Alben Barkley

A Life in Politics

James K. Libbey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813167138
• eBook ISBN: 9780813167145
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Born to poor tenant farmers in a log cabin in Graves County, Kentucky, Alben Barkley (1877–1956) rose to achieve a national political stature equaled by few of his contemporaries. His memorable public career ranged from the Progressive era to the early years of the Cold War, and he witnessed or influenced many of the key events of the twentieth century. Eventually elected vice president of the United States on the ticket with Harry S. Truman in 1949, Barkley possessed a candid demeanor and social skills that helped him become one of the most popular politicians of his day.

In Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics, James K. Libbey offers the first full-length biography of this larger-than-life personality, following Barkley in his transition from local politician to congressman, then senator, senate majority leader, vice president, and senator once again. A loyal Democrat, Barkley was instrumental in guiding Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs through Congress. He later took on a key role in managing domestic policy as the president became more and more immersed in World War II.

Libbey also reveals Barkley's human side, from his extremely humble beginnings to his dramatic and chilling final speech at Washington and Lee University in 1956, when he said, "I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty," delivering the legendary quote moments before succumbing to a massive heart attack. A significant contribution to American history, this definitive biography offers a long overdue look at the "Iron Man" of politics.

1

Child of the Jackson Purchase

Throughout his chosen pursuit of politics, Alben W. Barkley would often reflect on the fact that he had been born in a log house. Sometimes half-jokingly, he would ponder this rustic birthright that had been a stepping stone into the White House for several of America’s illustrious presidents. He would later, of course, come to know intimately the nation’s first home, but always as a visitor, never as its occupant. His origins in humble surroundings and his aspirations for the highest office in the land, however, provide a convenient and even crucial introduction to that life force that drove him to experience one of the most extraordinary and extended careers ever witnessed in American politics. Three-quarters of a century after his birth in a Graves County log cabin near Wheel, Kentucky, Barkley remarked wryly that this single symbolic circumstance made it “inevitable that [he] should one day enter politics.”¹

Despite this confident statement, appearing more flippant in isolation than in context, there was no earthly reason for anyone to predict that the nearly primitive environment into which Barkley was born on November 24, 1877, would nurture anything more remarkable than the miracle of new life shared by a hundred other infants in Graves County that year. Far from being unique, numerous log cabins and simple homes dotted the undulating landscape of western Kentucky. What would be unusual would be that this son of a tenant farmer would overcome the impediments of poverty to achieve a national political stature equaled by few of his contemporaries.²

Poverty, not plenty, was the norm for many nineteenth-century inhabitants eking out a marginal existence in that portion of Kentucky sometimes referred to as the Jackson Purchase. In 1818, General Andrew Jackson had bought the land between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers from the Chickasaw Indians in a treaty signed under a sprawling oak on the banks of the Tombigbee River in Mississippi. For the princely sum of $20,000 per annum for fifteen years, the Chickasaw king Chinnuby and his nine chiefs surrendered all title to the land that would become not only eight Kentucky counties, including Graves, but also western Tennessee. The homogeneity of climate, soils, topographic characteristics such as good bottomland, and, later, inhabitants in the purchase area made that section a singular part of Kentucky and bolstered one historian’s thesis that the commonwealth is indeed a land of contrast.³

What made the Jackson Purchase so peculiar were its ties to the state of Tennessee and the lower reaches of the Mississippi River. While the rest of Kentucky developed a schizoid relationship with North and South, western Kentucky, for good or ill, suffered no such crisis of identity. During the Civil War this western section acquired the reputation of being Kentucky’s South Carolina, and one of its river towns, Paducah, became known as Kentucky’s Charleston. In fact, Mayfield, the seat of government for Graves County, was the scene of a convention that strongly recommended the purchase’s secession. Left to the wiles of its people and to different circumstances, that section of Kentucky and Tennessee might have formed a separate state. This geographic-cultural link in the history of the purchase area had a direct, twofold effect on the life of Alben Barkley.⁴

