Truman’s First Campaign
Harry Truman, who grew up in Independence, represented a familiar face to voters in eastern Jackson County. (Jackson County Historical Society).
It was 100 years ago when Harry Truman won his first election, the 1922 Democratic Party primary for the post of Eastern Jackson County judge.
He had to overcome his own fears, the support - or lack of it - from the Pendergast political machine, opposition from a rival political faction as well as the Ku Klux Klan, and finally the accusation that he recently had voted for a Republican, a serious allegation among Jackson County Democrats.
To that charge, Truman pleaded guilty and explained why in a compelling speech. Not long after that same Republican would help thwart the election day theft of a polling station ballot box, an act that could have ended the future president’s political career before it began.
This story first appeared, in a slightly different form, on Flatland KC, a digital news site operated by Kansas City Public Broadcasting.
By Brian Burnes
At the Third Street Social in Lee’s Summit, customers can stand where Harry Truman first ran.
The restaurant is located on the same site where Truman launched his first political campaign 100 years ago when he announced his candidacy for eastern Jackson County judge.
The Third Street Social restaurant in Lee’s Summit is located on the same spot where Harry Truman announced his candidacy in 1922.
“Harry Truman would have stood on our front steps,” said Andy Lock who, with business partner Domhnall Molloy, operates the eatery.
Inside the restaurant, where diners can reserve the Truman Table or the Bess Table, and order the Harry Truman Old Fashioned, featuring the bourbon the 33rd president so famously admired, visitors easily can be persuaded that the career of Missouri’s most familiar politician had been inevitable.
But the details of his 1922 campaign dramatically demonstrate it was not.
Truman - then 38 years old and co-owner of a failed downtown Kansas City men’s clothing store - was one of five candidates in a crowded Democratic primary.
He prevailed by about 280 votes among some 12,000 cast or just over 2 percent.
“It was the hottest primary fight in the history of the county,” the Examiner of Independence declared the day after.
Truman’s campaign survived his own poor judgment (a dalliance with the Ku Klux Klan that one Truman biographer has called “shabby”), embarrassing personal displays (after dropping leaflets from a biplane over an Oak Grove picnic, he threw up promptly upon landing); his own unpolished public speaking style, (“I suffered for him,” remembered a friend), and even the attempted theft of a polling station ballot box which - had it succeeded - might have ended or at least postponed Truman’s political career.
Given all that, the 1922 campaign remains - if not quite as memorable as Truman’s 1948 upset presidential election victory - a hinge in history that could have swung another way, given the realities of early 20th century Jackson County voting practices.
But the attempted ballot box theft failed, thanks largely to a Republican friend. Truman prevailed in the August 1 Democratic Party primary, defeated his Republican Party opponent the following November, and the world knows the rest.
Today that attempted theft represents just one election day outrage in a grim continuum of them that dated to Kansas City’s frontier origins, when shootings and violence prompted the formation of a state-sanctioned Kansas City election board in 1895 and a similar body in eastern Jackson County in 1917.
Today, Jackson County remains the only Missouri county with two election boards, according to the Missouri Secretary of State website.
The Pool Hall Polling Station
The election day violence that prompted the formation of an eastern Jackson County election board dated to before World War I.
“There had been several riots,” said Bob Nichols, Jr., who served 31 years as the board’s Democratic Party director before retiring in 2017.
“Hired thugs would come out from Kansas City to beat up voters. It was unbelievable the things that happened back then - there were shootings - all kinds of crazy things.
"But that was why the board was established, to keep the city politicians out of it.”
Prior to the 1917 legislation approved by the Missouri General Assembly, voters were not preregistered across eastern Jackson County before elections.
“The Kansas City politicians were trying to control the county outside of Kansas City by sending in large numbers of bogus voters and by stealing ballot boxes and intimidating election workers,” reads a 1983 history of the eastern Jackson County election board.
In 1916 elections had proved especially chaotic, with election judges and clerks often under control of opposing political factions.
“Every man who votes August 1 should watch his ballot from the time he hands it to the judge of election until it is dropped into the ballot box,” wrote William Southern, Jr., publisher of the Examiner of Independence.
