Every subject of debate tended sooner or later to center in the views of a quiet-spoken man who sat across the table from me [wrote the editor]. It was with surprise amounting almost to incredulity that I observed this trend of affairs, for the quiet man whose opinions had so much respect in a gathering of reformers was the presiding judge of…Jackson County…home bailiwick of the notorious Pendergast machine.
More important and equally unexpected was the way in which he proved himself a leader. His first day in office he Spoke to the point:
We intend to operate the county government for the benefit of the taxpayers. While we were elected as Democrats, we were also elected as public servants. We will appoint all Democrats to jobs appointable, but we are going to see that every man does a full day’s work for his pay. In other words we are going to conduct the county’s affairs as efficiently and economically as possible.
The other new members of the court, Howard Vrooman and Robert Barr, were expected to follow his lead. Vrooman, the western judge, was an affable Kansas City real estate executive and a Rabbit. Barr, a gentleman farmer and graduate of West Point, had been Harry’s own choice to fill his former position as eastern judge. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Presiding Judge Truman was the chief executive officer. Later in his political career it would be charged that he had had no executive experience. But in fact he was responsible now for an annual operating budget of $7 million, more than the budget of some states, and for seven hundred employees—county treasurer, sheriff, county councilor, road overseers, surveyors, highway engineer, health officials, parole officers, purchasing agents, a coroner, a collector (the job he had wanted), a recorder of deeds, superintendent of schools, liquor license inspector, election commissioners, and nine justices of the peace. He had overall responsibility for the county home for the aged, the county hospital, the McCune Home for (white) Boys, the Parental Home for (white) Girls, the Home for Negro Boys and Girls, and more than a thousand miles of county roads. He also had charge of two courthouses (with jails), since Kansas City, too, had a courthouse. He had the most say in apportioning the budget, and keeping the books was ultimately his responsibility. It was, theoretically, within his power now to award contracts, adjust tax rates, float bond issues, or determine what sums for the county would be borrowed from which banks and when. As the county’s topmost official he was also expected to be its chief spokesman, to appear at business lunches, take part in conferences, spread the word of Jackson County progress and opportunities.
In theory, he had only the electorate to report to, and his constituency was no longer just the country vote, as before when he was eastern judge. It was the whole county now, including all Kansas City, which had a population of nearly 500,000. Theory apart, there was also Tom Pendergast, with whom he had had almost no prior contact. Mike Pendergast could be counted on to stand by him. Mike came calling frequently at the court, still the mentor, arriving in a dark green Peerless sedan with Jim driving and accompanied sometimes by Mike’s youngest son Robert, a small boy who liked to take a turn spinning about in Judge Truman’s swivel chair. But Mike was not Tom. Mike, furthermore, had suffered something like a nervous breakdown from the strain of political battles, and at the urging of his doctors and family, he had eventually to relinquish his place in the organization.
Instead of borrowing county funds from Kansas City banks at 6 percent interest, as had been the practice for years, Judge Truman went to Chicago and St. Louis and negotiated loans at 4 percent, then 2½ percent. Told by outraged Kansas City bankers that he was inflicting unjust punishment on their stockholders, he said he thought the taxpayers of the county had some rights in the matter, too.
When the Republican National Committee announced Kansas City as the choice for their national convention in 1928, then appeared to be reconsidering because of costs, Harry helped raise money locally for the Republicans, on the sensible ground that the Kansas City economy could only benefit. (It was in Kansas City’s Convention Hall, on June 12, that the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover.)
He hired Democrats only, as promised, both Goats and Rabbits, and apparently on an even basis. He also put his brother Vivian on the payroll, as purchasing agent for the county homes, and hired Fred Wallace, his youngest brother-in-law, as county architect, primarily to appease Bess and her mother. Fred, like his father, was a drinker and a worry, and still the apple of his mother’s eye.
Roads, however, were the priority. Within days after taking office, Judge Truman named a bipartisan board of two civil engineers, Colonel (later General) E. M. Stayton and a Republican named N. T. Veatch, Jr., to appraise the roads of the entire county and draw up a plan, something that had never been done before. He also accompanied them on much of their survey, covering hundreds of miles in all. The report, issued three months later, described 350 miles of “ ‘pie crust’ roads clearly inadequate to stand the demands of modern traffic,” and stressed that the cost just to maintain them would exceed what might be raised by taxes. The plan was to build 224 miles of new concrete roads, in a system so designed that no farmer would be more than two miles from at least one of them. The cost was to be $6.5 million, this raised by a bond issue, which, again, was something that until now had not been done for roads in Jackson County. Bond issues of any kind had seldom fared well in years past. Harry, however, was convinced the people would support the program if guaranteed honest contracts and first-rate construction.
Great skepticism was expressed by the Kansas City Star and by Tom Pendergast, when Harry went for his approval. “You can’t do it. They’ll say I’m going to steal it,” Harry would remember “the Big Boss” insisting. If he told the people what he meant to do, they would vote the bonds, Harry said. He could tell the voters anything he liked, Pendergast replied, which Harry took to mean he had an agreement.
