Word: pendergast
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Harry & Tom. In 1934 Boss Tom Pendergast, the corrupt Kansas City politico, was looking for a respectable name to sweeten up the noisome Pendergast ticket. Harry Truman, a likable plodder, had lived a clean life: he did not smoke, and did not like his womenfolk to smoke; he was a high Mason; he had married the girl he went to Sunday School with; he had been a World War I hero (an artillery captain, he saved his panicky battery from a German trap in the St. Mihiel fighting). He was a farm boy become county judge, with friends...
Harry Truman had also been utterly loyal for twelve years to Boss Pendergast-ever since he had lost all his money ($15,000) in a postwar Kansas City haberdashery venture, and Pendergast had started him off as a county road overseer. By 1934 Harry Truman had become presiding judge of Jackson County, Mo. (which in Missouri is actually the county's administrative officer; as such he spent $25,000,000 on roads and buildings). He was ripe for another step up the ladder, and asked Pendergast for the county collectorship. Big Tom replied: "The best...
Most startling proof of this came from Missouri-and incidentally led to the jailing of famed Boss Tom Pendergast for income-tax evasion. The criminal aspects of that case are more typical of the low state of Missouri politics than of the manner in which fire underwriters normally win friends and influence legislatures. Pendergast & Co. were convicted of collecting large slush funds for supporting the fire companies in a rate fight. The more pertinent facts: 1) since 1922, Missouri has been trying to enforce a 10% reduction in rates; 2) since 1930 it has been trying to collect (for Missouri...
Truman was no ball of fire in his first term. He sat meekly in the freshman row, blinked when critics called him Pendergast's "errand boy," was second only to Pennsylvania's Joseph Guffey (whose vote for New Deal measures was pure automatic reflex) in unswerving support of Administration policies...
...young U.S. attorney named Maurice M. Milligan was cleaning up Kansas City, sending one Pendergast henchman after another to jail for vote frauds, getting closer & closer to the Big Boss himself. When Milligan came up for reappointment, Truman did his best to ease him out, made one of the bitterest speeches ever heard on the Senate floor. Milligan got the reappointment anyway, promptly sent Pendergast to prison for evading income taxes on some of his slush money. Truman shouted: "Purely political. . . . I won't desert a ship in distress...