Alben W. Barkley
Alben William Barkley was an American lawyer and politician from Kentucky who served as the 35th vice president of the United States from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry S. Truman. In 1905, he was elected to local offices and in 1912 as a U.S. representative. Serving in both houses of Congress, he was a liberal Democrat, supporting President Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom domestic agenda and foreign policy.
Willie Alben Barkley, the eldest of eight children of John Wilson Barkley and Electa Eliza (Smith) Barkley, was born November 24, 1877. His grandmother, midwife Amanda Barkley, delivered him in the log house she lived in with her husband, Alben, in Wheel, Kentucky. Barkley's parents were tenant farmers who grew tobacco, and his father was an elder in the local Presbyterian church. Barkley traced his father's ancestry to Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Rowan County, North Carolina. Both parents were religious, opposed to playing cards and alcohol. Occasionally, Barkley's parents would leave him in the care of his grandparents for extended periods. During these times, his grandmother related stories of her relatives. Her childhood playmates included future U.S. Vice President Adlai Stevenson I and James A. McKenzie, a future U.S. representative from Kentucky. Barkley worked on his parents' farm and attended school in Lowes, Kentucky, between the fall harvest and spring planting. Unhappy with his birth name, he adopted "Alben William" as soon as he was old enough to express his opinion in the matter. In the hard times of late 1891, relatives convinced Barkley's father to move to Clinton, where he was a tenant wheat farmer. Barkley enrolled at a local seminary school, but did not finish his studies before entering Marvin College, a Methodist school in Clinton that accepted younger students, in 1892. The college's president offered him a scholarship that covered his academic expenses in exchange for his work as a janitor. He allowed Barkley to miss the first and last month of the academic year to help on the family farm. Barkley was active in the debating society at Marvin. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and joined the Methodist Church, which he was a member of for the rest of life.
In Paducah, Barkley worked as a law clerk for Charles K. Wheeler, an attorney and congressman, accepting access to Wheeler's law library as payment for his services. Despite their political differences – Wheeler supported William Jennings Bryan and Free Silver, while Barkley identified with the Gold Democrats – he hoped that being acquainted with and taught by Wheeler would aid him in his future endeavors, but congressional duties frequently kept Wheeler away from the office. After two months, Barkley accepted an offer to clerk for Judge William Sutton Bishop and former congressman John Kerr Hendrick, who paid him $15 per month. He read law while completing his duties and was admitted to the bar in 1901. Barkley practiced in Paducah where a friend of Hendrick's appointed him reporter of the circuit court. He continued studying law in the summer of 1902 at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Prompted by First District representative Ollie M. James' decision to seek election to the U.S. Senate in 1912, Barkley declared his candidacy for the district's congressional seat in December 1911. Courting the votes of the district's farmers, Barkley advocated lower taxes and increased regulation of railroads by the Interstate Commerce Commission. After one challenger withdrew in March, three more candidates entered the race – Trigg County Commonwealth's Attorney Denny Smith, Ballard County Judge Jacob Corbett, and John K. Hendrick, Barkley's former employer. All were conservative Democrats who branded Barkley a socialist because he supported federal funding of highway construction. Hendrick attacked Barkley's youth, inexperience and ambition to seek higher offices. Barkley admitted his eventual desire for a Senate seat, and countered that Hendrick had also frequently sought office: "When the Pope died some years ago, nobody would tell Hendrick, for fear he would declare for that office." Charging that Barkley's membership in Woodmen of the World was politically motivated, Hendrick ended up attacking the organization itself, angering the approximately 5,000 club members in the First District. In June, the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for president and adoption of a progressive platform at the 1912 Democratic National Convention bolstered Barkley's candidacy. He won 48.2% of the votes in the primary and went on to win the general election.
Domestic matters
Initially conservative, working with Wilson (who was elected president) inspired Barkley to become more liberal. On April 24, 1913, he first spoke on the House floor, favoring the administration-backed Underwood–Simmons Tariff Act which lowered tariffs on foreign goods. He endorsed Wilson's New Freedom agenda, including the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and the 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act. Because of his support for the administration, he was assigned to the powerful Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee and became the first freshman to preside over a session of the House. As a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, he supported the Clayton Antitrust Act and sought to end child labor in interstate commerce through the Keating–Owen Act in 1916. He also supported measures to extend credit to and fund road improvements in rural areas.