It was as though all he had absorbed in his readings in the history of the Romans, the memory of the model of Caesar’s bridge, the experience of countless misadventures by automobile since the days of the old Stafford, the memory of the roads he had seen in France, not to say his own experience with the farm roads in and about Grandview and the father who had literally died as a result of his determination to maintain them properly, converged now in one grand constructive vision. He would build the best roads in the state, if not the country, he vowed, and see they were built honestly.
He set off on another speaking tour, town to town. “I told the voters we would let the contracts to low bidders and build under the supervision of bipartisan engineers.” It was early spring, the mud season, so no one needed reminding of the condition the roads were in. Every voter received a map showing where the improvements would come.
The bond issue was enlarged to include a new courthouse and jail for Kansas City, a new county hospital, and a home for retarded children. The courthouse, jail, and children’s home were voted down. The roads and hospital carried, the vote taking place on Harry’s forty-fourth birthday, May 8, 1928. It was a stunning victory—the vote in favor of the bond issue was three to one. Good as his word, he let a first contract of $400,000 to a construction firm from South Dakota. Other work soon went to other firms not usually chosen for public projects in Jackson County.
The roads were built, and extremely well. Five years later, in 1933, the Examiner could report:
It is now generally recognized that every promise made at that time [1928] by the County Court…and by General E. M. Stayton and N. T. Veatch, Jr., the bipartisan board of engineers, selected to supervise the construction of the system of roads…has been carefully fulfilled. Every road proposed in the plans submitted has been built exactly as promised, and all well within the money voted and the estimates of the engineers.
Trees were planted along the sides, as Harry remembered from France, seven thousand seedling elms and poplars in all, though to his sorrow, Jackson County seemed as yet unready for the look of the Loire Valley. The farmers mowed them down.
He repeatedly stressed th
e practical in much of what he said, but he attempted the trees and, with the roads completed, he published a handsomely designed booklet, Results of County Planning, showing in more than a hundred pages of photographs what beauty there was in the landscape of the county to be enhanced, not destroyed, by progress, and for the benefit of everyone. “Here were hundreds of square miles…hundreds of thousands of people…each dependent on the other…and only a plan and a determined spirit needed to develop these opportunities and make each available to an understanding of the other!” In time, the report continued, would come “parks and recreation grounds at points easily available to all the county population—the healthful places of diversion that every large and growing population needs for its own pleasure and for the sake of coming generations.” The pictures were of schools, farms, industry, main streets and the mushrooming Kansas City skyline, bridges over the Missouri, the Blue and Little Blue, and mile after mile of roads through rolling countryside, where so much pioneer history had taken place. The interest in history, felt so strongly by the presiding judge, was all through the book. A caption under a photograph of Raytown’s main street read: “Raytown, once a favorite place for assembling teams for Santa Fe caravans, also had the distinction of a home nearby which was framed and cut in Kentucky and shipped here by water—the Jesse Barnes home, 2½ miles southwest of Raytown. A part of the house is still standing.” Another photograph showed the path worn by the wagons where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Big Blue. Under another, of a frame house set among old elms, the caption read: “Since 1867, Mrs. Martha E. Truman has lived on this farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard. She was born in Jackson County in 1852. She is the mother of Judge Harry S. Truman, presiding judge of the County Court.”
“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller or Mellon…I’d make this section (six counties) the world’s real paradise,” he wrote privately. As it was, the road system was completed on schedule and, almost unimaginably, for less than the original estimate.
Another bond issue was voted, for more roads, for the Kansas City Courthouse, and for a total remodeling of the Independence Courthouse. The new Kansas City Courthouse, to replace a Victorian firetrap with creaking elevator and oiled wood floors, would be the county’s part in an extensive Ten-Year Plan that would include a new City Hall and civic auditorium. It was among the most ambitious city projects in the country and one championed vigorously by both the Star and, Tom Pendergast, which meant it was certain to go forward.
Brisk about his business as always, seemingly tireless, Harry insisted that everything be done just so and concerned himself with details of a kind others would never have bothered with. Raised on the idea that appearances mattered, as an expression of self-respect, raised on the old premise that any job worth doing was worth doing well, ambitious for his community and for himself, he was determined to give the county a courthouse in Kansas City second to none.
Unsure of exactly what he wanted in the new building, he decided he wouldn’t know until he had educated himself. Thus he set off by automobile—in his own car, at his own expense—on an amazing cross-country tour to look at public buildings of all kinds and to talk to their architects. He traveled thousands of miles—as far west as Denver and Houston, east all the way to Brooklyn, south as far as Baton Rouge—and took with him, for company and to help with the driving, a man named Fred Canfil, whose companionship he apparently enjoyed, but who to a great many people seemed to personify nearly everything odious about Kansas City politics. By appearance, manner, by reputation, Canfil was the typical Pendergast roughneck, “a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar, and uncouth person…a low ward heeler of the worst type,” in the words of testimony that would be taken some years later by agents of the FBI. He was considered a bully, a braggart, “a big bag of wind,” overbearing and crude. Six feet tall and built like a heavyweight wrestler, he had a dark, glowering expression nearly all of the time. He wore the brim of his hat low over his eyes and stood with his legs apart, feet firmly planted, as if braced to block a doorway. He was called peculiar and secretive, “a mystery man,” and as time went on, because of his booming voice, “Whispering Fred.” And it was whispered of “Whispering Fred” that he had a criminal record.
