Truman (4 page)

He also had fairly immediate political prospects. The outfitters had not only been a fluctuatingly successful sales outlet. It had in addition been a great political talking shop, particularly for
demobilized veterans. Truman loved veterans. ‘My whole political career is based on my war service and war associates,' he said with a little exaggeration 25 years later. Of course he could not love them all, not even those from Battery D, or the 129th Field Artillery. Some of them were Republicans, and this produced an awkward conflict of loyalties. But in 1920, for the only time in his life he crossed over party lines and voted for a Major Miles (of the 129th) as County Marshal. A few others of the battery played him false, either politically or financially, and his sense of shock and betrayal then made him unforgiving. But in general army reunion companionship was exactly to his taste. He always supported ‘the bonus'.
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It was one of the few issues on which he went against Roosevelt in the 1930s. The American Legion Convention in Kansas City in October 1921 was a brief uplift during his decline to insolvency.

Amongst the intermediate ring of his army acquaintanceships was Lieutenant James M. Pendergast. He was the son of Michael J. Pendergast, who was an older but less dynamic brother of Thomas J. Pendergast, one of the legendary city bosses of American politics in the first 40 years of this century. In 1911 Tom Pendergast had inherited from the eldest brother of the three, ‘Alderman Jim', a traditional, poor neighbourhood, immigrant-based machine in the riverside areas of West Bottoms and North End. Within a few years he had extended this domain to include the new southern suburbs of Kansas City, as well as the more rural area to the east, and was endeavouring to control the state, although he was always subject to competition from St Louis, which was a bigger city.

Truman's relations in the early days were primarily with Mike Pendergast rather than with the ‘Big Boss', Tom. He knew him better (through his son, the lieutenant). He liked him more. (‘I loved him as I did my own daddy', he is recorded by
Margaret Truman as saying after Mike Pendergast's death in 1929.) And while Truman's political arena was confined to the rural part of Jackson County, Mike was to him the more relevant figure. ‘Tom didn't like the country,' he laconically and convincingly explained.

Later his relations with the greater Pendergast became a crucial and fluctuating factor in his career. He never ‘loved him like his daddy,' but he was his awkward client. He could not have secured his Senate seat without him. He lived honestly and therefore uncomfortably alongside him, his reputation suffering as a result. As Vice-President, he insisted on flying 1000 miles to his funeral, after Tom Pendergast had collapsed into disgrace and a jail sentence.

But in 1922 it was Mike Pendergast who helped him to win the nomination for Eastern Judge. This mandarin-like title concealed a moderately significant executive local office. Its holder was in no sense a judge: he had no judicial functions; he was the elected assistant administrator of the eastern district of Jackson County; together with the Western Judge, he worked under the Presiding Judge who covered the whole county. The western district was Kansas City. The eastern part was Independence, Grandview, and five other small communities. Truman therefore fought his first election very much on his own doorstep. But it was certainly not a ‘front-porch' campaign. He attempted to speak everywhere, but was frustrated not by the hostility of his audiences but his own tongue-tiedness.

There is complete agreement that he was at this stage an appalling speaker. At least it gave him the habit of never talking for more than 20 minutes, which he retained throughout his subsequent campaigns. He had the other advantages of a good local reputation and the enthusiastic support of the thick concentration of his army companions (the intensely local nature of the unit giving him a base which the dispersal policy of World War II would have made impossible). A claque from Battery D called for ‘three cheers for Captain Harry' whenever his oratory broke down. And he had Mike Pendergast, who endorsed him enthusiastically for the office. ‘Now I'm going to tell you who you are going to be for for county judge', Truman later recalled his saying to a Democratic Club meeting. ‘It's Harry Truman. He's got a fine war record. He comes from a fine family. He'll make a fine judge.'
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Even so, Truman won with difficulty. The Democrats were split into two factions, mysteriously named Goats and Rabbits. Truman was an hereditary Goat. So were the Pendergasts, although the division pre-dated their sway. But the Rabbits were quite strong and made a determined attempt to get a local banker named Montgomery nominated. The Ku Klux Klan presented an additional complication. They began to erupt into Missouri at this stage, and torches were burnt near Grandview. Truman was at first inclined to join them, and offered a $10 subscription (the extent of their intolerance had not fully surfaced) but his Battery D loyalty came to his rescue. He was asked to give an assurance that, if elected, he would never give a job to a Catholic. That would have excluded 90% of his beloved associates. He firmly refused. The $10 were returned. That was the end of his flirtation with the Klan, but not of his embroilment with it.

