He set off on another speaking tour, town to town. “I told the voters we would let the contracts to low bidders and build under the supervision of bipartisan engineers.” It was early spring, the mud season, so no one needed reminding of the condition the roads were in. Every voter received a map showing where the improvements would come.
The bond issue was enlarged to include a new courthouse and jail for Kansas City, a new county hospital, and a home for retarded children. The courthouse, jail, and children’s home were voted down. The roads and hospital carried, the vote taking place on Harry’s forty-fourth birthday, May 8, 1928. It was a stunning victory—the vote in favor of the bond issue was three to one. Good as his word, he let a first contract of $400,000 to a construction firm from South Dakota. Other work soon went to other firms not usually chosen for public projects in Jackson County.
The roads were built, and extremely well. Five years later, in 1933, the Examiner could report:
It is now generally recognized that every promise made at that time [1928] by the County Court…and by General E. M. Stayton and N. T. Veatch, Jr., the bipartisan board of engineers, selected to supervise the construction of the system of roads…has been carefully fulfilled. Every road proposed in the plans submitted has been built exactly as promised, and all well within the money voted and the estimates of the engineers.
Trees were planted along the sides, as Harry remembered from France, seven thousand seedling elms and poplars in all, though to his sorrow, Jackson County seemed as yet unready for the look of the Loire Valley. The farmers mowed them down.
He repeatedly stressed the practical in much of what he said, but he attempted the trees and, with the roads completed, he published a handsomely designed booklet, Results of County Planning, showing in more than a hundred pages of photographs what beauty there was in the landscape of the county to be enhanced, not destroyed, by progress, and for the benefit of everyone. “Here were hundreds of square miles…hundreds of thousands of people…each dependent on the other…and only a plan and a determined spirit needed to develop these opportunities and make each available to an understanding of the other!” In time, the report continued, would come “parks and recreation grounds at points easily available to all the county population—the healthful places of diversion that every large and growing population needs for its own pleasure and for the sake of coming generations.” The pictures were of schools, farms, industry, main streets and the mushrooming Kansas City skyline, bridges over the Missouri, the Blue and Little Blue, and mile after mile of roads through rolling countryside, where so much pioneer history had taken place. The interest in history, felt so strongly by the presiding judge, was all through the book. A caption under a photograph of Raytown’s main street read: “Raytown, once a favorite place for assembling teams for Santa Fe caravans, also had the distinction of a home nearby which was framed and cut in Kentucky and shipped here by water—the Jesse Barnes home, 2½ miles southwest of Raytown. A part of the house is still standing.” Another photograph showed the path worn by the wagons where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Big Blue. Under another, of a frame house set among old elms, the caption read: “Since 1867, Mrs. Martha E. Truman has lived on this farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard. She was born in Jackson County in 1852. She is the mother of Judge Harry S. Truman, presiding judge of the County Court.”
“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller or Mellon…I’d make this section (six counties) the world’s real paradise,” he wrote privately. As it was, the road system was completed on schedule and, almost unimaginably, for less than the original estimate.
Another bond issue was voted, for more roads, for the Kansas City Courthouse, and for a total remodeling of the Independence Courthouse. The new Kansas City Courthouse, to replace a Victorian firetrap with creaking elevator and oiled wood floors, would be the county’s part in an extensive Ten-Year Plan that would include a new City Hall and civic auditorium. It was among the most ambitious city projects in the country and one championed vigorously by both the Star and, Tom Pendergast, which meant it was certain to go forward.
Brisk about his business as always, seemingly tireless, Harry insisted that everything be done just so and concerned himself with details of a kind others would never have bothered with. Raised on the idea that appearances mattered, as an expression of self-respect, raised on the old premise that any job worth doing was worth doing well, ambitious for his community and for himself, he was determined to give the county a courthouse in Kansas City second to none.
Unsure of exactly what he wanted in the new building, he decided he wouldn’t know until he had educated himself. Thus he set off by automobile—in his own car, at his own expense—on an amazing cross-country tour to look at public buildings of all kinds and to talk to their architects. He traveled thousands of miles—as far west as Denver and Houston, east all the way to Brooklyn, south as far as Baton Rouge—and took with him, for company and to help with the driving, a man named Fred Canfil, whose companionship he apparently enjoyed, but who to a great many people seemed to personify nearly everything odious about Kansas City politics. By appearance, manner, by reputation, Canfil was the typical Pendergast roughneck, “a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar, and uncouth person…a low ward heeler of the worst type,” in the words of testimony that would be taken some years later by agents of the FBI. He was considered a bully, a braggart, “a big bag of wind,” overbearing and crude. Six feet tall and built like a heavyweight wrestler, he had a dark, glowering expression nearly all of the time. He wore the brim of his hat low over his eyes and stood with his legs apart, feet firmly planted, as if braced to block a doorway. He was called peculiar and secretive, “a mystery man,” and as time went on, because of his booming voice, “Whispering Fred.” And it was whispered of “Whispering Fred” that he had a criminal record.
