Down from the Penthouse

In a penthouse political conference in Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel last December, Harry Truman decided, and shortly proclaimed for all to hear, that Emery Allison would make a wonderful U.S. Senator for the state of Missouri.

The common reaction among many Missouri Democrats was to ask: Who is Emery Allison? He turned out to be an Ozark country lawyer, a Baptist, Mason and Legionnaire, and the plodding, cigar-smoking, 56-year-old president pro tem of the Missouri state senate. He was also the great & good friend of Jim Pendergast, who, like his father before him, is the great & good friend of Harry Truman.

In succeeding months, as Harry Truman popped in & out of the state clapping Em Allison encouragingly on the back, the Democratic Party bucked and groaned like a plow that had hit a patch of Ozark hardscrabble. Most Democrats thought that Thomas C. Hennings Jr., a hearty St. Louis attorney who had earned a substantial reputation as a U.S. Congressman in the '30s, would make a better candidate and many of them were committed to him.

The state C.I.O. pulled itself together and came out for Allison, declaring that it guessed the President "ought to have the chance to vote for the man of his choice." Hennings countered that the right of free primaries was at stake, and pointed to his liberal record as a Congressman (A.F.L. President William Green told his unionists: "I can say he was your friend"). Governor Forrest Smith and St. Louis' Mayor Joseph Darst decided to stick with Harry Truman. "I ain't going to bite the hand that feeds me," said Joe.

Exhorted, harangued and warned that a Hennings victory would be advertised as a repudiation of the President of the U.S., Missouri Democrats weighed Truman's man Allison. Last week, in a close race, they defeated him.

But Truman's rebuff was possibly the Democrats' gain--Hennings looked like a better campaigner than Allison against the Republicans' Senator Forrest Donnell, an earnest, hair-splitting legalist in the Senate (where he is known as "The Big Itch"), but a cracker-barrel, Bible-quoting spellbinder along Missouri's back roads.

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