Man of the People

...You have 30-day return and one-year warranty...

...You can even adjust it to keep larger pests, such as raccoons, pigeons, or rabbits at bay...

...However, while Arkansas remained part of the cotton economy, and so of the South, Missouri developed as a prairie state with links to the West, and in 1860 its Unionists kept it officially loyal to the federal government...

...The main function of the court in Truman's day was maintaining and updating the transport system of Kansas City and its environs during a revolutionary period when the whole of America, not least the Midwest, was becoming motorized, and when the building of modern roads was paramount...

...He wrote in one agonizing memo to himself: "Am I a fool or an ethical giant...

...A former editor at the New York Times op-ed page and former member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, Lee is also an economist raised in the orthodoxy of Keynesianism at Columbia who has abandoned the faith She is unflinching in her apostasy: "That Keynesian economics didn't work is evident in its legacythe problems that we are trying to solve today...

...Truman's administrative career was thus built up despite and in some respects against the Pendergast machine...

...You could hardly invent a better example than energy prices to dramatize the superiority of free markets to government control...

...Thus the stage was set for Truman's selection as FDR's running-mate in 1944 and his accession to the White House less than three months after Roosevelt began his fourth term...

...Lee's mission is to dissect America's major blunders in fiscal policy since the Kennedy administrationfrom deliberate and premeditated deficit spending to inflationary monetary policy to high marginal tax rates to presumptuous federal regulation...

...In the vast majority of cases, she believes, the best thing the government can do is get the hell out of the way...

...He now set about building up his own machine and conducted the first of his great barnstorming campaigns...

...P. himself probably would pay all the ill-gotten loot they took for my position and clear conscience...

...Having attended Kansas City Law School, he was elected judge of the Jackson County Court in 1922 and from 1926 was its presiding judge...

...He has now found a first-class biographer, who has condensed into one thorough and fairminded volume everything that needs to be known about the 33rd president...

...Dismantle them...

...But its savings were clearly huge...

...The result, in fact, was a speedy decline in prices that extended throughout the 198o's and-with a brief interruption after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait -continued until this year...

...But it did not prove easy...

...So he had to operate the legitimate aspects of machine-politics for all they were worth...

...The actions immediately revived memories of the 196o's and '70's, when presidents and their aides routinely stuck their...

...As a successful administrator he had become used to making difficult decisions in rapid succession...

...In the end, Truman completed his new highway system on time, within budget, and to the highest quality standards...

...Farm supports and other forms of economic welfare...

...Louis, kept comparatively honest thanks to a then-outstanding newspaper, the St...

...Both were originally slave states, and Missouri's admission was part of a famous act of Congress known as the Missouri Compromise, which took in slave-holding Missouri and free Maine - making twelve states on each side of the issue -but at the same time forbade slavery north of latitude 36° 30...

...Truman's state, Missouri, like Clinton's Arkansas, was part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and was admitted to the Union as the twenty-fourth state (1821), immediately preceding Arkansas, the...

...AI Capone himself recognized Lazia as king in Kansas City...

...Bill Clinton might thereby learn some important lessons while there is still time to put them to use...

...Spencer Salisbury "used me for his own ends, robbed me...

...Rodelsonix IX is a powerful industrial-type unit that protects up to 10,000 sq...

...Truman emerges from Hamby's book as a powerful and resilient personality, with a bedrock of sturdy honesty based on clear distinctions between right and wrong, who successfully overcame all the limitations of a notoriously corrupt state to prepare himself splendidly for the greatest office on earth...

...as for Willie Ross, who had recently died, "I suspect his sales of rotten paving have bankrupted the government of hell by now...

...Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way...

...It was a moral as well as an administrative 44 Truman's nearly thirty years with the U.S...

...It's that powerful and that effective...

...The Truman image has him down as a haberdasher, but the truth is he was a jack of all trades and master of none...

...Louis Post-Dispatch crowed: "He is a dead cock in the pit...

...thus it reinforced the pioneer optimism of his forebears...

...Pests just disappear...

...Mike Ross was "just a plain thief...

...twenty-fifth state, admitted in 1836...

...In some ways the schooling was primitive but its emphasis on character-building was of a kind American parents find it impossible to obtain for their children today, however much they pay for it...

...It was the First World War that made him...

...He saw both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia as hideous totalitarian systems, with nothing morally to choose between them...

...There he dis covered his second great gift, for administration...

