The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  In the months of judicial maneuverings and delays that followed, the cry of “Get Jim Reed!” grew, until, as spring perennials bloomed across the Country Club District, the idea became reality.

  SIX

  Senator Reed Comes Home

  Jim Reed was bigger than Kansas City. He smoked cigars with H. L. Mencken. William Randolph Hearst and Clarence Darrow were among his friends. As an attorney he represented Henry Ford, and oil companies. His political oratory had rained fire on Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. At the moment, he was eyeing the White House.

  If such a famously celebrated and controversial Kansas Citian were asked to serve as criminal defense attorney for the Boss’s wife, Caroline Pendergast, or for the local millionaire businesswoman Nell Donnelly, the request would be understood. There would be political considerations, and chits repaid.

  But Myrtle Bennett was an obscure housewife of a Ward Parkway perfume salesman. The simultaneous sensations of the bridge craze and the killing had drawn the nation’s attention and maybe that of Reed, who didn’t play bridge (he preferred a hearty game of Red Dog), though always craved attention. Reed was a maverick. But even so, why on earth would he take Myrtle Bennett’s case?

  The Old Roman came home by train in March 1929. A loving multitude six thousand strong awaited his arrival. Filling Kansas City’s Union Station was a brass band (he loved brass bands!), Pendergast loyalists (Attendance: Mandatory!), the Boss himself (fedora, suspenders), red-white-and-blue bunting (the colors of Washington, Jefferson!), a wealthy, married businesswoman (awaiting her next secret rendezvous with the Old Roman), and hand-painted banners that proclaimed JIM’S HOME, HURRAH, JACKSON COUNTY DEMOCRATIC CLUB, and FAITHFUL JIM. This was Senator Jim Reed’s favored milieu, richly American, the haze of cigar smoke and heartwarming huzzahs, reminiscent of stump speeches he had made in Missouri pastures filled with calls of “Give it to ’em, Jim!”

  The scene roared vividly to life. It was all syrup, smiles, and exploding flashbulbs. Boss T. J. Pendergast, choreographer of this event (and of a “Jim Reed for President in 1932” movement), had missed no detail. Reed’s wife, Lura, received roses, snapdragons, and forget-me-nots. Even Jackson County’s administrative judge, bespectacled Harry S. Truman, smiled broadly for the cameras, and Truman hated Jim Reed for his party disloyalty and for what he had done to Woodrow Wilson.

  Virile at sixty-seven, with a chiseled profile, ruddy complexion, and hair the color of morning frost, Jim Reed, a nineteenth-century man with nineteenth-century sensibilities, and a self-styled Jeffersonian, was now, as a venerable elder, the living portrait of a Roman senator. Thirty years in politics, the last eighteen as U.S. senator from Missouri, Reed knew these gathered people, and they knew him. They remembered how his oratorical sword had cut through big government, foreign entanglements, Prohibition, woman suffrage, and, most famously, the League of Nations. In each instance, he filled the Senate chamber with oratory influenced by the old masters that soared even in the next day’s newspapers. Missouri was the Show Me State, and no one doubted that Jim Reed in Washington had shown them. Other senators treaded lightly around him, fearing his invective. Pennsylvania senator George Wharton Pepper described Reed’s verbal assaults as “chemical.” “It was,” Pepper noted, “as if he had thrown acid upon his victim.” Reed had mastered the art of senatorial repartee. With his satire and willingness to strike below the belt, he inspired fear. Because of his personal attacks and his practice of talking to the gallery, his colleagues often invoked a rule regulating senatorial conduct during debate. A senator once asked Reed to suspend a lengthy address to allow for a vote on a routine matter, to which Reed, with no small hubris, replied, “We will vote on the resolution in ample time, and you can also hear me. You will thus revel in a double pleasure.” He said he opposed woman suffrage because wives would merely vote the same as their husbands (therefore not changing the vote, but doubling it), and besides, he added, the women of Missouri opposed the amendment. He spoke of “nature’s law of love and life,” which he viewed straightforwardly: “That man will remain master in external conflicts, including politics, and that woman will continue mistress of the home, the mother and guardian of the generations yet to be.” From the Senate floor in September 1918, Reed attacked colleagues who had caved to the suffrage lobby, his voice rising in righteous indignation: “Now we find a petticoat brigade awaits outside, and Senate leaders, like little boys, like pages, trek back and forth for orders. If you accept that office, Senators, then put on a cap and bells and paint your cheeks like clowns, as did the court fools of the middle centuries, and do your truckling in a proper garb.” According to the old-fashioned doctrine embraced by Reed, men should bare their bosoms to the iron hail of battle while their women, with the divine spark, would stand behind them, protected, and ready to bind their wounds.

