He had become a terrible worrier. He was anxious about little Margaret, who was too thin and pale, too often ill. He began taking medicine for his nerves. He worried about money. He worried about possible entrapment with women, an old device for destroying politicians. Once, responding to a call for a meeting in a room at the Baltimore Hotel, he asked Edgar Hinde to go along, just in case. When they knocked at the room, Hinde remembered, a blond woman in a negligée opened the door. Harry spun on his heels and ran back down the hall, disappearing around the corner. Hinde thought it was a fear verging on the abnormal.
I’ve been around Legion conventions with him. He’d have his room there, [and] naturally, everybody would kind of gravitate to his room. If some fellow brought a woman in there, or his wife even, I’ve seen him pick up his hat and coat and take off out of there and that would be the last you’d see of him until those women left. He just didn’t want any women around his room in a hotel…. He had a phobia on it.
“Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women.
“I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”
On April 30, 1929, after Harry had assigned something over $6 million in road contracts, a judgment by default for $8,944.78 was brought against him for his old haberdashery debts. His mother, meantime, had been forced to take another mortgage on the farm. Yet when one of his new roads cut 11 acres from her property, he felt he must deny her the usual reimbursement from the county, as a matter of principle, given his position. Had he not been the presiding judge, her payment would have been $1,000 an acre or $11,000.
He was scrupulous over money almost to a fault, but also over the range of small favors and shortcuts, the expedient little “arrangements” by which politicians traditionally benefited—so much so that stories about him would be told for years.
A young man from Independence named Yancey Wasson, who worked for his cousin at Guy Wasson’s Fabric Company on Magee Trafficway in Kansas City, would remember Judge Truman coming in to buy seat covers for his car. The bill came to $32, but on instructions from his cousin, young Wasson said Judge Truman could forget the bill if he just arranged for the company to get some business on county cars and trucks. Harry gave him a look. “Son, I don’t do business that way,” he said, and paid the bill.
Sometime later, when Tom Pendergast ordered seat covers for his car that were to cost $65 and Yancey Wasson, calling at Pendergast’s office, made a similar offer, Pendergast, leaning back in his chair, said, “I think we can do that.”
“About two hours later,” Wasson recalled, “I walked out of the police garage with an order for 200 quick-change seat covers for 100 cars on the police register and an order for 20 front rubber mats.”
On September 2, 1929, seven weeks before the stock market crash, Mike Pendergast, whom Harry had “loved like a daddy,” died of heart failure. With the onset of the Depression, the pressures on Judge Truman, as the county’s chief executive, intensified dramatically, for the harder work was to find, the more farms and businesses failed, the more his county contracts and county employment mattered. Even the most insignificant jobs that he had to give out became plums. Friends and family were after him continually and at the very time he had to start cutting back on the payroll, since the county, too, was in trouble, as increasing numbers of people fell delinquent on taxes. At the end of the day when he had at last to fire two hundred county employees, he went home and became sick to his stomach.
With Nurse Kinnaman accompanying her, Bess had taken Margaret to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf, in the hope that a change of climate for a few weeks might restore the child’s health. To find a little peace and quiet for himself, and a night’s rest, Harry would drive to Grandview and sleep in his old bed over the kitchen, or arrange with the manager of a downtown hotel to give him a room without registering, “so no job holder who wants to stay on can see or phone me.”
The afternoon of Monday, November 3, 1930, on the eve of election day, an attempt was made to kidnap six-year-old Margaret from her first-grade classroom at the Bryant School on River Boulevard, just four blocks from home.
According to her teacher, Madeline Etzenhouser, an unknown middle-aged man who kept his hat on appeared at the door of the room shortly before the afternoon recess, saying he had come to pick up Judge Truman’s child, Mary Margaret. “I was a little curious about that,” Miss Etzenhouser later said, “since we always called her Margaret, never Mary Margaret. I also was puzzled because either Mrs. Truman or one of Margaret’s uncles always picked her up after school.” Telling the man to wait, she hurried to the principal’s office. When she returned, the man was gone. “In a few minutes Mrs. Truman came into the room. She was panicky. I believe she thought Margaret was not there, and she was extremely relieved to find her all right.” Judge Truman and several deputy sheriffs arrived soon after. “It was quite a stir….”
The following day, election day, while Harry was out in the county visiting the precinct polls, Margaret and her mother, accompanied by the deputy sheriffs, were taken to a hotel in town to spend the day under close security. To what extent the incident was connected with politics, Bess and Harry could only wonder. Nothing further was learned. But Margaret was to be closely watched thereafter and the tragedy of the Lindbergh kidnapping two years later was deeply felt by the Trumans.