World War I
Barkley supported U.S. neutrality in World War I and endorsed Wilson's plan to purchase merchant ships for the U.S. instead of paying foreign carriers to travel waters containing German U-boats. His position was popular in his district, as 80% of the dark tobacco grown in western Kentucky was sold overseas, and higher shipping costs adversely affected profits. The House authorized the purchase, but Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate regarded the idea as socialistic and blocked its passage with a filibuster. Wilson supporters, including Barkley, campaigned for his re-election in 1916, using the slogan "he kept us out of war". By early 1917, Germany had lifted all restrictions on attacks on neutral shipping supplying Britain and France, outraging many Americans. The publication in February of the Zimmermann Telegram, in which a German official proposed to Mexico that, if the U.S. entered the war, Mexico should declare war on them and the Germans would work to return Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico to Mexican control, also brought the United States closer to war. Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, and Barkley voted for the resolution when it came before the House two weeks later. At 40 years old, he considered resigning his seat to enlist in the U.S. Army, but Wilson persuaded him not to do so.
Relations with Harding administration
Barkley supported William Gibbs McAdoo for president at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, but the nomination went to James M. Cox. He campaigned for Cox and his running mate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, but his speeches focused more on Wilson's progressive record than Cox's fitness for office. Republican Warren G. Harding defeated Cox in the general election, and Barkley found common ground with him on issues such as the creation of the Veterans' Bureau and the passage of the progressive Sheppard–Towner Act. Barkley thought the administration was too favorable to big business interests, however, and in 1922 he proclaimed that if Harding had returned the country to normalcy, "then in God's name let us have Abnormalcy".
Gubernatorial election of 1923
By the time of his 1922 re-election bid, Barkley was the ranking Democrat on the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. In the election, he carried every First District county, including the Republican strongholds of Caldwell and Crittenden counties. Despite the victory he lacked the political organization needed for higher office. According to Barkley biographer James K. Libbey, the establishment of such an organization, and not necessarily a desire to become governor, may have motivated him to announce his candidacy for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination on November 11, 1922. Critics charged that this was his intent, and he did little to deny it.
Later House career
Barkley's party loyalty in the governor's race made him a formidable candidate to challenge Stanley, who by 1924 had angered members of both party factions, but Barkley had spent most of his funds in his campaign against Cantrill, and he did not want to risk his reputation as a party unifier by challenging a Democrat. Instead, he decided to rebuild his war chest to unseat Kentucky's incumbent Republican senator, Richard P. Ernst, in 1926. In the meantime, he refrained from using his influence in state races to avoid losing any goodwill with Kentucky voters. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Barkley again supported William G. McAdoo for president. Urban interests at the convention promoted New York Governor Al Smith, and a bitter convention fight ensued. During the course of 103 ballots, chairman Thomas J. Walsh needed a rest and temporarily yielded his position to Barkley. The convention was the first to be broadcast nationally, and Barkley's service as chair augmented his national recognition and appeal. The two Democratic factions agreed to compromise, nominating John W. Davis, who Libbey called a "competent nonentity"; Davis lost in the general election to incumbent Calvin Coolidge. Barkley won another term in the House by a 2-to-1 margin over his Republican opponent in 1924, but Democratic divisions cost Stanley his Senate seat, and Barkley became even more convinced of the value of party loyalty.
Because of Barkley's role in crafting the Railway Labor Act, the Associated Railway Labor Organizations endorsed him to unseat Ernst even before he formally announced his candidacy on April 26, 1926. Since the 1923 gubernatorial contest, he had distanced himself from Haly and promised the conservatives that he would not push a ban on parimutuel betting if elected. Consequently, he had no opposition in the primary. Congressman (and later Chief Justice) Fred M. Vinson managed his general election campaign. Coolidge supported Ernst, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover campaigned in the state on his behalf. Ernst had opposed a bonus for veterans of World War I, an unpopular position in Kentucky, and at 68 years old, his age worked against him. Barkley contrasted his impoverished upbringing with Ernst's affluent lifestyle as a corporate lawyer, and also attacked him for supporting Michigan senator Truman Handy Newberry, who resigned due to allegations of election fraud. Republican voters were angered that Ernst did not support Republican Congressman John W. Langley when Langley was charged with illegally aiding a large bootlegging operation in Louisville. Ernst tried to resurrect the issues of Barkley's support for the coal tax and opposition to parimutuel betting, but in the general election, Barkley won by a vote of 287,997 to 266,657.
Second term and ascension to floor leader
Barkley supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, but facing a re-election bid himself, he did not announce his support, fearing that his message might not resonate with Kentucky voters. Roosevelt supporters offered Barkley the keynote address and temporary chairmanship of the 1932 Democratic National Convention if he would endorse their candidate. Both opportunities would help Barkley's re-election chances, so he announced his support for Roosevelt on March 22. In his keynote, Barkley warmly recalled the Wilson administration and denounced more than a decade of Republican dominance. Applause frequently punctuated the speech, with the longest interruption – a 45-minute near-riot – erupting after Barkley called for a platform plank directing Congress to repeal prohibition. According to Libbey, the remark was not a repudiation of his prohibitionist position but a desire for the people to express their will on repeal. Prohibitionist constituents still supported Barkley because, for most of them, the depression trumped all other concerns.
