Harry S. Truman was famously from Independence, Mo. He lived much of his life there, and it’s where the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum is located. It would be impossible, however, to tell his story without reference to the nearby metropolis of Kansas City.
Truman had a series of jobs in Downtown Kansas City from about age 18. One of the people he knew there was called Jesse James, the son of the outlaw and Confederate bushwhacker of the same name. James the younger ran a Downtown soda fountain and candy store.
In 1906, when Truman was 22, his family said he was needed back on the farm in Independence. He spent several years plowing fields and keeping the books; but he got back to the city often on dates with a woman he was courting named Bess Wallace, also of Independence.
Duty came calling again in 1917, but this time it was Uncle Sam. He’d already had years of experience with the National Guard, and was proud of his dress uniform, which was navy blue. Not everyone was. His grandmother — she once owned slaves, as did the James family — told him not to visit her again while wearing it. He looked like a Yankee invader and she didn’t have fond memories of the Northern army marching through their fields in Western Missouri.
In the army proper, the Baptist and Freemason Truman was concerned to learn that most of the men who’d be under his command in the 129th Field Artillery in France were raucous German and Irish Catholics from Kansas City (one of his grandfathers, in particular, had a very low opinion of Catholics). They all got along fine, it turned out, and the 34-year-old farmer proved to be a natural leader.
After the war, he married Bess, and, with an army buddy named Eddie Jacobson, opened a store in Kansas City that sold men’s shirts and ties. It failed after a couple of years; he made sure, nonetheless, that all of his outstanding debts connected with it were paid off eventually.
One day, during his period as a haberdasher on 12th Street Downtown, Truman got a visit from Michael Pendergast, father of Jim Pendergast, another army buddy. Michael’s brother was the famous Alderman James Pendergast, who had died in 1911, and whose statue these days overlooks the urban valley known as the West Bottoms, once an Irish stronghold. The main man in the 1920s was another brother of Michael’s named Thomas Joseph, or T.J. Pendergast. Eventually, the family. whose faction, the Goats, operated from the West Bottoms, prevailed over the Rabbits, a rival Irish faction, thanks in part to their ability to spot talent when they saw it.
Michael Pendergast had a question for Harry: “Have you ever considered running for office?”
“Have I ever!” was his first thought no doubt, even if he played it casual at that first approach.
Truman followed the political scene closely, an interest he inherited from his father with whom he attended the DNC in 1904. In any case, under the Pendergasts’ tutelage he ran for a “judgeship” in Jackson County, which encompasses both Kansas City and Independence. This was an administrative office rather than a legal one; and three such judges ran the county. He did a good job, before being voted out. When the Goats were returned to power, Truman was presiding judge and his name became a by-word for efficiency. The Pendergasts, alas, were notoriously corrupt, or at least T.J. was, and Harry tried not to think about it. He just put his head down and did the work.
Truman was finished with local politics when he got another approach from the Pendergasts. T.J. wanted someone from the “Organization,” to run for U.S. Senate in 1934. The first four people he asked turned him down, and so did Harry. He thought maybe the gubernatorial race in 1936 would be a better fit for him. T.J. replied in effect, “No, it’s this or nothing.” Truman ran, of course, and he won a tough three-way primary with the Pendergasts pulling out all the stops, and then he prevailed in the general election via the New Deal’s coattails. He went to Washington DC. He was 50. There were two problems: it was hard for a junior senator to extract favors from a White House that was backed by a large congressional majority and second, sections of the media and the Republicans referred to him as the “Senator from Pendergast.”
Given that it was smart enough to tap Truman, you’d think the Pendergast machine had some redeeming qualities. It did. Its coalition of support was multi-racial and multi-cultural in a region where the Democrats were the party of the common man, who was understood to be white. It ushered in the golden age of Kansas City jazz. It wanted KC to be a party town, while it also encouraged the good-governance technocratic types like Truman. But it was close to organized crime in a way that would’ve been uncomfortable for most other machines.
By the late 1930s, T.J., who had a gambling addiction, was in trouble legally. And he was in prison when Truman was running for reelection in 1940. The man from Independence won again, though, and his work on wartime Senate committees garnered him notice in his second term.
When FDR was angling for his fourth tilt at the presidency, the party bosses made clear they preferred that Vice President Henry Wallace be ditched. They saw him as an ideologue and a liability. If Roosevelt won again in ‘44, and then died before 1948, which they reckoned was very possible, Wallace would crash and burn as the standard-bearer in ‘48.
They considered the candidates and all had a major mark against them — “too old,” “too pro-business,” “too liberal,” as in the case of Wallace, “too Southern” and so on. A media favorite was James F. Byrnes, recently of the Supreme Court, but the half-dozen or so major bosses and big-city mayors, who were mostly Catholic and Irish, knew that someone who’d given up Catholicism to marry an Episcopalian would never fly. It was bad enough being a loyal Catholic, worse again being a disloyal one.
They chose their man in the smoke-filled rooms, and his name was Harry S. Truman. He was a plain-spoken centrist from what was then called a border state, and we now refer to as a flyover state. FDR didn’t care who was veep pick. Winning was the priority; but he didn’t want to be seen by the bosses as doing their bidding and so he dragged the process out for weeks.
Now with “centrist,” we’re talking internally in party terms. Truman, despite the warm patriotic feelings his name might evoke across the board, couldn’t abide Republicans. He didn’t coin the term “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but he certainly thought it. They were out to get him. He would not have had any inhibitions about publicly calling someone like Sean Hannity a jackass.
As for T.J. Pendergast, he never uttered a public word of criticism about him or the Organization. He was loyal and loyalty was a political virtue. T.J. had a serious heart attack in 1936, which Truman thought was to blame for things going wrong and for his ending up in serving a 15-month term in a federal penitentiary for tax evasion.
Loyalty can be taken too far, but it can explain why people stick with their guy — the way Kelli McGlothlin does with Trump. She’s featured in a Kansas City Star story, one in an excellent series, about the DOGE firings.
“Trump is not the issue. I think Elon Musk is puppeteering a lot of it,” she said. “If he’d stay out of the stuff, I think we would be fine. I mean, Trump was fine before.”
So, now you may be thinking of the most famous phrase associated with Truman: “The buck stops here.” Someone down the chain of command might’ve screwed up but as the top guy he had to take responsibility. The buck should stop at the Oval Office, but it never does with Trump.
McGlothlin is a 43-year-old white woman with flaming red hair, who worked with McDonald’s for 24 years before getting a job with the IRS a year ago. She was fired in February, “one of roughly 100 terminations at the IRS campus in Kansas City.”
She delineated for KC Star reporter Jonathan Shorman all the various ways in which she felt that the IRS job had made her life much better.
She didn’t even mind waking at 3 a.m. for the commute from St. Joseph, a place where so many Western Missouri stories begin and end.
Lots of people thought, indeed some hoped fervently, that Jesse James’s demise would involve a hanging. It did — he was shot in the back of the head while hanging a picture in his living room in St. Joseph. The Pendergasts were born and raised in St. Joseph. T.J. turned 10 three months after James was killed in 1882.
Pendergast’s first real job was in Kansas City as a bouncer at his alderman brother’s bar in the West Bottoms. He was 18. The bouncer would in time put a local farmer on the road to the White House.
When T.J. Pendergast died on Jan. 26, 1945, it was said that no elected official would dare attend the ex-con’s funeral. Well, actually, one did, just a week after he was sworn in as vice-president of the United States. People were astonished, both locally and nationally.
The soon to be President Truman said after he’d arrived by plane: “He was always my friend and I have always been his.”
