Early in the 20th Century, the most powerful force in Missouri politics was the Pendergast family. Jim Pendergast was a Kansas City alderman who for 18 years reached out to his fellow Irishmen and to various other immigrant groups. During the peak of his power, he had not only hand picked his own mayor, James A. Reed, but every other key office at City Hall.
When Jim Pendergast died in 1911, his brother Tom took over the machine. Tom Pendergast was tremendously popular in Kansas City, where he fed the poor and provided thousands of jobs, and those people often repaid him by voting “early and often” on election day.
Harry Truman was good friends with Tom Pendergast’s nephew, young Jim Pendergast, who was a regular customer during the time Truman and Eddie Jacobson were operating “The Haberdashery,” at 12th and Baltimore. The clothing store went belly up during the recession of the early 1920s, but shortly before the store closed, Jim and his father Mike – another leader of the Pendergast machine – asked Truman if he wanted to run for eastern judge of the Jackson County Court. Truman accepted and easily won the election. He was sworn in on Jan. 1, 1923.
Truman lost re-election to that position two years later, but that would be the only election he would ever lose. In November 1926, with the support of the Pendergasts, he was back and won the election as presiding judge.
Truman served two four-year terms as a presiding judge. He was in charge of an annual budget of $7 million, two courthouses, 700 employees (including sheriff, superintendent of schools, and county treasurer), the county hospital, the county’s home for the aged, and three homes for neglected children and young criminals. One of his most significant accomplishments was the creation of a modern road system for Jackson County.
In 1934, Tom Pendergast asked Truman if he was interested in running for the U.S. Senate and Truman agreed, defeating John Cochran that November. In his biography, “Truman: The Rise to Power,” Richard Lawrence Miller suggested that Truman benefited from the Pendergast machine in that election. “The Pendergast machine was in fine form when Election Day arrived… At one polling place Truman watched men going round and round in a circle, casting one ballot after another.”
Many people questioned Truman’s ties with the Pendergast family, because of the questionable power that the family held. The Pendergast machine lost its power in 1939 after Tom Pendergast was convicted of income tax evasion and served one year at the Leavenworth Prison.
