Truman (25 page)

Harry spoke at White Oak, Raytown, Lone Jack, Englewood, and Blue Springs. He covered every township and precinct, driving himself in the old four-cylinder Dodge over roads so rough he had to put sacks of cement in the trunk for ballast, to keep the car from slamming him through the windshield.

The main event of the political summer took place in July, a picnic at Oak Grove attended by four thousand people, twice the number expected. Every Democratic candidate was scheduled to speak. As a way of giving Harry added attention, Eddie McKim arranged for him to arrive by airplane. Harry and the pilot, another war veteran named Clarence England, sailed over the crowd in the open cockpits of a two-seat Jenny of the kind flown in France. After circling several times, dropping leaflets, they landed in a pasture beside the picnic ground, stopping with difficulty just short of a barbed-wire fence. As the crowd rushed forward, the candidate climbed out, leaned over the fence, and became violently ill. Apparently it had been his first ride in a plane. He then proceeded to the rostrum.

It was by far the largest crowd he had ever faced and an opportunity, he knew, such as he had not been given before. He was the last to speak. “I am now going to tell you what I stand for and why you should vote for me,” he began in a flat, rapid voice. “The time has arrived for some definite policy to be pursued in regard to our highways and our finances. They are so closely connected with our tax problem that if they are properly cared for the tax problem will care for itself….”

Eddie McKim, remembering earlier appearances in the campaign, thought Harry had come a long way. A style was evolving. Having stated the problem, he proceeded to a solution joined to a fundamental philosophy plainly expressed.

“I want men for road overseers who know roads and who want work—men who will do a day’s work for a day’s pay, who will work for the county as they would for themselves. I would rather have 40 road men for overseers who are willing to work than to have 60 politicians who care nothing about work. I believe that honest work for the county is the best politics anyway.”

Running the county into debt was bad business and bad politics, he said. He wanted it stopped.

Thus far in the campaign only one charge had been brought against him—that in an election in 1920 he had voted for a Republican, Major John Miles, who had been his superior officer at the Argonne. It was the worst his opponents had been able to come up with, and given the spirit of Jackson County politics, it was a serious charge. He chose the moment now to explain himself.

“You have heard it said that I voted for John Miles as County Marshal. I’ll plead guilty…along with 5,000 other ex-soldiers. I was closer to John Miles than a brother. I have seen him in places that would make hell look like a playground.” His tone was flat no longer.

At that moment, for many who were listening, the primary election for eastern judge was over, and Harry Truman had won.

No county election in years had aroused such interest, a phenomenon attributed by some to the novelty of the women’s vote. Harry, however, was dwelling more and more on what the influence might be of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing strength of which was another sign of the times. Crosses had been burned near Lee’s Summit. Klan membership was growing in Independence and two of his opponents, Parent and Shaw, had Klan support. Edgar Hinde urged Harry to sign up with the Klan, to join immediately, convinced it was “good politics.” Hinde himself had already joined, “to see what was going on, you know,” as he later explained. A Klan organizer named “Jones” told him to bring Harry in any time, saying it was all Harry had to do to guarantee Klan backing.

Harry refused at first, but then gave Hinde $10 for membership. “Jones” insisted on meeting Harry privately at the Baltimore Hotel and Harry agreed. But when at the meeting “Jones” told him he would get no support unless he promised never to hire Catholics if elected, Harry ended the discussion. He had commanded a mostly Catholic battery in France, he said, and he would give jobs to whomever he saw fit. Apparently the $10 was returned.

It had been a grievous mistake ever to have said he would join in the first place. It was an act either of amazing naivete, or one revealing a side he had not shown before, a willingness under pressure to sacrifice principle for ambition. Either way the whole incident was shabby and out of character, and hardly good politics. How he thought Klan support might offset the devastating effect such an alliance would have on the Pendergasts—not to say the effect on his own beloved “Irish bunch”—is difficult to imagine.

In his defense later, it would be said that the Klan in 1922 seemed still a fairly harmless organization to which a good God-fearing patriot might naturally be attracted, that it offered a way for those who felt at odds with the changes sweeping the country to make known their views. Yet only the year before Harry had lent his support to a Masonic effort to suppress the Klan in St. Louis. He had to have known what the Klan was about. William Reddig of the
Star
would remember Jackson County Klansmen of the time as anything but good fellows. “They didn’t just hate Catholics, Jews, and Negroes,” Reddig wrote. “They hated everybody.”

A rumor was now circulated by the Klan that Harry’s grandfather, Solomon Young, was a Jew. At a Klan meeting in Independence just before the primary on August 1, a guest speaker from Atlanta said Harry Truman was less than 100 percent American—that is, not sufficiently opposed to Catholics and Jews. Edgar Hinde stood up and protested. There were shouts to throw him out. A friend of Harry’s from Grandview named Toliver rose to say they could throw him out, too, which, as Hinde remembered, had a “cooling influence.” But the Klan’s previous indifference to the Truman candidacy had ended.

He said later it was the soldier vote plus “kinfolks in nearly every precinct” that put him over. He would talk of being “accidentally” elected and suggest that his failure with the haberdashery also had an important influence. “Most people were broke and they sympathized with a man in politics who admitted his financial condition.” Others close to the campaign said the deciding factor was Harry Truman. People liked him—and largely because he so obviously liked them and being among them.

Privately, Harry was disappointed in the efforts of the Pendergast people in his behalf. He had expected more.

The campaign ended with a big Saturday night rally at the courthouse. On election day cars covered with placards were busy back and forth across town bringing people to the polls. “The smell of old ’alky, hooch, and ‘good’ whiskey is on the breath of many a man,” wrote Colonel Southern, a teetotaler.

