The primary was on August 1st. Truman had a bare majority of 288, in a vote of over 11,000. The run-off was a formality. That autumn, at the age of thirty-eight, he was Eastern Judge for a two year spell, with a modest salary of $6,000, debts of well over that amount, considerable opportunities for graft, and his foot upon a rung of the political ladder.
Whatever else is in dispute about Truman’s career, his repute, and relations with the Pendergasts, it is clear that he was totally untouched by personal monetary corruption. However great the temptation, with his debts and lack of financial prospects, however loose the surrounding practice, he was aggressively clean so far as anything approaching a bribe or even the free use of public expenses were concerned. He lived and died the poorest president of the past fifty years, probably of this century. (His closest rivals are Wilson and Coolidge.)
In this respect his administration of his new little office was therefore spotless. So far as jobs were concerned it was less immaculate, and this was to continue to be his pattern. But this fault stemmed from a mixture of instinctive partisanship and excessive loyalty to old friends rather than from paybacks for financial benefits. As county judge it took the simple form of appointing only Goats and never Rabbits.
When he came up for re-election two years later this made his basis of support too narrow. The Rabbits bolted the ticket. The Klan, then near to its peak,7 was viciously against him. This accumulation of opposition counted for more than a good record of administration, particularly in relation to the re-funding of the county debt and the beginning of an efficient road building programme. An obscure Republican harness maker, who only got on the ballot paper by accident, was elected fairly easily. It was the only election which Truman ever lost. It left him once more without a job, and with only the most minor political achievement behind him.
He was out of office for two years. It was the height of the boom of the 1920s, and, although he certainly did not become rich, he had no difficulty in supporting his small family (Margaret Truman, his only child, had been born in 1924) in their habitual modest small-town prosperity. He became a minor Kansas City man of affairs. He established himself in an office in the Board of Trade building there. Successfully, and for a commission, he sold membership in the Kansas City Automobile Club. He became state president of the National Old Trails Association, but this, which remained an abiding interest, was a voluntary activity. And he had a business partnership with a gentleman crookster (as he subsequently turned out to be) from Independence, the suspiciously grandly named Spencer Salisbury. Salisbury had been a fellow captain from the 129th Artillery. They did housing finance business together, took over and then quickly withdrew from a tottering local bank. Jonathan Daniels, in his otherwise friendly life of Truman,8 published during his presidency, suggested that Truman was lucky to escape from this association without serious damage not merely to his finances but to his integrity. But it was a decade and a half before Salisbury went to gaol, and long before that he and Truman had become implacable enemies, both politically and personally. There is no evidence that he and Truman did anything wrong together. They certainly made no substantial amount of money.
Truman’s eyes were always on a return to political office. In 1926 he sought his one favour of Tom Pendergast. He proposed himself for the office of County Collector, which for some extraordinary reason carried a salary with fees of $25,000 a year, and which would have given him affluence. Pendergast refused. The office was bespoken. But later that year he promoted Truman for Presiding Judge of the whole county, the official to whom Truman had previously been subordinate. Truman accepted, and was elected with ease. It was to be his niche for the next eight years, and made his political reputation in Missouri. But it gave him no advance in salary. He was still on $6,000.
During these eight years he proved a sound, clean, constructive local administrator. He re-structured the County’s debt and financed it at a much cheaper rate. He balanced the County’s current books. But he was also a substantial builder, and one who was peculiarly successful in getting popular support (referenda were necessary) for bond issues to finance his projects. There was a local tradition of negative votes in these polls, based upon a well-founded cynical belief that a significant part of the proceeds would find its way into the pockets of the promoters. In Truman’s time several Kansas City proposals were decisively rejected. But he got most of his County projects through, accomplished by barnstorming advocacy against a background of sound administration.
In his first term he built roads, 224 miles of them. With mass motor car ownership exploding in the boom of the late 1920s, they were an essential public service. He aimed to bring a metalled road within two and a half miles of every farmhouse, and broadly achieved it. In 1930 he claimed to have been told that, on some unspecified scale of measurement, Jackson County was throughout the nation second only to Westchester County, New York, in the quality of its roads. Also, although he had to obtain that gentleman’s general approval for his bond issues, he built them without the aid of Tom Pendergast. This was a considerable feat, not because Pendergast was a renowned civil engineer but because he was the owner of the happily (if not wholly reassuringly) named Ready Mixed Concrete Company, and was used to seeing a good deal of the mixture spread on the highways of his domain.9 Apparently it was only used on three-quarters of a mile of Truman’s programme.