As presiding judge, Elihu Hayes should have been the dominant figure and leader of the court, and by the Fifty-Fifty Agreement his Rabbit friends looked forward to an equal share in county jobs and every other form of largess under the court’s control. Things did not work out that way, however. It was Henry McElroy who took charge from the start and McElroy showed no desire to give anything to the Rabbits. With Judge Truman voting with him, there was not much to keep McElroy from having his way. (“He ran the court with my vote,” Harry later said.) The roster of road overseers was filled with Goats only. Goats were named to county jobs large and small. Rabbits already on the payroll were always the first to be fired.
The old adage of Andrew Jackson, that to the victors belong the spoils, was gospel again in Jackson County, Missouri. The decision had come down from the Pendergasts. Fifty-Fifty was finished. And though in hindsight Harry would see the peril in this, at the time he did not. He was preoccupied with being businesslike, concentrating on cost cuts, improvements in services, determined to perform as promised.
He also knew what pleasure the plight of the Rabbits was bringing to his mentor, Mike Pendergast.
“We ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economic basis,” Harry claimed later, and in truth the new court stood in striking contrast with what had gone on before under the renegade Miles Bulger. Under McElroy and Truman a county debt of more than a million dollars was cut in half. The county’s credit rating improved. So did county services and, most notably, the quality of work on the roads. Harry Truman, as he later boasted, made himself “completely familiar with every road and bridge…visited every state institution in which the county had patients.” Years of mismanagement and crooked contracts had produced roads so poorly constructed that they caved in like pie crusts. Bridges were inadequate or in sad repair. The improvements made now were impossible to ignore. Even the Kansas City Star had praise for what was happening under the crisp, efficient new county administration. And if Harry was taking McElroy’s cue on matters political, McElroy appeared no less dependent on Harry on practical questions. “When a road project or a bridge application is brought before the county court, here is what happens,” wrote one Republican. “Judge McElroy turns to Judge Truman and asks him what about it. Nine times out of ten Judge Truman already has been on the ground and knows all about the proposition. He explains it to the court. Judge McElroy then says, ‘All right, if you say so I move the work be done,’ and it is ordered.”
At a Triangle Club lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel, Judges Hayes, McElroy, and Truman were given a standing ovation. It seemed a new era had dawned.
But the job, Harry discovered, wasn’t enough to satisfy. To his surprise, he felt restless for more to do. He wanted other ways to make himself known, other associations beyond “the courthouse crowd.” He grew increasingly active in the Masons and the Army reserve. He became Deputy Grand Master of the 59th Masonic District of Jackson County. The summer of 1923 he spent two weeks on active duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, his first long separation from Bess since their wedding day. In September he enrolled in night courses at the Kansas City School of Law, where he studied hard (Blackstone, contracts, criminal law), keeping pages of notes. Only someone of extraordinary energy could have maintained the pace.
Meantime, life at home at 219 North Delaware—the Gates house, as Harry would always refer to it—went on quietly and privately. Bess had taken no part in his political campaign because, as known only within the family, she had suffered a second miscarriage. The first had occurred the spring of 1920, when prospects were still bright at the store, and nothing had been said then either. With friends Harry left no doubt that he and Bess wanted children but implied that if there was a problem it was with him. When a cousin, Ralph Truman, wrote from Springfield to say he had a new child, Harry responded, “I wish you would send me a pair of your old breeches to hang on the bed, maybe I can have some luck.”
His devotion to Bess was unstinting as ever and because of their separation the summer of 1923, when he was at Fort Leavenworth and they were again corresponding, it is known how much she, too, cared for her “Old Sweetness.”
“It is now 10:20 and I am in bed. There was a black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it myself—but that wasn’t the first time I had wished for you,” she wrote. “Lots and lots of good night kisses.”
She would wait for hours by the front window watching for the postman. A night toward the end of the two weeks was “the worst night yet.”
“You be a good girl and I’ll be a good boy,” he wrote. A week later he was saying he hoped he would never have to be away so long again. He was feeling “marvelous,” he told her, ready to come home and “lick all the Rabbits.”
