Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Roman Law 84

  Statutory Rights and Remedies 85

  On February 21, 1925, at the Washington’s Birthday banquet in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, my father represented his class and gave a speech entitled, “Honor in Government.” But after his sophomore year, he had to abandon the course. Every time he came to Kansas City, he was overwhelmed by pleas for advice and help from his Battery D boys. To them, he was still Captain Harry, the leader who had taken them through France without a single casualty from enemy fire.

  Dad’s heart was still in politics. Moreover, he was constantly encouraged to return to the campaign trail by Mike Pendergast and his son Jim. Mike Pendergast was a simple, direct, uncomplicated man, utterly different from his powerful brother. “I loved him as I did my own daddy,” my father said after Mike died in 1929.

  In the two years since Dad’s defeat, the Democrats had been out of power in the Jackson County government and not doing very well in Kansas City either. They were learning the hard way that their endless feuding was politically ruinous. With Republicans in control of the government in Washington and in the Missouri State House in Jefferson City, the party was hard pressed in Jackson County. In 1926, they decided to bury their feuds and get behind potentially winning candidates. Early that year, Jim Pendergast introduced my father to Tom, the “Big Boss,” as Dad always called him.

  A stocky, grizzly bear of a man with a massive neck and shoulders and huge hands, Tom Pendergast was a formidable character. Prone to violence, he was known to knock a man cold with a single punch in an argument. He was a kind of natural force, around which other men clustered like pilot fish on a shark.

  Tom Pendergast was twelve years older than my father. He was the voice - the very authoritative voice - of an earlier, cruder era in American politics. He had been building power in Kansas City since 1900. Along with his native strength of personality and body, Boss Tom was a shrewd man. Unlike similar bosses in New York and Chicago, his power was not based on the support of masses of immigrants. Foreign-born voters in Kansas City never numbered much more than 6 percent. Tom Pendergast rose to power by demonstrating a genius for local political leadership, for working with people of all creeds and colors.

  Jim Pendergast urged his uncle to back my father for presiding judge of Jackson County. Boss Tom agreed. With a united party behind him, Dad swept to a solid victory at the head of a ticket that put Democrats into almost every available county office. The triumph made Tom Pendergast the most powerful politician in Missouri. Earlier in the year, the Goats had won complete control of Kansas City, installing Henry McElroy, the presiding judge in Dad’s first term, as city manager.

  Elected presiding judge by 16,000 votes, my father was, as he described it “the key man in the county government.” He dates the real beginning of his political career from this 1926 election. For the first time, he had the kind of authority he needed to build a record that voters could see and admire. He poured all his energy into the job, and he needed every bit of it. The county government was in disastrous shape. The roads, most of them built by Bulger, were called “piecrusts” by two local engineers whom my father hired to survey them. “These men with my assistance planned a system of roads estimated to cost $6.5 million,” Dad says. My father then went to Tom Pendergast and persuaded him to back a bond issue to build these roads. Pendergast was pushing a $28 million bond issue for Kansas City, and he was extremely lukewarm to Dad’s plan. Boss Tom said the voters would never approve it. There had been so much corruption in the county court system that the voters had become extremely reluctant to hand over any large amounts of money to the judges. Dad argued back - something few men had the nerve to do with Tom Pendergast. He said he was confident he could sell the bond issue to the people, by telling them exactly how he planned to spend it. Pendergast told him to go ahead. The Kansas City Star declared editorially that the presiding judge did not have a prayer of winning either the votes or the money. Judging from the fate of other bond issues, the Star certainly seemed to be making a safe prediction. Out of $116.41 million requested by the politicians in the 1920s in Jackson County, the voters refused $83.76 million.

  This skepticism only made my father more determined. He launched a Truman-style campaign which once more took him into every corner of the county. He explained how he was planning to award the contracts - on a low-bid basis. He proposed a bipartisan board of engineers to supervise the program. He took the head of the Taxpayers League - his former major in the army - over the county roads inch by inch and convinced him of the necessity for new construction. He even persuaded the local leaders of the Republican Party to back the idea.