The day before that year’s primary several men presented themselves at the home of an election judge in Jackson County’s Mount Washington district, identifying themselves as voting officials and insisting that two boxes of ballots “were not fixed quite right.”
The election judge's wife handed them over.
“The same trick was tried on the wife of one of the judges of election at Sugar Creek, but she refused to let the boxes go,” the Examiner reported.
A deputy sheriff soon retrieved the missing boxes from an election judge affiliated with the Pendergast Democratic Party faction.
It was several days after both the 1916 primary and general elections before winners in Jackson County could be declared.
With the new election board in Independence established the following year, four election commissioners - two Democratic, two Republican - would receive $200 a year, with a clerk receiving an annual $1,500 salary.
But the new board still would be starved for resources.
In 1916 there had been 35 precincts outside the Kansas City municipal boundaries. But because Kansas City politicians dominated the county court - which set the precinct boundaries - Independence voters sometimes only had four polling stations available to them. Meanwhile, rural voters outside Independence would have to spend hours just to get to their distant polling stations.
Some stations, further, were not placed in appropriate locations. A Sugar Creek polling station had put in a pool hall.
Resources remained strained in 1922.
Just weeks before the August 1 primary an election board official pleaded before county administrators, saying voters needed more resources. Women in Missouri had received the right to vote when the state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.
By 1922 the Sugar Creek pool hall would be out of the election business. But some Jackson County journalists still worried about the lack of proper polling stations, as some which “would be tolerated by the men will not be suitable for the women,” the Examiner of Independence insisted.
Enter the Pendergasts
Harry Truman, meanwhile, had resolved to run for office in 1921.
Kansas City political machine boss Tom Pendergast, seen here with nephew James Pendergast, wanted to expand his organization’s influence in eastern Jackson County in the early 1920s. (Courtesy: Harry Truman Library and Museum).
Sometime that year James Pendergast, a nephew of machine boss Tom Pendergast and a fellow artillery officer of Truman’s during World War I, had dropped by the store with his father, Mike Pendergast.
The elder Pendergast was in charge of the family political machine’s operations in eastern Jackson County.
At first, the Pendergast machine - whose followers were known as “Goats” - didn’t then have much clout in places like Independence and Grandview.
The Pendergast family resolved to change that after World War I.
Minutes of the Rural Jackson County Democratic Club, today held by the Jackson County Historical Society archives, document that Mike Pendergast addressed the organization on Nov. 21, 1918, the same night he was made an honorary member. On Jan. 16, 1920, the organization listed a “J.V. Truman” - likely John Vivian Truman, Harry Truman’s younger brother - as a club precinct captain in Washington Township, in southern Jackson County.
The Truman family was well known there. Harry and John Vivian Truman had helped run the family’s Grandview farm before World War I. Older brother Harry long had been active in Masonic groups and in 1919 had married Elizabeth Wallace, a granddaughter of George Porterfield Gates, co-founder of the Waggoner-Gates Milling Co. in Independence.
Members of the Pendergast family approached Harry Truman about running for Eastern Jackson County Judge at about the same time he attended this Swope Park picnic in 1921. (Courtesy: Harry Truman Library and Museum).
“Truman was selected because Pendergast was seeking to move into eastern Jackson County,” said Jon Taylor, history professor at University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg and author of several books about Truman and Jackson County.
“Truman checked a number of boxes - he was a farmer, a war veteran and had travelled the Masonic circuit.”
The county judges were important to the Pendergast machine because of jobs, and the three-person county court (an administrative body) controlled hundreds of them. The political organization whose candidates held the court could distribute the jobs to its supporters.
In 1922 Truman, the former farmer, sought to frame himself as a friend of business.
“Harry Truman told his audience that he was for a business administration of county affairs,” the Examiner reported after one campaign appearance. “He charged Republicans with extravagance, quoting figures to show greater expense accounts of Republican office-holders than their Democratic predecessors,” the Examiner added.
“In the 1920s there was a nationwide shift back to the Republican Party,” said Taylor. “In 1922 Truman talks about his pro-business stance he is going to take, so he is trying to counter this Republican wave.”
Truman’s victory in 1922 was largely his own, Taylor added.
“He certainly made a good effort, and without any kind of padded votes as far as I know, as Pendergast did not then have a stronghold in eastern Jackson County,” Taylor said.
