Truman (23 page)

His real love, however, was politics. He was of course a Democrat and a natural vote-getter. In time, with the hardworking, hard-drinking, steadily expanding populace of the West Bottoms, the First Ward, as his base of power, he built Kansas City’s first political organization and made himself boss, a term he disliked. “I’ve got friends,” he would say cheerfully. “And, by the way, that’s all there is to this boss business—friends.” In 1889, Jim brought three younger brothers, Michael, John, and Thomas, on from St. Joseph to help manage things. Three years later, in 1892, he ran for alderman from the First Ward. “There is no kinder hearted or more sympathetic man in Kansas City than Jim Pendergast,” said one devoted Democrat introducing the candidate. It was a reputation not lightly earned.

He remained on the city council for eighteen years, never losing an election. He was “Big Jim,” “King of the First,” conspicuously, proudly Irish and Catholic, with a physical resemblance to the great Irish-American hero of the day, prizefighter John L. Sullivan, which did him no harm as a public personality. With his love of good food he had grown to well over 200 pounds. He had a thick, black handlebar mustache, wore small black bow ties and a heavy gold watch chain, and worked steadily for public improvements—parks, boulevards, buildings, all projects that meant work for his people. He fought for higher pay for firemen. He fought the anti-Catholic American Protective Association. He fought the reformers, kept the saloons open and purchased another on Main Street, a block from City Hall, which he made his headquarters. He had courage and a much-loved sense of humor. When a bill was put before the state legislature in Jefferson City that would have prohibited anyone who owned a saloon from holding elective office and reporters asked what he thought of it, Alderman Jim said probably the bill was intended as a way of improving the reputation of saloonkeepers.

With the city growing by leaps and bounds, he reached out more and more to constituencies other than the Irish—to blacks, Poles, Slavs, Croatian slaughterhouse workers, to every immigrant group, and particularly the largest, the Italians, whose stronghold lay beyond the First Ward in the teeming, crime-ridden North End. The peak of his power came after the turn of the century, at the time when the bankrupt Truman family had moved to Kansas City. By then he had picked his own mayor, James A. (“Fighting Jim”) Reed, in addition to nearly every other key office at City Hall. Charges of vote fraud in the First Ward led to investigations that produced no evidence of wrongdoing. “I never needed a crooked vote,” Jim enjoyed telling reporters. “All I want is a chance for my friends to get to the polls.”

Following his death in 1911, a ten-foot bronze statue was erected in Mulkey Square, on the heights overlooking the West Bottoms, a commanding seated figure of Alderman Jim paid for by public subscription and inscribed “to the rugged character and splendid achievements of a man whose private and public life was the embodiment of truth and courage.” Even the Kansas City
Star,
arch-opponent of machine politics, lamented his passing. His word had been his bond, said the paper. “His support of any man or measure never had a price in cash.”

It was the Pendergast “organization,” however, that stood as Big Jim’s great legacy, and it was to his brother Tom, sixteen years his junior—young enough nearly to have been his son—that he passed the mantle of leadership. “Brother Tom will make a fine alderman, and he’ll be good to the boys—just as I have been,” an ailing Jim had reassured a gathering of patrons at his Main Street saloon. As bookkeeper for the saloons and precinct captain, young Tom had learned the business and politics from the ground up, rising to superintendent of streets, a job second only to mayor in the patronage it offered. At Jim’s retirement, Tom was elected to Jim’s old seat on the city council. But unlike Jim, Tom cared little for public office and retired from the council in 1915, not to run for anything ever again.

Tom—Thomas Joseph Pendergast, or T.J.—was no one to quarrel with. Though only 5 feet 9, he was a blond, ruddy-faced bull of a man, with a head so massive it looked oversized even on so large and powerful a body. His neck seemed part of his heavy shoulders, almost as though he had no neck, and it was well known that he could knock a man senseless with a single blow. Yet for all this, he had a kind of jauntiness, an appealing ease of manner. People spoke of the warmth, not menace, in his large, oddly protruding, pale blue eyes. It was the eyes, in combination with his “hugeness,” according to a close observer named William Reddig, that made Tom look both formidable and engaging. To Reddig, a veteran reporter for the
Star,
Tom was one of the most arresting figures ever seen in Kansas City, and once seen, never forgotten.