As he never let on at the time, Harry was in terrible turmoil over what he had found politics to be in reality. He was suffering from disillusionment and pangs of conscience such as he had never before known, all of which may have had a great deal to do with his headaches.
“While it looks good from the sidelines to have control and get your name in both papers every day and pictures every other day, it’s not a pleasant position,” he confided to Bess. “Politics should make a thief, a roué, and a pessimist of anyone,” he said in another letter, “but I don’t believe I am any of them….” But could he withstand the pressures?
Later would come a vivid, if fragmented, picture of what he was going through behind the scenes, described in occasional reminiscences, and in one long, extraordinary, private, undated memoir written on two or three different nights when he hid away alone in the Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City, pouring himself out on paper, writing page after page for no one but himself.
VII
Trouble had come immediately after the road bond issue passed, as soon as Tom Pendergast discovered that Harry meant to keep his promise to the voters and refuse favoritism on contracts.
“The Boss wanted me to give a lot of crooked contractors the inside and I couldn’t,” he wrote. Pendergast became furious when Harry held his ground. The code of honor that meant so much to Harry, said T.J., was worth nothing in the real world. He dismissed the road plan as needless fuss that would serve only to give the engineers big reputations. Bids need merely be doctored so that the right people got the contracts, Pendergast told him. Harry held firm, arguing that his way was the best for the public and for the party, and it seems Pendergast realized for the first time the sort of man his brother Michael had brought into the organization. Possibly T.J. had been testing Harry. In any event, his anger appeared to pass. A meeting was called at his office, a confrontation that may have been arranged in part for T.J.’s own amusement, and one that Harry would enjoy recounting in later years.
The office at 1908 Main was so small, all of 12 by 14 feet, that it seemed overcrowded when T.J. sat there alone. Two windows with Venetian blinds overlooked the street. Furnishings were sparse—a rolltop desk against the wall, a few chairs and spittoons, a faded green rug, and over the desk, in a frame, the original drawing of an old cartoon from the Star showing an expansive Alderman Jim with a box of First Ward votes in his grip. The spittoons were an accommodation for guests, since T.J. smoked cigarettes only, using an elegant cigarette holder. Customarily he also kept his hat on while at his desk and sat w
ell forward in his wooden swivel chair, as though about to leave on other business, a technique, he found, that helped keep conversations short. Stationed just outside the office was his massive, veteran secretary, or gatekeeper, Elijah Matheus, a former riverboat captain called “Cap,” who was as large as T.J. himself.
Five were present for the meeting—Pendergast, Harry, and three road contractors who were old friends of the organization and all extremely upset over Harry’s attitude, according to Harry’s later account, which is the only one available. One man, Mike Ross, was not only head of Ross Construction, in which T.J. had part interest, but ward boss in Little Italy, which made him extremely important. Privately Harry considered Ross “a plain thief.”
“These boys tell me that you won’t give them contracts,” Pendergast began.
“They can get them if they are low bidders,” Harry answered, “but they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.”
“Didn’t I tell you boys,” said Pendergast. “He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”
When the meeting ended and the three contractors left, Pendergast told Harry to go ahead and run things as he thought best, adding only that of course he, Pendergast, always had the two other judges to call on if he needed to vote Harry down.
From that point forward apparently Pendergast was as good as his word, never asking Harry to do anything dishonest. “And that’s the God’s truth. I did my job the way I thought it should be done,” Harry said in an interview years afterward. “And he never interfered….”
They were not close—there was never to be the kind of relationship Harry had with Mike—but they grew to respect one another. Pendergast recognized Harry’s integrity as an asset. Harry, in the Pickwick Hotel memoir, written close to events, portrayed the Big Boss as a man of parts whose code, though very different from his own, he could not help but admire. Pendergast was no hypocrite, no “trimmer,” however rough and sordid his background. “He, in times past, owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man.” He wondered, Harry wrote, who was worth more in the sight of the Lord, Tom Pendergast or the “sniveling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday and start over on Sunday?”
He felt he understood Tom Pendergast. At least he knew where he stood with him. It was Vrooman and Barr, the other two on the court, who dismayed and infuriated him. Any man who was dissolute with women, Truman believed, was not a man to be trusted entirely. He had discovered that Vrooman and Barr both “loved the ladies” and kept “telephone girls” on the payroll. (“I’ll say this for the Big Boss,” he wrote as an aside, “he has no feminine connections.”) Vrooman, the western judge, though a “good fellow,” seemed determined to make any profit possible from county transactions. Barr, the eastern judge and Harry’s own choice for the job, was a total disappointment, and, to Harry, beyond understanding:
Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise. For instance, I picked a West Pointer, son of an honorable father, a man who should have had Washington, Lee, Jackson, Gustavus Adolphus for his ideals, to associate with me in carrying out a program and I got—a dud, a weakling, no ideals, no nothing. He’d use his office for his own enrichment, he’s not true to his wife (and a man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any other). He’d sell me or anyone else he’s associated with out for his own gain….
