Truman and Pendergast
BARONE, MICHAEL
Truman and Pendergast By Michael Barone Was Harry Truman a great president, as has generally been conceded in the last twenty years? Or was he a corrupt bumbler, as was generally believed in 1952,...
...he took piano lessons from a teacher who had taken lessons from Paderewski, the famous pianist and, at one point, prime minister of Poland...
...At that point he was thirty-eight and in desperate need of a job...
...For years before the First World War, he worked as a farmer following a mule plowing furrows...
...Another potential competitor, Alben Barkley, was a Protestant from Kentucky, but was out of favor because he had resigned as majority leader over Roosevelt's veto of a tax bill in 1944...
...He built a $125,000 mansion on concrete-paved Ward Parkway, near the new concrete-paved Country Club Plaza shopping center...
...Truman's autodidactic but not contemptible knowledge of history contributed to his habit of making swift and remorseless decisions, more of which were right than wrong: the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the recognition of Israel, the NATO alliance, the defense of Korea, the firing of MacArthur, and, memorably, the characterization of the case against Alger Hiss as a "red herring...
...We have absorbed from Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s poll (mostly of liberals) on the greatness of presidents the habit of awarding them one-word verdicts— "near great," "failure," and the like...
...Useful information comes from Truman and Pendergast, Robert Ferrell's short study of the relationship between Truman and the Kansas City political boss who was his great patron for the first years of his political career...
...But as the votes came in, Truman surged ahead...
...Stark was running for Senate (though he also boomed himself for president if Roosevelt did not run and vice president otherwise...
...Ferrell has published many books on Truman...
...Then Harry Truman's luck seemed to run out...
...Truman's career was intertwined with corruption...
...Louis's Italian neighborhood, the Hill...
...Actually, the phrase was a reporter's, asking him if that was what the Hiss case amounted to, but Truman quickly snapped, "Yes...
...He joined the Army Reserve and served as an artillery officer in France, showing genuine bravery and skill...
...In 1922 Truman ran for the eastern district, got the support of the high-minded editor of the Independence Examiner, and then of Pendergast...
...Enter Tom Pendergast, the son of Irish immigrants and boss of the First Ward of Kansas City since the death of his brother in 1911...
...he read widely in history...
...then and later, Truman didn't much like blacks, but felt they should have equal rights...
...Truman was in some ways a great president, in others a disaster, and in still other ways everything in between...
...He was a Baptist, not a Catholic, which made him a suitable candidate to Pendergast for presiding county judge in 1926 and a suitable candidate to Roosevelt as vice president in 1944...
...Truman, like his father, had an almost Irish capacity for not making money...
...Truman's campaign was in many ways pathetic...
...He joined the Masons and in time ascended to the thirty-third degree...
...Truman won the Democratic nomination and, in a hugely Democratic year, the general election...
...He needed more money and got it out of the insurance settlement...
...Truman had a New Deal voting record, mostly...
...He was indicted in 1939, pled guilty, and went to jail for a year and a day...
...One of the attractions of the job was that its holders could not be sued on personal debts...
...Truman and Pendergast reads like the reminiscences of a charming old-timer with political stories to tell—a bit cryptic here, gossipy there, with a cast of characters once familiar to every political insider in Missouri but now brought fitfully back to life by one of the few who still have memories of the old days, a great American political story rescued from the dusty shelves of archives by a first-class scholar...
...He won by a 7,000-vote margin in Gualdoni's ward, and 7,976 statewide: The vote was 41 percent for Truman, 40 percent for Stark, and 19 percent for Milligan...
...And yet, if Pendergast had not needed a Baptist in 1934, or Louis Gual-doni had not delivered the Hill in 1940...
...This was a formidable man, Ferrell reports...
...And of course, he was stubborn and loyal, as he demonstrated when he attended Tom Pender-gast's funeral in Kansas City...
...As usual, reform backfired: Pendergast appointed a stern-looking Presbyterian named Henry McElroy who cast a tolerant eye on Pendergast's exactions from illegal speakeasies and houses of prostitution...
...When the state won an $11 million judgment against insurance companies, Pendergast ended up with perhaps $500,000 of the money...
...When they attacked him he knocked out two and hit the third in the stomach so hard that, so said a newspaper article, 'You couldn't see Gualdoni's fist, it was buried so far into the man's stomach.'" Those were the days when politics was politics...
...In 1934 the all-powerful Pendergast decided that the nomination to oppose Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson should go to Harry Truman...
...Roosevelt and Morgenthau encouraged the investigation of Pendergast...
...attorney from Kansas City who helped bring down Pendergast...
...He maintained faithful membership in the Baptist church...
...Jackson County was recorded as casting 295,000 votes in 1936, 73 percent for Roosevelt, more than it has ever cast since...
...Roosevelt had come to see Stark as the key figure who could deliver Missouri to him in 1940...
