The Man Who Started It

You could have knocked a Kentucky colonel over with a mint leaf. Kentuckians well remember Alben Barkley's admission of fealty: "If being loyal to the greatest President is hanging on his coattails, I'm proud to hang on."

Kentuckians know Alben William Barkley, 66, as the poor tobacco farmer's son who rose to represent them in Washington longer (31 years) than any other man. He was born in a log cabin deep in the backwoods of western Kentucky, where "one-sucker" tobacco (black, heavy-leaf) is the crop. To earn his way into Georgia's tiny Emory College, he rode through the hills on a black horse, peddling kitchen utensils from the saddlebag; at the University of Virginia Law School he janitored and waited table. His first law job was in the office of Paducah's Judge W. S. Bishop (Irvin S. Cobb's fictional Judge Priest).

After routine apprenticeship as prose cuting attorney and judge, he got to Congress in 1913. There he worked hard to pass the railroad eight-hour law (Adamson Act), which endeared him to labor. A personal and political dry, he was a paid speaker for the Anti-Saloon League, once traveled all the way to Stockholm for an international prohibition conference. All during Prohibition, he stuck to ice-cream sodas. But he stumped for Al Smith, backed the Democrats' repeal plank in 1932, now takes an occasional drink.

"Glorified Messenger Boy." He graduated to the Senate in 1926, was re-elected in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932. The next year, when Democrats reorganized the Senate, Alben Barkley became assistant to powerful, stocky Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. In 1937, at the peak of the bitter, party-splitting fight over the President's Supreme Court-packing bill, Joe Robinson died. Senate Democrats got ready to elect Mississippi's popular Pat Harrison to the leadership. But Franklin Roosevelt wanted a majority leader of his own choosing. In days of the hottest kind of politicking, when New Dealers were throwing patronage around, the Harrison majority was steadily whittled down.

The President then issued his famed, first "Dear Alben" letter, unmistakably naming his choice. There were 75 Democrats in the Senate then. Caucusing, they threw their ballots into Carter Glass's battered old Panama. The first 74 to be counted were evenly divided; the 75th was for Alben Barkley. When the result was announced, he bit off the stem of his briar pipe.

"The Excellent Barkley." Alben Barkley said: "I will act as a sort of glorified messenger boy to the best of my ability." This he did. By nature kindly, courteous, decent, Alben Barkley inherently could not be a driving leader such as Joe Robinson. He was often caught napping; sometimes Franklin Roosevelt pulled the rug from under him. Emil Ludwig's admiring, semi-official biography of Franklin Roosevelt has but one mention of Alben Barkley as "the excellent Barkley." This had expressed the butler-to-the-master relationship which Franklin Roosevelt had sought. Gradually, Alben Barkley's personal popularity grew in the Senate. A gregarious man, who likes Washington's glittering parties, he sings a good Senatorial baritone. Alben Barkley was now the leader of 58 Democratic Senators, most of whom were anti-Roosevelt. Only the last 13, the very quintessence of New Dealism, had voted to sustain the veto.

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