As they both knew, she was already two months pregnant.
The arrival of the baby, in the midst of a snowstorm, Sunday, February 17, 1924, was, with the exception of his wedding day, the biggest event of Harry Truman’s life thus far, and the one bright moment in what otherwise was to be a bad year for him.
He had urged Bess to go to a hospital. She and her mother insisted the baby be born at home. Out of superstition that too much advance fuss could again bring disappointment, there was not even a crib or cradle at hand. The baby would spend the first days of life on pillows in a bureau drawer.
About noon, Harry was told to call the doctor, Charles E. Krimminger, a big red-faced man remembered for his huge hands—“hands as big as a frying pan”—who came in covered with snow and went directly upstairs. A practical nurse, Edna Kinnaman, arrived soon after and would remember Mrs. Wallace and Harry waiting patiently through the afternoon in the upstairs hall, the very proper Mrs. Wallace seated on a cedar chest, Harry in a chair looking amazingly composed.
Bess, according to Nurse Kinnaman, “got along beautifully.” It was a normal birth. The baby, a girl, weighed 7½ pounds. “We didn’t have to announce it [when the baby arrived]…because they heard her cry and the grandmother and daddy came into the room.” It was five o’clock. Harry called his mother and sister and told them the name would be Mary Margaret, after Mary Jane and Mrs. Wallace. The wife of a friend who saw him soon afterward said “his face just beamed.”
There had not been a baby in the old house since Madge Wallace’s own childhood. Now, for several months, until the death of Mrs. Gates that spring, there were four generations in residence. Little Margaret, as everybody was calling her, was more than just Bess and Harry’s firstborn, she was the delight and center of attention for great-grandmother, grandmother, four Wallace aunts and uncles in the adjoining houses to the rear who remained childless, Uncle Fred, who was still part of the household, and the two Noland sisters across the street. Her arrival changed the entire atmosphere of the family. For Harry, on the verge of forty, life had new meaning. Nurse Kinnaman remembered his devotion to the child was both remarkable and instantaneous.
For Democrats everywhere it was a dismal time. At the national convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden the delegates took a record 103 ballots to pick an unknown, unlikely Wall Street lawyer as their candidate for President, John W. Davis, who seemed destined to lose. A drive to nominate the colorful Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, had failed, along with a resolution to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. When William Jennings Bryan tried to speak, he was rudely shouted down. To the Jackson County delegation it was a pathetic show. The single ray of hope was Franklin Roosevelt, who, though crippled with polio, made the nominating speech for Smith. Tom Pendergast was “carried away” by it and said Roosevelt would have been the choice of the convention had he been physically able to withstand the campaign. “He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met,” Pendergast later declared.
The Republicans, to the surprise of no one, nominated Calvin Coolidge, who had assumed the presidency the year before, after the sudden death of Warren G. Harding. And though the Harding administration had left a trail of scandal, giving t
he Democrats a promising campaign issue, Coolidge, who sat out the campaign in the White House, was to win in November by a popular margin of nearly two to one.
If Judge Truman saw actual defeat in store when he began to campaign for reelection that spring, he never let on. As friends were to observe so many times in his life, Harry refused ever to look discouraged. The remedy of “Dr. A. Gloom Chaser” was not forgotten. “He kept his feelings to himself,” remembered a young Pendergast worker named Tom Evans, “and he was always very, very cheerful….”
The Shannon forces, bitter over how they had been treated, burning for revenge, lined up with the Ku Klux Klan to try to beat both McElroy and Truman in the primary—the fact that Joe Shannon was a Catholic, the fact that Shannon personally spoke out against the Klan at the national convention, all notwithstanding. When McElroy and Truman won in the primary, Shannon quietly decided to bolt the ticket in the fall and throw his support, with that of the Klan, to the Republicans.