  Reed made the suffragists’ blood boil. Women in Missouri rose up to create “Rid Us of Reed” clubs and banded together with Wilson loyalists to lock Reed out of the 1920 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, an embarrassing moment for the Old Roman. But Fighting Jim fought his way back, and in his final speech in the Senate, begun on a Saturday and concluded on a Monday, he railed against the Volstead Act, which enabled federal enforcement of Prohibition. In that speech he spoke of the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, when “some of the leading ‘political prohibitionists’ were paying the bellboys $7, $8, $9 and $10 for a pint of class whiskey that no Missourian would ever think of drinking.” Reed threatened to make public the names of those Republicans “who vote dry and drink wet.” After a worrisome two nights in the nation’s capital, Reed returned on Monday and put the minds of his Republican colleagues at ease: “I am not going to do it!” They could not wait to rid him from their chamber.

  He possessed what one writer called a “magnificent bellicosity.” Like a gargoyle by the gate, he stood sentinel protecting the Constitution and individual liberties. These were his political anchors. He never tired of paying tribute to the Constitution and the men who had framed it. Among his oratorical devices, he used repetition, analogy, sarcasm, florid language. He made few gestures with his hands. Rather, he used his eyes—they transformed from a deep watery blue to gunmetal gray—and his famous sneer. He made emotional appeals to patriotism and mother love, drawing huge crowds in courtrooms and in the Senate’s public galleries. Even without modern amplification devices, he never struggled to be heard, speaking in a high baritone, and sometimes, for effect, whispering. Oswald Garrison Villard, writing in The Nation, suggested in 1928, “Like [Daniel] Webster it is impossible for Mr. Reed ‘to be as great as he looks or sounds.’”

  Reed stated his positions with such force and eloquence that no one ever forgot where he stood. This puzzled members of the Capitol press corps, for there seemed little political sense to it. Reed’s orations seemed reckless and stated without concern for personal backlash. His attacks from the Senate floor were often personal, bitter. Newspapermen considered him enigmatic and wrote off his presidential prospects, even as the public requested his office to mail out 750,000 copies of his speeches on Prohibition, and more than a million copies of his speeches on the League of Nations, “the most monstrous doctrine ever proposed in this Republic.” His admirers considered him an oppositional force without equal, but his detractors, noting that he had written not a single important piece of legislation in eighteen years, viewed him as destructive, an obstructionist. As senators crafted legislation, one question seemed essential: Can this get past Reed?

  Now Reed climbed atop an information booth counter at Union Station, the band and the throng quieting. Later on this night, he would be fêted at a banquet with five hundred guests at the Muehlebach Hotel, featuring special whole stuffed poulet, Reed-style, and wax busts of Senator Reed at the speaker’s table. Atop the counter, Reed said, “I prefer to come back here to live with my friends and neighbors than be king of any country on the face of the earth. It is
the finest thing a man can have: neighbors and friends who stand by him.”

  It was folksy, homespun. He told the crowd he was done with politics, but how could anyone believe that? “He may talk of retiring, but nobody can associate him with the idea of repose,” The Kansas City Journal-Post said. “He was a born fighter and will remain so, with the last faint exhalation of his fleeting breath. Otherwise he would not be our Jim.” Even as Reed spoke, the presidency was in his head, and the Boss was holding meetings and making phone calls on his behalf.