Challenge by Happy Chandler
Barkley faced a primary challenge in his 1938 re-election bid from Albert B. "Happy" Chandler, Kentucky's popular governor who had a strong political organization throughout the state. According to historian James C. Klotter, Chandler was confident of his ascension to the presidency and saw the Senate as a stepping stone. Chandler twice asked Roosevelt to appoint Kentucky's junior Senator, M. M. Logan, to a federal judgeship so he could arrange his own appointment to Logan's Senate seat. On one of these occasions – the retirement of Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland – Barkley advised Roosevelt to appoint Solicitor General Stanley Reed instead. Chandler's mentor, Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd, and the bloc of Democrats who opposed Roosevelt's New Deal, then encouraged Chandler to announce his candidacy for Barkley's seat.
Floor leadership
With his caucus divided between conservatives and liberals, Barkley failed to secure passage for Roosevelt's court-packing plan. After the successive failures of several administration-backed domestic bills, the press dubbed the Senate Majority Leader "bumbling Barkley". He was able to salvage an appropriations bill to cover overspending by the WPA, although it allocated much less funding than Roosevelt had wanted. He helped secure the Hatch Act, and The Washington Daily News called a 1940 amendment that prohibited campaigning by federally funded state employees a "monument to Alben Barkley's persistence and parliamentary skill". Despite this mixed record, Roosevelt believed some Democratic partisans hoped to nominate Barkley for president at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, but the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, deepened his resolve to seek a third term.
Split with Roosevelt
In April 1943 a confidential analysis by Isaiah Berlin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office described Barkley as "a Democratic party 'wheelhorse' who will pull the Administration wagon through thick and thin. Although he is the Majority Leader in the Senate, he is not an adroit negotiator, but a loyal supporter of the President come hell or high water." Tension developed between Roosevelt and Barkley during the war, however. In 1943, Roosevelt refused to appoint Barkley to a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and Barkley criticized the War Production Board for awarding contracts for the production of war-related materials to large companies rather than small businesses. Their most notable clash occurred in February 1944 when Roosevelt requested that Congress approve tax increases to generate over $10 billion in revenue for the war. Barkley and the Senate Finance Committee negotiated a bill containing only $2.3 billion in tax increases. Feeling the measure was insufficient, Roosevelt convened the "Big Four" on February 21 and told them he would veto it. They urged him not to do so, assuring him the bill they had drafted was the best one they could pass. Roosevelt vetoed the bill the next day, marking the first time a U.S. president vetoed a revenue bill.
Buchenwald concentration camp
On April 11, 1945, U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, established in 1937, where at least 56,545 people died. General Dwight D. Eisenhower left rotting corpses unburied so a visiting group of U.S. legislators could truly understand the horror of the atrocities. This group visited Buchenwald on April 24 to inspect the camp and learn firsthand about the enormity of the Nazi Final Solution and treatment of other prisoners. The legislators included Barkley, Ed Izac, John M. Vorys, Dewey Short, C. Wayland Brooks, and Kenneth S. Wherry, along with General Omar Bradley and journalists Joseph Pulitzer, Norman Chandler, William I. Nichols, and Julius Ochs Adler.
Truman succeeds Roosevelt
Truman ascended to the presidency when Roosevelt died in April 1945, just before the end of World War II. In the war's aftermath, Americans wanted to know why the U.S. seemed ill-prepared for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Barkley sponsored a resolution to create the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack and was chosen as chairman of the ten-person committee. The committee's report, delivered on July 20, 1946, exonerated Roosevelt of any blame for the attack and highlighted weaknesses in communications between branches of the U.S. armed forces, leading to the creation of the United States Department of Defense. Barkley also helped ensure U.S. participation in the United Nations and advocated approval of billions of dollars in loans to rebuild Europe. Look magazine named him the second most fascinating person in the country behind Eisenhower.
