Harry Truman (10 page)

To my father, being a Democrat was and is an article of faith. He could not run on a Republican ticket if an angel from on high appeared with a flaming sword and ordered him to do so. He supported the Pendergasts because they were Democrats, and they supported him for the same reason. His Missouri blood responded to the idea of loyalty with the same fervor that the idea inspired in the emotional hearts of Pendergast’s Irish. I am not suggesting that this made life easy. On the contrary, it involved him in some agonizing conflicts.

Even with Pendergast backing, my father continued his strenuous day and night campaigning. He had shown himself to be a political innovator by his shrewd appeal to the veteran vote - a new force in American politics. Later in the campaign, he came up with another innovation. He was one of the first to use the airplane as a political weapon.

One of his fellow veterans, Eddie McKim, persuaded a local flier to take Dad up above the biggest political picnic of the summer, at Oak Grove, and bombard the assembled farmers with Truman leaflets. According to Eddie McKim, the plane was “one of those old Jennies that was held together with baling wire.” They circled the picnic grounds and disgorged their pamphlets with no difficulty. But then the pilot tried to land in a nearby pasture. “He had a little trouble stopping the plane and it ended up about three feet from a barbed wire fence,” Eddie McKim said. “Our candidate got out as green as grass. But he mounted the rostrum and made a speech.”

On the eve of the election, an ominous force put in an appearance. Grim-faced men stood outside the doors of several Protestant churches in Independence and handed out pink “sample ballots.” When someone asked them what they were doing, they simply replied, “A hundred percent.” It was the local slogan of the Ku Klux Klan, and it meant 100 percent American. Only one man on the county ticket was endorsed by the Klan. Opposite his name they had written, “Church affiliation, Protestant, record good.” Opposite the name of Harry S. Truman was written “Church affiliation Protestant, endorsed by Tom and Mike.” The Pendergasts were Catholic, of course, and the Klansmen, with their instinctive talent for bad taste and worse judgment, were attempting to inject religious hatred into the campaign. The
Examiner,
reporting the story, went out of the way to point out how unfair this slur was against my father who had been “only supported by the Pendergast faction after he had been out campaigning for some months.”

When the Klan appeared in Missouri, no one was especially alarmed. It seemed a fairly harmless patriotic organization at first. The Independence
Examiner
wrote a mild editorial, disapproving of its bed sheets and secret meetings but praising the patriotic aspects of its program. My father even considered joining it. But when he met with one of the organizers, he was told bluntly that he had to promise never to give a Catholic a job, if he won election to the county court. My father was outraged. Most of his boys in Battery D were Catholics, and he told the Klansman he would give any one of them a job, if they needed help. That was the beginning and the end of his relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. By turning the story inside out, his enemies were to convert it into a vicious political smear against him in years to come.

When the votes for eastern district judge were finally counted on August 1, 1922, another Truman tradition was launched. My father won what the Independence
Examiner
called “the hottest primary fight in the history of the county” by a plurality of 300, out of a total of 11,664 votes cast. The next day, thanking those who had supported him, he reiterated his independent stance. “I have made no promises to anybody or organization,” he said. “The support I received was wonderful and I appreciated every bit. I shall endeavor to so serve as county judge that no man or woman will be ashamed of having voted for me and to give a square deal to everybody and keep the only promises I have made, which were made in my speeches to the public.”

The job he tackled was not easy, and the political situation was not much better. Previous county court administrations, especially those presided over by Miles Bulger, had made a policy of boondoggling away millions and running the county into murderous debt. In 1921, the Bulger court had spent $1,070,000 on roads that were already disintegrating because they had been built by crooked contractors using shoddy, low-grade materials. A long history of mismanagement had enabled the state to seize control of several county institutions. There was a deficit of $800,000 as well as $2,300,000 borrowed against incoming taxes at 6 percent interest.

“I learned a lot about government as she is executed in those two years,” my father says of his first term as county judge. “They were invaluable in my education. I learned the machinery of operation and I also found out who really ran things locally.” It proved to be a harsh education.

Judge Truman and his fellow Democrat, Presiding Judge Henry McElroy, first concentrated on reforming the county’s shaky fiscal structure. Dad went to Chicago and St. Louis to discuss ways to improve the county’s borrowing, and found bankers who were willing to loan money on tax anticipation notes at 4 percent. Eventually, he got them down to 2 percent. In two years, they paid off more than $600,000 of the county’s debt. When they stood for reelection in 1924, the Kansas City
Star,
staunchly Republican and a violent foe of the Pendergasts, said one of the few nice things they’ve ever printed about my father. Citing the improvement in the county’s roads and the reduction in the debt, the editorial declared: “The men who did this, Judge McElroy and Judge Truman, are up for renomination. Tuesday the Democratic voters of Jackson County will show whether they are interested enough in good service to renominate the men who were responsible for the remarkable showing made.”

But on the political side, Judge Truman and Presiding Judge McElroy overreached themselves. They put only Goat Democrats on the county payroll. This aroused the extreme enmity of the Rabbits. Worse, they tried to ignore the growing power of the Ku Klux Klan.

In their now familiar style, the Klan turned the election of 1924 into a vicious, hate-filled melee. They threatened to kill my father at one point. This only aroused his native pugnacity, and he astonished them by appearing at one of their meetings - not the bed sheet variety, but a political forum where they masqueraded as the Independent Democrats - and calling their bluff to their faces. He told them they were a bunch of cheap un-American fakers, and then coolly walked off the platform and through the crowd to his car. As drama, as courage, it was magnificent, but as politics, it was suicide in the year 1924, the high tide of the Klan in Missouri and in the United States. On the eve of the election, the head of the Klan in Jackson County stated bluntly in the Kansas City
Star,
“We are unalterably opposed to Harry Truman.” Meanwhile, the Rabbit Democrats were pursuing their own vendetta. They joined forces with the Klansmen to vote McElroy and Truman into political oblivion in November.