  The vote came on May 8, 1928, my father’s forty-fourth birthday. To the astonishment of all the local political experts, his entire program - all $7 million of it - won by a three-fourths majority instead of the necessary two-thirds, while the $28 million Kansas City bond issue was pared by most of the same voters to a mere $700,000.

  In a few months, the road-building program was under way, run exactly as my father said it would be run. The two engineers, Colonel Edward Stayton and Ν. T. Veatch, were in charge of the specifications, and they administered the contracts with absolutely unswerving honesty. Firms from outside Missouri - as far away as South Dakota - were awarded major slices of the work, on the basis of their low bids. Meanwhile, Dad was roughing up Democrats throughout the county. In Kansas City, there was a tradition of carrying one or two thousand city employees “on the pad” without requiring them to show up for work. Some Democrats thought this principle could be applied with equal ease to the county government. But the moment my father found a man drawing pay without performing his job, he fired him.

  Cries of political anguish reached Tom Pendergast’s ears. Even louder were the howls of rage from the local contractors, who had complacently expected to do most of the work for Judge Truman’s $7 million road program. Soon Dad was invited to a meeting in Tom Pendergast’s office. He was confronted by three of the leading Goat Democrat contractors, all in a very ugly mood. There was a ferocious argument. My father insisted that he had made a commitment to the voters, and he was not going to back down on it. With his eye on Tom Pendergast, he argued that it was not only good government, it was good politics, to keep his promises to the voters.

  Tom was fond of saying there were three sides to every argument, my side, your side, and the right side. He decided my father was on the right side, and, in spite of the fact that Pendergast was a partner of at least one of these crooked contractors, he threw them out of the office and told Dad to go on doing the job the honest way.

  Only in the last five or six years have scholars of my father’s career begun to dig behind the myths that have accumulated around these days and discover the truth that we Trumans have known all the time. For instance, Dr. Dorsett W. Lyle, in his unpublished doctoral thesis, “The Pendergast Machine,” writes of Dad’s nomination: “Desperately wanting to gain his hold on the rich county patronage, and likewise desiring to maintain the hold once he regained it, Tom Pendergast decided that he would be willing to relinquish, if necessary, such assets to his machine as special favors to contractors, in order to be able to hold on to the patronage. This was exactly what Pendergast had to do the minute he selected Harry Truman to become the machine’s candidate for county judge.” In this relinquishment, Boss Tom also abandoned special favors for himself. Pendergast owned the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company, which in the past had been used almost exclusively by contractors paving Jackson County roads. In Judge Truman’s 225-mile road-building program, only three-fourths of a mile were paved with Ready-Mixed.

  The road program was completed on schedule, giving Jackson County one of the finest highway systems in the nation. To everyone’s amazement, there was not a hint of scandal connected with it. Even the Kansas City Star had to admit that Presiding Judge Truman was “extraordinarily honest.” To her dying day, Mamma Truman maintained that he was too honest for his own good - or for
her good, anyway. When a new road sliced off a piece of her farm, my father refused to pay a cent for the land. She complained about this super-honesty for years. Other aspects of this remarkable road program can be seen in a long-forgotten booklet that Dad published on Jackson County’s roads. It reveals him to have been decades in advance of his time. He set aside land for parks and recreation centers. He discussed the problem of keeping local streams pure and preserving the forested parts of the county. Remembering the tree-lined roads he had seen in France during the war, he planted seedlings along every mile of his new roads. The local farmers, indifferent to beauty as well as soil conservation, uprooted most of them. But Dad’s insistence that every farm in the county should be within two and a half miles of a hard-surface road won him their undying enthusiasm.