As this 1926 poll book for Jackson County’s Blue Township suggests, political organizers kept careful track of voters and their party affiliations (Jackson County Historical Society).
That’s not to say Truman wouldn’t later benefit from the experience of political machine operatives. Factions like the Pendergast machine would develop sophisticated knowledge of just who and where their voters were on election day. “Every Democrat whose vote is not polled by noon should be sent for,” reads the “Private and Confidential” directives listed in a 1918 “Democratic Polling Book” used in the county’s Prairie Township and today held by the Jackson County Historical Society’s archives.
“They would know, down to the household, how someone would vote,” Taylor said.
“That kind of politics Truman would come to learn during his time on the county court and it never left him.”
Not for nothing were such efficient political organizations known as “machines.” But some historians have written that Truman did more for the Pendergast machine in 1922 than its operators did for Truman.
“Grandpa didn’t get as much help from Pendergast as he might have,” added Clifton Truman Daniel, eldest grandson of the 33rd president. “It sounds lopsided to me today. Grandpa staunchly defended Pendergast. He knew the man was crooked but he always said ’At least Pendergast was upfront about it.’ ‘’
As the downtown Kansas City haberdashery Truman was running with Army pal Eddie Jacobson was struggling, Truman accepted the Pendergast machine’s invitation and agreed to run.
“The failure of our business followed and when the time came in 1922, I filed for eastern judge,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, published in the mid-1950s.
“The primary campaign was a very bitter fight,” he added.
Truman first announced his candidacy during a March 7 rally organized by a local American Legion chapter and held in the Lee’s Summit Veterans Memorial Building - on the same site now occupied by the Third Street Social restaurant.
Some 300 people, many of them world war veterans, attended.
“The hall was filled and many stood back of the seats,” the Examiner reported.
The evening’s program included a 15-minute wrestling match of two Lee’s Summit residents observing a 160-pound weight limit, with no falls reported, followed by a boxing match of 90-pound fighters, which went four rounds and was ruled a draw.
Then Truman spoke.
Newspaper accounts detailed that Truman quietly confirmed that he was indeed a candidate.
“I had stage fright so badly that all I could say was ‘I hope you’ll vote and work for me in the primary’ in a trembling voice and then I sat down,” Truman once wrote.
(In 1956 Truman attended the Jackson County Fair and Western Horse Show in Lee’s Summit.
“I will tell you now,” Truman said, 34 years after his first campaign speech, “that I was more scared then than I was at any time later, even when I was on the front in the first world war in France.”)
In affiliating himself with the Pendergast operation, Truman knowingly signed up with a political faction already known for growing aggressive on election day.
For a 20-year period between 1916 and 1936, thugs representing either Pendergast or the rival Democratic Party “Rabbit” faction operated by Joseph Shannon routinely re-defined the term “election irregularity.”
On election days, both factions would round up dodgy residents and herd them to polling stations.
Municipal employees, such as police officers or water department workers, would ignore or even provoke violence at polling stations, depending upon which faction had supplied their jobs.
“Many election judges were patronage employees from the fire and water departments,” wrote authors Lawrence H. Larsen and Nancy J. Hulston in their book “Pendergast!”, published in 1997.
Ballot box mischief proved routine.
In 1916 Pendergast operatives, using sophisticated counterfeiting skills, had fabricated facsimiles of genuine ballot boxes - similar “right down to scratches and chipped paint,” wrote Larsen and Hulston - and then replaced genuine ballot boxes with those, filled with forged and fake ballots.
“In a very overt manner, the Pendergast machine moved in the direction of forming an invisible government under which the elective franchise meant nothing in Kansas City,” the historians asserted.
In 1918 Albert Reeves, a Kansas City lawyer running for the Fifth District congressional seat as a Republican, had hoped to ride a sour anti-Woodrow Wilson, post-World War I mood to victory.
It didn’t work in Kansas City.
In one precinct in which only 30 residents had voted, Reeves allegedly lost by a margin of 700 voters to one. Reeves would never run for public office again - but he wouldn’t forget the defeat, either, as the Pendergast forces later would learn.
Ballot box crookedness continued to be a common feature of Jackson County elections. And sometimes tactics would escalate.