...only a few would spend any time with him (one was Indiana's Sherman Minton, whom he would later appoint to the Supreme Court...
...Ferrell unearthed Hartmann's manuscript from "the Morgenthau diaries," which the longtime treasury secretary deposited in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library...
...Local custom imposed a two-term limit on officeholders...
...He dickered with Democrats in southeast Missouri's Bootheel, and traded support with their candidate for governor, and then got them to pressure St...
...He had some knowledge of history, but few of his Senate colleagues appreciated that...
...he was from a border state...
...Yet Truman insisted on giving contracts to the lowest bidder...
...Truman was honest but loyal, an unbeatable combination for Pendergast...
...yet these great issues, we may be sure, were not for the moment engaging Harry Truman's full attention...
...If not for these qualities, he would surely have ended up an impoverished has-been, henpecked by his wife and her insufferable mother...
...News & World Report and the co-author of The Almanac ofAmerican Politics...
...He had seen to it that Jackson County had more paved roads than anywhere else, except Wayne County, Michigan, and Westchester County, New York...
...Meanwhile, in 1926, reformers got Kansas City to adopt a city manager form of government...
...Michael Barone is senior writer at U.S...
...In 1935 he got control from Harry Hopkins of WPA patronage in Missouri—80,000 jobs...
...Byrnes, who was from South Carolina, had left the Catholic Church as a youngster (if he hadn't, he could never have been elected there...
...the governor's mansion in Jefferson City was called Uncle Tom's Cabin...
...Truman's pro-New Deal voting record counted for little, and he had voted for Pat Harrison over Roosevelt's choice, Alben Barkley, for majority leader in 1937...
...In 1936 he thought to maintain his political prominence by casting ghost votes...
...So the characteristics that had made Truman the candidate of a corrupt political boss in 1922 and 1934 also made him, after he survived his near-political-death experience of 1940, the only possible successor to the president of the United States four years later...
...Instead, in April 1945, Truman became the commander in chief of the largest military force ever assembled by man, and, in August 1945, he made, unhesitatingly and without self-doubting guilt, the decision to use the atomic bomb to end World War II...
...in one season he lost the unimaginable sum of $600,000...
...He once lived in a rooming house in Kansas City with one of Dwight Eisenhower's brothers (did they ever think that he and Ike would both become president...
...Yet he was proud of his Confederate veteran uncle, and his mother, who lived to see him president, still bristled at how Yankee troops had treated her family in the War Between the States...
...But one word will not do to characterize Truman, or most other presidents for that matter...
...But Stark, an Annapolis graduate and the nation's leading apple farmer, had national ambitions...
...Midwestern culture was not as barren as Sinclair Lewis has had us believe...
...Truman was one of the very few who was neither...
...Truman had worked to create a new congressional district after the 1932 election, but Pendergast gave it to someone else, a man who had earned a great reputation as an expert on the Philippines...
...He saw that the road to success was to pave the dusty roads of Jackson County...
...He had the covert opposition of his Senate colleague Bennett Champ Clark, an indolent alcoholic whose father had been speaker of the House...
...More important perhaps, Truman was honest, which saved him from ignominious political defeat when he was Pendergast's political creature...
...With Byrnes and Barkley eliminated, Truman was the only conceivable choice for vice president—and for president, since it was apparent to any who saw him in person that Roosevelt, if reelected, would not live out his term...
...He had far less money than Stark, and was grateful ever after to a man who contributed $500...
...Park was elected in the Democratic landslide, and named Pendergast's man the insurance commissioner...
...Truman solicited support from black politicians in St...
...Or was he a corrupt bumbler, as was generally believed in 1952, when not only Republicans but Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson casually blamed him for "the mess in Washington...
...Truman was never quite the utterly ordinary man of legend...
...Truman won the six-candidate Democratic primary with a plurality...
...he was petty and unwisely loyal...
...Pendergast supported the governor elected that year, Lloyd Stark...
...August 1940, if we can take our eyes off Louis Gualdoni and the Bootheel Democrats for a moment, was the high-water mark of totalitarianism...
...He was a beneficiary of malapportionment...
...Louis...
...It was said that Pendergast ran the state out of the Jackson Democratic Club at 1908 Main Street...
...In contrast, Truman's major competitor to replace Henry Wallace as vice president that year, James Byrnes, a man with a far more formidable record in the Senate and a much stronger reputation as a policymaker, was a southerner...
...Truman was defeated for reelection in 1924, the Calvin Coolidge landslide, but, with Pendergast's support, was elected presiding county judge in 1926 and reelected in 1930...
...He seemed stymied, but Pendergast had other ideas...
...He may have lied to the now portly but always adored Bess Truman about that...
...He came from Jackson County gentry...
...Hitler and his allies—Mussolini and Stalin and the Japanese—had control of most of the land mass of Eurasia, and were preparing to take control of the rest...
...In October 1932, the Democratic nominee for governor died...
