Harry Truman (11 page)

In a few months, the road-building program was under way, run exactly as my father said it would be run. The two engineers, Colonel Edward Stayton and Ν. T. Veatch, were in charge of the specifications, and they administered the contracts with absolutely unswerving honesty. Firms from outside Missouri - as far away as South Dakota - were awarded major slices of the work, on the basis of their low bids. Meanwhile, Dad was roughing up Democrats throughout the county. In Kansas City, there was a tradition of carrying one or two thousand city employees “on the pad” without requiring them to show up for work. Some Democrats thought this principle could be applied with equal ease to the county government. But the moment my father found a man drawing pay without performing his job, he fired him.

Cries of political anguish reached Tom Pendergast’s ears. Even louder were the howls of rage from the local contractors, who had complacently expected to do most of the work for Judge Truman’s $7 million road program. Soon Dad was invited to a meeting in Tom Pendergast’s office. He was confronted by three of the leading Goat Democrat contractors, all in a very ugly mood. There was a ferocious argument. My father insisted that he had made a commitment to the voters, and he was not going to back down on it. With his eye on Tom Pendergast, he argued that it was not only good government, it was good politics, to keep his promises to the voters.

Tom was fond of saying there were three sides to every argument, my side, your side, and the right side. He decided my father was on the right side, and, in spite of the fact that Pendergast was a partner of at least one of these crooked contractors, he threw them out of the office and told Dad to go on doing the job the honest way.

Only in the last five or six years have scholars of my father’s career begun to dig behind the myths that have accumulated around these days and discover the truth that we Trumans have known all the time. For instance, Dr. Dorsett W. Lyle, in his unpublished doctoral thesis, “The Pendergast Machine,” writes of Dad’s nomination: “Desperately wanting to gain his hold on the rich county patronage, and likewise desiring to maintain the hold once he regained it, Tom Pendergast decided that he would be willing to relinquish, if necessary, such assets to his machine as special favors to contractors, in order to be able to hold on to the patronage. This was exactly what Pendergast had to do the minute he selected Harry Truman to become the machine’s candidate for county judge.” In this relinquishment, Boss Tom also abandoned special favors for himself. Pendergast owned the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company, which in the past had been used almost exclusively by contractors paving Jackson County roads. In Judge Truman’s 225-mile road-building program, only three-fourths of a mile were paved with Ready-Mixed.

The road program was completed on schedule, giving Jackson County one of the finest highway systems in the nation. To everyone’s amazement, there was not a hint of scandal connected with it. Even the Kansas City
Star
had to admit that Presiding Judge Truman was “extraordinarily honest.” To her dying day, Mamma Truman maintained that he was too honest for his own good - or for her good, anyway. When a new road sliced off a piece of her farm, my father refused to pay a cent for the land. She complained about this super-honesty for years. Other aspects of this remarkable road program can be seen in a long-forgotten booklet that Dad published on Jackson County’s roads. It reveals him to have been decades in advance of his time. He set aside land for parks and recreation centers. He discussed the problem of keeping local streams pure and preserving the forested parts of the county. Remembering the tree-lined roads he had seen in France during the war, he planted seedlings along every mile of his new roads. The local farmers, indifferent to beauty as well as soil conservation, uprooted most of them. But Dad’s insistence that every farm in the county should be within two and a half miles of a hard-surface road won him their undying enthusiasm.

Tom Pendergast, reading the stories in the paper, and hearing echoes of the warm wave of approval from the rural part of Jackson County, realized my father was right - fulfilling campaign promises was good politics, as well as good government. In 1929, Mike Pendergast died. Although there was considerable competition from other Goats in the organization, Tom made Dad his official representative, responsible for the eastern part of the county. At this point in his career, Tom Pendergast knew exactly what he was doing, politically, and the results of the following year’s elections proved it. Harry S. Truman surged to the top of the party’s local ticket, and at the age of forty-five was reelected presiding judge by 55,000 votes.