  Tom Pendergast, reading the stories in the paper, and hearing echoes of the warm wave of approval from the rural part of Jackson County, realized my father was right - fulfilling campaign promises was good politics, as well as good government. In 1929, Mike Pendergast died. Although there was considerable competition from other Goats in the organization, Tom made Dad his official representative, responsible for the eastern part of the county. At this point in his career, Tom Pendergast knew exactly what he was doing, politically, and the results of the following year’s elections proved it. Harry S. Truman surged to the top of the party’s local ticket, and at the age of forty-five was reelected presiding judge by 55,000 votes.

  In four years of hard, continuous effort, my father had accomplished a great deal. He has summarized these accomplishments in his memoirs. But he has never revealed the inner agony he suffered as he struggled to retain his principles and at the same time build a political career within the domain of Boss Tom Pendergast. Unfortunately for history, Dad has never kept a diary. But at times of stress in his life, he has written memoranda in which he wrestled with himself over decisions that confronted him. He has given me one of these documents which he wrote shortly after his reelection as presiding judge:

  I have been doing some very deep and conscientious thinking. Is a service to the public or one’s country worth one’s life if it becomes necessary to give it, to accomplish the end sought? Should a man in public office see that his family and offspring are provided for even though ethics and honor have to be thrown overboard? One of my predecessors answered that in the affirmative.

  Since a child at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise. For instance, I picked a West Pointer, son of an honorable father, a man who should have had Washington, Lee, Jackson, Gustavus Adolphus for his ideals, to associate with me in carrying out a program and I got - a dud, a weakling, no ideals, no nothing. He’d use his office for his own enrichment, he’s not true to his wife (and a man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any other). He’d sell me or anyone else he’s associated with out for his own gain, but for lack of guts. He worried about the front in the army in 1918 until he made himself sick enough to stay at home.

  I am obligated to the Big Boss, a man of his word, but he gives it very seldom and usually on a sure thing. But he is not a trimmer. He, in times past, owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man. I wonder who is worth more in the sight of the Lord?

  I am only a small duck in a very large puddle, but I am interested very deeply in local or municipal government. Who is to blame for present conditions but sniveling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday, and start over on Sunday. I think maybe the Boss is nearer Heaven than the snivelers.

  We’ve spent seven million in bonds and seven million in revenue in my administration. I could have had $1,500,000. But I haven’t a hundred and fifty dollars. Am I a fool or an ethical giant? I don’t know. The Boss in his wrath at me because his crooked contractors got no contracts, said I was working to give my consulting engineers a nationwide reputation and that my honor wouldn’t be [worth] a pinch of snuff. I don’t care if I get honor, if the taxpayers’ money goes on the ground or into the buildings it’s intended for.

  Several pages of this memorandum describe in detail the terrific fight my father had to wage against corruption on the county court itself. The men he mentions are dead now, and I see no point in printing their names. Dad noted sadly that one of his fellow judges, put on the court by Joe Shannon, the Rabbit boss, was instructed “to treat me for what I am in his estimation, that is, the lowest human on earth.” But Shannon was soon forced to send his emissaries to see Presiding Judge Truman when he wanted anything. Why? Because his man and the other judge preferred to shoot craps down behind the bench while the court was in session. “When I wanted something done,” Dad says, “I’d let them start a crap game and then introduce a long and technical order. Neither of them would have time to read it, and over it would go. I got a lot of good legislation for Jackson County over while they shot craps.”

  Finally, my father summed up his experience as a county judge: “I’ll go out of here poorer in every way than when I came into office. . . . I hope that there are no bond issues and no more troubles, until I’m done and then maybe I can run a filling station or something until I’ve run up my three score and ten and go to a quiet grave.”

