Happy Chandler - U.S. Senator

U.S. Senator

Both Robert Bingham and Percy Haly died in 1937; with J. C. W. Beckham aging – he would die in 1940 – Chandler moved to fill the leadership void in the faction. He soon came to believe he was destined to become President of the United States. In mid-1937, he began advocating for Marvel Mills Logan, Kentucky's junior senator, to be appointed to the Supreme Court, creating a Senate vacancy to which Chandler, as governor, could appoint himself. The death of Justice George Sutherland in January 1938 gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the opportunity to accommodate Chandler's wishes, but Roosevelt preferred younger justices – Logan was 63 – and Kentucky's senior Senator, Alben Barkley, recommended Solicitor General Stanley Forman Reed for the appointment. Roosevelt heeded Barkley's advice and appointed Reed instead of Logan.

Eager to augment his power and angered by Roosevelt's and Barkley's refusal to accept his suggestion of appointing Logan to the Supreme Court, Chandler did not attend a long-planned dinner in Barkley's honor on January 22, 1938; instead, he held an event of his own at Louisville's exclusive Pendennis Club at which he alluded to his intentions of challenging Barkley during the upcoming Democratic senatorial primary. Barkley officially announced his re-election bid the following day. The death of another federal judge on January 26 provided a second opportunity for Roosevelt to appoint Senator Logan to a judgeship and appease Chandler, but Logan refused to consider the appointment. Following a January 31 meeting in Washington, D.C. between Roosevelt and Chandler, during which Roosevelt urged Chandler to put his senatorial ambitions on hold, Chandler was encouraged by his political mentor, Virginia's Harry F. Byrd to challenge Barkley. Chandler heeded Byrd's advice, making an official announcement of his candidacy on February 23, 1938, in Newport, Kentucky.

Barkley, recently chosen as Senate Majority Leader by a single vote, was a strong supporter of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Chandler identified with the more conservative southern Democrats who, wary of Roosevelt and his New Deal, sought to gain control of the party ahead of the 1940 presidential election. Because Roosevelt was very popular in Kentucky, Chandler was put in the awkward position of expressing personal support of the president while opposing his hand-picked leader in the Senate and his New Deal legislation. In April, polls showed Barkley ahead of Chandler by a 2-to-1 margin, and the May 3 primary victory of New Deal Florida Senator Claude Pepper finally persuaded Chandler to abandon his attacks of the program.

In late May 1938, Chandler's campaign manager publicly claimed that federal relief agencies – especially the Works Progress Administration – were openly working for Barkley's re-election. Although the WPA administrator in Kentucky denied the charges, veteran reporter Thomas Lunsford Stokes launched an investigation of the agency's activities in the state and eventually raised twenty-two charges of political corruption in a series of eight articles covering the Barkley-Chandler campaign. Federal WPA administrator Harry Hopkins claimed an internal investigation of the agency refuted all but two of Stokes' charges, but Stokes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1939 for his investigation. In the wake of the investigation. Congress passed the Hatch Act of 1939 to limit the WPA's involvement in future elections.

The negative effects of the investigation on Barkley's campaign were minimal because of Chandler's own use of his gubernatorial power and patronage on behalf of his own campaign. Dan Talbott, one of Chandler's chief political advisors, encouraged supervisors of state workers to take punitive action against employees who made "pessimistic expressions" concerning Chandler's chances in the primary. Furthermore, Chandler initiated a rural road building project in the state, employing loyal supporters to construct and maintain the new roads. State workers who supported Chandler were employed to deliver pension checks to the state's elderly citizens, and Talbott did not deny charges that these workers threatened to withhold the checks if the recipients did not pledge their support to Chandler.

President Roosevelt personally visited Kentucky to campaign on Barkley's behalf on July 8, 1938. As governor of the state, Chandler was on hand to greet Roosevelt on his arrival in Covington. Seeking to benefit from being nearest to the president, Chandler sat between Roosevelt and Barkley in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle that transported them to Latonia Race Track, the site of Roosevelt's first speech. Throughout his tour of the state, Roosevelt endorsed Barkley while remaining friendly with Chandler; after Roosevelt's departure, Chandler played up Roosevelt's complimentary remarks about him while downplaying or ignoring critical remarks.

