Truman (34 page)

This, too, was heartland America, no less than the old-fashioned, country-town peace and quiet of nearby Independence.

“Dance All Night Long!” said an advertisement in the
Star
for the Musicians Ball at the Labor Temple, in the spring of 1932, at which Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, Walter Page and his Blue Devils, the Nighthawks—in all, eight orchestras—played until sunup.

There were no closing hours. At the Subway, in a basement at 18th and Vine, thirty to forty musicians would “crowd in” to play. “Everybody played that wanted to play…and every night you could find music there…. It never really did open until after 1:00 [in the morning].” “A cracker town, but a happy town,” Count Basie remembered.

The red-light district ran for blocks, on 13th and 14th Streets. One high-priced place called the Chesterfield Club offered a businessman’s lunch served by waitresses clad only in high heels and cellophane aprons.

A lifetime resident of Kansas City named John Doohan, trying years later to describe the rollicking city it had been, would suddenly stop in mid-sentence, realizing how much he missed it. “See…there just wasn’t any law,” said Doohan, whose job in the research library at the
Star
required keeping watch on the unfolding history of the city.

Whenever questioned about this, Tom Pendergast customarily replied, “Well, the rich men have their clubs, where they can gamble and have a good time. Would you deny the poor man an equal right?”

“Ours is a fine, clean, and well-ordered town,” Pendergast would insist repeatedly, and John Doohan, too, would remember there being little fear of violent crime.

Others, including respected, proper citizens, conceded privately that “wide open” was good business, particularly in hard times.

The head of the rackets, one of T.J.’s acknowledged “chief lieutenants,” was a small, dapper Italian-American with a master-of-ceremonies personality named Johnny Lazia, who had earlier served a prison sentence for armed robbery. Lazia was the King of Little Italy, where, in 1926, he had seized power from T.J.’s old Ninth Ward leader, Mike Ross. T.J. had accepted Lazia as part of the organization largely because he had no choice and apparently with the understanding that Lazia would keep Al Capone and other out-of-town gangsters clear of the city. “Our Johnny,” it seems, relied on his charm as well as his power, and he and Boss Tom soon were “fast friends.” Also, importantly, T.J. had by this time become a heavy gambler on horse races and so was in continuous need of such “fast friends.” At the office at 1908 Main, he had installed his own direct wire to tracks in the East, even set up betting cages at the rear of the clubroom. Across the Missouri River in Platte County he had established his own race track, the Riverside Park Jockey Club, where he also kept his own stable of horses.

In return for his support in the Ninth Ward, Lazia was to have control over liquor and gambling in the city, as well as a say in hiring policies at the police department. Allegedly, Lazia even had his own office at the police department. A federal agent sent to investigate Lazia’s activities reported to Washington that when he called Kansas City police headquarters, Lazia answered the phone.

Lazia, too, knew how to be a friend in need. When former Senator James Reed’s companion (later wife) Nell Donnelly was kidnapped in 1931, it was to Lazia that Reed went immediately for help, and Lazia who brought her safely home. Two years later, in 1933, when City Manager McElroy’s stylish twenty-five-year-old daughter Mary was kidnapped, it was again “Our Johnny” who came to the rescue, this time producing the ransom money, $30,000 in cash, which he collected with astonishing speed from friends among the gamblers.

Through all this, only one brave voice was raised in protest, Samuel S. Mayerberg, the rabbi of Temple B’nai Jehudah, who in the spring of 1932 decided to speak out before a government study club, a meeting of perhaps forty people, most of whom were women. It was then that a reform movement began, though few, and clearly no one in the organization, seemed particularly concerned, nor was there a rush of good citizens to join his ranks. “One of my hardest jobs was not fighting the underworld,” Mayerberg later said, “but in using my energy and time to convince thoroughly nice people, honorable men…that as respectable citizens, they ought to be in it [the fight] also.”

When federal investigators started proceedings against Lazia for income tax evasion in 1933, T.J. wrote at once to Jim Farley, the new Postmaster General in Washington and part of FDR’s inner circle, to stress how extremely important Lazia was to him. “Now Jim,” he wrote, “Lazia is one of my chief lieutenants and I am more sincerely interested in his welfare than anything you might be able to do for me now or in the future….”

But then, only weeks later, came the stunning news of Kansas City’s “Union Station Massacre,” one of the most sensational atrocities of the whole gangster era. On Saturday, June 17, 1933, three notorious bankrobbers and killers, Verne Miller, Adam Richetti, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd, armed with submachine guns, attempted to rescue another “public enemy,” Frank (“Jelly”) Nash, as Nash, in handcuffs, was being escorted by law officers from a train to a waiting car at Union Station, to make the short drive to the federal prison at Leavenworth. The three killers, who were waiting in the parking lot outside the station, made their move as Nash was being put in the car. One officer turned and fired with a pistol. The three then opened up with machine guns, killing five men—two Kansas City policemen, an agent of the FBI, a police chief from Oklahoma, and Nash—after which the killers vanished. And though none of the three had any known ties to Kansas City, a local racketeer named Michael James (“Jimmy Needles”) LaCapra would later testify that it was Johnny Lazia who arranged to get them safely out of town. True or not, Lazia became the most talked-about man in Kansas City, drawing more popular attention even than Tom Pendergast.

In what was to be a long, often trying, and continuously eventful public life, some days for Harry Truman would stand out always as moments of great personal satisfaction. One was Tuesday, September 5, 1933, in the middle of what otherwise was a particularly difficult and uncertain time for him.

