charter-idealism of FDR, who tried as Wilson had to turn the necessary war into a crusade. The country was cynical after the disillusionment of 1918–19.
Most poignant is Drury’s great esteem for Congress. He calls it “the most powerful guarantor of human liberties free men have devised.” This was when calling the Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body” was not necessarily facetious. It may not have been “the good Congress” any more than it was “the good war,” but it was better than most we’ve seen.
—Paul Moreno
Paul Moreno is the William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in the American Constitution and is the Dean of the Social Science Division at Hillsdale College. He earned his doctorate under Herman Belz at the University of Maryland in 1994. He is the author of From Direct Action to Affirmative Action (1997); Black Americans and Organized Labor (2006); The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal (2013); and The Bureaucrat Kings (2017). He has taught at Hillsdale College for twenty years and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Paris School of Law.
Foreword
On October 1, 1943, I was discharged from the Army because of an old back injury and came East from my home in California to look for a job. On November 29 I found one with United Press in Washington and three days later was assigned to the Senate. I soon realized how little most Americans know about the very human institution which makes their laws and in large measure runs their country.
I began, at once and deliberately, to keep a diary of the Hill; partly to send to my family, partly because I had hopes that it might eventually be of some slight assistance in making my fellow countrymen better acquainted with their Congress and particularly with their Senate. There is a vast area of casual ignorance concerning this lively and appealing body. Its members in their deliberations do a great deal to decide your future and mine, and that of our country and of our world. Who are they? (Today, as twenty years ago, you have heard of a scattering, those who appear consistently on television or make the headlines regularly. The rest you couldn’t name if you had to.) “What are they like? How do they look, how do they act, what is their institutional slant on things? And over and beyond the special emphasis of the days here recorded, the days of the War Senate on its way to becoming the Peace Senate, how does the Senate function from day to day? What is this Congress?”
I attempted to set down what I saw and heard in a time of testing. This is how we fought the war on Capitol Hill: not too nobly in some respects, not too meanly in others; no worse, on the whole, and no better, than everyone else who had some part to play in victory.
Here is the soldier-vote fight, the subsidy battle, OPA and FEPC, Barkley’s resignation, the State Department debate, the Wallace nomination, the change in Presidents from Roosevelt to Truman, the manpower bill and reconversion, the Bretton Woods Agreement and the United Nations Charter.
Here are the people from downtown who came to the Hill to testify: Frank Knox, Donald Nelson, James Forrestal, Henry Stimson, General Brehon Somervell, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Philip Murray, Sidney Hillman, Francis Biddle, Fred Vinson, Chester Bowles. Here are Franklin Roosevelt and the Duke of Windsor, Clement Attlee and Colonel Robert McCormick. Here is Harry Truman—Senator, Vice President, President of the United States.
Here are they all, all honorable men—or, at least, entertaining men. No one can deny them that.
Here also is the flavor of that special and fascinating amalgam that is life on the Hill. Here is the easygoing intimacy between politicians and press that makes of the latter virtually a formal branch of government; here is the pattern of the Press Gallery days, some slow, some hectic, the interviewing, the waiting outside committee rooms, the covering of debates and hearings, the exciting sense of being at the storm center of the government which, for good or ill, probably has the ultimate decisive impact upon these middle years of the twentieth century.
Here it is, caught in a time of tension when bitterness between President and Congress was rising to a point rare in American history; when the last of the eloquent isolationists were doing their best to turn the course of American involvement in the world; and when generations had not yet changed in the Senate, so that we still had delightful characters, one or two of them still in tail-coats and possessed of flowing hair, all filled with a lively awareness of their own egos, all imbued with a massive sense of the dignity and power of being a Senator of the United States. The egos and the dignity remain, but this is a newer day: the suits are Brooks Brothers, the air is junior-executive, the average age is much younger now than then, and heavy sits the weight of time upon these earnest brows. Understandably so, of course: these are serious days, and a Senator now has even more demands upon his time and ability than a Senator then. The rush of history no longer allows much scope for characters. But it is permissible, perhaps, to say—too bad. For they contributed much, in their own cantankerous ways, and it is symptomatic of times grown grimmer and grayer that there is no longer much place for such individuality, even in the one body which above all others in our system gives free rein to individuality.
Many of those you will meet in these pages are no longer with us on the Hill. Bob Taft no longer bestrides the Capitol like Colossus. Arthur Vandenberg has smoked his last cigar and gone to rest. Ken Wherry, seemingly too alive ever to die, sleeps in his native Nebraska. Bob La Follette, dead by his own hand, trudges no more with dogged earnestness down the marbled corridors where his father walked before him. Barkley is gone, and Walter George.
Many are gone—but some are still here. More importantly, the Senate is still here. And here in these pages, unchanged, unchanging, indeed unchangeable, you will find it pickled in its own sometimes acerbic juices.
The editing I have done, with the perspective of two decades, has been slight—a word deleted here, a sentence or paragraph there, mostly because they have seemed too harsh or hurtful now, where once it seemed they must be said. On some things, particularly the soldier-vote bill, the manpower bill and the basic weaknesses of the United Nations Charter, the judgments were harsh and I have let them stand. Twenty years have not changed conclusions which seemed valid to me then, and to me seem valid still.
In a few places I have inserted a present-day comment to illuminate the flow of narrative. And here and there I have added an occasional historical clarification, such as the full name War Production Board for the casual WPB which in wartime was familiar to every informed American.
The record stands as it was written. In the interests of an honest account I have even decided to leave in something of the youthful wide-eyed approach that I find upon rereading characterized my first days on the Hill. Especially have I done so in my first impressions of Senators and Congressmen, even at the risk of arousing some antagonism among the gentlemen themselves. Henry Cabot Lodge, I imagine, will not be pleased to know that he first impressed me as somewhat supercilious, though I soon came to like and respect him. And it seems laughable now that my first impression of Kenneth McKellar was “a trifle slow on the uptake … shrewd but not in the way some people are shrewd.” I swiftly learned that there were few people indeed as shrewd as Old Mack from Tennessee, in his day the most powerful and the most ruthless man in the United States Senate.