That Harry Truman survived the primary, winning by more than 1,000 votes, was impressive under the circumstances, and due in good measure to all-out support from the Kansas City Star. Putting aside its distaste for Pendergast for the moment, the paper had declared candidates McElroy and Truman superior public servants. It seemed inconceivable, said the Star, that the Democrats could care more about “factional advantage” than efficiency in public office. “The record of the county court of Jackson County is refreshing…. Expenditures of the court last year were more than $640,000 less than those of the previous year. To date the deficit has been reduced nearly one half, and there is now a cash balance of more than a quarter of a million dollars.” Harry Truman, said the Independence Sentinel, was the very model of a public man. “To even talk about throwing him out of office after two years of faithful service would be to destroy the incentive for a public official to make good,” declared the paper, and the Star agreed, saying everyone who believed in good government should vote for Judge Harry Truman.
In the same issue of the Star the local head Klansman, Todd George, announced that his organization was “unalterably opposed” to Harry Truman. Later, Harry said the Klan had threatened to kill him. When the Klan staged a big outdoor, daylight rally at Lee’s Summit, Harry decided to drive out and confront them. Perhaps a thousand people were gathered, many of whom he knew. “I poured it into them,” he remembered. “Then I came down from the platform and walked through them to my car.” On the way home, he met another car headed for the rally filled with “my gang” armed with shotguns and baseball bats. Had they come earlier, he knew, things might have become very unpleasant.
The Republican nominee for eastern judge was Henry Rummel, the Independence harnessmaker who, years before, had made the special equipage for the team of red goats to pull the Truman children in a miniature farm wagon. Harry, who liked “old man” Rummel and respected him, said nothing against him in the campaign.
Rummel won. Harry was out of a job again, and McElroy also. Harry showed no sign of bitterness. The morning after the election, on a corner near the square, seeing a friend, Henry Chiles, who had worked hard with the Rabbits for Rummel, he crossed the street to shake hands and say there should be no hard feelings. When Chiles expressed regret over the part he had played in defeating Harry, saying he felt ashamed of himself, Harry told him to put it out of his mind. “You did what your gang told you and I did what my gang told me.” That was the way it was in politics.
Cousin Ralph Truman, in a letter of encouragement, said that were Harry to run again in two years he would win by a landslide, a conclusion Harry had already reached on his own.
In the intervening time, he became something of a man of affairs in Kansas City. From an office in the Board of Trade Building, he began selling memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club, working on commission, which, after expenses, came to approximately five dollars for every new member he recruited. In a year he had sold more than a thousand memberships and cleared $5,000, which, with a family to support and debts to pay, he greatly needed. Roads, highways, the new age of the automobile had become his specialty. He was named president of the National Old Trails Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to building highways along the country’s historic trails and to spreading the concept of history as a tourist attraction. (Writing from Kansas during one of many trips in behalf of the group, he told Bess, “This is almost like campaigning for President, except that the people are making promises to me instead of the other way around.”) He kept up contacts with old friends, stayed active in the Masons and the Army reserve. Only his interest in law school seemed to suffer. After nearly two years of work there, he dropped out.
In times past, during the early days of the Morgan Oil Company, he had been described as constantly surrounded by people—“people, people, people.” It was the same again now. Ted Marks would remember him everlastingly on the move. “If one thing did not work—he’d get into something else right away. He was never idle, always operating.”
One thing he got into was another of his mistakes. With Colonel Stayton, Spencer Salisbury, and several others he took over a tottering little bank called the Citizens Security, in Englewood, adjacent to Independence. He and his partners soon discovered they had been lied to about its assets. Reporting the situation at once, they got out as quickly as possible, selling their interest to new management. No one made money in the transaction. There is no evidence of wrongdoing. But the bank failed soon afterward and its new president, B. M. Houchens, a brother of Harry’s high school classmate Fielding Houchens, killed himself in his garage. To many people the whole episode seemed shadowy and left bad memories.