...The old outlaw Frank James still lived there, the veterans of Quantrill's Raiders, most notorious of Missouri's Confederate guerrillas, held annual reunions in the district, and one of Truman's uncles, Jim "Crow" Chiles, had been killed in a gunfight with Marshal Jim Peacock in Kansas City's Courthouse Square...

...But all this was taken for granted by the American people, who had come to assume that falling fuel prices are constitutionally guaranteed...

...It is hard to think of any book which takes one closer to the heartbeats of middle America in the first half of the twentieth century than this exemplary study...

...In 1943 Truman's work got him on the cover of Time as "a crusader for an effective war effort...

...McElroy, Mr...

...In my opinion," he wrote in his diary, "eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity...

...In the 1920's and 1930's, when Truman made his mark, power was divided between St...

...Any organization he became a member of had the free use of his services, until he had to resign because he simply could not afford the dues...

...Let firms and industries fail if they can't cut the mustard internationally...

...69 The American Spectator • August 1996 subsequently convicted...

...1 / achievement, which took farmers out of their isolation and increased the value of farmland by an average of $5o an acre, while making the rural beauty of the region accessible to city-dwellers...

...Add $4.95 standard shipping/insurance charge (plus sales tax for California delivery...

...Obviously in some ways he was forced to yield simply to get things done...

...But the worst that happened was that the county foreclosed on the family farm, and that in turn underlined his own poverty and suggested to most people that Truman was honest...

...Between 1981 and the end of 1995, the inflation-adjusted price of filling your tank fell by more than half, reaching the lowest level of the postwar era...

...The scandals uncovered there in 1951 were particularly damaging to Truman at a time when, to fight the Korean War, he was requesting one round of tax increases after another...

...The whole of the first half of his book is devoted to showing how Truman emerged from a corrupt local system yet remained honest and his own man...

...No doubt he was tired by then, and hag-ridden by the demands and risks of Chinese intervention in the Far Eastern war...

...Murray, Mr...

...H arty S. Truman-the "S" stood, not for nothing, as his enemies said, but for both Solomon and Slippe-was one of the greatest ofAmerican presidents, and in some respects the most typical...

...railroad system was regulated...

...I'm glad I can still sleep well even if it is a hardship on you and Margie [his daughter Margaret] for me to be so damn poor...

...0 n successive days in April, Bill Clinton used his presidential powers to do two surprising things...

...He probably knew more about the nuts and bolts of defense than Roosevelt himself...

...Hamby describes the work of what became known as the Truman Committee in detail...

...Many Americans apparently missed some of the crucial economic lessons of the last thirty-five years, but Susan Lee was more attentive...

...But, after reading Hamby's book, I am inclined to think that it is wrong to make moral judgments about a politician just because he flourishes in a particular state...

...He was certainly under fewer illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime...

...Rodelsonix IX works on a different principle: It delivers a tremendous blast of ultra-sound-inaudible to you and to your pets-that disrupts the nervous system of those pests...

...The background to Truman's road administration was not just corruption but gangland violence...

...He remained a reserve officer throughout the interwar years, regularly going into camp and on maneuvers, being promoted to full colonel and finally resigning only in 1945, when he became U.S...

...forces in Europe, to introduce the policy of containment, the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, the implementation of the Marshall Plan two months later, the Berlin airlift of 1948-9, the creation of NATO, the armed response to the Communist invasion of Korea in June 1950 and, in due course, the removal of General MacArthur, the most popular commanding general in American history-all these challenges were coolly accepted and promptly dealt with...

...Truman, thus formed, felt the moral high-ground was slipping away from America even in the 1930's, confiding to his diary just before he entered the Senate: "Some day we'll awake, have a reformation of the heart, teach our kids honor and kill a few sex psychologists, put boys in high schools to themselves with men teachers (not cissies), close all the girls' finishing schools, shoot all the efficiency experts and become a nation of God's people once more...

...But his response to the initial rumblings of scandal had been slow, inadequate, and marked by poor public relations...

...Army was part of his Americanism-his desire to participate in every aspect of life in his community...

...The greatest in the history of the world...

...They'll leave your home within a few weeks-never to return...

...The plain fact is that the government cannot fix economic problems," she writes...

...And many of those errors continue to be repeated today...

...Despite poor eyesight, he was commissioned, served in France as a battery commander in the 129th Field Artillery, led his men with conspicuous courage and skill, and was discharged from active service as a major...

...It was built with a speed which would be unimaginable today...

...Jackson County was only semi-tamed...

