Word: pendergastlies
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...Chicago Daily News recalled last week that Tom Pendergast used to hand out signed cards that said simply: "This man is my friend." The card, said the News, "promised nothing, but it was immunity from everything...
...politicians. The big-city machines were a lot huskier then than they are today. They recruited thousands of people like Clara Boyle, who considered themselves and were considered by their neighbors as decent, God-fearing men & women. (It would never have occurred to Clara Boyle that her friend Tom Pendergast was a crook; they both attended the Visitation Roman Catholic Church.) The machine politicians of the precincts and the city-hall corridors had ethical standards which were, in all the everyday affairs of life, as high as those of their communities. In politics, however, they had a special code...
...understand the spirit behind Tom Pendergast's card is to understand the ever-mounting spate of scandals in Washington. Most of the men accused, including Bill Boyle, are sincerely indignant at the charges against them. They have done nothing that they consider wrong, nothing that was not approved or tolerated in the political environment where they learned the game, nothing that was not done in Washington years ago. Public criticism of their actions strikes them as strange and unfair...
...family moved to Kansas City in 1915, and Mother Boyle had Bill and Russ pushing doorbells and passing out handbills in the hilly Fourth Ward before they were out of high school. Theirs was a predominantly Republican district, and the few Democrats were badly split between Tom Pendergast's "goats" and Joe Shannon's "rabbits." Mother Boyle stuck loyally to the "goats," and ran her Cosmopolitan Democratic club for Tom Pendergast with a firm hand. At the big, rip-snorting Pendergast picnics at Lonejack, Mo., the Boyles got well acquainted with the Trumans, another loyal Pendergast family. Harry...
When the depression caught Bill with two babies and no job, Mother Boyle hustled to the rescue. She knew just where to turn, and the Pendergast organization did not fail her. She got Bill on as a $100-a-month booking clerk at the old Fourth District police station, in the heart of Kansas City's Irish district. Two years later he was secretary to the director of police, an old Pendergast hack named Otto P. (Onie) Higgins. The ward bosses, the flatfeet and the job hunters who came to deal with Higgins called Bill Boyle "Onie...