Word: pendergastlies
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...thousand people gathered near the tracks to hear him at Crestline, Ohio; at Fort Wayne, Ind., 3,000 turned out. He was respectfully received-although at Gary, Ind., a woman in a floppy hat shouted: "Hello,. Harry. I'm from Independence. I knowed you when you worked for Pendergast." In Chicago, 100,000 lined the streets to watch him ride from the train to the Palmer House. But what the political doctors had ordered was a roaring ovation-and Harry Truman got only a spattering of hand-claps...
Bullets & Ballots. The citizens and the Star got an awakening on election day in 1934. Four people were killed by gunplay and knifings at the polls as the young, earnest Citizens group tried to do something to halt illegal voting. Pendergastlies gave a Starman a pistol-whipping about the head, chased him back to the Star. From there on it was open war, with Roy Roberts, then the Star's managing editor, planning much of the reformers' strategy. It was the beginning of Pendergast's decline & fall...
...greatest change has come in the town's leadership. Merchants, bankers, railroad managers and hundreds of citizens who once would never think of messing in the town's dirty politics are now the backbone of the reform. Says Roberts: "Pendergast had civic leadership constricted. He even controlled the Chamber of Commerce. Good and able citizens took no part in the city's affairs. If they bucked the machine, they were liable to personal harm. When the machine broke down, we had a flood of new blood. Where there were a few civic leaders a few years...
...nine years since Old Tom went to prison for cheating the income-tax collector of $443,550, his machine has had only one victory worth crowing about: its defeat, demanded by Harry Truman, of Congressman Roger C. Slaughter in 1946's Democratic primary. A fortnight ago, oldtime Pendergastlies celebrated a minor victory: eight Pendergast machinemen were acquitted of vote-fraud charges (on which the Star had gathered the evidence) growing out of the 1946 primary. In a year of trials, only four of 39 accused had been pronounced guilty...
...Roberts lives in Kansas on account of Old Tom Pendergast. The boss's assessors, by upping tax valuations, had made it tough on the Star's wealthy executives to own property on the Missouri side...