The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  “It’s a very simple thing when you come down to it,” Boss Tom Pendergast said. “There’s people that need things, lots of ’em, and I see to it that they get ’em. I go to my office on South Main Street in Kansas City at seven o’clock in the morning and I stay there when I’m in town till about six o’clock at night and during that time I see maybe 200, maybe 300 people. One needs a half a ton of coal. Another woman’s gotta get a job for her boy. I see to it that they get those things. That’s all there is to it.”

  He left out one piece of information, the key to machine politics: in return for favors, people would be in Pendergast’s debt. Which meant he told them how to vote, so he controlled elections throughout Jackson County. It was Boss Tom Pendergast—racehorse gambler, saloon owner, the “Big Fellow” and “Democratic Czar” of Kansas City—who really had his fingers on the county purse strings.

  The Pendergasts were fending off a challenge from a rival machine run by a Democratic politician named Joe Shannon. Pendergast’s faction of the Democratic Party was called the Goats, while Shannon controlled the Rabbits. The race for eastern judge in Jackson County in 1922 became a contest between the two, and inexperienced Harry Truman found himself a cog in a heated battle of the machines. On August 1, 1922, voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, due to the Pendergast versus Shannon showdown. Truman won by fewer than 300 votes (4,230 to 3,951 for the top Rabbit candidate), and so at age thirty-eight he began a new career as a rural politician.

  It is highly likely that the Pendergasts had engineered the win. As Truman scholar Robert H. Ferrell once wrote: “Certainly Mike and Tom Pendergast used repeaters [repeat voters] . . . They not only took care that absent voters had ballots cast for them, they even voted the dead—a well-known quip on election day was, ‘Now is the time for all good cemeteries to come to the aid of the party.’”

  Still, Truman emerged victorious and unscathed. Despite what may have occurred behind the scenes, he himself had proven a rare breed—an honest politician—and he had run a campaign that would have made his father proud. As he wrote his cousin Ralph Truman at the time: “I won the dirtiest and hardest fought campaign Eastern Jackson Co. has ever seen without money or promises.”

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  Mornings in Independence found Truman striding the cobbles of Independence Square, greeting locals with his affable smile. Two words—“Morning, Judge”—became part of his daily routine and his identity. He carried a badge now, the badge of a Jackson County judge, and he also started taking classes at Kansas City Law School (though he never got any degree).

  In 1924, after his first two-year term, he lost his bid for reelection (it would be the only election he would ever lose). But he won again in 1926—not as eastern judge but as presiding judge, the county’s chief executive. By this time, Boss Tom Pendergast had become Missouri’s political kingmaker. His Kansas City machine was known to be corrupt, all the more reason why Truman became a preferred face of the organization in Jackson County. “Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window dressing,” said Harry Vaughan, one of Truman’s closest friends. “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.’”

  On February 17, 1924, Harry and Bess had a baby daughter, Mary Margaret. The Trumans had married later in life, and Bess had suffered two miscarriages, so the arrival of Margaret was the most important moment of their lives. The baby was born four days after Bess’s thirty-ninth birthday. At home, financial troubles continued. Harry was sued by a landlord for the remaining $2,950 rent due from the Truman & Jacobson store, and he owed banks too. His $6,000 salary got the family by but was not enough to pay off debts.

  The judgeship served as on-the-job political training. The 1920s economy was roaring indeed—a strong wind at Truman’s back. Jackson County was still mostly rural, with 610 square miles and roughly 470,000 citizens (almost 400,000 of those living in Kansas City). The county judges employed the sheriff and police, health officials, civil engineers, jailhouse personnel, a treasurer, and a coroner. Truman ran the county’s finances “as if I were the president of a private corporation,” he said. Or, as he put it, he tried “to live up to my good mother’s teachings.”

  As he had promised in his first campaign, paved roads would be the focus of his tenure. The county’s roads were what was commonly called “piecrust,” oiled-dirt thoroughfares that turned to pools of mud in spring rains and then froze in winter. Truman wanted every farm to be within 2.5 miles of a paved road, and a road system that could handle not just the 100,000 autos in Jackson County at the time but exponentially more in the future. This meant 250 miles of new, paved roadways—and a big bill for county taxpayers. “Everybody thought Mr. Truman was crazy,” recalled a local, Mize Peters, “because he was advocating paved roads.”

  Truman convinced county officials and citizens to issue a $6.5 million bond (there was a hard-fought referendum, which Truman won), and soon construction crews were at work. But the project forced a hard lesson on him. In politics, issues do not always pit right against wrong. Sometimes a politician is forced to choose the lesser of two evils. Truman discovered that one of the two judges working under him was collecting kickback money in the road-building program. He was forced to look the other way in order to prevent more injurious crimes from occurring and to keep on the good side of Boss Pendergast, who had given him his career.

  Harry wrote bitterly of this crooked judge, in a diary entry: “This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s . . . I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out . . . I had to let . . . a friend of the Boss’s steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know.”

