Truman and Pendergast

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, when not only Republicans but Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson casually blamed him for “the mess in Washington”?

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. But one word will not do to characterize Truman, or most other presidents for that matter. Truman was in some ways a great president, in others a disaster, and in still other ways everything in between.

What kind of man was he? 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. 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. Ferrell unearthed Hartmann’s manuscript from “the Morgenthau diaries,” which the longtime treasury secretary deposited in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The University of Missouri Press has published it in a handsome format along with Ferrell’s book.

Ferrell has published many books on Truman; his latest contains material he has not before had a chance to package. 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.

Truman was never quite the utterly ordinary man of legend. He came from Jackson County gentry; his grandfathers were big landowners in a county which was also the site of Kansas City, bound in time to become entirely metropolitan. Young Harry had a serious, though not a college, education; he read widely in history; he took piano lessons from a teacher who had taken lessons from Paderewski, the famous pianist and, at one point, prime minister of Poland. Midwestern culture was not as barren as Sinclair Lewis has had us believe.

Truman, like his father, had an almost Irish capacity for not making money. For years before the First World War, he worked as a farmer following a mule plowing furrows. It did not earn him enough money to marry his childhood sweetheart Bess Wallace, who lived with her mother in a seventeen-room house in the county seat of Independence. Mrs. Wallace was a horrifying battle-axe who, although she lived until 1952, never admitted that Truman had amounted to anything.

Harry Truman’s genius was joining. He joined the Masons and in time ascended to the thirty-third degree. He maintained faithful membership in the Baptist church. 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?). He joined the Army Reserve and served as an artillery officer in France, showing genuine bravery and skill. 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.

At that point he was thirty-eight and in desperate need of a job. 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. 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 one-fourth of the county’s population. In 1922 Truman ran for the eastern district, got the support of the high-minded editor of the Independence Examiner, and then of Pendergast. He was a beneficiary of malapportionment. One of the attractions of the job was that its holders could not be sued on personal debts.

Truman won the six-candidate Democratic primary with a plurality. He saw that the road to success was to pave the dusty roads of Jackson County. Pendergast owned the Ready Mixed Concrete Company. Yet Truman insisted on giving contracts to the lowest bidder. Pendergast backed him up; he had plenty of business in Kansas City, paving over Brushy Creek and in time building the huge concrete courthouse there. Truman was honest but loyal, an unbeatable combination for Pendergast. 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.

Local custom imposed a two-term limit on officeholders. 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. 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. He seemed stymied, but Pendergast had other ideas.

Meanwhile, in 1926, reformers got Kansas City to adopt a city manager form of government. 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.

In October 1932, the Democratic nominee for governor died. Pendergast substituted Judge Guy Park, from nearby Platte City, who cast a tolerant eye on Pendergast’s rackets there. Park was elected in the Democratic landslide, and named Pendergast’s man the insurance commissioner. When the state won an $ 11 million judgment against insurance companies, Pendergast ended up with perhaps $ 500,000 of the money. In 1935 he got control from Harry Hopkins of WPA patronage in Missouri — 80,000 jobs. He built a $ 125,000 mansion on concrete-paved Ward Parkway, near the new concrete-paved Country Club Plaza shopping center.

It was said that Pendergast ran the state out of the Jackson Democratic Club at 1908 Main Street; the governor’s mansion in Jefferson City was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1934 the all-powerful Pendergast decided that the nomination to oppose Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson should go to Harry Truman. He had a well-earned reputation, even among Pendergast’s enemies, for honesty. He had seen to it that Jackson County had more paved roads than anywhere else, except Wayne County, Michigan, and Westchester County, New York. 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. Louis and Kansas City. Truman won the Democratic nomination and, in a hugely Democratic year, the general election. A ruined haberdasher at thirty-eight, he was a United States senator at fifty. Then Harry Truman’s luck seemed to run out. He was patronized by most senators; only a few would spend any time with him (one was Indiana’s Sherman Minton, whom he would later appoint to the Supreme Court).