...He fired Pender-gast's insurance commissioner and brought to Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury Department evidence of Pender-gast's insurance scam...
...All of which left Truman, in the calculations of the pundits of his day, a dead duck for reelection in 1940...
...he had plenty of business in Kansas City, paving over Brushy Creek and in time building the huge concrete courthouse there...
...he was woefully unprepared for, but worked very hard at, the responsibilities he undertook (in 1945 he would stay up all night reading official papers, trying to figure out what Roosevelt had been up to...
...In 1996, though considerably more populous, it cast 247,000 votes...
...He was patronized by most senators...
...And more can be found in The Kansas City Investigation, a report written by Rudolph H. Hartmann, the Treasury Department investigator who brought about Pendergast's prosecution for income tax evasion in 1939...
...Truman's campaign manager was a shady character from Republican southwest Missouri, with whom he afterwards broke...
...For the Democrats it was a problem indeed: Most of their officeholders, those with credentials that could make them remotely conceivable as national candidates, were either southerners or Catholics...
...there is dispute about whether he went off with buddies the next day drinking...
...Wallace was a horrifying battle-axe who, although she lived until 1952, never admitted that Truman had amounted to anything...
...As chairman of the special committee investigating the conduct of the war, Truman would earn a national reputation as he gave constructive aid to the war effort—although after sniffing out evidence of the Manhattan Project, he did not look into it further at the request of secretary of war Henry Stimson...
...his grandfathers were big landowners in a county which was also the site of Kansas City, bound in time to become entirely metropolitan...
...Louis and Kansas City...
...Harry Truman's genius was joining...
...Jackson County government was headed by a board of three judges, one elected county-wide, one from Kansas City, and one from the eastern district, including Independence and the farming townships that had less than onefourth of the county's population...
...he had supported blacks on issues like the anti-lynching laws, and he had won their support in the key 1940 primary...
...It leads one to think that there is something in the basic character of this country that produced our great historic achievement of rolling back the high-tide of totalitarianism...
...At the national convention in New York in 1924, Gualdoni asked some Ku Klux Klan people on the floor if they had credentials...
...In his wonderful book The Future of American Politics, first published in 1952, Samuel Lubell started off with a description of Truman as "the man who bought time...
...As Lubell wrote, "Only a man exactly like Truman politically, with both his limitations and his strong points, could have been the Democratic choice for Roosevelt's successor...
...He was a Baptist and a Mason and a World War veteran—great selling points in outstate Missouri, the part of the state outside metropolitan St...
...It was a settled rule of politics at that time that no Catholic and no southerner could be president...
...On primary night in August 1940, Truman thought he had lost...
...The University of Missouri Press has published it in a handsome format along with Ferrell's book...
...A ruined haberdasher at thirty-eight, he was a United States senator at fifty...
...Robert Ferrell's account of the relations of Truman and Pendergast reminds us that we cannot take the triumphs of American history partially, but must take them whole...
...Pendergast owned the Ready Mixed Concrete Company...
...Pendergast substituted Judge Guy Park, from nearby Platte City, who cast a tolerant eye on Pendergast's rackets there...
...his latest contains material he has not before had a chance to package...
...as a southerner he was suspect and as an apostate Catholic he was vetoed by Ed Flynn, the politically canny boss of the Bronx...
...It did not earn him enough money to marry his childhood sweetheart Bess Wallace, who lived with her mother in a seven-teen-room house in the county seat of Independence...
...He had a well-earned reputation, even among Pendergast's enemies, for honesty...
...Hitler had overrun Western Europe in June, and had started the Battle of Britain in August...
...But he was also—as Ronald Reagan, who similarly grew up in the Midwest, would be—a man of sufficient intellect, knowledge, and character to get most of the big things right...
...Also running was Maurice Milligan, brother of the U.S...
...He came back to Kansas City, married Bess, and went into the haberdashery business with his friend Eddie Jacobson—and in the recession of 1921-22 went bankrupt, with a staggering debt of $8,900...
...For the Republicans this was no problem: Most of their officeholders were northern Protestants...
...Pendergast backed him up...
...He got the support of Louis Jean Gualdoni, the political boss of St...
...Gualdoni had been a professional boxer, and could have been a contender if his fiancee had not forced him to leave the ring...
...Roosevelt, the devious foe of Truman, was running for a third term, but had not yet embraced the policies of aiding Britain or instituting a military draft...
...her father was an alcoholic and killed himself, and she abhorred drinking...
...What kind of man was he...
...Louis ward heelers to support him...
...Young Harry had a serious, though not a college, education...
...Pendergast owned race horses and bet heavily on the races...
...Truman sought the nomination for county collector, which would have maintained his immunity from debt, but Pendergast gave it to a candidate chosen by banker William Kemper...
...These strengths would become apparent in the next four years...
...he had a capacity for hard work, which his reputation as Pendergast's senator obscured...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 6
