Even before my father came home from France and married Mother, he had made up his mind that he was through with farming. Mother played a role in this decision. She made it clear that she had no desire to be a farmer’s wife. Like her mother-in-law, she had - and still has - a strong disinclination for cooking (although she can cook very well), and I doubt if the English language is adequate to describe her attitude toward the other laborious chores that need doing around a farm. But not even Mother could make up my father’s mind on anything so fundamental if he didn’t want it that way in the first place. Although he had spent eleven of his best years as a working farmer and enjoyed them thoroughly, he was eager to tackle bigger, more challenging opportunities.
Everyone over the age of thirty has heard ad nauseam about my father’s next adventure - his failure as the co-owner of a men’s clothing store in Kansas City. He went into business with Eddie Jacobson, a friend who had helped him run a very successful canteen during their army training days in Oklahoma. His political enemies have endlessly retold the story, as if it was a kind of parable that proved Dad was a gross incompetent. The truth is simple and sad - he got caught in the recession of 1920-21 when business failures tripled overnight. Dad has always insisted it was a Republican recession, engineered by “old Mellon” - Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury under Harding.
More important than the failure, in my opinion, is the way my father handled it. He absolutely refused to go into bankruptcy and spent the next fifteen years trying to pay off some $12,000 in debts. Altogether, he lost about $28,000 in this bitter experience.
According to those who misread his career, my father, having failed as a merchant, now turned in desperation to politics. Those who prefer the worst possible scenario have him going hat in hand to Tom Pendergast, the boss of Kansas City, and humbly accepting his nomination for county judge. This version reveals nothing but a vast ignorance of my father - and of Democratic politics in and around Kansas City in the early 1920s. The Pendergasts were by no means the absolute rulers of Kansas City, or of Jackson County, which included Kansas City, Independence, and smaller farming communities such as Grandview. They were fiercely opposed in primaries by a Democratic faction known as the Rabbits. The Pendergasts were called the Goats. No one that I have found, including my father, can explain satisfactorily the origin of these nicknames.
My grandfather, John Anderson Truman, had been a close friend of one of the Goat leaders in Independence and thus Dad always thought of himself as a Goat - that is, a Pendergast - Democrat. But it was not Tom Pendergast, the boss of Kansas City, who came into his mind when the name was mentioned. It was Mike Pendergast, Tom’s older, far more easy-going brother who led the Goats in eastern Jackson County. As my father explained it somewhat cryptically - “Tom didn’t like the country.”
During the war, my father had become friendly with Mike Pendergast’s son, Jim, who was a fellow officer in the 129th Field Artillery. In Missouri, a county judge is an administrative, not a judicial office. The three-man Board of Judges in Jackson County were responsible for building roads as well as running the courthouse and other county facilities. They had command of a substantial political payroll, and this made control of the three-man board of vital interest to Goats, Rabbits, and Republicans. One judge was elected from the western district, which included Kansas City. The other judge came from the eastern district, and the third, the presiding judge, was elected from the county at large.
My father had toyed with the idea of going into politics even before he returned from France. Half playfully, he had written Cousin Ethel that he intended to run for Congress when he returned home. Jim Pendergast knew this and told his father, Mike, about it. In mid-1921, when Truman and Jacobson’s haberdashery was flourishing, Mike appeared on the customer’s side of the counter one day and asked Dad if he would like to run for judge of the county court for the eastern district. My father politely declined to commit himself. It was obvious to him - and to everyone else - that the Pendergasts needed Harry S. Truman at least as much as he needed them.
On January 9, 1922, the Independence Examiner ran a story speculating on who would be the Democratic candidate for judge from the eastern district. This story discussed several men, including Ε. Ε. Montgomery of Blue Springs, a banker, and Charles W. Brady, the postmaster of Independence. “Among the younger men, Harry Truman is talked of,” the reporter wrote. “Mr. Truman was born and reared in Jackson County and lived forty years near Grandview and his vote in Washington Township would be mighty near unanimous if he should run. He now lives in Independence and is in business in Kansas City. . . . Mr. Truman has not said that he is willing to be a candidate.”