As the day wore on, the rough play began. At a polling place at Fairmont Junction, close to the Kansas City line, an armed gang of Shannon henchmen tried to make off with the ballot box before the Pendergast people could get to it, only to be confronted by two deputy marshals who had rushed to the scene on orders from Harry’s Republican friend, Marshal John Miles. Guns were drawn, when suddenly Shannon himself materialized out of the shadows and with the barrel of Deputy John W. Gibson’s 45-caliber automatic pressing on his ample stomach, announced it would be best if everybody quieted down and went home. Had Shannon’s men succeeded in their mission, Harry would most likely have lost the election. As it was he defeated the Rabbit candidate, Emmett Montgomery, by a bare 279 votes out of a total (for all five in the race) of more than 11,000.

It was “the damn Republicans” who were to blame, Joe Shannon complained bitterly. If they had only kept out of things, Harry Truman would never have won. Probably that was so. Deputy Gibson, the man with the 45, was, like John Miles, a veteran of the 129th Field Artillery.

The fall electi on was a formality only—every Democrat won—and on New Year’s Day, 1923, in a ceremony at the courthouse, the new county court was seated. The other two judges were Elihu Hayes and Henry McElroy. Hayes was the presiding judge, and though a Rabbit, “a fine old gentleman” in Harry’s estimate. McElroy, the new western judge, was a through-and-through Goat and close associate of Tom Pendergast, a spare, bucktoothed, ambitious businessman commonly praised for his efficiency. The huge basket of red roses in the courtroom was the gift of McElroy admirers from Little Italy.

To be called “Judge” pleased Harry immensely. He enjoyed the prestige of the job and the way people greeted him as he walked briskly to and from the courthouse. He had rank again.

As presiding judge, Elihu Hayes should have been the dominant figure and leader of the court, and by the Fifty-Fifty Agreement his Rabbit friends looked forward to an equal share in county jobs and every other form of largess under the court’s control. Things did not work out that way, however. It was Henry McElroy who took charge from the start and McElroy showed no desire to give anything to the Rabbits. With Judge Truman voting with him, there was not much to keep McElroy from having his way. (“He ran the court with my vote,” Harry later said.) The roster of road overseers was filled with Goats only. Goats were named to county jobs large and small. Rabbits already on the payroll were always the first to be fired.

The old adage of Andrew Jackson, that to the victors belong the spoils, was gospel again in Jackson County, Missouri. The decision had come down from the Pendergasts. Fifty-Fifty was finished. And though in hindsight Harry would see the peril in this, at the time he did not. He was preoccupied with being businesslike, concentrating on cost cuts, improvements in services, determined to perform as promised.

He also knew what pleasure the plight of the Rabbits was bringing to his mentor, Mike Pendergast.

“We ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economic basis,” Harry claimed later, and in truth the new court stood in striking contrast with what had gone on before under the renegade Miles Bulger. Under McElroy and Truman a county debt of more than a million dollars was cut in half. The county’s credit rating improved. So did county services and, most notably, the quality of work on the roads. Harry Truman, as he later boasted, made himself “completely familiar with every road and bridge…visited every state institution in which the county had patients.” Years of mismanagement and crooked contracts had produced roads so poorly constructed that they caved in like pie crusts. Bridges were inadequate or in sad repair. The improvements made now were impossible to ignore. Even the Kansas City
Star
had praise for what was happening under the crisp, efficient new county administration. And if Harry was taking McElroy’s cue on matters political, McElroy appeared no less dependent on Harry on practical questions. “When a road project or a bridge application is brought before the county court, here is what happens,” wrote one Republican. “Judge McElroy turns to Judge Truman and asks him what about it. Nine times out of ten Judge Truman already has been on the ground and knows all about the proposition. He explains it to the court. Judge McElroy then says, ‘All right, if you say so I move the work be done,’ and it is ordered.”

At a Triangle Club lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel, Judges Hayes, McElroy, and Truman were given a standing ovation. It seemed a new era had dawned.

But the job, Harry discovered, wasn’t enough to satisfy. To his surprise, he felt restless for more to do. He wanted other ways to make himself known, other associations beyond “the courthouse crowd.” He grew increasingly active in the Masons and the Army reserve. He became Deputy Grand Master of the 59th Masonic District of Jackson County. The summer of 1923 he spent two weeks on active duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, his first long separation from Bess since their wedding day. In September he enrolled in night courses at the Kansas City School of Law, where he studied hard (Blackstone, contracts, criminal law), keeping pages of notes. Only someone of extraordinary energy could have maintained the pace.

Meantime, life at home at 219 North Delaware—the Gates house, as Harry would always refer to it—went on quietly and privately. Bess had taken no part in his political campaign because, as known only within the family, she had suffered a second miscarriage. The first had occurred the spring of 1920, when prospects were still bright at the store, and nothing had been said then either. With friends Harry left no doubt that he and Bess wanted children but implied that if there was a problem it was with him. When a cousin, Ralph Truman, wrote from Springfield to say he had a new child, Harry responded, “I wish you would send me a pair of your old breeches to hang on the bed, maybe I can have some luck.”

His devotion to Bess was unstinting as ever and because of their separation the summer of 1923, when he was at Fort Leavenworth and they were again corresponding, it is known how much she, too, cared for her “Old Sweetness.”

“It is now 10:20 and I am in bed. There was a black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it myself—but that wasn’t the first time I had wished for you,” she wrote. “Lots and lots of good night kisses.”

She would wait for hours by the front window watching for the postman. A night toward the end of the two weeks was “the worst night yet.”

“You be a good girl and I’ll be a good boy,” he wrote. A week later he was saying he hoped he would never have to be away so long again. He was feeling “marvelous,” he told her, ready to come home and “lick all the Rabbits.”