People who had worked with him for years had no idea where he lived or where he came from, whether even he was married. Earlier, before going to work for Judge Truman, Canfil had kept an office in the Board of Trade Building, but there had been no name on the door or telephone listed. He drove a good car, his suits were custom-tailored. Yet no one knew what he did for a living. One prominent Kansas City Democrat who was considering Canfil for a job tried in vain to find out more and finally asked him face to face, “What the hell do you do for a living?” Canfil only laughed and said lots of people would like to know. Refusing to give up, the man asked the police commissioner, as a favor, to put a tail on Canfil. But after several days the police could report only that Canfil had lunch regularly in a booth at the Savoy Grill with Harry Truman and Ted Marks. (Probably this was in 1925, when Harry was selling memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club and had his own office in the Board of Trade Building, as did Ted Marks, who no doubt made the good suits Canfil wore.)
The facts about Canfil, as Harry Truman knew, were these:
He was Harry’s own age and had grown up on a farm in Kansas. Unmarried, he lived with a sister in a small house on East 77 Terrace, Kansas City. Until the war, he had worked briefly as treasurer for a circus and for several years ran the service department of a Cadillac agency in Shreveport, Louisiana, his mother’s hometown. At the time he had the office in the Board of Trade Building, Canfil was working as a rent collector for a Kansas City landlord. Contrary to rumor, he had no criminal record.
How long he had been involved with the Pendergast organization is not known, but, according to later testimony, it was his association with Judge Truman that had kept him in good graces with the organization and not the other way around.
Harry had met Canfil first in the Army. After being elected to the court, he hired Canfil as a tax investigator. Harry liked him, liked how he went about his work. “Fred’s a little rough, but Fred’s all right; he’s as loyal as a bulldog,” he would explain long afterward, recalling the years Canfil had been at his side. The loud mouth and crude language were largely a front. As a soldier Canfil had been superb, rising from sergeant to lieutenant by dint of his own merit, a point that counted greatly with Harry, and one that later investigators would find amply documented in Canfil’s service record. “Character excellent right along and recommended as an unusually efficient officer,” read one entry in the file at the War Department. “He generally worked twelve to fifteen hours a day,” read another. “But I never saw him worn out or tired. He was ever full of enthusiasm and eager for the next task….”
It was in Shreveport, Canfil’s old place of business, that Harry saw a building that he admired more than any others on the tour, the massive new Caddo Parish Courthouse, and decided to hire its architect, Edward F. Neild, as a consultant. The building was in what would later be known as the Art Deco style. Though disdainful of the “modern” in painting, Harry was very definite in his admiration of Art Deco.
As he would have trees for his roads, so he determined now to have an equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson for the front of the courthouse. In Charlottesville, Virginia, he saw one of Stonewall Jackson that he thought exceptional and at once commissioned its sculptor, Charles L. Keck of New York. Concerned about historical accuracy—and out of long affection for “Old Andy”—he drove to the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, to make measurements of Jackson’s clothing. He would have his hero’s statue no larger or smaller than life. “I wanted a real man on a real horse.”
The Kansas City Times declared the new road system “a distinct achievement that would be creditable to any county in the United States,” which it was. The Star lauded the “extraordinary record” of Presiding Judge Truman. He was elected the president of the Greate
r Kansas City Plan Association, made the director of the National Conference of City Planning.
With his reputation fast growing he seemed to everyone who knew him still the cheery, optimistic “same old Harry,” for whom work was a tonic. But it was not that way entirely. He had become so tense, so keyed up, as he wrote Bess from one of his journeys, “that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk.” He loathed the sound of the telephone and at home or his office the telephone rang incessantly—“and every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity on him and furnish him some county money without much return.” He suffered from headaches, dizziness, and insomnia. As time went on and the stress of the job increased, the headaches grew more severe. The telephone and headaches were among the chief reasons he went away so often, on his cross-country surveys of public buildings or to Masonic meetings or to summer Army camp, where, interestingly, the Army doctors found him exceptionally fit. One said he was as physically sound as a twenty-four-year-old.
“I haven’t had a headache since I came,” he wrote to Bess three days after arriving at Camp Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1927. “This day has been successful. I have a letter from you, have been horseback riding, watched the Battery fire nine problems, had an hour swim, a good meal and am tired as I can be without any headache,” he told her another day. Some of the other officers in the reserve, like Harry Vaughan, wondered at times why they bothered keeping up with it. “We didn’t have any equipment,” Vaughan would remember. “We didn’t have any enlisted personnel, we had no materiel…we just didn’t have anything.” But for Harry the chance to be outdoors, the exercise, the companionship without the pressures of politics, were a godsend.