The publisher of the Examiner was Colonel William M. “Pop” Southern. One of my mother’s brothers had married his daughter. This explains, in part at least, the editor’s kind words. Note, however, that my father was easing himself into the race, not as a Pendergast man, but as an independent. On March 8, 1922, the Examiner headlined Dad’s formal announcement of his candidacy. It did not emanate from Mike Pendergast’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club. Instead, it came from “an enthusiastic meeting” attended by 300 war veterans at Lee’s Summit, one of the small farming communities outside Independence. The story told how Major Harry Truman (he had been promoted in the Reserve in 1920) of Grandview was declared the choice of the ex-servicemen as a candidate for county judge from the eastern district. Colonel Ε. M. Stayton, the former commander of the 129th Field Artillery, presented Major Truman to the meeting. He urged his fellow veterans to back him in the forthcoming election.
“It was a new method for starting out a candidate for county judge,” the reporter wrote. “Usually the factions of the Party in Kansas City agree on a man and the word is sent out to the workers in the county and instructions given to support him for the nomination. The Truman announcement is made without any organizational or factional endorsement whatever.” The reporter specified that there were men from Kansas City, Independence, Buckner, Blue Springs, and Oak Grove and they included both Goat and Rabbit Democrats. But we can be certain that there was a solid contingent of old Battery D boys in the crowd, from a description of the entertainment. Mrs. Ethel Lee Buxton of Kansas City, who had sung for the soldiers in France, entertained with songs that included “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “Mother Machree.”
This appearance also marked my father’s first attempt to become a public speaker. It was a disaster. When Colonel Stayton introduced him, Dad rose and completely forgot the little speech he had intended to make. All he could do was stammer that he was grateful for his fellow veterans’ support, and sit down. Fortunately, the boys from Battery D were not a critical audience. They cheered “Captain Harry” anyway.
On April 21, 1922, another Examiner story on the coming election described the ominous three-way fight that was developing among the Democrats. Along with the usual brawl between the Rabbits and the Goats, there was a faction surrounding Judge Miles Bulger, who was presiding judge of the county court. This meant he controlled some sixty road overseers, powerful allies in the sixty districts covering every part of the eastern half of the county. After speculating on Goat and Rabbit candidates, the reporter noted that one candidate, George W. Shaw, had no promise of support from any organization. “Harry S. Truman is another,” he wrote. “He has consulted no political director and has already announced and has received much promise of support. He stands well with the ex-servicemen, being an ex-serviceman himself, and is the youngest man suggested. He is going ahead with his campaign regardless of factional permission.”
On April 26, the Examiner reported a visit of Mike Pendergast to Independence. He held a meeting at the Eagles’ Hall, where about 100 of “the faithful,” as the reporter described them, discussed candidates for eastern district judge but came to no conclusion as to whom they would endorse. Meanwhile, my father was campaigning vigorously. In Grandview, on May 4, he filled the local movie house at a rally. On May 12, the M
en’s Rural Jackson County Democratic Club endorsed him in a rally at Lee’s Summit. The Examiner continued to describe him as “Harry S. Truman of Grandview.” Already he was demonstrating an instinctive strategy that was to be a basic part of his political success - an ability to bridge the gap between city and country Democrats.
By June, Mike Pendergast had seen enough of Harry S. Truman in action to convince him that he was a potential winner. He invited him to a meeting of the Tenth Ward Democratic Club and announced that my father had the organization’s support. Mike gave a speech, describing Dad as “a returned veteran, a captain whose men didn’t want to shoot him” - an interesting comment on army mores in World War I. As my father has said repeatedly, in discussing his relationship with the Pendergasts, he was grateful for this support. He knew he needed every available vote to win the election. There were now no less than five candidates campaigning. But he had already made it clear that he had the backing and ability to run a pretty good race on his own. Thus, there never was and never would be any subservience in his relationship with the Pendergasts. But there was another element, which some of Dad’s critics have mistaken for subservience - party loyalty.