People who had worked with him for years had no idea where he lived or where he came from, whether even he was married. Earlier, before going to work for Judge Truman, Canfil had kept an office in the Board of Trade Building, but there had been no name on the door or telephone listed. He drove a good car, his suits were custom-tailored. Yet no one knew what he did for a living. One prominent Kansas City Democrat who was considering Canfil for a job tried in vain to find out more and finally asked him face to face, “What the hell do you do for a living?” Canfil only laughed and said lots of people would like to know. Refusing to give up, the man asked the police commissioner, as a favor, to put a tail on Canfil. But after several days the police could report only that Canfil had lunch regularly in a booth at the Savoy Grill with Harry Truman and Ted Marks. (Probably this was in 1925, when Harry was selling memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club and had his own office in the Board of Trade Building, as did Ted Marks, who no doubt made the good suits Canfil wore.)
The facts about Canfil, as Harry Truman knew, were these:
He was Harry’s own age and had grown up on a farm in Kansas. Unmarried, he lived with a sister in a small house on East 77 Terrace, Kansas City. Until the war, he had worked briefly as treasurer for a circus and for several years ran the service department of a Cadillac agency in Shreveport, Louisiana, his mother’s hometown. At the time he had the office in the Board of Trade Building, Canfil was working as a rent collector for a Kansas City landlord. Contrary to rumor, he had no criminal record.
How long he had been involved with the Pendergast organization is not known, but, according to later testimony, it was his association with Judge Truman that had kept him in good graces with the organization and not the other way around.
Harry had met Canfil first in the Army. After being elected to the court, he hired Canfil as a tax investigator. Harry liked him, liked how he went about his work. “Fred’s a little rough, but Fred’s all right; he’s as loyal as a bulldog,” he would explain long afterward, recalling the years Canfil had been at his side. The loud mouth and crude language were largely a front. As a soldier Canfil had been superb, rising from sergeant to lie
utenant by dint of his own merit, a point that counted greatly with Harry, and one that later investigators would find amply documented in Canfil’s service record. “Character excellent right along and recommended as an unusually efficient officer,” read one entry in the file at the War Department. “He generally worked twelve to fifteen hours a day,” read another. “But I never saw him worn out or tired. He was ever full of enthusiasm and eager for the next task….”
It was in Shreveport, Canfil’s old place of business, that Harry saw a building that he admired more than any others on the tour, the massive new Caddo Parish Courthouse, and decided to hire its architect, Edward F. Neild, as a consultant. The building was in what would later be known as the Art Deco style. Though disdainful of the “modern” in painting, Harry was very definite in his admiration of Art Deco.
As he would have trees for his roads, so he determined now to have an equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson for the front of the courthouse. In Charlottesville, Virginia, he saw one of Stonewall Jackson that he thought exceptional and at once commissioned its sculptor, Charles L. Keck of New York. Concerned about historical accuracy—and out of long affection for “Old Andy”—he drove to the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, to make measurements of Jackson’s clothing. He would have his hero’s statue no larger or smaller than life. “I wanted a real man on a real horse.”
The Kansas City Times declared the new road system “a distinct achievement that would be creditable to any county in the United States,” which it was. The Star lauded the “extraordinary record” of Presiding Judge Truman. He was elected the president of the Greater Kansas City Plan Association, made the director of the National Conference of City Planning.
With his reputation fast growing he seemed to everyone who knew him still the cheery, optimistic “same old Harry,” for whom work was a tonic. But it was not that way entirely. He had become so tense, so keyed up, as he wrote Bess from one of his journeys, “that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk.” He loathed the sound of the telephone and at home or his office the telephone rang incessantly—“and every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity on him and furnish him some county money without much return.” He suffered from headaches, dizziness, and insomnia. As time went on and the stress of the job increased, the headaches grew more severe. The telephone and headaches were among the chief reasons he went away so often, on his cross-country surveys of public buildings or to Masonic meetings or to summer Army camp, where, interestingly, the Army doctors found him exceptionally fit. One said he was as physically sound as a twenty-four-year-old.
“I haven’t had a headache since I came,” he wrote to Bess three days after arriving at Camp Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1927. “This day has been successful. I have a letter from you, have been horseback riding, watched the Battery fire nine problems, had an hour swim, a good meal and am tired as I can be without any headache,” he told her another day. Some of the other officers in the reserve, like Harry Vaughan, wondered at times why they bothered keeping up with it. “We didn’t have any equipment,” Vaughan would remember. “We didn’t have any enlisted personnel, we had no materiel…we just didn’t have anything.” But for Harry the chance to be outdoors, the exercise, the companionship without the pressures of politics, were a godsend.
He had become a terrible worrier. He was anxious about little Margaret, who was too thin and pale, too often ill. He began taking medicine for his nerves. He worried about money. He worried about possible entrapment with women, an old device for destroying politicians. Once, responding to a call for a meeting in a room at the Baltimore Hotel, he asked Edgar Hinde to go along, just in case. When they knocked at the room, Hinde remembered, a blond woman in a negligée opened the door. Harry spun on his heels and ran back down the hall, disappearing around the corner. Hinde thought it was a fear verging on the abnormal.
