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Poor Little Fellow. In 1896 a letter from Sheridan, Ark. plopped into the Washington mailbox of Arkansas' Democratic Representative John Little. It bore the news that Constituents Isaac and Belle McClellan intended to name their newborn son John Little McClellan in honor of the Congressman.* To his namesake John Little promptly sent $5. Belle McClellan, a lovely woman with a fine singing voice, died three weeks after John's birth. On her deathbed she made only one request: she asked that Congressman Little's $5 be used to buy her newborn baby a Bible. So John was left to grow up with the Bible and his father Ike—who still thinks sadly of John's earliest days and calls him "that poor little fellow."
The son of Farmer James McClellan, Isaac McClellan, sometime farmer himself, schoolteacher and country editor, longtime lawyer and dabbler in Democratic politics, was quite a man. He remarried in three years, started tutoring John when the boy was four. He pushed hard and John gritted himself ahead, within two years was doing fine in the fourth grade of Ike's school. When Ike turned from teaching to politics, he took John along on the political trail.
Foot-Washing Convert. Not even the uproarious Arkansas political meetings of the day were larks for John McClellan. His political favorite was Governor Jeff Davis,† an imposing figure in a Prince Albert coat of Confederate grey, whose platform was simple: "I am a hard-shell Baptist in religion. I believe in foot-washing, saving your seed potatoes and paying your honest debts." Invective .ran high in Arkansas politics, and little John McClellan had no way of telling the campaign flourish from the mortal insult. He took everything with deadly seriousness, spent sleepless nights after his heroes were attacked, blazingly denounced Jeff's enemies to audiences of two or three farmboys. Even Ike McClellan says: "I should have held off until John was a little older and could understand that our opponents didn't really mean what they said."
Ike, after years of studying nights, became a lawyer in 1907, and John traveled the circuit with him. John's Henty was Blackstone. He learned that preparation for a case is 90% of success. (One of the things that makes his current Senate investigation stand out is its painstaking preparation.) As his father got busier, teen-age John was virtually in sole charge of a 75-acre farm, but he still found time to study his lawbooks. In the law he seemed to find something otherwise missing from most of his life. Says one observer: "His father was a lawyer—and his only mother was the law."
The minimum age for admission to the Arkansas bar was 21, but Ike wangled special legislative permission for John to take the required oral test at 17. John scored a 90, 15 points above passing, and became the youngest lawyer in Arkansas.
The Death Curse. All work and no play made John a dour boy. What happened next was to make him a dour man. The same year he passed his law examination he married Eula Hicks, the prettiest girl in Sheridan, a tiny thing with a profusion of auburn ringlets. When John went away to World War I (he was discharged as a first lieutenant), something happened to the marriage. Exactly what is locked behind the tight lips of John McClellan himself. Court records show only that