  As far as the public knew, Truman had come through on his word—spent $6.5 million, every penny honestly. “We never had to do a thing that wasn’t right through that whole job,” recalled Tom Veatch, one of the road program’s chief engineers. “And it is one of the miracles that I have been through in my life.”

  Truman set his sights on another ambitious plan: a new courthouse for Kansas City and a complete remodel of the Independence courthouse. He hit the road, driving for days to examine courthouses so he could hire the best architect. He crossed the borders of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, all at his own expense. In these travels, a man named Fred Canfil did most of the driving. It was Canfil’s first appearance in a partnership with Truman that would last for years. Canfil was a heavily muscled associate of Tom Pendergast, with an oversized head and a hero-worshipping dedication to Truman. He carried a strong odor of garlic and was so unusual-looking, one Independence local said of him, “If I were to choose the five or ten most memorable people I have ever known, I would say that Fred Canfil was one of them.” In Shreveport, Louisiana, Truman and Canfil found a courthouse on which to model their own, and soon construction in Kansas City was under way. Truman also hired a sculptor to build a statue out front—his hero and the namesake of Jackson County, Andrew Jackson, on horseback.

  Truman’s tenure as presiding judge was going surprisingly well. “Mr. Truman had a natural, human instinct of understanding the man in the street,” said Oscar Chapman, who would later serve with Truman in Washington. “He really had a gift for interpreting the thinking of the problems that that man had . . . and he seemed to understand them so well that he got along with people very well.” The Kansas City Star called him “extraordinarily efficient”; his plans were achieved with “not a suspicion of graft.”

  Everywhere one looked in Jackson County in 1929 there were signs of prosperity. There was money in the coffers, and plenty of jobs. What could go wrong?

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  In August 1929, the New York Stock Excha
nge soared to a series of record highs. The market cracked 350 for the first time on August 1. It launched past 360 on the sixteenth, past 370 one week later, and set another record high on August 30, of 380.33.

  The small savings of ordinary citizens fueled the hot marketplace, the hard earnings of the new American middle class. To most it was a wholly new idea—to invest money and watch it grow, as if dollars were seeds planted in the soil. Much of the stock-buying frenzy was on margin; small-town investors put up a quarter of the price, while stockbrokers (there were 70,950 of them in the United States in 1929, up from 29,609 at the start of the decade) put up the rest by borrowing from banks. As the market grew, a hunger for easy capital began to spread like a contagion. As one financial columnist wrote of Wall Street investing: “I am firm in my belief that anyone not only can be rich, but ought to be rich.” There seemed no end to the pyramiding profits—until October 1929, when sharp declines sent shock waves of panic across the globe.

  On October 24, in a single trading day, $5 billion evaporated from the stock market. President Herbert Hoover tried to assuage the nation’s nerves, issuing a statement the following morning: “The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” The week following this unfortunate utterance, real panic set in, resulting in what the Christian Science Monitor called “one of the most uncontrollable selling stampedes ever witnessed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,” with “billions of quoted values erased as by the sweep of a sponge.”

  In Jackson County, Truman entered 1930 facing reelection. He breezed through on the strength of his road program, with the backing of Tom Pendergast. But now the job of presiding judge became a nightmare. In 1931, weighed down by skyrocketing unemployment, Jackson County revenues sank tens of thousands of dollars. That same year, the Jackson County Bank of Independence failed, along with two other banks outside Kansas City. In Truman’s hometown the signs of prosperity disappeared. As the man who controlled the county’s purse strings, he was forced to cut jobs and order pay cuts to people he knew well, whose wives and children he knew well. The county sliced huge numbers from its workforce, cut salaries of others, and sent two hundred patients home from mental asylums.

  It was all “pretty hard on head and nerves,” Truman wrote, and he began to suffer insomnia and headaches. On one short business trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, in February 1931, a trip he engineered just to get away, he wrote Bess, “The finances of the county were never in such shape since [the previous presiding judge] Miles Bulger handled them, and every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity and furnish him some county money without much return. On top of that, the refinancing on the farm at home [the Truman family farm in Grandview, where Harry’s mother and sister were living] has been getting deeper and deeper into difficulties . . . I was becoming so keyed up that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk.”

  As the county sunk deeper into the Depression, two shocking crimes drew the nation’s attention to Kansas City. On June 17, 1933, a convicted murderer named Frank Nash was being transported through Union Station when a gang led by Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd opened fire on law enforcement officials with machine guns. Six county employees were gunned down in the “Kansas City massacre,” and Nash and his gang made a getaway. (All were later believed to be caught or killed, including Pretty Boy Floyd, shot dead in a hail of FBI gunfire in Ohio on October 22, 1934.)