In four years of hard, continuous effort, my father had accomplished a great deal. He has summarized these accomplishments in his memoirs. But he has never revealed the inner agony he suffered as he struggled to retain his principles and at the same time build a political career within the domain of Boss Tom Pendergast. Unfortunately for history, Dad has never kept a diary. But at times of stress in his life, he has written memoranda in which he wrestled with himself over decisions that confronted him. He has given me one of these documents which he wrote shortly after his reelection as presiding judge:

Several pages of this memorandum describe in detail the terrific fight my father had to wage against corruption on the county court itself. The men he mentions are dead now, and I see no point in printing their names. Dad noted sadly that one of his fellow judges, put on the court by Joe Shannon, the Rabbit boss, was instructed “to treat me for what I am in his estimation, that is, the lowest human on earth.” But Shannon was soon forced to send his emissaries to see Presiding Judge Truman when he wanted anything. Why? Because his man and the other judge preferred to shoot craps down behind the bench while the court was in session. “When I wanted something done,” Dad says, “I’d let them start a crap game and then introduce a long and technical order. Neither of them would have time to read it, and over it would go. I got a lot of good legislation for Jackson County over while they shot craps.”

Finally, my father summed up his experience as a county judge: “I’ll go out of here poorer in every way than when I came into office. . . . I hope that there are no bond issues and no more troubles, until I’m done and then maybe I can run a filling station or something until I’ve run up my three score and ten and go to a quiet grave.”

There was never a hint of this inner turmoil in the man I saw during these years. At home, he was the perfect father, full of jokes and a constant tease. For a while, he called me Skinny, because I was. He fretted endlessly over my health and one winter early in the 1930s, he shipped Mother and me off to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to see if a miracle could be achieved, and I could get through one year without becoming a case study in walking pneumonia. I had whooping cough, German measles, and a lot of other childhood diseases, but when it came to colds, flu, and the like, I was in a class by myself. Perhaps this was one of several reasons why Dad tended to spoil me, especially in matters of money. He was always slipping me an extra quarter or half dollar, to Mother’s vast indignation. She thought I should learn to live on my allowance. More than once, when I found myself struggling as an adult to balance my chaotic checkbook (lately I’ve given up), I realized Mother was right.

Another argument which I continued off and on for the better part of a year concerned the color of my hair. It grew in snow white, and my father roundly declared that I had inherited it from him. “I was a blond when I was her age,” he said serenely. My mother dragged out a picture of him and Uncle Vivian at the age of about four and two respectively. Their hair looked terribly dark to her. That did not bother Dad in the least. He insisted he had been a towheaded toddler. Finally, on one of our Sunday visits to the farm at Grandview, the question was put to Mamma Truman for adjudication.

“Did Harry have blond hair when he was growing up?” my Mother asked.

“Never,” snapped Mamma Truman. That was the end of that argument.

Perhaps Dad was worried I wasn’t really a Truman. Perhaps he found it difficult to adjust to being the father of an only daughter. As a natural leader, I suspect he always envisioned himself as the father of a son, whom he could discipline without a deluge of tears. Now that I have become the mother of four boys, I tell him frequently he had a better deal.

Occasionally politicians came to our house on pressing matters. Once, a tall man with a big nose who was running for governor, tried to kiss me. I pulled his nose, to my mother’s scarcely concealed delight. Kissing babies, incidentally, was something Dad himself never felt compelled to do. Most of the time, especially after he became the political leader of the eastern part of the county, he kept politics outside the house, seeing people at an office in the business district of Independence. I was never very conscious of him as a politician, during those early years, but I did know he was a highway builder. He often took me with him on inspection tours of the new roads, and sometimes on longer trips, when he dedicated or inspected a historic road, as part of his still continuing presidency of the National Old Trails Association.

Throughout these early Independence years, my father was haunted by a worry which he never mentioned - the possibility I might be kidnapped. There was still plenty of leftover Klan animosity against Judge Truman in the area, and his insistence on running an honest administration made him enemies by the score in Kansas City. More important, kidnapping around this time was becoming a favorite form of extortion for the underworld. One day, when I was in the first grade, an odd-looking character appeared at school and informed my teacher he was delegated to take “Mary Truman, Judge Truman’s daughter” home. I had been christened Mary Margaret, but I had long since abandoned Mary and my teacher, Mrs. Etzanhouser, knew it. Pretending to look for me, she stepped into another room and phoned my mother. Dad sent police hustling to the scene. By this time, the mysterious stranger had vanished. Thereafter my father or mother - or an available uncle or aunt - drove me to and from school.