First, the Democratic Party, which gave succor to the South’s peculiar and sometimes abhorrent way of life, dominated western Kentucky. Banished were the old Whigs. The later Republican Party found the area so inhospitable that for decades after the Civil War district Democrats secured majorities for most local, state, and national elections. The press, too, revealed this party allegiance by the inclusion of Democrat in the masthead of several town and county newspapers. Second, the prevalent unity of the section meant that after the initial influx of pioneers most migration occurred within the purchase and to such an extent as to blur the population and make a mockery of the border between the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Thus it was that Alben’s father, John Wilson Barkley, had been born across the line in Henry County, Tennessee, in 1854.⁵

John’s father, Alben Graham Barkley, had been a native of North Carolina before the family migrated farther inland. The elder Barkley eventually moved his family into Tennessee and then, in 1866, to Wheel, Kentucky, and the two-story log house where his grandson and namesake would be born. Wheel was less a town than a community of small farmers not far from the village of Lowes. Like most of their neighbors in that northwest section of Graves County, Alben Graham and his wife, Amanda Louise Barkley, raised a large family on a small farm by growing dark tobacco.⁶

The staple had its advantages; otherwise it would be difficult to explain why so many employed themselves at such an arduous task. In fact, Graves County came close to producing more tobacco in 1880 than any other county in the state. The reason for all this activity lay, in part, with the soils of the area, which were suited to little else but tobacco cultivation. In good years a relatively small plot of tobacco could bring in sufficient cash to permit a farmer to pay part of his mortgage, buy some of the essentials he could not produce himself, and still have a little left over for taxes and the local preacher. However, like all crops—and perhaps even more than most—tobacco is subject to the whims of nature. In addition, the value of the cash crop depended on the vagaries of supply and demand in an international market and on the ever-present middlemen involved in warehousing, transporting, processing, and distributing this ancient, mildly narcotic weed in its final form. Dark tobacco, moreover, the sugary leaf used for chewing instead of smoking, was particularly and quite literally susceptible to the changing tastes and habits of tobacco users in America and Europe.⁷

Indeed, tastes changed, and the weather proved incorrigibly indifferent to the needs of plants and men. Regardless of these events, the Barkley family remained deeply rooted in and firmly fixed to the traditions of farm-work and tobacco cultivation. While the difficult life did not breed surrender to personal uselessness and pessimism, neither did it allow Alben and Amanda to invest their six children with a secure future. As the children reached adulthood and married, they each had to fend for themselves. The luxury exhibited by wealthier families in providing an inheritance of land and tools for the next generation was simply not possible for the Barkleys to duplicate. When John, for example, married Electa Eliza Smith at the age of twenty-two, he worked a tenant farm a scant quarter mile away from his parents’ home.⁸

Electa, though not a beauty, had other attractions that made her an ideal tenant farmer’s wife. Her thin lips and petite and angular features contrasted sharply with her husband’s proclivity to roundness and with his oversized appearance, including the characteristically large Barkley ears, nose, and mouth. The latter he usually hid underneath an ill-kept, bushy beard. When John was forty, his incautious use of a taper to light a fireplace destroyed most of his facial hair. He did manage to salvage a mustache, and, in his maturity and dressed in his finest, he could exude an aura of near distinction. Electa, on the other hand, resembled nothing so much as a coiled spring—tight, strong, and resilient, stubbornly resuming her original form after a hard blow from the vicissitudes of life. She was only seventeen when she married, yet, as did other girls raised in the eddies of civilization, she achieved maturity at an early age. Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, shortly before the Civil War, she lost her father, James Henry Smith, to the Confederate cause; he died a soldier’s death as a captain with Morgan’s Raiders. Her mother continued this pattern of fierce dedication to one’s beliefs by raising Electa in a strict setting, teaching her through experience to be independent. This stamina and strong will, acquired early in life, served Electa well in the years to come when she and John raised eight children under impoverished circumstances.⁹

Even though they often found the skimpy fruits of their labor spotted to the core, the light of John and Electa’s lives emanated from their children and especially from the first, Alben. This is hardly an idle statement based on hindsight. Contemporary and reflective observers alike note that, if John and Electa had any faults at all, they cherished their first child excessively. Later in his life, John would quote the Bible to those who noticed his doting behavior toward his son: “‘Thou (shall) give honor and love to your first born child, for with that child the Lord blesseth thee.’”¹⁰