One day before the general election in 1930, a man presented himself to the teachers of Bryant School in Independence, whose students included a then-six-year-old Margaret Truman, the daughter of Truman, who that year was running for re-election as Jackson County presiding judge.
The man asked for “Mary Truman.” Mary Margaret Truman was her full name - but no one ever addressed her as “Mary.”
The teachers hesitated, and soon the man vanished.
The next day a car on U.S. 24 forced off the road another vehicle being driven by a Buckner banker who was head of the Jackson County Republican Party. Thugs beat, bound and blindfolded the banker before taking him to an unknown basement, where he spent the day.
Later that night - after the polls had closed - the banker staggered into a Kansas City filling station, asking for help. Taken from him had been his lists of Republican Party precinct captains and other election day contacts.
Whether that kidnapping had anything to do with the previous day’s unsuccessful abduction of young Margaret Truman remained unclear.
Four years later, in 1934, four people died and 11 were injured in election day violence in Kansas City. Among those killed killed near one polling station was P.W. Oldham, a 78-year-old hardware dealer who was locking up his store in the 5800 block of Swope Parkway when the shooting began.
“I shall never vote again,” a niece of Oldham told The Kansas City Star. “Who can we trust? What can we believe in after this? This was not an election. This was war.”
Things proved little changed two years later.
“On election day pimps, whores, crooks, derelicts and other noncomformists, given lists of names, hurried from precinct to precinct, receiving 25 cents per vote,” Larsen and Hulston wrote.
Tom Pendergast, Jr,, in a letter written to Margaret Truman Daniel after the former president’s daughter had published a 1973 biography of her father, admitted that machine workers “got carried away and voted the sick, the dying and the dead.”
A federal grand jury convened within weeks of the 1936 general election.
“Gentlemen, reach for all, even if you find them in high authority,” U.S. District Court Judge Albert Reeves - the same frustrated Republican candidate from 1918 - told jurors.
“Move on them,” he said. “We can’t surrender the ballot box to thugs, gangsters and plug-uglies.”
Jurors returned the first indictments the following spring. Throughout 1937 and into 1938 other juries brought in guilty verdicts on 259 of 278 individuals indicted.
Soon election officials struck some 60,000 bogus names from Kansas City voter registration files.
In 1940 Kansas City voters elected reform mayoral candidate John Gage, who had campaigned under a “Clean Sweep” banner. His election diminished the power of the Pendergast machine.
Tom Pendergast, meanwhile, had pleaded guilty to tax evasion the previous year and had entered Leavenworth federal penitentiary.
“…Shabby and out of character…”
In 1944, after Harry Truman had agreed to run as vice presidential running mate with President Franklin Roosevelt, the Hearst newspaper chain reported that Truman had been a Ku Klux Klan member in the 1920s.
Former Truman haberdashery partner Eddie Jacobson and Congregation B’nai Jehudah Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg thought it prudent to place an advertisement in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle including testimonials to the contrary.
Although many historians believe Truman was never actually a former Klan member, Truman apparently briefly had considered the idea during the 1922 campaign.
Klan membership across the country increased from 100,000 in 1921 to five million in 1924. Newspapers considered Klan rallies newsworthy. In covering one rally, one Kansas City area newspaper found it appropriate to report that the particular cross burned the previous evening had stood 40 feet high and had required six barrels of oil to properly ignite.
In Kansas City, in advance of the 1922 general election, Klan officials organized rallies in downtown Kansas City’s Convention Hall. There, speakers identified Kansas City’s Democratic Party faction members as among their enemies.
Truman friend Edgar Hinde briefly had been a Klan member.
“Some of us had joined to see what it was, to see what was going on, you know,” Hinde said in a 1962 Truman Library oral history.
“So they got after me to get Truman to join the Klan.”
According to Hinde’s account, after Truman agreed to consider the idea, Hinde brought a $10 membership fee to a Klan organizer, who then requested a meeting with Truman.
Truman, according to Hinde, went to a downtown Kansas City hotel room to meet with the representative, who told Truman that if he won his election with Klan support, he couldn’t give any county jobs to Catholics.
Truman, according to several accounts, explained how the Pendergast family was Catholic, as were many of those soldiers who had served in the artillery battery he had led during World War I.
