“He did so much for poor people,” it would be said again and again. “Oh, he was a wonderful man. To me he was a Robin Hood,” said a woman for whom he had found a job in a hospital laundry, one of the thousands of jobs he had provided over the years. “No, I never had a sense of evil when I was with him,” remembered a Catholic priest. “The man never exuded a sense of evil.” Even the judge who later sent Pendergast to prison would concede afterward that had he known him, he, too, very likely would have been one of his friends.
Reticent by nature, Tom kept himself to himself, as would be said, and this supposedly was his “edge.” But those associated with him in his long career, including Harry Truman, were to hear certain observations repeated many times:
The amateur failed in politics because politics was concerned with “things as they are.” “Most people don’t think for themselves. They lean on newspapers.” “You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.” Politics, as his brother Jim had so often professed, was primarily a business of friends. “We have the theory that if we do a man a favor he will do us one. That’s human nature.” Few people were ingrates. Ingratitude was a cardinal sin. “Let the river take its course.”
To reporters, with whom he was invariably courteous, he would describe himself only as a realist and claim to know more about how the people felt than anyone in town, or any newspaper. “It’s my business to know.”
As his admirers also liked to point out, Tom Pendergast was not the kind to flaunt his power. He was never seen parading about the courthouse or City Hall. He preferred to run things quietly, keeping tabs on the precincts where the organization was in business 365 days a year.
“Politics is a business, an all-the-year-round competitive business. To the victor belong the spoils. I might as well be honest about it. It may be cynical but that’s the fact. It’s the same locally and nationally. Nobody gets a job on an appointment because he’s a nice fellow. He must deserve it politically. It’s the same as in any other business.”
The pattern of the organization followed the pattern established by law for election purposes. There was a ward leader, a precinct captain for each precinct, and a block leader for every square block within the precinct. The precinct captain was the first person who called on newcomers to the neighborhood, who saw that their water was connected, gas and electricity turned on. Coal in winter, food, clothing, and medical attention were all provided by the organization to whoever was in need at no charge, and as those benefiting from such help would remember fondly, the system involved no paperwork, few delays, no stigma of the dole. “When a man’s in need,” T.J. would lecture, “we don’t ask whether he’s a Republican or Democrat…. We function as nearly as we can 100 percent by making people feel kindly toward us.”
Politics was personal contact. When winter storms hit the city, trucks from the various Pendergast enterprises would arrive in the West Bottoms loaded with overcoats and other warm clothing to be handed out to the homeless, the drunken derelicts, to any and all who were suffering. At Christmas, Tom gave out three thousand free dinners. Many people would remember for the rest of their lives how at the height of the deadly influenza epidemic in 1918-19 and at great personal risk Tom Pendergast had made a personal survey, house to house, to see who needed help.
All that was expected in return was gratitude expressed at the polls on election day. And to most of his people this seemed little enough to ask and perfectly proper. Many, too, were happy to be “repeaters,” those who voted “early and often” on election day. The woman who worked in the hospital laundry, as an example, started as a repeater at age eighteen, three years shy of the voting age, and enjoyed every moment. She and several others would dress up in different costumes for each new identity, as they were driven from polling place to polling place in a fine, big car. It was like play-acting, she remembered years later. She would vote at least four or five times before the day ended. “Oh, I knew it was illegal, but I certainly never thought it was wrong.”
But for all his sway and subsequent notoriety as the machine overlord of Kansas City, Tom Pendergast was not without rivals. His power was as yet limited, even as late as the 1920s. In opposition was another Democratic faction led by another exceedingly adroit, popular Irish-Catholic politician named Joseph B. Shannon. In the parlance of Jackson County, Pendergast Democrats were the “Goats,” whereas Shannon’s people were the “Rabbits,” and both sides proudly so. The names began, supposedly, because the poverty-stricken families aligned with Alderman Jim had kept goats on the bluffs above the West Bottoms, while the Shannon people occupied a territory overrun by rabbits. It was also said that once on a march to a political convention Alderman Jim had roared, “When we come over the hill like goats, they’ll run like rabbits.” In any event, Joe Shannon was nothing like a rabbit in temperament. He was smooth, well dressed, and handsome in much the way Warren G. Harding was handsome. He was also quite as fearless as any Pendergast and had both the pluck and personality to inspire a following. And since the Republicans rarely had support enough to carry a general election in the county, the real knockdown contests were always in the primaries, among Democrats, where the lines were sharply drawn. Every Democrat counted himself either a Goat or a Rabbit, whether in town or out in the country. John Truman in his time had been a Goat and it was his Goat friends at the Independence Courthouse who made him a road overseer. So in that sense John Truman had been a Pendergast man, as was Harry briefly when he replaced his father as overseer.
