Purges & Picnics

Chicago's old Boss Ed Kelly was there, talking to Jersey City's debonair old Boss Frank Hague, who wore a straw boater and flourished a cane. With other Democratic National Committee members, they had gathered in Washington's Mayflower

Hotel. They were there to elect a new national chairman, hand-picked by Harry Truman: smooth, 46-year-old William M. Boyle Jr., a veteran Kansas City politico. And at Boyle's insistence, they were there to expel some fifth columnists from the Party of the People.

The outgoing national chairman, Rhode Island's easygoing J. Howard McGrath, had never wanted to be beastly to the Dixiecrats. He thought that judicious use of patronage and cajolery would corral some Dixiecrat votes in Congress for Harry Truman's Fair Deal. It hadn't done any such thing.

Inseparable Connection. One by one, National Committee members accused of Dixiecrat activities marched before the credentials committee. Some pleaded that it was all a mistake--deep down inside they had been for Truman all along. Others were truculently defiant. After hearing them out, the credentials committee unanimously recommended the purging of five Southerners. The committee briskly voted approval. It was the first such expulsion since 1896.

That night at the gala dinner, the politicos had their happy fill of virtue, curried shrimp and good cheer. Harry Truman kidded Vice President Alben Barkley about his St. Louis girl friend, and McGrath introduced the Veep, to great applause, as "the squire of Paducah and the new spirit of St. Louis." Barkley said imperturbably that "there has always been an inseparable connection between Kentucky and Missouri and it looks like it's going to continue--I hope."

Loudest & Longest. Harry Truman was in high good spirits at the way things had gone. Said he: "The Democratic Party is a national party, and not a sectional party any more. The tail no longer wags the dog." He boasted that the Democrats had won the election "without New York, without the industrial East and without the Solid South. And I am prouder of that than anything that ever happened to me." He added: "That doesn't mean that we are not inviting the industrial East and the Solid South and all the rest of the country to join the party of the people."

Looking at Bill Boyle, Truman declared: "I am as happy as I can be, of course, that my lifetime friend--I have known him ever since he was a kid; I knew his mother before him and she was one of the best Democrats that Missouri ever produced--is the national chairman of the Democratic Party." Bill Boyle beamed.

Later Boyle reminisced: "We lived in a big, old-fashioned house, and I remember the Trumans used to come over and visit us on Sundays. What I remember best were the political picnics the party used to hold every summer at Lone jack, Mo., outside Kansas City. These were hell-roaring, rip-snorting affairs with the loudest & longest speeches you ever heard. The President loved those picnics, never missed one." Boyle recalled listening to the President's St. Louis speech just before the 1948 election. "About halfway through, he began talking off the cuff. 'Uh-oh,' I said to myself, 'here goes a Lonejack oration,' and that's what it was."

Meat & Drink. Shrewd, hard-bitten Bill Boyle believes in machine politics and the everlasting value of the faithful ward-heeler. He was a precinct captain himself before he could vote, rose through the ranks of the Boss Pendergast machine to acting director of police (TIME, Feb. 21). In 1941, Senator Harry Truman appointed him to the counsel staff of his war investigating committee, later made him his personal secretary. Last year Boyle plotted Truman's whistle-stop campaign, insisted on going after what proved to be the decisive farm and labor vote. An Irish-Catholic politician on the Jim Farley pattern, Boyle probably knows more Democratic politicians by their first names than any man.

Boyle was sure the Dixiecrats could be brought into line. Said he: "Recognition is a politician's meat & drink. If they don't get it, they are nothing. I quoted Abraham Lincoln in my speech: 'I will go along with a man as long as he is going in my direction.' That's an invitation for sinners to march down the aisle. Those who don't march will be suffocated, as far as the National Committee is concerned."

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