Truman(10)

Even more provocatively, at a 1928 meeting in Pendergast’s office, which has subsequently found a place in almost every biography of Truman, he declined to give any contracts to three important clients of the Kansas City machine, and awarded a substantial slice to an out-of-state low bidder instead. ‘Didn’t I tell you boys,’ Pendergast complacently summed up the meeting, ‘he’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri?’3 Then he privately told Truman to go ahead.

The story rings a little too good to be true. There is a feeling that Pendergast was not trying to do business but was parading Truman like a clergyman persuaded to visit a whore house (a form of enterprise familiar to Pendergast) on a rest day when it was disguised as a sewing class. However, the fact that he thought this was temporarily the best use he could make of Truman is in itself something of a tribute. Certainly the Judge’s handling of public money was impeccable, almost excessively so. He refused to allow his far from affluent mother to be paid for two slices which were taken off the Grandview land. She half-seriously complained for the rest of her life.

In 1930 Truman was re-elected for a second term with a much bigger majority than in 1926. The economic climate was very different. Coolidge prosperity had given way to Hoover slump. But Truman continued to build: additional roads but more spectacularly a 20-storey courthouse (administrative building) for Jackson County in Kansas City, as well as re-fashioning its eastern district off-shoot in Independence. This time the provision of jobs was an essential part of the scheme. There could have been no question of going for an out-of-state contractor. But he was determined to get the best traditional design that he could find. He toured the county looking at courthouses. He did 24,000 miles in his own car, and his own expense. He went to the old South, to New York State, to Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and into Canada. He saw more of North America than he ever had before. He was mostly accompanied by a villainous-looking courthouse custodian called Fred Canfil, who was no great judge of architecture, but intensely loyal to Truman.10

Truman found what he wanted in the improbable location of Shreveport, Louisiana. It had recently been built by an architect called Edward F. Neild. He was hired to come to Kansas City. It was a worthwhile assignment in itself and also a very good preparatory exercise for him. He was commissioned to do the internal reconstruction of the collapsing White House in 1948-52. The White House was a suitable job, for he was a highly conventional architect. Truman liked this; it was why he chose Neild. His taste in architecture, in music, in writing, was not bad but instinctively suspicious of the adventurous. He not only disliked but almost despised anything which sought to break new ground. It must be the work of city slickers, and probably ‘sissy’ as well. It was an extraordinary limitation for such a robust man with a sense, or at least a knowledge, of history. ‘I don’t understand fellows like Lloyd Wright,’ he told Merle Miller in 1961, à propos of the Neild choice. ‘I don’t understand what gets into people like that. He started this whole business of chicken-coop and hen-house architecture, and I don’t know why in the world he did it.’4

However, Truman got quite a good courthouse, and had it built far enough under the estimate (not too difficult a feat in those years of falling prices) to be able to afford an equally conventional equestrian statue of his hero, Andrew Jackson, after whom Jackson County was named, in the foreground. He at first wanted to put it on the roof but was persuaded that few would see it there, and that those who did would think it ridiculously placed. The complex was complete and inaugurated just after Christmas 1934, in the last days of his judgeship, with the ten-year-old Margaret Truman leading a troop of girls who unveiled the statue.11

Truman’s extensive journeying in 1931 was probably not only a mark of his diligence in planning the new courthouse but also a sign that he was becoming bored with his routine county tasks. He wanted a change and wider horizons. In the reorganization of district boundaries which followed the census of 1930, he had worked hard to secure the creation of a new congressional seat comprised of the eastern wards of Kansas City and the western part of rural Jackson County. ‘His dream was to represent that district in Congress,’ his daughter tells us.5 Pendergast however decided otherwise. He had his own candidate. Truman accepted the decision.

Then as the 1932 elections began to approach a substantial ‘Truman for Governor’ movement built up. His name had become fairly well known outside Jackson County. In 1930 he had been elected President of the Greater Kansas City Planning Association, which embraced three Missouri counties as well as another three across the state line in Kansas. He was also a familiar figure in the State House at Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. But St Louis, the metropolis to the east, remained alien territory to him. He would have been very much the candidate of the western part of the state. But, again, this did not fit in with Pendergast’s ideas. He wanted to run his elderly candidate (Francis M. Wilson) of 1928. And once again Truman submitted and withdrew. The elderly candidate then died a month before polling day and a rushed replacement had to be found. Pendergast, even then, did not turn to Truman.