Even in the depths of the Depression’s worst years, Kansas City was enjoying a building boom. A new thirty-four-story Power & Light Building, the tallest skyscraper in Missouri, stood over the city like a shining statement of faith. Swinging his car out of the driveway each morning, heading to town on Van Horne Road, Judge Truman would see it rising proudly against the horizon, the very picture of progress.
A new Nelson Art Gallery was under construction at a cost of $3 million. As part of Kansas City’s Ten-Year Plan, work began on a magnificent municipal auditorium that would fill an entire block, include an arena seating twelve thousand and an elegant music hall. A new police building was also part of the plan, along with a new waterworks system and a new public market. A few blocks from Judge Truman’s skyscraper courthouse, a still larger City Hall was going up.
Compared to other cities, the Kansas City outlook was confident and expansive. There were jobs, and local government—the organization—was providing most of them. Under the direction of City Manager Henry McElroy, thousands were put to work with picks and shovels, while heavy machinery was left standing by unused, so that more men could be employed. (McElroy would later claim it was the Kansas City make-work program that inspired the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the WPA.) One seemingly endless project involved paving mile after mile of Brush Creek with a thick bed of Pendergast’s Ready-Mixed concrete.
If Judge Truman felt besieged by job applicants in these early Depression years, his was a small burden compared to what T.J. faced. The lines outside the yellow-brick building on Main Street began gathering before dawn most weekdays and by mid-morning stretched two or three blocks. He saw as many people as possible, on a first-come-first-served basis, no matter who they were, keeping the interviews to a few minutes at most, beginning about nine and ending promptly at noon when he stopped for lunch. Rarely was anyone sent away feeling empty-handed. Invariably courteous, Pendergast would listen attentively, ask a few questions, then scrawl a note on a slip of paper requesting somebody somewhere in one or another city or county organization, or in one of his own enterprises, to consider the needs of the bearer “and oblige,” these final two words seeming to carry the full weight of his command. Actually, it depended on which color pencil he used. If the note was written in red, his “and oblige” meant the applicant should be given a job or granted a favor without delay. If, however, the Big Boss wrote in blue, then this was only someone to keep in mind should anything turn up. If the note was written with an ordinary lead pencil, the bearer was nobody to bother with.
When a reporter questioned Pendergast whether jobholders were ever asked to donate to the organization at election time, he said, “Why shouldn’t they be? That’s how they got their jobs.”
Harry loved to tell the story of the day when there was a particularly large crowd waiting to see Pendergast, and his gatekeeper, “Cap” Matheus, went out to say that if there was anyone in line who had anything to give Tom, he should come directly in. But no one moved.
The old Pendergast policy that politics was chiefly a business of making friends placed no limits because of ethnic background, religion, or race. To be a Democrat was to be a Democrat. Tolerance was good politics. And while less was done to alleviate suffering in the desperate Negro wards, the attitude of the Pendergast organization was seen by black people as progress. As one of them remembered, “The machine did small favors mainly, but small favors were better than no favors at all.”
Business people had few quibbles about the organization or the man who ruled it. Taxes were low. With a phone call or two, a talk with T.J. or young Jim, red tape wondrously dissolved, projects went forward. People in business found they could get quick, reliable answers to important questions, that problems with the city could be resolved with amazing dispatch. The comment most often heard about Tom Pendergast was that “he got things done.”
Even the editors of the Star at this point were impressed by the executive ability of City Manager McElroy, a judgment they lived to regret. Kansas City probably had “the most efficient city government in its history,” said the Star in 1930. Presiding Judge Truman was frequently cited as an exemplary public official.
But others, too, commanded respect and deservedly. Harry Truman was not, as sometimes implied later, the sole exception-to-the-rule in a wholly nefarious crowd. Jim Pendergast was able and honest and had, as remembered his priest, Monsignor Arthur Tighe, a remarkable “kind of gentleness about him for being a politician.” Attorney James P. Aylward, T.J.’s friend and adviser, and chairman of the Democratic County Committee, was astute, hardworking, and well regarded within Kansas City professional circles.
Even Pendergast himself had lately acquired some of the trappings of respectability, a degree of polish unimaginable in earlier times. He dressed now in conservative, well-tailored suits. He and his wife had been to Paris. T.J. would expound on his love of Paris, without apology. He had developed a great fondness for French cooking, his friends knew. His new home on Ward Parkway, in the Country Club district, Kansas City’s loveliest residential section, was an exact copy of a house he had seen in France, a red-brick mansion in the Regency style, perfect in every detail.
Life had never been better. And by the close of the year, with Prohibition ended in December 1933, the Pendergasts would be back in the legal liquor business again. Best of their line was “Old 1889 Brand,” named for the year Tom first arrived in Kansas City. It was seven-and-a-half-year-old Kentucky bourbon, one hundred proof.
That gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, the sale of narcotics, and racketeering were a roaring business in Kansas City was all too obvious. Nor did anyone for a moment doubt that the ruling spirit behind it all remained Tom Pendergast. It was the Pendergast heyday. Never, not even in the gaudy era following the Civil War, had the city known such “wide-open” times. Forty dance halls and more than a hundred nightclubs were in operation, offering floor shows, dancers, comedians, and some of the best blues and jazz to be heard anywhere in America—the Bennie Moten Orchestra at the Reno, and later at the Reno, Count Basie and his Kansas City Seven doing “The One O’clock Jump,” trumpeter Hot Lips Page at the Subway, blues singer Julia Lee at the Yellow Front Saloon. Musicians from all over the country, most of them black and all hard hit by the Depression, came to Kansas City, knowing there was work. “Every joint had music,” one of them remembered, “every joint.”
This, too, was heartland America, no less than the old-fashioned, country-town peace and quiet of nearby Independence.
“Dance All Night Long!” said an advertisement in the Star for the Musicians Ball at the Labor Temple, in the spring of 1932, at which Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, Walter Page and his Blue Devils, the Nighthawks—in all, eight orchestras—played until sunup.
There were no closing hours. At the Subway, in a basement at 18th and Vine, thirty to forty musicians would “crowd in” to play. “Everybody played that wanted to play…and every night you could find music there…. It never really did open until after 1:00 [in the morning].” “A cracker town, but a happy town,” Count Basie remembered.
The red-light district ran for blocks, on 13th and 14th Streets. One high-priced place called the Chesterfield Club offered a businessman’s lunch served by waitresses clad only in high heels and cellophane aprons.
A lifetime resident of Kansas City named John Doohan, trying years later to describe the rollicking city it had been, would suddenly stop in mid-sentence, realizing how much he missed it. “See…there just wasn’t any law,” said Doohan, whose job in the research library at the Star required keeping watch on the unfolding history of the city.
The clubs stayed open all night. Liquor flowed. There was a band in every place…and gambling, even around the Star [at Grand and 17th]…. On the northeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. On the southeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. Two doors north of the Star, there were two bookie joints. And then as you went on Main, there were
gambling places at 31st…at 31st and Prospect, 34th and Main….
Gambling places…Prostitution—wide open. Knocking on windows. Two bits, quarter and fifty-cent places.
Whenever questioned about this, Tom Pendergast customarily replied, “Well, the rich men have their clubs, where they can gamble and have a good time. Would you deny the poor man an equal right?”
“Ours is a fine, clean, and well-ordered town,” Pendergast would insist repeatedly, and John Doohan, too, would remember there being little fear of violent crime.
I will say the town was safe. You never got mugged. You could walk around downtown any time of the day or night. You could walk through the colored district, and there weren’t any problems. I mean things were…you know, there wasn’t much crime. But there were the rackets.
Others, including respected, proper citizens, conceded privately that “wide open” was good business, particularly in hard times.
The head of the rackets, one of T.J.’s acknowledged “chief lieutenants,” was a small, dapper Italian-American with a master-of-ceremonies personality named Johnny Lazia, who had earlier served a prison sentence for armed robbery. Lazia was the King of Little Italy, where, in 1926, he had seized power from T.J.’s old Ninth Ward leader, Mike Ross. T.J. had accepted Lazia as part of the organization largely because he had no choice and apparently with the understanding that Lazia would keep Al Capone and other out-of-town gangsters clear of the city. “Our Johnny,” it seems, relied on his charm as well as his power, and he and Boss Tom soon were “fast friends.” Also, importantly, T.J. had by this time become a heavy gambler on horse races and so was in continuous need of such “fast friends.” At the office at 1908 Main, he had installed his own direct wire to tracks in the East, even set up betting cages at the rear of the clubroom. Across the Missouri River in Platte County he had established his own race track, the Riverside Park Jockey Club, where he also kept his own stable of horses.
In return for his support in the Ninth Ward, Lazia was to have control over liquor and gambling in the city, as well as a say in hiring policies at the police department. Allegedly, Lazia even had his own office at the police department. A federal agent sent to investigate Lazia’s activities reported to Washington that when he called Kansas City police headquarters, Lazia answered the phone.
Lazia, too, knew how to be a friend in need. When former Senator James Reed’s companion (later wife) Nell Donnelly was kidnapped in 1931, it was to Lazia that Reed went immediately for help, and Lazia who brought her safely home. Two years later, in 1933, when City Manager McElroy’s stylish twenty-five-year-old daughter Mary was kidnapped, it was again “Our Johnny” who came to the rescue, this time producing the ransom money, $30,000 in cash, which he collected with astonishing speed from friends among the gamblers.
Through all this, only one brave voice was raised in protest, Samuel S. Mayerberg, the rabbi of Temple B’nai Jehudah, who in the spring of 1932 decided to speak out before a government study club, a meeting of perhaps forty people, most of whom were women. It was then that a reform movement began, though few, and clearly no one in the organization, seemed particularly concerned, nor was there a rush of good citizens to join his ranks. “One of my hardest jobs was not fighting the underworld,” Mayerberg later said, “but in using my energy and time to convince thoroughly nice people, honorable men…that as respectable citizens, they ought to be in it [the fight] also.”
