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Call Me Tom

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Contents

Preface...................................................viiAcknowledgments...........................................xi1. Growing Up in St. Louis................................12. Serving City and State Government......................363. The Inaugural 1968 Senate Campaign.....................624. Promising Beginnings...................................835. The Eagleton Affair....................................1056. In the Arena...........................................1347. The Final Campaign.....................................1628. Combating the Reagan Revolution........................1789. The Personal Eagleton..................................19910. The Sage of St. Louis.................................21211. The Final Years.......................................236Notes.....................................................253Bibliography..............................................289Index.....................................................299

Chapter One

Thomas Francis Eagleton was born on September 4, 1929, in St. Louis, Missouri, on a warm, sunny day in the glow of Hoover prosperity. Even though the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a slight drop in stock prices on that day, industrial, railroad, and utility stocks remained at near-record highs. Albeit modestly, St. Louis shared in the prosperity of the time. Located about ten miles south of the convergence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers along the crescent bend of the former, the city had long ago turned its back on the Mississippi. While barges and other vessels continued to carry commerce down the river, railroads and trucks had surpassed water transportation. The Romanesque Union Station in the downtown area housed the largest railroad terminal in the nation. Five railroad bridges spanned the river to points eastward.

In 1929 St. Louis ranked seventh in the nation in manufacturing and remained the state's leading manufacturing center. The St. Louis area provided 2.26 percent of the nation's manufacturing. Known for its industrial diversity, the river city produced food products, notably meat and bakery goods; clothing, especially for women; boots and shoes, mainly by the Brown and the International Shoe companies; chemicals and drugs; iron; steel; zinc; and aluminum products. The St. Louis Car Company continued to produce streetcars. Railroad yards and shops existed throughout the city, while the American Car and Foundry met the demand for new railroad cars. St. Louis also remained the world's largest raw fur market and a world leader in the production of stoves and ranges, sugar-mill machinery, brick, and terra cotta. Highlighting that diversity, twenty-nine of the top second-tier industries employed as many workers as the top eight. Prohibition, in part, prevented the city from keeping pace with Chicago, its Midwest competitor; Anheuser-Busch, the nation's largest brewery, once employing some seventy-five hundred local workers, was especially hard hit, as were other local breweries that serviced the city's two thousand saloons.

Diversity also characterized the city's population of 821,000, ranked seventh in the nation. The north side, mostly Democratic in politics, contained a sizable segment of working-class Irish Catholics, while South St. Louis housed a large concentration of Germans, mostly Republicans, who lived in virtually identical two-storied frame and brick houses. Czech, Bohemian, Lebanese, and Hispanic groups shared the south side area, with a large concentration of Italians in the southwest sector in a locale called the Hill, eventually known for its well-groomed bungalows, neighborhood restaurants, and major leaguers Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees and Joe Garagiola of the Cardinals. St. Louis also contained a sizable black population, migrating from the South during the World War. They numbered 11.5 percent of the city's population, about 2 percent more than the foreign born. Many of them lived in tenements immediately beyond the downtown business district and near the riverfront. In terms of deplorable housing and low wages, their plight epitomized the inequality that characterized the Republican era of the 1920s—and decades afterward. Segregation prevailed at Sportsman's Park, the home of the St. Louis Cardinals, until 1944, in the public school system until the 1950s, and at most department store lunch counters and restaurants until the 1960s. Despite its imperfections, St. Louis would become Tom's "town." Later in life he affectionately suggested that St. Louis was akin to a "raucous" Des Moines.

One of the many city attorneys in 1929 was Mark Eagleton, Tom's father. Much more is known about Mark than Tom's mother, Zitta. We do know that her father, William Swanson, was born in Missouri and was of Swedish and Irish ancestry. William's wife, Jessie, came from Illinois of French and Austrian heritage. Zitta's sister, Hazel, who was two years older, eventually played an important role in Tom's life. Their father labored as a railroad-yard master. Before her marriage to Mark during the early 1920s, Zitta worked for a real estate company as a stenographer. Only one photograph of her, taken in 1943, has survived. It depicts a forty-three year old, short and thin in stature and matronly in appearance. Tom later described his mother as "soft-spoken" and "self-sacrificing." "All she wanted for herself," he said, were the "bare necessities of life." Her wish for her two sons was that one become a doctor and the other a lawyer. In "Tom's Last Words," issued posthumously in 2007, he called her a "saint." Zitta died in 1948 on her birthday at the age of forty-nine of a cerebral hemorrhage. Writing to his daughter Christy nearly fifty years later, Eagleton remembered his mother as "very gentle" and "very quiet. A great listener." "I was my mother's 'favorite,'" he continued. His older brother, Mark Jr., "was my father's 'favorite.'" "Generally speaking, I was well-behaved. Generally speaking Mark raised constant hell. (My father thought it showed 'character' when Mark raised hell.)."

Mark David Eagleton, the paterfamilias, most influenced Tom's life. Fortunately, we know more about his background. Although of Irish ancestry, the surname first appeared in Rutland, England—rather than in Ireland—as early as 1250 either as Eagleton, Egleston, or Eglinton. Family members in Dublin, Ireland, contend that there was an Eagleton migration to Ireland sometime in the early nineteenth century. They located in parish records a William Eagleton at Carronurlare in Galway in 1825 and other family members in 1850 in nearby areas of western Ireland who owned land ranging from fifteen to forty-nine acres. They believed that one of them, Walter Egleton (or possibly his brother John), was Mark Eagleton's grandfather. One of Walter's sons, Thomas, married Mary Hennelly of Glencorrib in an arranged match. As late as the 1970s Hennelly still lived in the thatched cottage where Mary was born.

It was Tom's namesake, Thomas, and his wife, Mary, who emigrated to Mexico, Missouri, in 1880. At the time, according to census records, he was twenty-one years old, two years older than Mary. After an unsuccessful stint at farming, they moved to North St. Louis in the Irish ghetto of Kerry Patch. Thomas worked as a day laborer and then foreman for the city street department, and Mary became the...