To my father, being a Democrat was and is an article of faith. He could not run on a Republican ticket if an angel from on high appeared with a flaming sword and ordered him to do so. He supported the Pendergasts because they were Democrats, and they supported him for the same reason. His Missouri blood responded to the idea of loyalty with the same fervor that the idea inspired in the emotional hearts of Pendergast’s Irish. I am not suggesting that this made life easy. On the contrary, it involved him in some agonizing conflicts.
Even with Pendergast backing, my father continued his strenuous day and night campaigning. He had shown himself to be a political innovator by his shrewd appeal to the veteran vote - a new force in American politics. Later in the campaign, he came up with another innovation. He was one of the first to use the airplane as a political weapon.
One of his fellow veterans, Eddie McKim, persuaded a local flier to take Dad up above the biggest political picnic of the summer, at Oak Grove, and bombard the assembled farmers with Truman leaflets. According to Eddie McKim, the plane was “one of those old Jennies that was held together with baling wire.” They circled the picnic grounds and disgorged their pamphlets with no difficulty. But then the pilot tried to land in a nearby pasture. “He had a little trouble stopping the plane and it ended up about three feet from a barbed wire fence,” Eddie McKim said. “Our candidate got out as green as grass. But he mounted the rostrum and made a speech.”
On the eve of the election, an ominous force put in an appearance. Grim-faced men stood outside the doors of several Protestant churches in Independence and handed out pink “sample ballots.” When someone asked them what they were doing, they simply replied, “A hundred percent.” It was the local slogan of the Ku Klux Klan, and it meant 100 percent American. Only one man on the county ticket was endorsed by the Klan. Opposite his name they had written, “Church affiliation, Protestant, record good.” Opposite the name of Harry S. Truman was written “Church affiliation Protestant, endorsed by Tom and Mike.” The Pendergasts were Catholic, of course, and the Klansmen, with their instinctive talent for bad taste and worse judgment, were attempting to inject religious hatred into the campaign. The Examiner, reporting the story, went out of the way to point out how unfair this slur was against my father who had been “only supported by the Pendergast faction after he had been out campaigning for some months.”
When the Klan appeared in Missouri, no one was especially alarmed. It seemed a fairly harmless patriotic organization at first. The Independence Examiner wrote a mild editorial, disapproving of its bed sheets and secret meetings but praising the patriotic aspects of its program. My father even considered joining it. But when he met with one of the organizers, he was told bluntly that he had to promise never to give a Catholic a job, if he won election to the county court. My father was outraged. Most of his boys in Battery D were Catholics, and he told the Klansman he would give any one of them a job, if they needed help. That was the beginning and the end of his relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. By turning the story inside out, his enemies were to convert it into a vicious political smear against him in years to come.
When the votes for eastern district judge were finally counted on August 1, 1922, another Truman tradition was launched. My father won what the Independence Examiner called “the hottest primary fight in the history of the county” by a plurality of 300, out of a total of 11,664 votes cast. The next day, thanking those who had supported him, he reiterated his independent stance. “I have made no promises to anybody or organization,” he said. “The support I received was wonderful and I appreciated every bit. I shall endeavor to so serve as county judge that no man or woman will be ashamed of having voted for me and to give a square deal to everybody and keep the only promises I have made, which were made in my speeches to the public.”
The job he tackled was not easy, and the political situation was not much better. Previous county court administrations, especially those presided over by Miles Bulger, had made a policy of boondoggling away millions and running the county into murderous debt. In 1921, the Bulger court had spent $1,070,000 on roads that were already disintegrating because they had been built by crooked contractors using shoddy, low-grade materials. A long history of mismanagement had enabled the state to seize control of several county institutions. There was a deficit of $800,000 as well as $2,300,000 borrowed against incoming taxes at 6 percent interest.