Late in the campaign, Chandler fell ill with chills, stomach pains, and a high fever. After first claiming the symptoms were similar to those he experienced a year earlier, Chandler later described his malady as "intestinal poisoning". His doctor announced that Chandler, Dan Talbott, and a state police officer had all been sickened after drinking "poisoned water" provided to Chandler for a radio address. Chandler maintained that someone from the Barkley campaign had tried to poison him, but the charge never gained much credence with the press or the electorate. Barkley frequently mocked it on the campaign trail by first accepting a glass of water offered to him, then shuddering and rejecting it. He pointed out to audiences that it was the young Chandler, and not he, who had broken down first under the strain of the grueling campaign.

With Chandler ally Robert Bingham no longer at its helm, The Courier-Journal supported Barkley, and organized labor, a key Chandler supporter in 1935, also threw their support to Barkley. Former Chandler ally John Y. Brown, Sr. also took an active part in the Barkley campaign. Ultimately, Barkley defeated Chandler by a vote of 294,391 (56%) to 223,149 (42.6%). The remaining 1.4% of the vote was dividing among minor candidates. Chandler's 70,872-vote loss was the worst loss for a primary candidate in state history.

On October 9, 1939, following the death of Senator Logan, Chandler resigned as governor, elevating Lieutenant Governor Keen Johnson to the governorship; the following day, Johnson appointed Chandler to Logan's vacated seat in the Senate. In a subsequent special election to fill the remainder of the unexpired term, Chandler first defeated Charles R. Farnsley in the Democratic primary, then bested Republican Walter B. Smith by a vote of 561,151 to 401,812 in the November 5, 1940, general election. Although he never forgave President Roosevelt for backing Barkley in the 1938 senatorial primary, he generally supported his administration, although he opposed parts of the New Deal.

Chandler's mentor Harry F. Byrd led a group of Southern conservatives in the Senate, and through Byrd's influence, Chandler was appointed to the Committee on Military Affairs. In 1943, he was part of a five-person delegation from the Military Affairs Committee that traveled the world, inspecting U.S. military bases. He vociferously disagreed with Roosevelt's decision to prioritize European operations in World War II over the war in the Pacific.

Chandler upset many in the black community by voting against an anti-lynching bill soon after taking office. The bill levied fines against local governments and individual government officials in counties where illegal lynchings occurred. Of his vote against the bill, Chandler remarked, "I am against lynching by anybody and of anybody, black or white, but the present bill carries penalties on local officials and local subdivisions which I think are too severe." The bill passed in the House of Representatives, but died in the Senate. Later, Chandler joined with senators from other southern states in opposing the repeal of poll taxes, long used as a mechanism to prevent blacks from voting.

At the expiration of his partial term in 1942, Chandler faced a challenge from former ally John Y. Brown, Sr. in the Democratic primary. As a result of his votes on the anti-lynching bill and the poll tax repeal, the Louisville chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People worked against his re-election effort. During the campaign, Brown accused Chandler of abusing his power, including having a swimming pool installed at his home in violation of the federal rationing provisions implemented during World War II. Chandler invited the Truman Committee to investigate the installation of the pool; the committee found no violations of the federal rationing provisions. Chandler went on to defeat Brown and was easily re-elected in the general election over Republican Richard J. Colbert.

Chandler believed that he had enough support at the 1944 Democratic National Convention to be nominated as President Roosevelt's running mate for the upcoming presidential election. That support failed to materialize, however, after the Kentucky delegation and Earle C. Clements in particular, refused to back his nomination. The convention nominated Harry S. Truman as Roosevelt's running mate. Truman became president upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, and Chandler never forgave Clements for costing him the chance to be president.