  There was never a hint of this inner turmoil in the man I saw during these years. At home, he was the perfect father, full of jokes and a constant tease. For a while, he called me Skinny, because I was. He fretted endlessly over my health and one winter early in the 1930s, he shipped Mother and me off to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to see if a miracle could be achieved, and I could get through one year without becoming a case study in walking pneumonia. I had whooping cough, German measles, and a lot of other childhood diseases, but when it came to colds, flu, and the like, I was in a class by myself. Perhaps this was one of several reasons why Dad tended to spoil me, especially in matters of money. He was always slipping me an extra quarter or half dollar, to Mother’s vast indignation. She thought I should learn to live on my allowance. More than once, when I found myself struggling as an adult to balance my chaotic checkbook (lately I’ve given up), I realized Mother was right.

  Another argument which I continued off and on for the better part of a year concerned the color of my hair. It grew in snow white, and my father roundly declared that I had inherited it from him. “I was a blond when I was her age,” he said serenely. My mother dragged out a picture of him and Uncle Vivian at the age of about four and two respectively. Their hair looked terribly dark to her. That did not bother Dad in the least. He insisted he had been a towheaded toddler. Finally, on one of our Sunday visits to the farm at Grandview, the question was put to Mamma Truman for adjudication.

  “Did Harry have blond hair when he was growing up?” my Mother asked.

  “Never,” snapped Mamma Truman. That was the end of that argument.

  Perhaps Dad was worried I wasn’t really a Truman. Perhaps he found it difficult to adjust to being the father of an only daughter. As a natural leader, I suspect he always envisioned himself as the father of a son, whom he could discipline without a deluge of tears. Now that I have become the mother of four boys, I tell him frequently he had a better deal.

  Occasionally politicians came to our house on pressing matters. Once, a tall man with a big nose who was running for governor, tried to kiss me. I pulled his nose, to my mother’s scarcely concealed delight. Kissing babies, incidentally, was something Dad himself never felt compelled to do. Most of the time, especially after he became the political leader of the eastern part of the county, he kept politics outside the house, seeing people at an office in the business district of Independence. I was never very conscious of him as a politician, during those early years, but I did know he was a highway builder. He often took me with him on inspection tours of the new roads, and sometimes on l
onger trips, when he dedicated or inspected a historic road, as part of his still continuing presidency of the National Old Trails Association.

  Throughout these early Independence years, my father was haunted by a worry which he never mentioned - the possibility I might be kidnapped. There was still plenty of leftover Klan animosity against Judge Truman in the area, and his insistence on running an honest administration made him enemies by the score in Kansas City. More important, kidnapping around this time was becoming a favorite form of extortion for the underworld. One day, when I was in the first grade, an odd-looking character appeared at school and informed my teacher he was delegated to take “Mary Truman, Judge Truman’s daughter” home. I had been christened Mary Margaret, but I had long since abandoned Mary and my teacher, Mrs. Etzanhouser, knew it. Pretending to look for me, she stepped into another room and phoned my mother. Dad sent police hustling to the scene. By this time, the mysterious stranger had vanished. Thereafter my father or mother - or an available uncle or aunt - drove me to and from school.

  Meanwhile, events political and economic were conspiring to deny Dad that impulsive wish he had made, to retire to the simplicities of running a filling station. In his election victory in 1930, he had had the intense satisfaction of running far ahead of the Democratic ticket in general, including his old Rabbit enemy, “Uncle Joe” Shannon, who was elected to the House of Representatives that year. Dad had done more than build a fine set of roads for Jackson County. He had been elected president of the Greater Kansas City Planning Association and in that role proposed - again about thirty years ahead of his time - a metropolitan approach to the planning of the Kansas City area, which would have ignored state boundaries and county lines and included two other Missouri counties and three counties across the river in Kansas.

  My father has always been an ardent supporter of urban and metropolitan planning. One day, reminiscing about his experiences in Jackson County, he said, “We haven’t done enough planning. There isn’t a city in the United States that was properly planned to begin with. I know of only one whose streets were laid out in anticipation of the automobile and that is Salt Lake City. The old man that laid out that city really had vision - in more ways than one.”