From Alben’s birth they immersed the child in the sanctity of family designations by christening him not only with the name of John’s father but also, for good measure, with the first name “Willie” to honor uncles on both sides of the family. But Willie Alben was called Alben, or “Ah-ben” as his father would say, particularly after Grandfather Alben passed away in 1880. “I kept the ‘Willie’ business as quiet as possible,” Alben later confided, “and as soon as I was old enough to assert myself, I firmly let it be known that my official name henceforth was Alben William Barkley and no foolishness!” No record exists of the reaction of Alben’s uncles to this change of name.¹¹

What is amply recorded is the nearly primitive environment and subsistence existence surrounding the child’s early years. And that was not all to surround him. Without benefit of modern impediments to nature’s course, the life shared by John and Electa produced like clockwork a succession of siblings for Alben to play with: brothers Clarence, John, Harry, and George as well as sisters Ima, Bernice, and Ada. While children and their labor can be a blessing for a farm owner, the biennial appearance of a new mouth to feed spelled financial disaster for the tenant farmer. Almost frenetically, the Barkleys moved from one rented farm to another, at least five times between 1877 and 1886, in John’s efforts to provide for his family. Whenever he could, he employed his spare time in labor he sold to wealthier neighbors for a dollar a day. Small wonder that he associated himself with others in the same plight to form the Wheelers—western Kentucky Democrats who sought to defend their interests in a movement anticipating the rural revolt known as the Populist crusade. John Barkley’s commitment to agrarian democracy eventually extended to working as precinct captain for a candidate trying to win the clerk’s office in Graves County.¹²

Electa bolstered her husband in his convictions and possessed no fear of speaking out. “She was an outstanding woman,” recalled an acquaintance in 1951. “In her day women rarely took part in public affairs; but she was civic-minded and she’d have her say when things didn’t go right.” Although inhibited by legal restrictions and societal traditions from participating fully in John’s political activities, Electa contributed vitally to family life in other ways. She converted their rented farms into warm, livable homes and transformed raw materials into usable household goods. While John worked their acres or those of their neighbors, she cooked meals, washed dishes, made soap, carded wool, spun yarn, knitted socks, dyed material, sewed clothes, and ironed the handmade garments she had washed over the black cookstove. By making or mending every conceivable domestic item, she preserved scarce money for the family’s use. And all this work was interrupted only by the birth of each child with all the attendant burdens such “blessings” bring.¹³

As Electa hustled and bustled about in her first years of marriage, she had the occasional assistance of John’s mother. Amanda had been midwife at Alben’s birth, a service she gladly rendered in keeping with her reputation as the best midwife for miles around. In the case of Alben, however, she may have been midwife to more than just his birth. Whenever she spent time with him, she repeated to the growing youth the stories of her own childhood. She had shared a common ancestor with Adlai Stevenson and James McKenzie and played with cousins Adlai and Jim as a young girl. While she grew up to marry a farmer, Stevenson and McKenzie entered politics. The former would become Grover Cleveland’s vice president and the scion of the Stevenson political dynasty, and the latter would represent Kentucky in Congress and later serve as the US ambassador to Peru. Between his father’s community activities and his grandmother’s stories, young Alben had his blood infused with political plasma at an early age.¹⁴

While Amanda may have sown the seed of politics in Alben’s blood, the lad’s sinews and muscles, stamina and responsibility came from rugged farm life. Once Alben could walk, Electa enlisted him to help with household chores and, slightly later, to care for his brothers and sisters. The child apparently came close to reaching the ideal of an obedient youth. “He never gave me a word of sass,” Electa fondly told a Louisville Courier-Journal reporter in 1937. Thirteen years later Bernice, the youngest of the Barkley children, informed the author Bela Kornitzer: “I’ve been trying to recall, but I don’t remember that papa ever scolded Alben for anything.” However, in his memoirs, That Reminds Me, Barkley himself subverts this image of perfection, readily admitting his daily reluctance to perform one distasteful boyhood chore—maintaining the fireplace.¹⁵