...This is a Republic...

...In addition to his Army Reserve service, which involved countless dinners and outings, he rose steadily in the Masonic Order, was active in the American Legion and a prominent member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars...

...He is unable to verify Truman's boast that he saved the country $15 billion -a colossal sum in those days...

...That Keynesian economics could never work is obvious when its theoretical basis is examined...

...Higgins and even Mr...

...But it is a sad fact that his vigorous presidency ended on a note of decline and lassitude...

...Truman came from a family of Baptist farmers, who owned or leased substantial acreage but never seemed to make much money...

...He owed his position to a small army of enforcers, which included the notorious Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd...

...66 August r996 •The American Spectator Yet Hamby is doubtless right to say that Truman had "a Norman Rockwell childhood...

...What government can do, to a greater or lesser degree, is to make it difficult for us to solve problems or, at best, it can create a congenial climate for us to fix things...

...We can still offer this top-of-the-line industrial unit for just $69.95...

...When Clinton became the Democratic nominee, I remember thinking: "No man who has five times been elected governor of a state like Arkansas can possibly be honest...

...Army was part of his Americanismhis desire to join, to participate in, every aspect of life in his community...

...Hence, though he may have been elected senator for Missouri in 1934 as its nominee, he was also an independent figure who could justify himself without the help of Tom Pendergast or anyone else...

...Truman's nearly thirty years with the U.S...

...His family moral training was strict, reinforced by the public schools of his home town, Independence...

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...The public was furious at successive reports of tax-fixing by corrupt patronage appointees...

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...Hands Off: Why the Government Is a Menace to Economic Health Susan Lee Simon & Schuster / 252 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Stephen Chapman...

...He joined the Kansas City Club, the Lakewood Country Club, the Triangle Club of young businessmen, and the National Old Trails Association...

...It was a personal triumph which once and for all established Truman as his own man...

...Free employers to pay employees based on the value of their work, not on the political calculations of Congress...

...When he finally reached the Senate in 1935 he was referred to as "Tom Pendergast's office Boy," not least by the Post-Dispatch, which long remained his mortal enemy...

...Thomas B. Bash led Truman to ask: "I wonder what the B stands for-Bull or Baloney...

...They used Kansas City as a sanctu 67 The American Spectator • August r996 ary when things got tough in the law-abiding world to the north and east...

...Fred Wallace was "my drunken brother-in-law...

...Pendergast machine, and since Truman came from Jackson County, the future president had no alternative but to work with the machine and be branded for doing so...

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...Old-fashioned poisons get rid of them-but only temporarily, and they are a hazard to you and to your pets...

...I want this country to continue as a Republic...

...Dirty Hands Across America's Economy 70 August r996 • The American Spectator...

...But the best proof of Truman's honesty is that he remained poor...

...Between the beginning of the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and the end of Jimmy Carter's administration in 1981, when the prices of crude oil and gasoline were controlled by Washington, the retail cost of gasoline in the United States, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled...

...BOOKS I N R E V I E W Mr...

...snouts in the marketplace to overrule wages and prices that offended them...

...Her conversion to laissez-faire could hardly be more complete...

...The next year a Look survey of fifty-two Washington newsmen named Truman as one of the ten most valuable 68 August 1996 . The American Spectator officials in the nation-and the only one in Congress...

...president and commander-in-chief...

...though sometimes maken in haste, were vindicated by history...

...Clinton's meddling served as a reminder of how much distance we have traveled since then-and how little...

...In the interwar years, Kansas City usually held the upper hand, and since it was entirely controlled by the T.J...

...As a former field officer and active reservist he had followed closely the dangers that beset the democratic powers and America's ability to meet them...

...Truman's mother, Martha, "handled a shotgun as well as most men" and was "as tough as a barrel of roofing nails...

...The magazine even turned the Pendergast connection to Truman's advantage since it said he had remained personally uncorrupt in a machine-ridden state but refused to kick an old political friend and ally just because he was down...

...Truman saw it as a triumph of "planning"-the vogue word of the 1930'sand celebrated its completion with a little book, Results o f County Planning...

...All his chief associates were convicted...

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...Harry's schooling," Hamby writes, conspired with his moral and religious upbringing to leave him with the conviction that personal behavior, and by extension that of societies and nations, should be guided by universally understandable Victorian maxims, that distinctions between good and evil were unambiguous, and that there were few gray areas in life...

...It has six variable pitch and "loudness" settings...

