Word: pendergastlies
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Making of a Senator. Neat, grey Harry Shippe Truman was sworn in as Senator from Missouri in 1934. The only men seen to smile during the ceremony were two husky lieutenants of Boss Tom Pendergast's notorious Kansas City Democratic machine, who sat beaming in the gallery...
...perfect democracy, free from bosses, string-pulling and finagling at the polls, Harry Truman would probably never have reached Washington. He was Tom Pendergast's hand-picked candidate, yanked out of obscurity so deep that few Missouri voters had ever heard of him. He was nominated, over two more deserving candidates, largely by a vast plurality rolled up in Boss Pendergast's Jackson County, whose registration lists were loaded with dead men and men who had never lived. Thanks to the Boss's great power and the New Deal's 1934 popularity, his election was then...
...knows exactly why Boss Pendergast picked Truman for the Senate. One theory: the Boss was in the whimsical mood of a socialite sneaking a pet Pekingese into the Social Register. A better theory: the Boss was impressed by the Midwestern adage that every manure pile should sprout one rose-he saw in Truman a personally honest, courageous man whose respectability would disguise the odors of the Pendergast mob. Certainly Truman was no statesman in 1934. Neither had he ever been touched by scandal...
...know basic human desires, tragedies and needs; 2) their bosses, earthy and disillusioned men, have sometimes found talent where more snobbish souls would never have thought to look. In 1921, with his haberdashery under the hammer and black days ahead, Truman looked up some old servicemen friends in the Pendergast organization. Truman was a veteran, a farmer, a Mason, a Democrat from three generations back; he had friends all over Jackson County. The machine made him road overseer, then country judge (an administrative post), finally U.S. Senator...
...best evidence presented to date, however, is a picture printed in a Boston paper which shows conclusively that it was none other than Umpire W. J. Pendergast, running low and fast to keep up with Richards, who threw one of the finest blocks of the afternoon on Margarita, thus removing him from the play...