Worse than Barr’s immorality, more troubling than anything for Harry, was a situation, only vaguely described in his account, in which he had found it necessary to do wrong himself in order to prevent a greater wrong. Barr, it appears, had been in on the theft of some $10,000, and Harry, who found out, felt he must let Barr get away with it to protect his bond issue and to keep Barr from stealing even more.
This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s…I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out…I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a friend of the Boss’s, steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know…. Anyway I’ve got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wallace], whom I’d had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I’ve had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it…. Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can’t.
This and more came pouring out of him in the hotel room. He went on for pages. He described how Vrooman and Barr would shoot crap while court was in session, crouching down behind the judge’s bench as Harry tried to transact business. (He had actually found it easier to get things accomplished if they were so occupied.) He had always thought most men had a sense of honor. Now he wasn’t at all sure. Pendergast, as if lecturing a slow student, had told him that very few men stayed honest if given opportunity to cheat and get away with it. What chance was there for a clean honest government, he wondered, when a bunch of vultures sat on the sidelines? “If we only had Tom to deal with, the public might have a chance, but Tom can’t operate without Joe [Shannon] and Cass [Welch]. Cass is a thug and a crook of the worst water, he should have been in the pen twenty years ago. Joe hasn’t got an honest appointee on the payroll….”
The more Harry wrote, the angrier he grew:
I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right. Anyway I’m not a partner of any of them and I’ll go out poorer in every way than I came into office.
He reckoned he could already have pocketed $1.5 million, had he chosen, which, as future disclosures would make plain, was altogether realistic. As it was, “I haven’t $150.” He wondered if he might be better off if he quit and ran a filling station.
“All this,” he added, “gives me headaches….”
To little Sue Ogden, the big house where her playmate Margaret Truman lived was a magnificent sanctuary secure from the troubles of Depression times. Margaret’s Grandmother Wallace was an elegant lady who wore her old-fashioned clothes with style. Margaret had a beautiful new bicycle. Margaret had a new swing set. Whenever Margaret’s father came home from a trip, he brought her a present. “She had everything she wanted,” Sue remembered. Judge Truman always looked dressed up and there was a black servant, Vietta Garr, who did the cooking and waited on the table.
Independence was hard hit by the Depression. In 1931, three banks closed within three weeks. Hundreds of families were suffering. According to the records, in the fiscal year 1931–32 more than 900 families in town, some 2,800 people, were receiving relief—food and clothing—from a half-dozen organizations, including the Community Welfare League, the Red Cross, the Kiwanis Club, and the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had set up a soup kitchen on the Square. The Welfare League had taken over the old county jail as a distribution center and the lines there grew steadily longer. In 1932–33, families “comprising 4,347 individuals” received help, more than half again the number of the year before. Sue Ogden’s father, a machinist, had trouble finding work of any kind and kept leaving town to look elsewhere. She would remember being hungry during the times her father took the family away with him to other towns. Margaret, she knew, was never hungry. To Sue and her family, Margaret Truman was a child of wealth and privilege.
Margaret would remember that because of the Dep
ression her allowance had been cut from 50 cents a week to 25 cents. “And this was a disaster!”
Sue Ogden and her older sister Betty lived next door, across a narrow alley on the south side. Mrs. Truman encouraged Margaret to play with the two Ogden girls, who were tomboys, as Mrs. Truman had been once, and because they lived so close by. They were playmates “without risk,” as Sue remembered, and since the kidnapping scare, the Trumans were “terribly fearful” about Margaret. “We kind of had to teach her how to play.”
Judge Truman seemed always relaxed and friendly, “just a father.” He “wasn’t upset to be caught in his pajamas. He was just very calm about having us around the house. We played on his rowing machine in the bathroom and he didn’t mind.”
The two Ogdens were in and out of the house as if it were their own, or playing out back on the driveway, where Mrs. Truman or Vietta Garr could keep watch. The house was a “wonderful place” to play. A basement called “the dungeon” was big enough to ride Margaret’s bicycle in. A “fine attic” was filled with old-fashioned clothes for dressing up. It was a household that seemed to run smoothly year after year, with never a sign of friction. “If there was ever any bad feeling, even an undercurrent of bad feeling, they certainly hid it well,” Sue recalled. Vietta Garr, who had first come to work in 1927, said later, “I never heard a squabble the entire time I was with them. I have never seen Mr. Truman angry….” Her father had been groomsman for Grandfather Gates. “The whole family had good dispositions and were easy to work for,” she remembered. “They liked things nice, and that is the way I liked them, so we got along fine.”