I’ve been around Legion conventions with him. He’d have his room there, [and] naturally, everybody would kind of gravitate to his room. If some fellow brought a woman in there, or his wife even, I’ve seen him pick up his hat and coat and take off out of there and that would be the last you’d see of him until those women left. He just didn’t want any women around his room in a hotel…. He had a phobia on it.
“Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women.
“I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”
On April 30, 1929, after Harry had assigned something over $6 million in road contracts, a judgment by default for $8,944.78 was brought against him for his old haberdashery debts. His mother, meantime, had been forced to take another mortgage on the farm. Yet when one of his new roads cut 11 acres from her property, he felt he must deny her the usual reimbursement from the county, as a matter of principle, given his position. Had he not been the presiding judge, her payment would have been $1,000 an acre or $11,000.
He was scrupulous over money almost to a fault, but also over the range of small favors and shortcuts, the expedient little “arrangements” by which politicians traditionally benefited—so much so that stories about him would be told for years.
A young man from Independence named Yancey Wasson, who worked for his cousin at Guy Wasson’s Fabric Company on Magee Trafficway in Kansas City, would remember Judge Truman coming in to buy seat covers for his car. The bill came to $32, but on instructions from his cousin, young Wasson said Judge Truman could forget the bill if he just arranged for the company to get some business on county cars and trucks. Harry gave him a look. “Son, I don’t do business that way,” he said, and paid the bill.
Sometime later, when Tom Pendergast ordered seat covers for his car that were to cost $65 and Yancey Wasson, calling at Pendergast’s office, made a similar offer, Pendergast, leaning back in his chair, said, “I think we can do that.”
“About two hours later,” Wasson recalled, “I walked out of the police garage with an order for 200 quick-change seat covers for 100 cars on the police register and an order for 20 front rubber mats.”
On September 2, 1929, seven weeks before the stock market crash, Mike Pendergast, whom Harry had “loved like a daddy,” died of heart failure. With the onset of the Depression, the pressures on Judge Truman, as the county’s chief executive, intensified dramatically, for the harder work was to find, the more farms and businesses failed, the more his county contracts and county employment mattered. Even the most insignificant jobs that he had to give out became plums. Friends and family were after him continually and at the very time he had to start cutting back on the payroll, since the county, too, was in trouble, as increasing numbers of people fell delinquent on taxes. At the end of the day when he had at last to fire two hundred county employees, he went home and became sick to his stomach.
With Nurse Kinnaman accompanying her, Bess had taken Margaret to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf, in the hope that a change of climate for a few weeks might restore the child’s health. To find a little peace and quiet for himself, and a night’s rest, Harry would drive to Grandview and sleep in his old bed over the kitchen, or arrange with the manager of a downtown hotel to give him a room without registering, “so no job holder who wants to stay on can see or phone me.”
The afternoon of Monday, November 3, 1930, on the eve of election day, an attempt was made to kidnap six-year-old Margaret from her first-grade classroom at the Bryant School on River Boulevard, just four blocks from home.
According to her teacher, Madeline Etzenhouser, an unknown middle-aged man who kept his hat on appeared at the door of the room shortly before the afternoon recess, saying he had come to pick up Judge Truman’s child, Mary Margaret. “I was a little curious about that,” Miss Etzenhouser later said, “since we always called her Margaret, never Mary Margaret. I also was puzzled because either Mrs. Truman or one of Margaret’s uncles always picked her up after school.” Telling
the man to wait, she hurried to the principal’s office. When she returned, the man was gone. “In a few minutes Mrs. Truman came into the room. She was panicky. I believe she thought Margaret was not there, and she was extremely relieved to find her all right.” Judge Truman and several deputy sheriffs arrived soon after. “It was quite a stir….”
The following day, election day, while Harry was out in the county visiting the precinct polls, Margaret and her mother, accompanied by the deputy sheriffs, were taken to a hotel in town to spend the day under close security. To what extent the incident was connected with politics, Bess and Harry could only wonder. Nothing further was learned. But Margaret was to be closely watched thereafter and the tragedy of the Lindbergh kidnapping two years later was deeply felt by the Trumans.
As he never let on at the time, Harry was in terrible turmoil over what he had found politics to be in reality. He was suffering from disillusionment and pangs of conscience such as he had never before known, all of which may have had a great deal to do with his headaches.
“While it looks good from the sidelines to have control and get your name in both papers every day and pictures every other day, it’s not a pleasant position,” he confided to Bess. “Politics should make a thief, a roué, and a pessimist of anyone,” he said in another letter, “but I don’t believe I am any of them….” But could he withstand the pressures?
Later would come a vivid, if fragmented, picture of what he was going through behind the scenes, described in occasional reminiscences, and in one long, extraordinary, private, undated memoir written on two or three different nights when he hid away alone in the Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City, pouring himself out on paper, writing page after page for no one but himself.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 434