  The second crime hit closer to home for Truman. A city election held on March 27, 1934, pit candidates of Tom Pendergast against a reformist party struggling to dismantle the Kansas City machine. Pendergast won big, but the election was marred by a fury of violence. Two election workers were shot dead, and numerous others were injured. Reporters investigating whether Pendergast’s operatives were “running repeaters” (repeat voters) were assaulted by hoodlums from one precinct to another. The Washington Post reported “outbreaks of gunplay, kidnapping, slugging and fist-fights . . . Tom Pendergast’s Democratic organization tonight moved like a steam roller.”

  Jackson County politics had always been crooked; now the scene had grown sinister. It was during these anxious days that Truman began a new ritual. He checked into a room at the Pickwick Hotel on McGee Street in Kansas City, where he would stay up all night—likely with a bottle of bourbon—trying to sort through his thoughts. “The manager gave me a room without registering,” Truman noted in a letter to Bess, so no one would be able to “see or phone me.” He was now forty-nine, and he had served as a county judge for nearly ten years. He sat scribbling in the middle of the night on hotel stationery with a fountain pen, spelling out a political philosophy that was to guide him for the rest of his life.

  On ethics: “Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise.”

  On money and the cost of integrity: “We’ve spent $7,000,000 in bonds and $7,000,000 in revenue in my administration. I could have had $1,500,000; I haven’t $150.”

  On the ambiguity of political compromises: “I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right.”

  He wrote pages on his war experiences—for in war, he believed, unlike politics, there was a clear sense of right and wrong. He wrote of love—how like war, it meant always doing the right thing, of putting the cause before oneself. Most of all he wrote of the confounding nature of politics. “Maybe I can put the County where none of the crooks can profit,” he wrote. “I wonder if I can. All this gives me headaches and my private business has gone to pat so that I’ll be worse than a pauper when I’m done.”

  Even at that moment as he sat scribbling in the Pickwick Hotel, a number of narratives around the globe had begun to unfold, plot lines that in the years to come would converge upon this obscure county judge in their climactic moments. Franklin Roosevelt had been inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States, on March 4, 1933, uttering the famous words on that day: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Adolf Hitler had also taken power, and had been photographed waving from the window of Berlin’s Reich Chancellery as 25,000 Nazi followers marched past saluting him. “No power on earth will ever get me out of here alive,” Hitler was overheard saying. On the other side of the globe, Japanese troops had charged over the border into Chinese Manchuria on the night of September 18, 1931, starting an armed conflict in the East not to end until August 1945. In a small laboratory on the second floor of the Physics Institute at the University of Rome, a brilliant thirty-two-year-old scientist named Enrico Fermi had made a startling discovery. By bombarding atoms with neutrons, he could transform elements—a key revelation that would eventually lead to the discovery of nuclear fission and ultimately to the bomb.

  In Kansas City, a more immediate situation was about to confront Truman. In the office of Boss Tom Pendergast, above Pendergast’s saloon at 1908 Main Street, conversation in the spring of 1934 turned to the upcoming elections for the United States Senate. Pendergast had approached three potential candidates, but none of them was in a position to run.

  The Boss was nearing the peak of his power. The Great Depression had only served to strengthen him, for it put voters in need of his help. He had become extraordinarily rich and had built a $175,000 mansion for himself and his platinum-blond wife. He was “the Mussolini of Missouri,” “the last of the political bosses,” as the Washington Post put it. “In almost every block of Kansas City is someone who is looking after the interests of the machine.” He fed Thanksgiving turkeys to prison populations, gave out ball game tickets by the dozens, and had big money in the rackets, too—prostitution and gambling, which thrived in Kansas City, protected by paid-off police. Pendergast pl
ayed all the strings like a virtuoso. “He was an able clear thinker and he understood political situations and how to handle them better than any man I have ever known,” Truman said of Pendergast.

  In a meeting with the chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Committee, James P. Aylward, in the spring of 1934, Pendergast found himself shuffling through names, unable to come up with the right one to run for the U.S. Senate seat. Time was short, and the situation was getting critical. As powerful as he was, Pendergast found himself in a precarious situation. The senior senator from Missouri, Bennett “Champ” Clark, was based in St. Louis, and he was backing another St. Louis candidate for the second seat. If St. Louis was to win both Senate seats, the Kansas City machine would crumble. “If you don’t have a candidate for the Senate,” Aylward warned Pendergast, “you’ll be out of state politics. You’ll be finished.”

  Aylward made a suggestion: “Well, why don’t you run Harry S. Truman for the United States Senate? He’s a former soldier . . . He’s a member of the Masonic order; he’s a Baptist; he’s been active in affairs around here.”

  “Nobody knows him,” Pendergast came back. “He’s an ordinary county judge and not known outside Jackson County.” After further thought, Pendergast asked incredulously: “Do you mean seriously to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be nominated and elected to the United States Senate?”

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  TRUMAN WAS ON BUSINESS in the town of Warsaw, Missouri, in early May 1934 when he got a phone call at his hotel. It was Jackson County Democratic Committee chairman James Aylward. The conversation, as remembered by Aylward: