The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [37]
Men and women, black and white, these people were Democrats in every fiber of their being. The rest of Nebraska might be turning against the New Deal, the President’s cure for the Great Depression, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still a hero in this part of town. Yet the leaflets that Howard Buffett politely pressed into their callused hands shrieked that FDR was the greatest danger to democracy that America had ever known. If given a moment to speak, he would calmly explain why, as their Congressman, he would always vote to enact laws that the stockyard workers would oppose.
Howard was a zealot, but he was neither stupid nor crazy. Even though he placed his trust in God’s hands, he had a backup plan. Warren had not come for an education, nor to tag-team his father in a fight. His job was to run like hell for the cops if the stockyard workers started beating up his father.
Under the circumstances, a reasonable person might ask what Howard was doing there at all. His efforts might not be repaid by a single vote. But apparently he felt an obligation to appear before every potential voter in his district, however little of him they cared to see.
Warren always managed to return home intact; he never had to run for the cops. That may have been just luck or it may have been Howard’s demeanor, which conveyed his basic decency. Still, the Buffetts had no reason to believe the voters saw that, nor that if they did, it would overcome his underdog status. On election day, November 3, 1942, Doris, convinced that her father had lost, went downtown and bought herself a new pin to wear to school the next day so she would have something to look forward to. “My dad wrote out his concession statement. We all went to bed at eight-thirty or nine o’clock, because we never stayed up late. And he woke up the next morning to find out he’d won.”
Howard’s deep suspicion of foreign adventures was more than a quirk of his own Quaker-like personality. It reflected a reservoir of conservative isolationism, which had once run deep and wide through the Midwest. Although that stream was drying up, Pearl Harbor had revived it for a little while. Despite Roosevelt’s overwhelming popularity, labor’s support for his foreign policies had wavered temporarily in Omaha, just long enough to get Howard elected against an opponent who had been, perhaps, overconfident.
The following January, the Buffetts rented out their house in Dundee and boarded a train to Virginia. Ernest handed them a hamper of beautifully packaged food along with instructions not to stray into any other cars, lest they pick up dread diseases from traveling servicemen.
They arrived at Washington’s Union Station to find a provincial city grown packed and chaotic. Great crowds of people filled the town, most of them working at vast new wartime government agencies. The military had commandeered every building, office, chair, and pencil within reach in the effort to get itself organized in the newly finished Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, which was outgrown by the time it was completed. By now, flimsy temporary office buildings lined every inch of the Mall.8
Hordes of new arrivals had doubled the population. A ragged army of black men and women streamed across the 14th Street Bridge from Virginia, fleeing the tobacco farms, cotton fields, and textile mills of the poverty-stricken South, lured by the prospect of any job at all in the busiest city in the world. Following in the dust of the respectable, impoverished, and naive came pickpockets, prostitutes, grifters, and drifters, turning Washington into the nation’s crime capital.
Rickety nineteenth-century wooden trolleys packed with government workers crept