The primary was on August 1st. Truman had a bare majority of 288, in a vote of over 11,000. The run-off was a formality. That autumn, at the age of thirty-eight, he was Eastern Judge for a two year spell, with a modest salary of $6,000, debts of well over that amount, considerable opportunities for graft, and his foot upon a rung of the political ladder.

Whatever else is in dispute about Truman's career, his repute, and relations with the Pendergasts, it is clear that he was totally untouched by personal monetary corruption. However great the temptation, with his debts and lack of financial prospects, however loose the surrounding practice, he was aggressively clean so far as anything approaching a bribe or even the free use of public expenses were concerned. He lived and died the poorest president of the past fifty years, probably of this century. (His closest rivals are Wilson and Coolidge.)

In this respect his administration of his new little office was therefore spotless. So far as jobs were concerned it was less immaculate, and this was to continue to be his pattern. But this fault stemmed from a mixture of instinctive partisanship and excessive loyalty to old friends rather than from paybacks for financial benefits. As county judge it took the simple form of appointing only Goats and never Rabbits.

When he came up for re-election two years later this made his basis of support too narrow. The Rabbits bolted the ticket. The
Klan, then near to its peak,
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was viciously against him. This accumulation of opposition counted for more than a good record of administration, particularly in relation to the re-funding of the county debt and the beginning of an efficient road building programme. An obscure Republican harness maker, who only got on the ballot paper by accident, was elected fairly easily. It was the only election which Truman ever lost. It left him once more without a job, and with only the most minor political achievement behind him.

He was out of office for two years. It was the height of the boom of the 1920s, and, although he certainly did not become rich, he had no difficulty in supporting his small family (Margaret Truman, his only child, had been born in 1924) in their habitual modest small-town prosperity. He became a minor Kansas City man of affairs. He established himself in an office in the Board of Trade building there. Successfully, and for a commission, he sold membership in the Kansas City Automobile Club. He became state president of the National Old Trails Association, but this, which remained an abiding interest, was a voluntary activity. And he had a business partnership with a gentleman crookster (as he subsequently turned out to be) from Independence, the suspiciously grandly named Spencer Salisbury. Salisbury had been a fellow captain from the 129th Artillery. They did housing finance business together, took over and then quickly withdrew from a tottering local bank. Jonathan Daniels, in his otherwise friendly life of Truman,
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published during his presidency, suggested that Truman was lucky to escape from this association without serious damage not merely to his finances but to his integrity. But it was a decade and a half before Salisbury went to gaol, and long before that he and Truman had become implacable enemies, both politically and personally. There is no evidence that he and Truman did anything wrong together. They certainly made no substantial amount of money.

Truman's eyes were always on a return to political office. In 1926 he sought his one favour of Tom Pendergast. He proposed himself for the office of County Collector, which for some extraordinary reason carried a salary with fees of $25,000 a year, and which would have given him affluence. Pendergast refused. The office was bespoken. But later that year he promoted Truman for Presiding Judge of the whole county, the official to whom Truman had previously been subordinate. Truman accepted, and was elected with ease. It was to be his niche for the next eight years, and made his political reputation in Missouri. But it gave him no advance in salary. He was still on $6,000.