Although the modern child learns to ride a bicycle or operate and play with a dizzying array of electronic gadgets and breakable toys, Alben gained an intimate knowledge of sturdy farm implements. “As soon as I was old enough to throw an axe over my shoulder or pull an end of a crosscut saw,” he remembered “[my father] took me to the woods with him.” Any winter that ten more acres of trees and brush were not cleared for spring planting John considered a total loss. Nothing went to waste. Brush could be burned, and logs could be hewed into planks for building material, chopped into wood for the fireplace, or split into rails for fences. And the warmer months, too, were filled to the brim with plowing, planting, and raising tobacco—sticky, sweaty work. When John and Alben finished their chores in the tobacco patch, they moved on to fields of corn, wheat, and fruit, the bounty of which the family consumed or sold on a small scale for additional spending money.¹⁶

All this work at an early age helped build a physical constitution that gave Alben enough durability to enjoy a long life in robust health. “He was always a husky fellow,” Milton Jewell, Alben’s childhood playmate, commented decades later, “and strong like his father.” Indeed, Alben inherited from both parents in equal portions the family tendency for longevity and excellent health. John would not find it necessary to see a doctor until he reached the midpoint of his septuagenarian years, and, until shortly before her death at age eighty-nine, Electa puttered about in her own garden. Whatever fortuitous genetic code was responsible for Alben’s endurance, it combined with ample doses of manual labor to produce an additional characteristic that he carried to the day he died: a voracious and insatiable appetite. “We’d have three pieces of meat in the morning at breakfast,” Clarence used to say, “one for mom, one for pop, and one for Big Alben.”¹⁷

Years later, after “Big Alben” set foot on the path of politics, he would never have to insult his hosts by turning down the assortment of foods presented to him at rallies, picnics, and dinners. But those years of travel, food, and entertainments associated with political office were still far off in the future. In the 1880s, the activities and experiences available to Alben and his family proved limited indeed. Only an occasional fair, a shopping trip, or a Sunday church gathering seriously disturbed the humdrum daily pattern of life. And young Alben’s horizons remained quite confined except for accompanying his father on annual marketing trips to Mayfield or Paducah. Considering their neighbors’ similar social conditions, Alben probably did not realize the near destitution of his family until a trip to Mayfield included a stop at one of the town’s stores. “I observed with awe,” Alben reflected later, “how clean the clerks looked—they dressed better on weekdays than we did on Sundays.” In fact, at one point in his early life his ambition was to become a dry goods clerk in Paducah.¹⁸

Despite the poverty of money and experience endured by Alben and his family, their home life glowed with the warmth of harmony and mirth. “They were always a happy family, good natured and poking fun at each other, and always laughing,” claimed a close friend. “Old John was the laughin’est man you ever saw.” Alben could not help but acquire the infectious optimism, openness, and kindheartedness displayed by his father. John extended his sense of humor and generosity literally to all those about him, not just to his family. The Barkleys, for example, never locked their smokehouse door, and, if neighbors wanted to borrow tools, utensils, or food, they always received a welcome greeting. Part of this friendly spirit emanated naturally from the sense of cooperation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Child of the Jackson Purchase
• 2. Clinton and College
• 3. Barkley’s Reconciliation with His Roots
• 4. From Courthouse to Congress
• 5. Congressman Barkley and the New Freedom
• 6. The Reformer in Time of War
• 7. The Congressman in War and Peace
• 8. “Normalcy” and the Tale of Two Elections
• 9. Senator Barkley from Coolidge to Depression
• 10. Senator Barkley from Depression to the Announcement of a New Deal
• 11. The Assistant Majority Leader and the New Deal
• 12. The Majority Leader in Time of Peace
• 13. The Majority Leader from Neutrality to War
• 14. The Senator in a Time of Troubles and Triumphs
• 15. The Iron Man Becomes a Veep
• 16. The Iron Man Keeps His Mettle
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index