A further venture involved selling stock in the new Community Savings and Loan Association of Independence, and in this, too, Spencer Salisbury was in league—a sign, many were to say later, that Harry was not always the best judge of character when it came to his friends. Another of the Argonne brotherhood, Salisbury belonged to an old, well-to-do Independence family and was a lifelong operator, lively, talkative, and “smart,” by reputation, though “a little slick.” Tall and spare, he was known to those who knew him best as “Snake-eye” Salisbury. Even his own sister would remember him as “kind of a cold bird.” Asked long afterward why Harry ever associated himself with the man, Edgar Hinde replied, “Anybody who’s ever been a friend of his…they’ve got to hit him right in the face before he’ll drop them. And I think that’s one of Harry’s big faults.”
Salisbury was cheating him in the business, Harry concluded after a while, and so withdrew, saying nothing publicly. Only in private did he vent his anger, writing some years later that Salisbury “used me for his own ends, robbed me, got me into a position where I couldn’t shoot him without hurting a lot of innocent bystanders, and laughed at me. It nearly makes me a pessimist.” He had never had an enemy before.
Seeing Harry Truman go on to bigger and better things in later years, Salisbury would refer to him as “a no-good bastard.” But Truman by then had used his influence in Washington to put federal investigators on to Salisbury’s subsequent business activities in Independence, with the result that Salisbury spent fifteen months in Leavenworth prison. In turn, a few years after that, it was Salisbury, an avowed member of the Klan, who told reporters that Harry Truman had definitely joined the Klan, which was a lie and potent enough to carry far.
Between times, in the years 1925 and ’26, Harry kept in close touch with Jim and Mike Pendergast. On pleasant evenings he would drive into town to sit and talk for hours on Mike’s big front porch on Park Avenue. Mike thought Harry should run next time for county collector, an appealing prospect since the job offered an inordinately high salary of $10,000 plus allotted fees that could mean that much again. But then Mike took Harry to meet Tom, who said he had already promised the job to someone who had been with the organization longer than Harry. Tom thought that Harry, with his experience on the court, would be better suited for presiding judge, which had a salary of $6,000. Mi
ke advised Harry to fight for the collector’s job, if that was what he wanted, but Harry thought it better to do as Tom wished.
For Harry, this apparently was the first face-to-face encounter with the Big Boss. It took place early in 1926, in Tom’s office at 1908 Main Street, the new headquarters for the Jackson Democratic Club, a nondescript two-story building of pale yellow brick that Tom had had put up beside the small Monroe Hotel, which he also owned. The neighborhood was one of drab little stores, cheap restaurants, and machine shops, anything but a center of power by appearances. The big banks, office towers, and department stores, all that visitors took as emblematic of Kansas City wealth and vitality, were six or seven blocks to the north. The club’s meeting room and Tom’s office were on the second floor, over a wholesale linen supply store. The aura of the narrow stairway, a flight of twenty wooden steps, was about that of the approach to a dance studio or tailor shop.
So it was settled. Harry would run for presiding judge, and since the Pendergasts and Joe Shannon had by now patched up their differences, there was never much doubt about the outcome. Harry ran in the primary unopposed. In November, he and the entire Democratic slate swept into office. Henry McElroy became the new city manager of Kansas City. As presiding judge, Harry Truman himself had real authority at last.
VI
The term of office was four years, rather than two, and he served two consecutive terms, eight years, from January 1927 to January 1935. His performance was outstanding, as judged by nearly everyone—civic leaders, business people (Republicans included), fellow politicians, the press, students of government (then and later) and, emphatically, by the electorate. In the 1926 election he won by 16,000 votes. When he ran again for presiding judge in 1930, his margin of victory was 58,000.
Something unusual had happened, said the Independence Examiner halfway through his first term: “No criticism or scandals of any importance have been brought with the county court as a center and no political charges of graft and corruption have been made against it.” The Star praised him for his “enthusiastic devotion to county affairs.” Harry Truman was efficient, known to be always informed. “Here was a man you could talk to that knew what was going on, and knew what ought to be done about it,” said a representative of the Kansas City Civic Research Institute. At a conference on better state and local government sponsored by the University of Missouri at Columbia, an editor of the St. Louis Star-Times noted that Judge Truman was the only Missouri official present who could discuss administrative problems on an equal basis with visiting experts.
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