In an upset victory, Truman and Barkley were elected over the Republican ticket by over 2 million votes, and Democrats regained majorities in both houses of Congress. Aged 71 years old at the time of his inauguration, he was (and still is) the oldest man ever elected vice president, breaking Charles Curtis' record at 69. His grandson, Stephen M. Truitt, suggested the nickname "Veep" as an alternative to "Mr. Vice President". The nickname was used by the press, but Barkley's successor, Richard Nixon, discontinued using it, saying it belonged to Barkley. Despite their personal differences, Truman and Barkley agreed on most issues. Because of Barkley's legislative experience, Truman insisted his vice president attend cabinet meetings. Barkley chaired the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and attended Truman's weekly legislative conferences. When Congress created the National Security Council, it included the vice president as a member. Barkley acted as the administration's primary spokesperson, making 40 major speeches in his first eight months in office. Truman commissioned the United States Army Institute of Heraldry to create a seal and flag for the vice president, advocated raising his salary, and increased his expense budget. Mark Hatfield's biographical sketch of Barkley noted that he was "the last [vice president] to preside regularly over the Senate, the last not to have an office in or near the White House, [and] the last to identify more with the legislative than the executive branch".
Campaign for president
At the March 29, 1952 Jefferson–Jackson Day fundraiser, Truman announced that he would not seek re-election, although he was exempt from the Twenty-second Amendment's term limits. After the announcement, the District of Columbia Democratic Club formed a Barkley for President Club with Iowa senator Guy Gillette as chairman. Prominent Kentuckians – including senator Earle C. Clements, governor Lawrence Wetherby, and lieutenant governor Emerson "Doc" Beauchamp – supported the candidacy. Exactly two months after Truman's announcement, Barkley declared his availability to run for president while maintaining he was not actively seeking the office. Barkley's distant cousin, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II (grandson of Adlai Stevenson I), was considered his primary competition for the presidential nomination, but had not committed before the convention. Richard Russell Jr. and Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver were also interested in the nomination. Kentucky's delegation to the 1952 Democratic National Convention announced that they would support Barkley, and Truman encouraged Missouri's delegates to do so. Democratic National Committee chairman Frank E. McKinney, former chairman James Farley, and Senate Secretary Leslie Biffle also supported him. Two weeks before the convention, Stevenson advisor Jacob Arvey told Barkley that Stevenson was not going to be nominated and favored nominating Barkley. Barkley's advisors believed that Kefauver and Russell would knock each other out of the early balloting, allowing Barkley to capture the nomination.
Barkley's term as vice president ended on January 20, 1953. After the election, he had surgery to remove his cataracts. He contracted with NBC to create 26 fifteen-minute commentary broadcasts called "Meet the Veep". Low ratings prompted NBC's decision not to renew the series in September 1953. In retirement, Barkley remained a popular speaker and began working on his memoirs with journalist Sidney Shallett.
Return to the Senate
He re-entered politics in 1954, challenging incumbent Republican senator John Sherman Cooper. In a 1971 study of Barkley's Senate career, historian Glenn Finch argued that Barkley was the only person who could beat Cooper. Few issues differentiated the candidates, and the campaign hinged on party politics; visits to Kentucky by President Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Illinois senator Everett Dirksen on Cooper's behalf reinforced this notion. Barkley resumed his Iron Man campaign style, campaigning for up to sixteen hours a day, countering the "too old" charge that had cost him the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. He won the general election by a vote of 434,109 (54%) to 362,948 (46%), giving Democrats a one-vote advantage in the Senate.
Death
In a keynote address at the Washington and Lee Mock Convention in Lexington, Virginia on April 30, 1956, Barkley spoke of his willingness to sit with the other freshman senators in Congress; he ended with an allusion to Psalm 84:10, saying "I'm glad to sit on the back row, for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty," drawing riotous applause. He then collapsed onstage and died of a heart attack, aged 78. He was buried in Mount Kenton Cemetery near Paducah.
Barkley joined the Broadway Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was a lay preacher, and several fraternal organizations, including Woodmen of the World, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and the Improved Order of Red Men. On June 23, 1903, he married Dorothy Brower (November 14, 1882 – March 10, 1947). They had three children: David Murrell Barkley (1906–1983), Marion Frances Barkley (1909–1996), and Laura Louise Barkley (1911–1987). Laura Louise married Douglas MacArthur II, a U.S. diplomat and nephew of General Douglas MacArthur.
A dam constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Cumberland River in 1966, and the lake it forms, were named Barkley Dam and Lake Barkley in Barkley's honor. Barkley Regional Airport in Paducah is also named for him. In 1984, the federal government declined to purchase The Angles, his Paducah home, and it was sold at auction. Many personal items owned by Barkley are displayed on the second floor of the historic house Whitehaven in Paducah. In February 2008, Paducah's American Justice School of Law changed owners after failing to secure accreditation from the American Bar Association. It was renamed the Alben W. Barkley School of Law, but remained unaccredited, and closed in December 2008.