  For several years, Jim and Lura Reed had lived in the Muehlebach, but in 1927 they moved into a fine brick home, with a basement library, a sprawling sun porch with high-backed rocking chairs decorated whimsically with the original cartoons of Reed’s caricaturists, and a yard in which to romp with Jeff, their German shepherd. The house sat on Cherry Street, in the Country Club District, not far from the Pendergast mansion, and only a few miles from Myrtle and Jack Bennett’s apartment on Ward Parkway. The Reeds would have a good life now, with a maid, a chauffeur, and Tom, their longtime cook, who had returned with them from Washington, where he had mastered the Southern breakfast of hot corn bread, fried chicken, baked ham, and waffles.

  At Union Station, Reed was moved to tears and dabbed a handkerchief to his eyes. He made one comment to the crowd that had the ring of complete truth: “I shall resume my law practice. I’m going to keep busy.”

  Reed was, without challenge, the most famous man in Kansas City. There were others whom Kansas Citians embraced as their own, but they had only a limited local connection. Joan Crawford, the Hollywood starlet, once lived in Kansas City under the name of Billie Cassen. But an old Kansas City friend approached Crawford and pleasantly brought up the old days, only to hear Crawford say, “I’m sure you are mistaken. I never remember meeting you at all.” A young writer briefly worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, attracted warm reviews—his name, Ernest Hemingway. And a one-time paperboy for The Star, who left Kansas City for California in 1923, created the first sound animated cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928), featuring Mickey Mouse. “We thought of a tiny bit of a mouse,” the artist would say, “that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin—a little fellow trying to do the best he could.” The artist was Walt Disney.

  Even Jim Reed did not belong entirely to Kansas City. Born in rural Ohio, near Mansfield, during the first year of the Civil War, Reed and his family drove a covered wagon and five thousand sheep to a farm in east-central Iowa (or, as he pronounced it, Eye-oh-way), just over the river from present-day Cedar Rapids. His father died soon after, and Jim Reed worked the fields, the family’s heavily mortgaged farm hovering near bankruptcy. His older brother was said to have died out west at the hands of horse thieves. Neighbors considered his mother Nancy cold, “vinegary,” and suspicious of change. She raised her children with the teachings of the Presbyterian Church. In 1877, at sixteen, Reed won a state oratorical contest. Friday debates were customary at the high school, and townspeople came to hear the boy orator talk about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He attended Coe College briefly, read law in a local office, and began a private practice in Cedar Rapids. Along the way, he ran for alderman (and lost) and then fell in love with a married woman. Their love affair prompted the woman’s husband to file for divorce. In an early sign of his boldness, the bachelor Reed swept in and married the woman, Lura Olmstead, even though, at the time, she was forty-two and he just twenty-five. Running from the storm they had created in Iowa, they moved to Kansas City.

  Jim and Lura Reed arrived in 1887, a time when four-mule teams drove through mud to the axles in the boomtown’s streets. Reed rented a corner in a downtown room filled with desks, and hung out his shingle. His ambition and his oratorical skills, most notably stumping for the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896, captured the attention of alderman Jim Pendergast. Elected Jackson County prosecutor in 1898, Reed would win all but two of his 287 cases (one of his defeats: Jesse James, Jr., acquitted on robbery charges), and then twice was elected as a reform mayor of Kansas City. As mayor, he delivered an eloquent welcome address at the 1900 Democratic Convention in Kansas City. That year, even The Kansas City Star, his most implacable foe, suggested, “It would hardly be possible for Mr. Reed to order a beefsteak and a dish of hash brown potatoes without impressing his rare declamatory gifts on the waiter.” Reed also paid his political debt to the Pendergast brothers, naming younger brother, Tom, to a two-year term as Kansas City’s superintendent of streets, a plum patronage job, and allowing Tom’s older brother, alderman Jim, to appoint the majority of the 173 men on the police force. Reed took on the local utility interests, and became known for courage and toughness. “There is no more compromise in Jim Reed,” The Star wrote in 1902, “than in a crowbar.” Even so, one adversary in Kansas City called him the Saw-Voiced Raven of the Kaw, and another, Bridlewise Jim, to be led like a horse in the Pendergast stable.