Meanwhile, events political and economic were conspiring to deny Dad that impulsive wish he had made, to retire to the simplicities of running a filling station. In his election victory in 1930, he had had the intense satisfaction of running far ahead of the Democratic ticket in general, including his old Rabbit enemy, “Uncle Joe” Shannon, who was elected to the House of Representatives that year. Dad had done more than build a fine set of roads for Jackson County. He had been elected president of the Greater Kansas City Planning Association and in that role proposed - again about thirty years ahead of his time - a metropolitan approach to the planning of the Kansas City area, which would have ignored state boundaries and county lines and included two other Missouri counties and three counties across the river in Kansas.

My father has always been an ardent supporter of urban and metropolitan planning. One day, reminiscing about his experiences in Jackson County, he said, “We haven’t done enough planning. There isn’t a city in the United States that was properly planned to begin with. I know of only one whose streets were laid out in anticipation of the automobile and that is Salt Lake City. The old man that laid out that city really had vision - in more ways than one.”

He was talking about Brigham Young, whom he has always admired.

“I was a great admirer of old D. H. Burnham, who organized the Chicago regional planning,” Dad continued, “and he had a motto over his mantel, ‘Make No Little Plans.’ You can always amend a big plan, but you never can expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now. Back in 1900, we had about 75 million people. In the 1930s, we had about 125 million people. It is our business to at least anticipate a population of 300 million, maybe in the next hundred or hundred and fifty years. Maybe it won’t take that long.”

To drive this point home, Dad told the story of an engineer who submitted a report to the Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate in the middle of the nineteenth century. “It stated that if a bridge could be built in St. Louis over the Mississippi River, St. Louis now being a thriving village of 300, it was absolutely certain that in fifty years St. Louis would have at least 1,500 people. Well, they built that bridge and St. Louis has got a million people in it. The engineer didn’t quite have his sights high enough. You can’t get them too high.”

Judge Truman’s star quality soon had local newspapers suggesting him as gubernatorial timber. The Democrats had lost the governorship race in the Republican landslide of 1928. The Independence
Examiner
and another local paper, the Blue Valley
Intercity News,
both reported growing interest in Truman for governor. The Odessa
Democrat,
in adjoining Lafayette County, made similar remarks. On November 21, 1930, the
Democrat
ran a front page, two column story headlined: TRUMAN COULD BE NEXT GOVERNOR, JACKSON COUNTY JUDGE WOULD BE AN IDEAL DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE. Even the Kansas City
Star
was still saying nice things about him. “Efficient, unselfish public service is not so common that it shouldn’t be dispensed with merely for partisan reasons,” the
Star
said, announcing its support of my father for reelection in 1930.

In the spring of 1931 a Truman-for-Governor Club was formed. The men behind it were several National Guard friends such as James E. Ruffin, a young Springfield lawyer who organized support in southwest Missouri. Another enthusiast was my father’s cousin, Colonel Ralph Truman. At a Springfield meeting in early May 1931, fifty-two Democrats from fifteen counties of southwest Missouri endorsed Dad and organized a Truman-for-Governor Club in their region. Ruffin proudly assured potential members that the club included “some of the oldest and most substantial Democratic leaders in southwest and south central Missouri.” Alas, the club was doomed from the start.

Perhaps because Tom Pendergast had inherited the political organization from his older brother, Jim, the Big Boss had a penchant for backing older men, such as Senator James Reed, the reactionary who had led the Democratic opposition to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. His unsuccessful gubernatorial nominee in 1928, Francis M. Wilson, was sixty-four and in poor health, yet Pendergast showed strong signs of reendorsing him in 1932. My father appealed to the many Democrats who felt that a younger man, capable of an energetic campaign, was vital for victory.