Dad was defeated by 877 votes - the only election he ever lost. The Klan and the Rabbits cast all their votes for Dad’s Republican opponent, an aging harness maker named Henry Rummel. He did not even know he was running until the Republican leader of the county called him up and told him that he had put up $5 to file his name.

My father’s defeat and my birth practically coincided. “I spent two years thinking and trying to make some bread and butter for my sweetheart and our small daughter who came shortly before my licking,” he wrote, in a memoir of these years. Again, his instinctive modesty plays down the rather impressive scope of his activities while he was out of public office. He reorganized the Automobile Club of Kansas City and boosted it to over 4,000 members. He became president of the National Old Trails Association, a perfect job for Solomon Young’s grandson. He traveled extensively around Missouri and many other states, marking famous roads and urging local governments to see the value of their history as a tourist attraction. He also helped launch a savings and loan association, in which he served as vice president. Simultaneously, he kept up his political contacts. He made speeches at American Legion meetings and at school assemblies. Often his subject was historical.

Along with all these jobs and activities, my father struggled to keep up with a course in law. He had decided that a public official ought to have a law degree, and on October 5, 1923, he had enrolled in the Kansas City Law School. For the next two years, he carried a staggering schedule, but managed to earn the following grades:

On February 21, 1925, at the Washington’s Birthday banquet in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, my father represented his class and gave a speech entitled, “Honor in Government.” But after his sophomore year, he had to abandon the course. Every time he came to Kansas City, he was overwhelmed by pleas for advice and help from his Battery D boys. To them, he was still Captain Harry, the leader who had taken them through France without a single casualty from enemy fire.

Dad’s heart was still in politics. Moreover, he was constantly encouraged to return to the campaign trail by Mike Pendergast and his son Jim. Mike Pendergast was a simple, direct, uncomplicated man, utterly different from his powerful brother. “I loved him as I did my own daddy,” my father said after Mike died in 1929.

In the two years since Dad’s defeat, the Democrats had been out of power in the Jackson County government and not doing very well in Kansas City either. They were learning the hard way that their endless feuding was politically ruinous. With Republicans in control of the government in Washington and in the Missouri State House in Jefferson City, the party was hard pressed in Jackson County. In 1926, they decided to bury their feuds and get behind potentially winning candidates. Early that year, Jim Pendergast introduced my father to Tom, the “Big Boss,” as Dad always called him.

A stocky, grizzly bear of a man with a massive neck and shoulders and huge hands, Tom Pendergast was a formidable character. Prone to violence, he was known to knock a man cold with a single punch in an argument. He was a kind of natural force, around which other men clustered like pilot fish on a shark.

Tom Pendergast was twelve years older than my father. He was the voice - the very authoritative voice - of an earlier, cruder era in American politics. He had been building power in Kansas City since 1900. Along with his native strength of personality and body, Boss Tom was a shrewd man. Unlike similar bosses in New York and Chicago, his power was not based on the support of masses of immigrants. Foreign-born voters in Kansas City never numbered much more than 6 percent. Tom Pendergast rose to power by demonstrating a genius for local political leadership, for working with people of all creeds and colors.

Jim Pendergast urged his uncle to back my father for presiding judge of Jackson County. Boss Tom agreed. With a united party behind him, Dad swept to a solid victory at the head of a ticket that put Democrats into almost every available county office. The triumph made Tom Pendergast the most powerful politician in Missouri. Earlier in the year, the Goats had won complete control of Kansas City, installing Henry McElroy, the presiding judge in Dad’s first term, as city manager.

Elected presiding judge by 16,000 votes, my father was, as he described it “the key man in the county government.” He dates the real beginning of his political career from this 1926 election. For the first time, he had the kind of authority he needed to build a record that voters could see and admire. He poured all his energy into the job, and he needed every bit of it. The county government was in disastrous shape. The roads, most of them built by Bulger, were called “piecrusts” by two local engineers whom my father hired to survey them. “These men with my assistance planned a system of roads estimated to cost $6.5 million,” Dad says. My father then went to Tom Pendergast and persuaded him to back a bond issue to build these roads. Pendergast was pushing a $28 million bond issue for Kansas City, and he was extremely lukewarm to Dad’s plan. Boss Tom said the voters would never approve it. There had been so much corruption in the county court system that the voters had become extremely reluctant to hand over any large amounts of money to the judges. Dad argued back - something few men had the nerve to do with Tom Pendergast. He said he was confident he could sell the bond issue to the people, by telling them exactly how he planned to spend it. Pendergast told him to go ahead. The Kansas City
Star
declared editorially that the presiding judge did not have a prayer of winning either the votes or the money. Judging from the fate of other bond issues, the
Star
certainly seemed to be making a safe prediction. Out of $116.41 million requested by the politicians in the 1920s in Jackson County, the voters refused $83.76 million.

This skepticism only made my father more determined. He launched a Truman-style campaign which once more took him into every corner of the county. He explained how he was planning to award the contracts - on a low-bid basis. He proposed a bipartisan board of engineers to supervise the program. He took the head of the Taxpayers League - his former major in the army - over the county roads inch by inch and convinced him of the necessity for new construction. He even persuaded the local leaders of the Republican Party to back the idea.

The vote came on May 8, 1928, my father’s forty-fourth birthday. To the astonishment of all the local political experts, his entire program - all $7 million of it - won by a three-fourths majority instead of the necessary two-thirds, while the $28 million Kansas City bond issue was pared by most of the same voters to a mere $700,000.