Pendergast owned race horses and bet heavily on the races; in one season he lost the unimaginable sum of $ 600,000. He needed more money and got it out of the insurance settlement. In 1936 he thought to maintain his political prominence by casting ghost votes; Jackson County was recorded as casting 295,000 votes in 1936, 73 percent for Roosevelt, more than it has ever cast since. (In 1996, though considerably more populous, it cast 247,000 votes.) Pendergast supported the governor elected that year, Lloyd Stark. But Stark, an Annapolis graduate and the nation’s leading apple farmer, had national ambitions. He fired Pendergast’s insurance commissioner and brought to Franklin Roosevelt’s Treasury Department evidence of Pendergast’s insurance scam.

Roosevelt had come to see Stark as the key figure who could deliver Missouri to him in 1940. 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. Roosevelt and Morgenthau encouraged the investigation of Pendergast. He was indicted in 1939, pled guilty, and went to jail for a year and a day.

All of which left Truman, in the calculations of the pundits of his day, a dead duck for reelection in 1940. Stark was running for Senate (though he also boomed himself for president if Roosevelt did not run and vice president otherwise). Also running was Maurice Milligan, brother of the U.S. attorney from Kansas City who helped bring down Pendergast. Truman’s campaign was in many ways pathetic. He had far less money than Stark, and was grateful ever after to a man who contributed $ 500. He had the covert opposition of his Senate colleague Bennett Champ Clark, an indolent alcoholic whose father had been speaker of the House. Truman’s campaign manager was a shady character from Republican southwest Missouri, with whom he afterwards broke.

Truman solicited support from black politicians in St. Louis; then and later, Truman didn’t much like blacks, but felt they should have equal rights. He dickered with Democrats in southeast Missouri’s Bootheel, and traded support with their candidate for governor, and then got them to pressure St. Louis ward heelers to support him. He got the support of Louis Jean Gualdoni, the political boss of St. Louis’s Italian neighborhood, the Hill. Gualdoni had been a professional boxer, and could have been a contender if his fiancee had not forced him to leave the ring. This was a formidable man, Ferrell reports. “At the national convention in New York in 1924, Gualdoni asked some Ku Klux Klan people on the floor if they had credentials. 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.

On primary night in August 1940, Truman though he had lost; there is dispute about whether he went off with buddies the next day drinking. (He may have lied to the now portly but always adored Bess Truman about that; her father was an alcoholic and killed himself, and she abhorred drinking.) But as the votes came in, Truman surged ahead. 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.

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. Hitler had overrun Western Europe in June, and had started the Battle of Britain in August; 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; 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; yet these great issues, we may be sure, were not for the moment engaging Harry Truman’s full attention. He had some knowledge of history, but few of his Senate colleagues appreciated that; he had a capacity for hard work, which his reputation as Pendergast’s senator obscured. These strengths would become apparent in the next four years. 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.

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.” It was a settled rule of politics at that time that no Catholic and no southerner could be president. For the Republicans this was no problem: Most of their officeholders were northern Protestants. 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.

Truman was one of the very few who was neither. 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. 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. 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); as a southerner he was suspect and as an apostate Catholic he was vetoed by Ed Flynn, the politically canny boss of the Bronx.

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. Truman had a New Deal voting record, mostly; he was from a border state; he had supported blacks on issues like the anti-lynching laws, and he had won their support in the key 1940 primary. 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. 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.

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. More important perhaps, Truman was honest, which saved him from ignominious political defeat when he was Pendergast’s political creature. And of course, he was stubborn and loyal, as he demonstrated when he attended Tom Pendergast’s funeral in Kansas City. If not for these qualities, he would surely have ended up an impoverished has-been, henpecked by his wife and her insufferable mother. 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.

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.” (Actually, the phrase was a reporter’s, asking him if that was what the Hiss case amounted to, but Truman quickly snapped, “Yes.”)

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. Truman’s career was intertwined with corruption; he was petty and unwisely loyal; 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). 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. 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. And yet, if Pendergast had not needed a Baptist in 1934, or Louis Gualdoni had not delivered the Hill in 1940 . . .

Michael Barone is senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.