When federal investigators started proceedings against Lazia for income tax evasion in 1933, T.J. wrote at once to Jim Farley, the new Postmaster General in Washington and part of FDR’s inner circle, to stress how extremely important Lazia was to him. “Now Jim,” he wrote, “Lazia is one of my chief lieutenants and I am more sincerely interested in his welfare than anything you might be able to do for me now or in the future….”
But then, only weeks later, came the stunning news of Kansas City’s “Union Station Massacre,” one of the most sensational atrocities of the whole gangster era. On Saturday, June 17, 1933, three notorious bankrobbers and killers, Verne Miller, Adam Richetti, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd, armed with submachine guns, attempted to rescue another “public enemy,” Frank (“Jelly”) Nash, as Nash, in handcuffs, was being escorted by law officers from a train to a waiting car at Union Station, to make the short drive to the federal prison at Leavenworth. The three killers, who were waiting in the parking lot outside the station, made their move as Nash was being put in the car. One officer turned and fired with a pistol. The three then opened up with machine guns, killing five men—two Kansas City policemen, an agent of the FBI, a police chief from Oklahoma, and Nash—after which the killers vanished. And though none of the three had any known ties to Kansas City, a local racketeer named Michael James (“Jimmy Needles”) LaCapra would later testify that it was Johnny Lazia who arranged to get them safely out of town. True or not, Lazia became the most talked-about man in Kansas City, drawing more popular attention even than Tom Pendergast.
In what was to be a long, often trying, and continuously eventful public life, some days for Harry Truman would stand out always as moments of great personal satisfaction. One was Tuesday, September 5, 1933, in the middle of what otherwise was a particularly difficult and uncertain time for him.
On Tuesday, September 5, the completed new $200,000 county courthouse at Independence—the fifth so-called “remodeling” of the building since 1836—was dedicated with ceremonies and festivities that began early in the morning and stretched on into the night. There were horseshoe-pitching contests, an old fiddlers’ contest, a Negro dancing contest, music from seven marching bands and seven drum corps, a bathing beauty contest, a horse show, a street dance, a parade of floats by local merchants, and a historic pageant. The formal dedication itself took place in the afternoon, beginning at two by the old four-faced courthouse clock (it, too, newly refurbished and set now in a colonial cupola), and included speeches by Governor Park and Judge Harry S. Truman.
The day was warm and sunny, the large crowd in good spirits, everybody enjoying the occasion. The homely Victorian scruffiness of the old courthouse had been transformed into something larger, more spacious, and in a style vaguely like that of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, though the architect, Harry’s brother-in-law Fred Wallace, was quoted in the day’s special edition of the Examiner saying that his inspiration for the north and south porticos had been the Greek “Temple of the Winds.”
The new building had little of the character of what had stood there before, but was neat and trim, it seemed, with its pink brick and columned porticos, its cupola and refurbished clock and marble lobby—a clear improvement to nearly everyone and to those especially who would work there, numbers of whom were looking down from the open windows upstairs as Judge Truman, in a white suit, delivered his brief, unexceptional remarks from the speaker’s platform. The Examiner called the building “dignified, spacious, symmetrical” and praised the leadership of the man who, more than any other, had made it possible.
“During the six and one half years of his administration as presiding judge, Harry S. Truman, with the hearty cooperation of his associates on the county bench, has done a number of remarkably big things that will occupy a large place in the history of the county,” said the paper, which then went on to list “a few”: a $10 million road and bridge system built by two bond issues, a modern hospital at the Jackson County Home for the Aged and Infirm, a Girls’ Home for Negroes on the County Farm, a new Kansas City Courthouse estimated to cost $4 million, and now the $200,000 Independence Courthouse. It was a record unmatched in the history of the county.
During these years of strenuous service to Jackson County [the Examiner also wrote of Judge Truman] he has found time to serve as president of the National Old Trails Association, an office he still holds. He has become widely known throughout Missouri, and many of his friends have expressed the opinion that he will fill the office of governor someday….
But to Judge Truman himself, his future re
mained a large mystery and a worry.
Later in the fall of 1933, outraged that the Roosevelt administration had appointed a Republican as director of the federal reemployment service in Missouri, Tom Pendergast complained to Washington, with the immediate result that the Republican was fired and the job given to Judge Truman. Having no wish to relinquish his place on the county court any sooner than necessary, Harry agreed to serve in this new federal post without pay. He waived the $300-a-month salary and began driving to and from the federal office in Jefferson City, halfway across the state, twice a week. The task was to channel unemployed laborers into jobs with contractors on federal public works, and, with his experience in county projects, he was ideally suited. The long drives also provided time to think about the future.
For Pendergast it was another giant step. In a few months The Missouri Democrat (a paper controlled by the organization) could report that 100,000 men and nearly 10,000 women were employed in the state under the new federal (Democratic) program.
Harry found himself reporting to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s public works official, and traveling to Washington on government business, something he had never done before.
At long last Harry made up his mind. He would run for Congress, he decided, against the wishes of his wife, who had liked the sound of the collector’s job, with its high pay and security, and who greatly preferred staying in Independence. In Congress, Harry told her, he would have the chance for some “power in the nation.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 437