On Tuesday, September 5, the completed new $200,000 county courthouse at Independence—the fifth so-called “remodeling” of the building since 1836—was dedicated with ceremonies and festivities that began early in the morning and stretched on into the night. There were horseshoe-pitching contests, an old fiddlers’ contest, a Negro dancing contest, music from seven marching bands and seven drum corps, a bathing beauty contest, a horse show, a street dance, a parade of floats by local merchants, and a historic pageant. The formal dedication itself took place in the afternoon, beginning at two by the old four-faced courthouse clock (it, too, newly refurbished and set now in a colonial cupola), and included speeches by Governor Park and Judge Harry S. Truman.

The day was warm and sunny, the large crowd in good spirits, everybody enjoying the occasion. The homely Victorian scruffiness of the old courthouse had been transformed into something larger, more spacious, and in a style vaguely like that of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, though the architect, Harry’s brother-in-law Fred Wallace, was quoted in the day’s special edition of the
Examiner
saying that his inspiration for the north and south porticos had been the Greek “Temple of the Winds.”

The new building had little of the character of what had stood there before, but was neat and trim, it seemed, with its pink brick and columned porticos, its cupola and refurbished clock and marble lobby—a clear improvement to nearly everyone and to those especially who would work there, numbers of whom were looking down from the open windows upstairs as Judge Truman, in a white suit, delivered his brief, unexceptional remarks from the speaker’s platform. The
Examiner
called the building “dignified, spacious, symmetrical” and praised the leadership of the man who, more than any other, had made it possible.

“During the six and one half years of his administration as presiding judge, Harry S. Truman, with the hearty cooperation of his associates on the county bench, has done a number of remarkably big things that will occupy a large place in the history of the county,” said the paper, which then went on to list “a few”: a $10 million road and bridge system built by two bond issues, a modern hospital at the Jackson County Home for the Aged and Infirm, a Girls’ Home for Negroes on the County Farm, a new Kansas City Courthouse estimated to cost $4 million, and now the $200,000 Independence Courthouse. It was a record unmatched in the history of the county.

But to Judge Truman himself, his future remained a large mystery and a worry.

Later in the fall of 1933, outraged that the Roosevelt administration had appointed a Republican as director of the federal reemployment service in Missouri, Tom Pendergast complained to Washington, with the immediate result that the Republican was fired and the job given to Judge Truman. Having no wish to relinquish his place on the county court any sooner than necessary, Harry agreed to serve in this new federal post without pay. He waived the $300-a-month salary and began driving to and from the federal office in Jefferson City, halfway across the state, twice a week. The task was to channel unemployed laborers into jobs with contractors on federal public works, and, with his experience in county projects, he was ideally suited. The long drives also provided time to think about the future.

For Pendergast it was another giant step. In a few months
The Missouri Democrat
(a paper controlled by the organization) could report that 100,000 men and nearly 10,000 women were employed in the state under the new federal (Democratic) program.

Harry found himself reporting to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s public works official, and traveling to Washington on government business, something he had never done before.

At long last Harry made up his mind. He would run for Congress, he decided, against the wishes of his wife, who had liked the sound of the collector’s job, with its high pay and security, and who greatly preferred staying in Independence. In Congress, Harry told her, he would have the chance for some “power in the nation.”

But when he went to see T.J., he was told the choice was no longer his. Pendergast had picked another man, a circuit court judge named Jasper Bell (who would win handily in the primary, and again in November, and go on to serve six terms in Congress). Crestfallen, Harry found himself out in the cold again, “maneuvered out,” as he said.

Weeks went by. Nothing more was mentioned, no further offer made. His spirits fell to a new low.

Then, in early May 1934, without warning, everything changed. Stopping at Warsaw, Missouri, on a speaking tour, he received a call from Jim Pendergast asking him to meet as soon as possible at the Bothwell Hotel in Sedalia. It was a matter of importance.

The drive to Sedalia took about half an hour. Pendergast had Jim Aylward with him and the three of them drew up chairs in a corner of the hotel lobby. Harry had no idea what was coming.

There had been a meeting, he was told. T.J. wanted him to run for the United States Senate. Harry was incredulous, almost speechless.

“The Boss is 95 percent for you,” Aylward assured him.

“What’s wrong with the other five percent?” Truman asked.

“Oh you know what I mean,” Aylward said. “The Boss is for you.”

He needed time to think, Truman said. They told him he had to do it for the good of the party, and this apparently settled the issue. He agreed to run but said he was broke. In another day or so, Aylward and Jim Pendergast each gave him $500 to get started.

As Harry learned soon enough, he was anything but T.J.’s first choice for the Senate. T.J. had asked at least three others to run, only to be turned down by all three. Jim Reed had been asked first, largely as a courtesy. (
The New York Times
had predicted Reed would be the choice.) When Reed said no, T.J. turned to Joe Shannon, who professed feeling too out of sympathy with the New Deal and said that at his age he preferred to remain in the House. The third and most serious choice was Aylward, who, everyone agreed, would have made a strong candidate and a first-rate senator if elected. His name had been mentioned repeatedly in the papers as a prime possibility. But Aylward had no longing for the life in Washington, he told T.J., no wish to give up time with his family or leave his law practice.

Other names came up. When Jim Pendergast suggested Harry Truman, whose name to this moment had never been on anyone’s list, Aylward enthusiastically agreed. T.J. was skeptical. “Do you mean to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be elected to the United States Senate,” Aylward would remember Pendergast exclaiming. But Aylward and Jim persisted until T.J. agreed.