During these eight years he proved a sound, clean, constructive local administrator. He re-structured the County's debt and financed it at a much cheaper rate. He balanced the County's current books. But he was also a substantial builder, and one who was peculiarly successful in getting popular support (referenda were necessary) for bond issues to finance his projects. There was a local tradition of negative votes in these polls, based upon a well-founded cynical belief that a significant part of the proceeds would find its way into the pockets of the promoters. In Truman's time several Kansas City proposals were decisively rejected. But he got most of his County projects through, accomplished by barnstorming advocacy against a background of sound administration.

In his first term he built roads, 224 miles of them. With mass motor car ownership exploding in the boom of the late 1920s, they were an essential public service. He aimed to bring a metalled road within two and a half miles of every farmhouse, and broadly achieved it. In 1930 he claimed to have been told that, on some unspecified scale of measurement, Jackson County was throughout the nation second only to Westchester County, New York, in the quality of its roads. Also, although he had to obtain that gentleman's general approval for his bond issues, he built them without the aid of Tom Pendergast. This was a considerable feat, not
because Pendergast was a renowned civil engineer but because he was the owner of the happily (if not wholly reassuringly) named Ready Mixed Concrete Company, and was used to seeing a good deal of the mixture spread on the highways of his domain.
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Apparently it was only used on three-quarters of a mile of Truman's programme.

Even more provocatively, at a 1928 meeting in Pendergast's office, which has subsequently found a place in almost every biography of Truman, he declined to give any contracts to three important clients of the Kansas City machine, and awarded a substantial slice to an out-of-state low bidder instead. ‘Didn't I tell you boys,' Pendergast complacently summed up the meeting, ‘he's the contrariest cuss in Missouri?'
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Then he privately told Truman to go ahead.

The story rings a little too good to be true. There is a feeling that Pendergast was not trying to do business but was parading Truman like a clergyman persuaded to visit a whore house (a form of enterprise familiar to Pendergast) on a rest day when it was disguised as a sewing class. However, the fact that he thought this was temporarily the best use he could make of Truman is in itself something of a tribute. Certainly the Judge's handling of public money was impeccable, almost excessively so. He refused to allow his far from affluent mother to be paid for two slices which were taken off the Grandview land. She half-seriously complained for the rest of her life.

In 1930 Truman was re-elected for a second term with a much bigger majority than in 1926. The economic climate was very different. Coolidge prosperity had given way to Hoover slump. But Truman continued to build: additional roads but more spectacularly a 20-storey courthouse (administrative building) for Jackson County in Kansas City, as well as re-fashioning its eastern district off-shoot in Independence. This time the provision of jobs was an essential part of the scheme. There could have been no question of going for an out-of-state contractor. But he was determined to get the best traditional design that he could find. He toured the county looking at courthouses. He did 24,000
miles in his own car, and his own expense. He went to the old South, to New York State, to Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and into Canada. He saw more of North America than he ever had before. He was mostly accompanied by a villainous-looking courthouse custodian called Fred Canfil, who was no great judge of architecture, but intensely loyal to Truman.
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Truman found what he wanted in the improbable location of Shreveport, Louisiana. It had recently been built by an architect called Edward F. Neild. He was hired to come to Kansas City. It was a worthwhile assignment in itself and also a very good preparatory exercise for him. He was commissioned to do the internal reconstruction of the collapsing White House in 1948-52. The White House was a suitable job, for he was a highly conventional architect. Truman liked this; it was why he chose Neild. His taste in architecture, in music, in writing, was not bad but instinctively suspicious of the adventurous. He not only disliked but almost despised anything which sought to break new ground. It must be the work of city slickers, and probably ‘sissy' as well. It was an extraordinary limitation for such a robust man with a sense, or at least a knowledge, of history. ‘I don't understand fellows like Lloyd Wright,' he told Merle Miller in 1961,
à propos
of the Neild choice. ‘I don't understand what gets into people like that. He started this whole business of chicken-coop and hen-house architecture, and I don't know why in the world he did it.'
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