"The Modest and Capable Western Statesman": Harry S. Truman in the United States Senate, 1935-1940

In the 1930s, Harry S. Truman was in many respects a "typical" junior senator propelled into the upper house by the appeal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Coping with such personal difficulties as the expenses of his position and the considerable stresses that the profession of politics placed on him, he won the esteem of his colleagues with his high capacity for hard work and gift for cultivating male friendship. As is often the case when two senators from a state are from the same party, his relations with his fellow Missouri Senator Bennett Champ Clark oscillated between rivalry and cooperation. Indebted to Missouri's Pendergast machine, he walked an uneasy line in which he voted according to his preferences on substantive issues while pursuing the needs of the machine and its associates in matters of patronage and federal favors. Usually a reliable supporter of President Roosevelt despite a lack of recognition from the White House, he is best understood as a politician who moved from an early twentieth-century "insurgent progressivism" to the new urban-centered New Deal liberalism of the 1930s.