...Egregiously venal, it turned out, were the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Tax Division of the Justice Department...

...Hands Off is not, per se, a critique of the Clinton administration, but it can profitably be read as one...

...STEPHEN CHAPMAN is a syndicated colum nist on the staff o f the Chicago Tribune...

...Louis by 8,391, and won 44 counties out of 75, five more than he had six years earlier with the Pendergast machine behind him...

...Rodelsonix IX has been designed and engineered to work in restaurants, factories and food processing plants...

...He was already an experienced and effective election campaigner...

...This, then, was the background to Truman's eight-year presidency and to the series of historic decisions he found himself called to make...

...The worst Hamby can find is that in 1938, to overcome yet another crisis on the family farm, Truman arranged a nine-month loan of $35,000 from the Jackson County School Fund, on a property that was assessed at only $zz,68o...

...Truman wrote to his wife Bess: Looks like everybody got rich in Jackson County but me...

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...By 1950-51, the Democrats had controlled the administration for twenty years and the rot had set in in many branches...

...PAUL JOHNSON is the author, most recently, o f The Quest for God (HarperCollins...

...This book should be widely read, and I would particularly like to see it in the hands of America's current president...

...Apart from Pendergast himself, whom Truman insisted was "a real man" who "kept his word," albeit "he gives it very seldom and usually on a sure thing," all the other machinemen were worthless...

...Many of the most characteristic American attitudes and qualities were encapsulated in this dapper, fierce, and energetic little man...

...steel housing you can even use it outdoors...

...It was a sign of the maturity of the American people that in 1948, following a characteristically rumbustious campaign of exactly the kind that kept his Senate seat in 1940, the voters decided they wanted Truman to continue at the head of their affairs...

...It also] embodied the Victorian assumption that the history of mankind was a story of progress...

...Truman eventually introduced civil service status for tax collectors and took them out of the patronage system altogether...

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...The point is important because it helps to show why Truman, not despite his background but because of it, had the character and skills to save the West when suddenly thrust into supreme office in 1945...

...He is well described by Hamby as "an archetypal example of a peculiarly dark variant of the American dream: the poor immigrant boy made good as gangster, the gangster as businessman and community godfather...

...There is nothing to prepare, nothing to set up-no poison and no mess...

...In fact most observers believed Truman was sure to be convicted too or, if not, wiped out in the 1940 election...

...Minimum wages...

...He ordered oil stocks released from the federal government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an attempt to reverse a sudden rise in retail gasoline prices...

...Truman was under no illusions about his political associates...

...The collapse of the Pendergast machine left him exposed to a multitude of enemies...

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...With his war record and his love of community effort, it was inevitable he would go into local politics, care of the Pendergast machine...

...The St...

...Joe Shannon "hasn't got an honest appointee on the payroll...

...and he told the Department of Agriculture to buy more beef for public school cafeterias, in an effort to bolster sagging meat prices...

...It's a humane, clean, and effective system to get rid of your pests-once and for all...

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...Truman thus laid down the basic American posture which was fundamentally maintained, in good periods and bad, for forty years until, in the fullness of time, Ronald Reagan was able to bring the Cold War to a triumphant conclusion at the end of the 198o's...

...He undoubtedly felt the strain of working with corrupt men on a day-to-day basis while trying to keep them away from his roads program...

...Truman never seriously considered running for a further term, as was his right...

...That observation has been fully validated by events...

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...To get his road program through, Truman had to avoid being engulfed by the outrageous rake-off demands of Pendergast's machine -Pendergast himself was a compulsive gambler, which explains his incessant and growing need for cash - and to defy the strong-arm methods of Lazia...

...Writing to his wife Bess immediately after the United States entered the war, he told her that Stalin was "as untrustworthy as Hitler or Al Capone...

...For the court was not primarily a juridical body but an administrative one, distantly derived from the old Quarter Sessions that ran local government in England until the 188o's...

...Throughout the 1930's he was struggling desperately to pay off the miserable debts of his haberdashery business -and this at a time when he was responsible for spending scores of millions of dollars...

...In his final years as president, the sleaziness of machine politics came back to haunt the old warrior...

...Trade protection...

...His character and skill were put to the test when the Justice Department made Kansas City in general and Pendergast in particular its Number One targets in 1938...

...There is a lure in power...

...He reiterated his brutally realistic view of Russia as a war ally: "As long as the Russians keep the 192 divisions of the Germans busy in Europe that certainly is a war effort that cannot be sneered at ...I am perfectly willing to help Russia as long as they are willing to fight Germany to a stand-still...

