Until this point, Harry Truman had had his share of verbal rocks thrown at him. But they mostly were hurled from local political platforms in speeches that were forgotten the day after they were made. The newspapers, even the Kansas City Star, had been fairly kind to him. The Star had praised him remarkably often, considering the paper’s rock-ribbed Republican allegiance. Now he was running for one of the highest offices in the nation. And he was being backed by a political organization that suddenly had become unsavory to the highest degree. An outburst of gangster violence in Kansas City added to the shock of reading about dead and wounded around the polling places. As a result, the men opposing Harry Truman’s Senate candidacy felt no holds - or more exactly, no smears - were barred. Senator Bennett Clark announced that if Harry Truman were elected to the Senate, he would not have “any more independent control of his own vote than he had as presiding judge of Jackson County.”