“So that was it,” Hinde said in 1962. “and they gave me the $10 back.”
That was not quite it, however, as the Klan still targeted Truman before the 1922 primary. At one meeting Hinde recalled a speaker saying Truman was not “100 percent” American, which Hinde challenged, prompting shouts that he be thrown out.
“Boy, they commenced to mill around there,” Hinde recalled in 1962.
Klan animosity towards Truman continued in 1924, when Truman lost his re-election bid in part because rival Democratic Party faction leader Joseph Shannon joined forces with Republicans.
When Truman had won in in 1922, he and a second Pendergast or “Goat” judge representing the western district - Kansas City - had acted according to long-standing political practices. “The other judge and I were ‘Goats’ and we promptly took all the jobs,” Truman wrote in his memoirs.
“We ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economy basis.”
But Shannon faction members resented being shut out of those jobs, and joined forces with other Truman opponents. Local Klan members were among those opponents. Truman soon decided to confront those members during a daylight rally in Lee’s Summit.
This encounter is dramatized in “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!” the theatrical production made popular during the 1970s by actor James Whitmore and carried on in recent years by Clifton Truman Daniel.
“Shame on you,” Daniel, representing his grandfather, declares in footage available on YouTube.
“Shame on you - calling yourselves the Invisible Empire. The Good Lord ought to strike you off from the face of the earth.”
Truman’s brief consideration of the Klan, wrote Truman biographer David McCullough, “was shabby and out of character, and hardly good politics.”
McCullough did detail, meanwhile, Truman’s 1924 confrontation with Klan members.
“I poured it into them” McCullough quoted Truman as remembering.
Daniel, meanwhile, notes that his grandfather did not mention the Klan in his memoirs. “He didn’t want to give them any legitimacy,” he said. Daniel’s mother, Margaret Truman Daniel, however, did describe the encounter.
“He told them they were a bunch of cheap un-American fakers and then calmly walked off the platform and through the crowd to his car,” she wrote in her 1973 biography of her father.
In her 1986 biography of her mother, Margaret Truman Daniel added some more detail.
“He praised the fighting spirit of the Irish Catholics he had commanded in Battery D and scornfully implied that most of the Klansmen had been so busy hating their fellow Americans they had stayed home.
“ ‘If any Catholic or Jew who is a good Democrat needs help, I’m going to give them a job,’ he said.”
Across Party Lines
In 1922 there had been a separate accusation about Truman - that, during an election two years before, Truman had voted for a Republican.
John Miles, a World War I artillery officer who became Jackson County marshal in 1920, helped thwart the attempted theft of a ballot box in 1922. (Courtesy: Harry Truman Library and Museum).
That candidate had been John Miles, a fellow World War I artillery officer who in 1920 had been elected Jackson County marshal.
Among Jackson County Democrats, this represented a grave accusation. The county’s deep Democratic Party legacy can be traced to Andrew Jackson, the seventh president and Democrat for whom the county had been named in 1826. All four of Harry Truman’s grandparents - who had come from Kentucky - had been admirers of Jackson.
The family’s enmity toward Republicans, meanwhile, dated to at least the Civil War.
More than once Union soldiers had stopped at the southern Jackson County farm of Harriett Louisa Young, Truman’s maternal grandmother, and helped themselves to horses and mules.
In 1906 a federal claims court had ruled that the government owed Young $3,800 in compensation. That was about the same time a young Harry Truman, who had just joined the Missouri National Guard, made the mistake of wearing his new blue uniform into his grandmother’s house.
“She looked me over and I knew was going to catch it,” Truman wrote in a memoir.
“She said ‘Harry, this is the first time since 1863 that a blue uniform has been in this house. Don’t bring it here again.’
“I didn’t.”
Such long Jackson County memories hadn’t dissipated even by 1922. One Pendergast faction worker, Henry Abbott, an employee at the Sugar Creek Standard Oil refinery, lost his election job after word spread that he had been using a Pendergast car to shuttle voters - both Democrat and Republican - to the polls.
Abbott still resented his dismissal almost 70 years later.
“But they didn’t want Republicans riding in a Democratic car,” Abbott said in a 1990 Truman Library oral history.
Truman knew he had to answer the accusation about his support of a Republican, and did so in an Oak Grove speech, meriting a stand-alone story in the Kansas City Times.