  The defining moment of Jim Reed’s political career as an oppositional force occurred ten years before his return home to Union Station. For some Democrats (including the one in the White House at the time), the moment forever marked Reed as a party traitor.

  September 22, 1919. The subject at hand was a proposed peace treaty with Germany. Senator Jim Reed rose from his front-row desk in the Senate chamber. Senators poured from the cloakroom. The public gallery became energized. Now the floor was his. The North American Review, in assessing Reed’s speeches, wrote, “We find him nearly always occupying one of two roles. Either he is Nemesis, hunting down his prey inexorably, or he is Leonidas, dying at the pass. One moment discovers him ruthlessly pressing his adversary; the next reveals him waving a splintered sword above a bloody but unbowed head and defying the hosts of hell to come.”

  As part of the proposed Treaty of Versailles, a League of Nations would be created to prevent wars through disarmament and collective security. It would have no army, and so, if a military crisis arose, League member states would provide guns and troops. A group of Republicans—the “Irreconciliables”—firmly opposed the treaty. “Mild reservationists” sought minor changes. “Strong reservationists” would vote for the League only if American sovereignty were assured. Of course, Reed would suggest that joining the League of Nations with reservations would be like marrying with reservations: “What would they amount to, once married?” Reed aligned with the Irreconcilables led by the Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, President Wilson’s most voluble enemy.

  For four hours, Jim Reed presented his evidence. Reed despised Wilson for what he viewed as a pretentious man’s desire to make himself president of the world. More than one hundred thousand people had gathered in Washington to cheer Wilson’s return from the Paris negotiations. “Dare we reject it,” Wilson warned the Senate about the impending vote on the treaty, “and break the heart of the world?” But Reed invoked George Washington, who, in his Farewell Address, said, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Reed added, with a sneer, “So spoke the creator of this republic. Who will be its destroyer?”

  Now, from the Senate floor, Reed appealed to prejudice by offering race equality as an evil. He pointed out that Britain, with its voting protectorates, would have six votes to the United States’ one, and that League membership would be composed of three dark-skinned men to each white man. He spoke of “barbarism” and “voodooism.” Reed worried that “a single spark struck even in a remote and barbarous country may start a conflagration which will blaze around the world.”

  “The trouble with you gentlemen who want to overturn the world,” Reed said, “is that you set up a proposition of a great power and you forget… it may be used for our assassination.”

  A senator asked Reed if the United States would need a much larger army and navy if it opted not to join the League. “Not at all, sir. Let me puncture that balloon,” Reed replied, as
laughter filled the public gallery.

  Let me tell you something, there was a time when a lot of the people in the world—and I believe that is the reason why we got into this war—believed that the Yankee, as they call us, was a fat, sleek, overfed lounge lizard; that he would not fight; that he could not fight; that he was chasing dollars, and had no spirit in him that made it possible for him to go out and die. And so Germany threw the glove in our face. But that mistake will not be made again for a century of time. [Applause erupted in the gallery.] They found you can take a boy off an American farm and land him in France, and in two weeks’ time he could go over the top with the best of them. They found out these soldiers did not need the discipline of camp and of military establishment. They already had the discipline of American citizenship. They found out that these men could laugh in the face of death, and that they could go down into the shadows with a smile upon their lips. They found out that we can raise ten million men, if we have to, and that all the powers of earth and hell can not whip us on our own soil. [The gallery again erupted in applause.]

  Reed finished in a patriotic fervor: “I decline to help set up any government greater than that established by the fathers, baptized in the blood of patriots from the lanes of Lexington to the forests of the Argonne, sanctified by the tears of all the mothers whose heroic sons went down to death to sustain its glory and independence—the Government of the United States of America.”

  A thunder of applause came from the public gallery. Senators rushed to congratulate Reed. Soldiers clanged their helmets. A crippled young soldier slammed down his crutch on the rail in front of him with such force that the crutch broke in half, with one half falling to the floor below, and he shouted, “By God, you are right, Senator!” When the call came for quiet, the audience hissed in disapproval.