“I learned a lot about government as she is executed in those two years,” my father says of his first term as county judge. “They were invaluable in my education. I learned the machinery of operation and I also found out who really ran things locally.” It proved to be a harsh education.
Judge Truman and his fellow Democrat, Presiding Judge Henry McElroy, first concentrated on reforming the county’s shaky fiscal structure. Dad went to Chicago and St. Louis to discuss ways to improve the county’s borrowing, and found bankers who were willing to loan money on tax anticipation notes at 4 percent. Eventually, he got them down to 2 percent. In two years, they paid off more than $600,000 of the county’s debt. When they stood for reelection in 1924, the Kansas City Star, staunchly Republican and a violent foe of the Pendergasts, said one of the few nice things they’ve ever printed about my father. Citing the improvement in the county’s roads and the reduction in the debt, the editorial declared: “The men who did this, Judge McElroy and Judge Truman, are up for renomination. Tuesday the Democratic voters of Jackson County will show whether they are interested enough in good service to renominate the men who were responsible for the remarkable showing made.”
But on the political side, Judge Truman and Presiding Judge McElroy overreached themselves. They put only Goat Democrats on the county payroll. This aroused the extreme enmity of the Rabbits. Worse, they tried to ignore the growing power of the Ku Klux Klan.
In their now familiar style, the Klan turned the election of 1924 into a vicious, hate-filled melee. They threatened to kill my father at one point. This only aroused his native pugnacity, and he astonished them by appearing at one of their meetings - not the bed sheet variety, but a political forum where they masqueraded as the Independent Democrats - and calling their bluff to their faces. He told them they were a bunch of cheap un-American fakers, and then coolly walked off the platform and through the crowd to his car. As drama, as courage, it was magnificent, but as politics, it was suicide in the year 1924, the high tide of the Klan in Missouri and in the United States. On the eve of the election, the head of the Klan in Jackson County stated bluntly in the Kansas City Star, “We are unalterably opposed to Harry Truman.” Meanwhile, the Rabbit Democrats were pursuing their own vendetta. They joined forces with the Klansmen to vote McElroy and Truman into political oblivion in November.
Dad was defeated by 877 votes - the only election he ever lost. The Klan and
the Rabbits cast all their votes for Dad’s Republican opponent, an aging harness maker named Henry Rummel. He did not even know he was running until the Republican leader of the county called him up and told him that he had put up $5 to file his name.
My father’s defeat and my birth practically coincided. “I spent two years thinking and trying to make some bread and butter for my sweetheart and our small daughter who came shortly before my licking,” he wrote, in a memoir of these years. Again, his instinctive modesty plays down the rather impressive scope of his activities while he was out of public office. He reorganized the Automobile Club of Kansas City and boosted it to over 4,000 members. He became president of the National Old Trails Association, a perfect job for Solomon Young’s grandson. He traveled extensively around Missouri and many other states, marking famous roads and urging local governments to see the value of their history as a tourist attraction. He also helped launch a savings and loan association, in which he served as vice president. Simultaneously, he kept up his political contacts. He made speeches at American Legion meetings and at school assemblies. Often his subject was historical.
Along with all these jobs and activities, my father struggled to keep up with a course in law. He had decided that a public official ought to have a law degree, and on October 5, 1923, he had enrolled in the Kansas City Law School. For the next two years, he carried a staggering schedule, but managed to earn the following grades:
FRESHMAN YEAR
Criminal 84
Law Contracts 85
Blackstone’s Commentaries 96
Torts 87
Kent’s Commentaries 85
Sales 77
Agency 93
Domestic Relations 84
SOPHOMORE YEAR
Equity Jurisprudence 83
Damages 92½
Bailments and Common Carriers 82
Common Law & Equity Pleading 89
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