Like his brother, Tom was a saloonkeeper who abhorred drunkenness and drank only an occasional glass of beer. He dutifully attended early mass every morning. He liked to say he had never spent a night away from his wife. Further, as Big Jim had long appreciated, Tom was acutely intelligent.

Though the Pendergast operations had never suffered from lack of money, and money, as often said, was nowhere more useful than in politics, Tom, the bookkeeper, perceived politics as a business opportunity to a degree Jim never had. He acquired more saloons. He expanded the wholesale liquor business. Brother Mike Pendergast, meantime, was made the liquor license inspector for all Jackson County, which gave him the power to say yes or no to the operations of more than six hundred saloons, this naturally depending in no small part on how willingly the proprietors did business with the Pendergasts.

Even more important, as time would tell, was the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company established by Tom, one of the first companies anywhere to mix concrete in a plant, then deliver it by truck to the construction site. With his love of public improvements, Jim had been known as a builder—all the Pendergasts were builders—but Tom, with the city growing as never before, saw no reason why others should profit from the work if the organization could. In addition to the Ready-Mixed Company, he eventually founded or had substantial interest in the W. A. Ross Construction Company, the Midwest Paving Company, the Midwest Precoat Company, the Kansas City Concrete Pipe Company, the Centropolis Crusher Company, a cigar company, an oil company, and something called the Public Service Pulverizing Company. To charges that he used his political power to control contracts and furnish material for public use, Tom would reply, “Yes. Why not? Aren’t my products as good as any?” And, by and large, they were, often better.

Hundreds of people from all walks of life, every level of society, would later testify to the kindness, generosity, and fundamental decency of Tom Pendergast, not to say his impressiveness as a political leader. “He was a master! He had an analytical mind,” said one loyal foot soldier in the organization, a street repair inspector. “He ran the organization for people. His first concern was
always
people…. He was a man of immense heart and imagination…. He was always courteous. He would always listen you out.” To a young lawyer with no connection to the organization, a single face-to-face meeting with Tom was enough to convince him that “that fellow could probably talk anyone into anything.”

“He did so much for poor people,” it would be said again and again. “Oh, he was a wonderful man. To me he was a Robin Hood,” said a woman for whom he had found a job in a hospital laundry, one of the thousands of jobs he had provided over the years. “No, I never had a sense of evil when I was with him,” remembered a Catholic priest. “The man never exuded a sense of evil.” Even the judge who later sent Pendergast to prison would concede afterward that had he known him, he, too, very likely would have been one of his friends.

Reticent by nature, Tom kept himself to himself, as would be said, and this supposedly was his “edge.” But those associated with him in his long career, including Harry Truman, were to hear certain observations repeated many times:

The amateur failed in politics because politics was concerned with “things as they are.” “Most people don’t think for themselves. They lean on newspapers.” “You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.” Politics, as his brother Jim had so often professed, was primarily a business of friends. “We have the theory that if we do a man a favor he will do us one. That’s human nature.” Few people were ingrates. Ingratitude was a cardinal sin. “Let the river take its course.”

To reporters, with whom he was invariably courteous, he would describe himself only as a realist and claim to know more about how the people felt than anyone in town, or any newspaper. “It’s my business to know.”

As his admirers also liked to point out, Tom Pendergast was not the kind to flaunt his power. He was never seen parading about the courthouse or City Hall. He preferred to run things quietly, keeping tabs on the precincts where the organization was in business 365 days a year.

“Politics is a business, an all-the-year-round competitive business. To the victor belong the spoils. I might as well be honest about it. It may be cynical but that’s the fact. It’s the same locally and nationally. Nobody gets a job on an appointment because he’s a nice fellow. He must deserve it politically. It’s the same as in any other business.”

The pattern of the organization followed the pattern established by law for election purposes. There was a ward leader, a precinct captain for each precinct, and a block leader for every square block within the precinct. The precinct captain was the first person who called on newcomers to the neighborhood, who saw that their water was connected, gas and electricity turned on. Coal in winter, food, clothing, and medical attention were all provided by the organization to whoever was in need at no charge, and as those benefiting from such help would remember fondly, the system involved no paperwork, few delays, no stigma of the dole. “When a man’s in need,” T.J. would lecture, “we don’t ask whether he’s a Republican or Democrat…. We function as nearly as we can 100 percent by making people feel kindly toward us.”

Politics was personal contact. When winter storms hit the city, trucks from the various Pendergast enterprises would arrive in the West Bottoms loaded with overcoats and other warm clothing to be handed out to the homeless, the drunken derelicts, to any and all who were suffering. At Christmas, Tom gave out three thousand free dinners. Many people would remember for the rest of their lives how at the height of the deadly influenza epidemic in 1918-19 and at great personal risk Tom Pendergast had made a personal survey, house to house, to see who needed help.

All that was expected in return was gratitude expressed at the polls on election day. And to most of his people this seemed little enough to ask and perfectly proper. Many, too, were happy to be “repeaters,” those who voted “early and often” on election day. The woman who worked in the hospital laundry, as an example, started as a repeater at age eighteen, three years shy of the voting age, and enjoyed every moment. She and several others would dress up in different costumes for each new identity, as they were driven from polling place to polling place in a fine, big car. It was like play-acting, she remembered years later. She would vote at least four or five times before the day ended. “Oh, I knew it was illegal, but I certainly never thought it was wrong.”

But for all his sway and subsequent notoriety as the machine overlord of Kansas City, Tom Pendergast was not without rivals. His power was as yet limited, even as late as the 1920s. In opposition was another Democratic faction led by another exceedingly adroit, popular Irish-Catholic politician named Joseph B. Shannon. In the parlance of Jackson County, Pendergast Democrats were the “Goats,” whereas Shannon’s people were the “Rabbits,” and both sides proudly so. The names began, supposedly, because the poverty-stricken families aligned with Alderman Jim had kept goats on the bluffs above the West Bottoms, while the Shannon people occupied a territory overrun by rabbits. It was also said that once on a march to a political convention Alderman Jim had roared, “When we come over the hill like goats, they’ll run like rabbits.” In any event, Joe Shannon was nothing like a rabbit in temperament. He was smooth, well dressed, and handsome in much the way Warren G. Harding was handsome. He was also quite as fearless as any Pendergast and had both the pluck and personality to inspire a following. And since the Republicans rarely had support enough to carry a general election in the county, the real knockdown contests were always in the primaries, among Democrats, where the lines were sharply drawn. Every Democrat counted himself either a Goat or a Rabbit, whether in town or out in the country. John Truman in his time had been a Goat and it was his Goat friends at the Independence Courthouse who made him a road overseer. So in that sense John Truman had been a Pendergast man, as was Harry briefly when he replaced his father as overseer.

The difference in the two factions was mainly a matter of style. The Goats liked to win with strength, with big turnouts on election day. The Rabbits were known for their cleverness. But both sides could play rough—with money or by calling out the saloon bullies. Strong-arm tactics at the polls, ballot-stuffing, ballot-box theft, the buying of votes with whiskey or cash, bloody, headlong street brawls, all the odious stratagems that had made big-city machine politics notorious since the time of New York’s Boss Tweed, had been brought to bear to determine which side within the party gained the upper hand. “Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles….” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,” as Tom Pendergast would say. It was “the game” played by “the boys” with zest, and never over such issues of reform as inspired periodic Republican or independent citizens’ crusades. That the Republicans so rarely ever triumphed was taken by Democrats, whether Rabbit or Goat, as proof that Republican bosses just weren’t as smart as a Joe Shannon or a Tom Pendergast.