The difference in the two factions was mainly a matter of style. The Goats liked to win with strength, with big turnouts on election day. The Rabbits were known for their cleverness. But both sides could play rough—with money or by calling out the saloon bullies. Strong-arm tactics at the polls, ballot-stuffing, ballot-box theft, the buying of votes with whiskey or cash, bloody, headlong street brawls, all the odious stratagems that had made big-city machine politics notorious since the time of New York’s Boss Tweed, had been brought to bear to determine which side within the party gained the upper hand. “Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles….” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,” as Tom Pendergast would say. It was “the game” played by “the boys” with zest, and never over such issues of reform as inspired periodic Republican or independent citizens’ crusades. That the Republicans so rarely ever triumphed was taken by Democrats, whether Rabbit or Goat, as proof that Republican bosses just weren’t as smart as a Joe Shannon or a Tom Pendergast.
Years before, in the time of Alderman Jim, a landmark bargain had been struck, largely because Alderman Jim had at last concluded that the Rabbits were there to stay. He and Shannon reached what became known as the Fifty-Fifty Agreement, whereby the prize of patronage after every election was to be divided evenly, no matter which faction won, thereby guaranteeing that neither side could ever lose. But Goat and Rabbit loyalties remained strong all the same, the battles continued. Politics, after all, in the words of one Casimir Welch, a tough ward boss of “Rabbit persuasion,” was “a game for fighters.”
To every Goat Tom Pendergast was the Big Boss, while his brother Mike was the “enforcer of loyalty.” Mike was hard and combative, yet a charmer when he wished, or at least an easier man to talk to than Tom. Mike, who ran the “Bloody Tenth” Ward, liked to get out and see people, in contrast to Tom, who preferred to stay in his cubbyhole office off the lobby of the somewhat disreputable Jefferson Hotel, another Pendergast enterprise. They were different in appearance as well. Mike stood six feet tall. He was broad-shouldered and slim, his hips so narrow that to keep his trousers in place he felt obliged to wear both belt and suspenders. Mike had a resolute, chiseled look, strong chin, and eyes of an even paler blue than Tom’s. He was really quite a handsome man. His great flaw, as everyone knew, was his temper. He was a “tenacious fighting type of the old s
chool,” a hothead who hated double talk and compromise, which was why Alderman Jim had passed him over and put Tom at the head of the organization. There was never any halfway ground with Mike. As was said, you were either with him or against him. He detested all Rabbits and was credited with claiming their extinction as among his foremost ambitions. One Saturday he had walked alone into a saloon famous for being a Rabbit stronghold, and after inviting a half-dozen men to join him for a drink at the bar, for a toast to the spirit of Fifty-Fifty, he hurled his glass in their faces, only to be jumped and severely beaten. But it had all been worth it, Mike said afterward.
Because of his closeness to Tom, who called him “Michael,” Mike’s views were invariably taken as Tom’s own, and this gave him a standing second to none except Tom. Also, besides the Tenth Ward, Mike had responsibility for what was called the country vote, the whole outlying eastern section of the county that included such towns as Grandview, Lee’s Summit, and Independence. (For some reason, as Harry Truman would recall, Tom Pendergast had no interest in the country vote.) In addition, most importantly, Mike had produced the heir apparent. Tom had three children, but two were girls and his only son was still, in the early 1920s, a small child. Mike, however, had a daughter and six sons, the oldest of whom was being groomed to take over. He was Harry’s friend Jim Pendergast, and it was pleasant-mannered, pleasant-looking Jim who one day brought his father around to the haberdashery on 12th Street to meet Harry Truman.
The time of the meeting was probably the late fall or early winter of 1921, which was still several months before the final collapse of Truman & Jacobson but well past the point when Harry knew the business was doomed.
They wanted to know if Harry would like to run for eastern judge of Jackson County, a courthouse job in Independence, which under the Missouri system was not a judicial post but administrative, the equivalent of a county commissioner, and a prime spot politically, which Harry already understood. With three judges on the court—an eastern judge (for the outlying country), a western judge (for Kansas City), and a presiding judge—having one vote of the three was worth a great deal, if only for trading purposes. The judges had control of the county purse strings. They hired and controlled the road overseers, as well as road gangs, county clerks, and other employees numbering in the hundreds. They could also determine who was awarded county contracts, and for the county road system, such as it was, there seemed a never-ending need for maintenance and repairs.
According to Pendergast family tradition, the idea of running Harry was Jim’s alone, and, interestingly, his father gave his consent even before meeting Harry because, in part, of what he knew of John Truman. If Captain Truman was all Jim said, and he was John Truman’s son, then, providing he had no link to the Ku Klux Klan or any such anti-Catholic faction, Captain Truman was all right with Mike.
Harry accepted their offer at once, with no hesitation. To a friend he wrote, “They are trying to run me for Eastern Judge, out in Independence, and I guess they’ll do it before they are through.” This was in a letter dated February 4, 1922, suggesting the anonymous “they” already had things so well in hand there could be no turning back. At a meeting at Mike’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club, Harry sat quietly as Mike, who disliked making speeches, got up and said, “Now, I’m going to tell you who you are going to be for, for county judge. It’s Harry Truman. He’s got a fine war record. He comes from a fine family. He’ll make a fine judge.”
Had he wished, Mike could also have stressed that Harry Truman was a Baptist and a Mason who could talk farming with farmers as no big-city Irish politician ever could, that Harry was of old pioneer stock, the son of an honest farmer and an honest road overseer, that Harry was a fresh face in county politics, and, not incidentally, known himself to be an honest and honorable man—strong attributes under any circumstances, but ideal for what the organization needed to win the country vote. Indeed, for the Pendergasts’ purposes, Harry Truman was just about ideal, a dream candidate, which is what led some to observe then, as later, that he offered more to the Pendergasts than they to him.
“Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window-dressing,” Harry’s friend Harry Vaughan would later explain, “and Truman was really window-dressing for him because he could say, ‘Well, there’s my boy Truman. Nobody can ever say anything about Truman. Everybody thinks he’s okay.’ ”
For Harry, the timing could not have been better. He badly needed rescuing. To some latter-day admirers and students of his career, the suggestion that he turned to politics in desperation, because of his business failure, would be unacceptable, a fiction devised to cast him in the worst possible light. It would be stressed that his interest in politics was longstanding, that the Pendergasts had come to him, not he to them, and that in any event their power then was by no means absolute, hardly enough to dictate a political destiny. And all this was true. Yet to Harry himself there was never much question about the actual state of his affairs or to whom he owed the greatest debt of gratitude.
“Went into business all enthusiastic. Lost all I had and all I could borrow,” he would write in a private memoir. “Mike Pendergast picked me up and put me into politics and I’ve been lucky.” Mike was nothing less than his “political mentor,” continued Harry. “I loved him as I did my own daddy.”
He remembered he had been standing behind the counter “feeling fairly blue” the day Mike and Jim came into the store. What he wished to make especially clear was not that the Pendergasts had played no part of consequence, or that he had little indebtedness to them, but that it was Mike, not Tom, the Big Boss, whose interest made the difference. Harry was not even to meet Tom Pendergast for some time to come.
The job of eastern judge paid $3,465 a year. If elected, Harry would serve two years.
His Army friends were nearly unanimous for the idea. Only a few tried to dissuade him. Eddie McKim, his former sergeant, told him he was crazy. When Harry sat down with Edgar Hinde, in Hinde’s Willys-Overland garage in Independence, to explain what he was about to do—grinning, as Hinde recalled—Hinde told him he wasn’t the political type, to which Harry responded, “Well, I’ve got to eat.”
To sample opinion among those of the older generation who had influence in Independence, Harry called on Colonel William Southern, editor of the Examiner. Colonel Southern, whose rank was strictly honorary, was the father of May Southern Wallace, Bess’s brother George’s wife, which, in a manner of speaking, made him one of the family, as well as someone whose goodwill and backing could matter significantly. A short, pink-faced, cigar-chewing man with a goatee, who customarily wore his hat at his desk, the colonel listened patiently to Harry, then told him what a fool he would be to “mess up” his life with politics. “I told him all the bad effect a life of chronic campaigning could have on a man,” he would later recount. “I told him how poor were its rewards…how undermining the constant need for popular approval could be to a man’s character.” Harry, smiling, only shook his head and said he had made up his mind.
What opinions Bess had, what her mother was saying privately, or Mamma Truman thought, are not recorded. Ethel Noland, it is known, strongly approved and would later explain Harry’s willingness to take up with the Pendergasts as succinctly as anyone would: “They always like to pick winners, and they endorsed him. And, indeed, if he hadn’t been endorsed by the machine he couldn’t have run. He was very grateful to them….”
IV
Candidate Truman opened his campaign two months short of his thirty-eighth birthday, March 8, 1922, at a rousing, foot-stamping rally of war veterans in an auditorium at Lee’s Summit. About three hundred people turned out for speeches, free cigars, and music, and to see Harry Truman launched, ostensibly, as the American Legion candidate, an idea acclaimed as admirably new and progressive. (“If they [the veterans] want to mix in politics it is their right and when they take such matters into their hands they will settle affairs of state as they settled the Kaiser’s in France,” said the Lee’s
Summit Journal.) The Battery D “Irish bunch” were there in force, along with a “sprinkling” of Pendergast people. Harry, when introduced by former Colonel E. M. Stayton, another veteran of the Argonne, said he was willing to run and was only just able to say that, so “thoroughly rattled” was he by stage fright. “That first meeting was a flop for me,” he would recall long years afterward. “I was scared worse than I was when I first came under fire in 1918.” But his speech was all the crowd wanted. The highlight of the evening came when Ethel Lee Buxton of Kansas City, who had been a Red Cross entertainer in France, sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” then closed with “Mother Machree.”
Another evening Harry spoke at Grandview, another from a rough wooden platform in front of the Hickman’s Mills church, and on neither occasion was he able to say much more than that he was in the race and welcomed the support of his friends. At Hickman’s Mills the introduction was made by his old neighbor O. V. Slaughter, who had headed the Jackson County Red Cross during the war and was now president of the Grandview Bank, the kind of man who knew senators and governors, yet remained “strictly and primarily” a farmer. Gray-bearded, he looked like an old-style patriarch, and though seldom known to speak in public, he was considered highly persuasive when he did. One line only would be remembered from his remarks. “I knew Harry Truman before he was born,” he said, and to others who had known John and Matt Truman, or who, like Slaughter, remembered Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, no stronger endorsement could have been spoken. Reportedly there were only three votes in the precinct against Harry.
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