...He turned 16 in the year 19oo and for the next twenty years he engaged, sometimes in conjunction with his family, in a variety of farming, business, and mining ventures, always working hard, never making much money, often losing it and sometimes barely avoiding ruin...

...As late as 1941, when he was one of the most important men in the country, he was still worrying about the nomination of a dentist for the Jackson County farm, the selection of a shop-foreman for the county garage, and the appointment of road overseers...

...Truman was thus imbued with a strong determination to get on in life, and to do so honestly...

...In his second term, with the advent of war and the largest spending program in American history, he created and presided over the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program...

...Robert Barr was "a dud, a weakling, no ideals no nothin...

...It is also apposite, for there are certain striking parallels between the backgrounds of Truman and President Bill Clinton...

...The following year Pendergast was fined $350,000-his entire remaining net assets-and was lucky to get only fifteen months in Leavenworth...

...From 1928, the Pendergast machine was enmeshed with the minions of the Kansas City underworld boss John Lazia...

...It was his habit, throughout his life, to keep private notes or diaries in which he let off steam and worked away his frustrations...

...It is probably true to say that no other president, Lincoln alone excepted, had to carry such a heavy burden of command...

...Hamby unravels the history and finances of Truman's multifarious endeavors with admirable patience, but all they prove-to my mind at least-is that he was not born to be a businessman...

...It can get into a man's blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do...

...Get rid and stay rid of those nasty pests once and for all...

...Yet despite the most meticulous inquiries, Hamby does not uncover any examples of Truman himself profiting from all the easy opportunities open to him...

...Clinton's release of federal oil supplies got little criticism from Republicans, who were too busy trying to upstage him with their demand for a reduction in the federal gasoline tax, and it was utterly uncontroversial with the public at large...

...M ice, rats, roaches, bats, fleas, spiders and other pests make life miserable at home or at the plant...

...Leo Koehler's "ethics were acquired in the north-end precinct...

...In the Democratic primary-the key election-he actually carried the "enemy" city of St...

...He loved his gunners and they loved him...

...He C' I remember thinking: 'No man who has five times been elected governor of a state like Arkansas can possibly be honest.' / / enlisted as soon as possible, in a spirit of old-fashioned patriotism...

...Indeed, next to Chicago itself, Kansas City in the 1930's was the nation's crime center, specializing in arson, bombing, kidnapping, murder in the street, and official toleration of gambling, prostitution, the illicit sale of liquor, and extortion...

...I t is one of the many merits of Hamby's book that it shows why Truman was by no means unprepared, by character and experience, to take over control of the greatest power on earth in the concluding stages of a world war and the beginning of a confused and dangerous peace...

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...Thereafter Truman became, increasingly, a national figure...

...The beef-market intervention, meanwhile, went virtually unnoticed...

...All the same, it was the scene of guerrilla fighting through the Civil War, and thereafter remained thoroughly Democratic, violent, lawless in many ways, corrupt and machine-ridden...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, and Jackson County, which included Kansas City...

...he can't be stopped...

...The decision to enforce unconditional surrender on Japan and use atomic weapons, to continue their manufacture and embark upon the Hbomb program, to maintain U.S...

...When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 he told a reporter: "If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances...

...I don't know....Am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done...

...Cas Welch was "a thug and a crook of the worst water...

...His reasons for declining were similar to Calvin Coolidge's...

...You judge it, I can't...

...But the reality was different, as Hamby demonstrates...

...Pointing this out, the Kansas City Star commented that a loan of this size was strictly unlawful, and it later became overdue...

...One of Ronald Reagan's first acts upon taking office was to scrap the controls, defying predictions that consumers would have to bear an even heavier burden...

...During his first term in the Senate he had stuck to transport-in effect carrying through a fundamental reorganization of the way in which the U.S...

...Here, his experience in carrying through a large-scale and efficient road-building effort in the teeth of a corrupt machine was invaluable in ensuring that the United States, while arming with all deliberate speed, avoided waste, fraud, and abuse by both big business and big labor...

...To carry through a major road-building program as the nominee of the Pendergast machine, whose paymasters specialized in building contracts, was a challenge to any man's honesty...

...It showed he could, and given the chance would, lead from the front...

...By presiding over the most important wartime congressional committee he had acquired an enormous knowledge of the military effort, its cost, efficiency, and outreach...