The Truman-for-governor boom picked up momentum in the spring of 1931. The Kansas City
Star
ran a profile of Dad in a Sunday issue, and plans were made for a major rally in Houston, county seat of Texas County in the southern Ozarks. The commander of the Missouri National Guard pledged his support and Dad began making out-of-county speeches in response to numerous invitations. The boom continued, even after Tom Pendergast, on the eve of departing for Europe, declared the organization would back Wilson once more. My father spoke at the meeting in Texas County and made, in the opinion of a Springfield
Press
reporter, “an exceptionally favorable impression” upon his audience. By this time, Dad had mastered a relaxed, down-home style in his extemporaneous speeches. Even more important, perhaps, he kept his speeches short - never more than twenty minutes. This was a rarity in Missouri during those days.

The editor of another local paper, the Houston
Herald,
agreed with the Springfield
Press
about Judge Truman. He was obviously “a clean, conscientious businessman who would render unto the people a real business administration if chosen Governor.” Optimism soared in the Truman-for-Governor Club. “If you can get Wilson out of the way,” Ruffin wrote to my father, “I think you can win the nomination with very little difficulty.”

But Wilson declined to get out of the way. In spite of the very precarious condition of his health, he sensed that 1932 was a Democratic year, and coolly refused to abandon his candidacy. With Tom Pendergast remaining equally immovable, my father, with his instinct for party loyalty, quietly advised his supporters he was withdrawing from the race. In December 1931, Dad told Wilson he could expect his “wholehearted support” for another try at the governorship.

Ironically, everything my father’s supporters said about Wilson’s health turned out to be tragically true. On October 12, 1932, at the height of the fall campaign, he died, and the Democratic organization had to find a new, last-minute nominee. Although our loyal Independence
Examiner
urged my father as a logical choice, Pendergast had to contend with the growing power of the Democratic nominee for the Senate, Bennett Clark, and a compromise, non-Jackson County candidate was chosen, Guy B. Park.

But the Truman-for-Governor Club had by no means wasted its time and money. It had awakened a great many Missourians outside Jackson County to my father’s name and record. Even Francis Wilson recognized Dad’s political potential. Not long after he heard my father was supporting him for governor, Wilson wrote to a friend: “Judge Truman is a mighty fine man. I hope someday to see him elevated to other offices of trust.”

Dad had no time to fret over his gubernatorial aspirations. On May 26, 1931, the voters had approved another, even bigger bond issue, for $7.95 million. It was voted for more roads, a county hospital for the aged, and a new $4 million county courthouse in Kansas City. This time, instead of scoffing at Judge Truman’s improvement plans, Tom Pendergast used the county’s road-building record as the main argument to persuade voters in Kansas City and the rural parts of the county to approve another $31 million in building bonds for Kansas City as well. The proposal was put before the voters as “Kansas City’s Ten Year Plan.”

By now my father had county road building rather well systematized. But the courthouse was a new challenge. He decided to make it not only the best built, but the best designed public building in the United States. Climbing into his car, he drove 24,000 miles to confer with architects and study county and municipal buildings from Canada to Louisiana. As he drove, he saw grim evidence of the deepening economic depression spreading like a stain across the land.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, he found a courthouse which satisfied him, designed by Edward F. Neild. Dad hired Neild to design the Kansas City courthouse. (There was another courthouse in Independence which he also rebuilt at this time.) While Neild was designing his graceful, twenty-two-story building, Dad went off on another automobile journey. This time it was to hire Charles Keck, sculptor of the equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dad asked Keck to create an equestrian statue of his greatest hero, Andrew Jackson. Together he and the artist journeyed to Jackson’s Tennessee home, the Hermitage, to get the exact measurements of Old Andy’s dress uniform. The money for the statue, and an identical statue before the courthouse in Independence, was surplus cash which my father had saved from the bond issue, thanks to his tough economy.

He also demonstrated at this early stage in his career that, while he was a wholehearted backer of the union movement and the rights of the working man, he did not intend to let union leaders push him around. Early in 1934, the construction unions building the Jackson County courthouse in Kansas City went on strike. Dad sent them an ultimatum. Either they went back to work or he would replace every one of them with men from the relief rolls. “I have 3,000 applications for work on my desk,” he said. The men went back to work.