“My record has been searched and this is all my opponents can say about me and you knowing the facts can appreciate my position,” he said. “I know that every soldier understands it. I have no apology to make for it. John Miles and my comrades in arms are closer than brothers to me. There is no way to describe the feeling.
“But my friend John is the only Republican I ever voted for and I don’t think that counts against me.”
On primary election day, when Miles got a tip that a gang of Shannon men had been seen heading toward Precinct 20, at Fairmount Junction, he sent two deputies.
“Four guns appeared on the attacking side and the marshals drew their weapons,” the Examiner reported. “It was at this point that Mr. Shannon rushed between and stopped what might have resulted in serious trouble.”
The stalemate resulted in the ballots being left alone.
And yet still it was not over. Three days after the election, Truman sat in the election board office with his principal challenger, Blue Springs banker E.E. Montgomery. Both watched as ballots from all 58 precincts were brought in from a nearby bank vault.
“Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Truman sat on the same side of the table with a commissioner and a clerk between then,” the Examiner reported.
The final count included 4,230 votes for Truman with Montgomery receiving 3,951.
How the successful theft of a ballot box might have affected the final tally certified by the eastern Jackson County election board remained unknown. But the decision by Miles to send two deputies likely had prevented the ballot box from being stolen.
Almost 23 years later Miles, who had gone on to serve as Kansas City chief of police, mailed a letter to the White House not long after after the April 12, 1945 death of President Franklin Roosevelt resulted in Truman becoming president.
Miles congratulated Truman and wished him luck, according to the letter, today held by the Truman Library, adding that he believed “this entire community feels the same as I do, regardless of their political faith.”
The “Soldier Boys”
Finally, there had been the veterans vote.
Of the five Democratic Primary candidates Truman was the only veteran. He needed a way to remind voters of that.
Two or three times a week, Truman would pick up two Boy Scouts and bring them out to wherever he was scheduled to speak that day. One scout would be outfitted with a sandwich board, alerting area residents as to the time and place of Truman’s appearance.
The other scout was John Woodhouse, the 15-year old chief bugler for the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps, who had been promised $2 for each performance.
“We would start at one end of the street and I’d blast away,’ Woodhouse said in a 1986 Truman Library oral history.
The bugle calls would prompt residents to come out of their homes.
“They’d look out to see what the racket was about and then read the sandwich board and call their friends if they were interested, and then they congregated at the appointed place, and then Harry gave them hell,” Woodhouse said.
Ultimately, it was Truman’s fellow World War I veterans who would carry the election, according to the future president.
“The soldier stuff and the soldier boys won it for me,” he once said.
Members of Harry Truman’s Battery D, lined up outside his home in 1957, helped get out the vote for Truman in 1922. (Courtesy: Harry Truman Library and Museum).
In a photograph taken during the 1957 dedication of the Truman Library, many then-middle-aged veterans of Truman’s Battery D can be seen lined up on the sidewalk outside the Truman home, apparently waiting to enter.
“Rarely did politics enter the realm of 219 North Delaware,” Jon Taylor said. “So anyone who got in that house had standing with Truman.”
Many of the 300 people who had crowded into the Lee’s Summit memorial building back in 1922 had also been veterans.
The building where Truman briefly spoke burned down in 1941, and a manufacturing plant opened five years later on what is thought to be the original foundation. The building long was known as Arnold Hall, named for Joseph Arnold, who bought the building and donated it to Lee’s Summit in 1950.
Today a weathered plaque affixed to the building’s exterior marks the sport where Truman “first declared his candidacy for an elective political office.”
Andy Lock and business partner Domhnall Molloy in 2016 opened their Third Street Social restaurant in the building at 123 S. E. Third Street.
“It’s interesting,” Lock said.
“If you sit there and watch - and we like to do this - as our guests come into the building, there are some who don’t notice the big picture we have displayed that explains the history of Arnold Hall and the Harry Truman piece of it.
“But others will walk around and look at everything we have on the walls,” he said.
Then diners can be seated at the Truman Table or the Bess Table, Lock said - although the restaurant requests reservations for those tables be made in advance.
Brian Burnes is president of the Jackson County Historical Society.