ASHING TIME —At a camp in England bof—o darting for France, these WACs,
SgL LUllaa L. Perrins of Perry. N. Y„ Pfe. Mary A. Kennedy of Brooklyn and T/5 Katherine M. De
Nering of Marlon, N. Y„ wash (heir mesa kite in scalding water.
Truman of
Missouri Is
Avid Reader
(By the Associated Press)
A man who knew the value of
a dollar, Harry S. Truman made
himself a job fighting extrava
gance and waste in the United
States’ frenzied preparations for
a global war.
And the job he did made a na
tional figure of the quiet, affable
Senator from Missouri. Almost
overnight he found himself trans
ported from obscurity into the
ranks of household names.
Truman was beginning his sec-'
ond term in the Senate when the
i
United States launched the big
gest, costliest armament program'
in history at the start of the ’40’s.!
~ ' h.1—1 1 irrJ~vn f:
He attracted scant attention when
he suggested that the Senate au
thorize a committee to keep an
eye on the mushrooming war in
dustries and subsequently found
• himself the committee’s chairman.
But 10 months later—almost on
! the eye of the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor—he jolted the na
! tion with a documented report to
the Senate charging waste and
i worse in millions of dollars of war
contracts.
|
It blasted the vaunted dollar
a-year men who had gone to
Washington to manage the war
program, charged that slip-shod
contracts were pouring the na
tion’s wealth into the building of
an inferior air fleet, and depicted
wholesale wasting of money and
manpower in poorly organized,
frequently, conflicting national de
fense preparations.
Watchdog of Spoadiag
Immediately the Truman com
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Harry Gabrielson, Prop
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I
mittee became the accepted watch
dog of war spending. Its investi
gators stuck prying fingers into
: war plants, ship yards, army ana1
navy contracts. The committee’s
activities led indirectly to the1
concentrating of war production
au’hority in one man, war pro
duction chief Donald M. Nelson, j
! Behind it—quietly delighted
j with the commotion he had stir-1
red—was a graying, bespectacled j
Missouri democrat who had gone
to the Senate early In the Frank-!
lin D. Roosevelt administration I
j and made good on his pre-election
promise to do “lots of listening
and mighty li“tle talking.”
Never much of a phrase-maker,
Truman was one of the “silent
Senators” of his day. Rarely did.
he take the floor and,, until the
start of his war industries in
vestigation, he made few public
speeches outside his home state.
Once he summed up his dis
closures of extravagant war
spending in these words:
“The chief difficulty in our war,
industrial program is usually the;
I human factor. Suspicion, rival
ries, apathy, greed lie behind
: most of the bottlenecks.”
An Avid Reader
Truman, a Baptist and a Mason,
! was bom on a Missouri farm May
: 8, 1884. His middle initial “S”
; was just a letter—it didn’t stand
' for anything. Four generations of
; his family lived at “Grandview”,
a rolling, bottomland farm on the
outskirts of Kansas City.
His formal education ended
after high schood, a circumstance
he believed made him the avid
reader he became. Studying was
! his lifetime hobby. During his
first term he spent almost as
much time in the Congressional
Library as he did in the Senate.
! He educated himself in law.
He served in World War I as an
artillery captain and participated
in the St Mihiel Meuse-Ar
i gonne engagements. Then he
j turned to Missouri. He married a
I Childhood sweetheart. Pearl
Wallace, and they had one
; daughter.
Truman worked here and there,
J owned a haberdashery on Kansas
City’s blatant Twelfth Street for
a time and dabbled a little in
county political affairs. But he
I
devoted moat of hia attention to
the Truman family farm.
Supervise* Huge Program
That’s what he was doing when
he won his first political office,
a judge of Jackson county court
wflth administrative responsibil
ity over a multi-million dollar
system of highways and drainage
projects in and around Kansas
City.
Although he seldom discussed
it, Truman took quiet pride in his
investigating committee’s work.
“I know something abdut pub
lic spending and costs.’’ he told
an interviewer when the war in
vestigation was at its height, “and
I knew* it before this committee
started operating. When 1 was on
the Jackson county court I was
responsibile for a $25,000,000
highway program, and I watched
that, too.”
His committee objected ta “dol
lar-a-year men” on the ground
that some of them received sala
ries from big business concerns
and actually served as “lobby
ists” for private business inter
ests.
Like's Mother's Tribute Best
A committee report early in
1942 charged that government in
efficiency and private selfishness
had seriously retarded Amricea’s
war production. While the com
mittee expressed confidence that
the United States would be able
to produce sufficient quantities to
«. a. j -V. J. -v. •- -■ « » J, J, .»■ s. .> j. t- j. _i. i
VTYTVTT V 1 V I TTv VTTT W
enable it ultimately to win tb#
war, the report declared:
“The committee, however, wanlt^
the war to be won as soon as pos
sittle and at a minimum expend)
ture of life and property. Care
i lessness and inefficiency have
already cost us a great deal and,
if continued, can cost us much
more, even though in the long
1 run we will win the war because
of the sheer extent of our re
sources.”
i
Truman always said he would
return to “Grandview” when his
i public career ended. He enjoyed
the life of a farmer. Thousands
of congratulatory messages came
into his office during his long ii^
vestigation of war spending, but
he liked best the remark his
mother once made when someone
was dirfcusstng his senate career.
“That boy,” she said, “could
plow the straightlest row of corn
i in the county.”
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A A
I NATIVE OF ALASKA! I!
▼ o
4 '■
% Bom At Deering, Alaska, In 1904 !!
* «*
i —vote for— ::
J M
I Thomas "Tom” :!
MORRIS
4 O
| INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR
!| TERRITORIAL il
; REPRESENTATIVE a
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§ A “VOTE FOR TOM” Will Give Yon the Best il
* Representation Without Distinction of ^
$ Race, Color or Creed! •»
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| GENERAL ELECTION, SEPTEMBER 12, 1944. -
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