Kansas City Automobile Club

The Kansas City Automobile Club figures in Harry S. Truman’s post-election effort to regain financial footing: selling its memberships gave him a practical source of income while drawing him toward road and highway work.

Membership Sales and Income

After losing his county judgeship, Truman worked from an office in the Board of Trade Building selling memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club on commission. After expenses, each new member brought him approximately five dollars. He sold more than a thousand memberships in a year and cleared $5,000—a meaningful sum for a man supporting a family and paying debts.

Truman’s Road Work

The work placed Truman amid the growing interest in roads, highways, and the automobile. He made that field a specialty, and later became president of the National Old Trails Association, a nonprofit group devoted to building highways along historic trails and promoting history as a tourist attraction. His club sales thus belonged to a broader period of practical, mobile work: when one opportunity failed, he quickly moved to another.

Significance

The available account presents the Kansas City Automobile Club chiefly through Truman’s sales work, not through details of the club’s organization or policies. Its significance in his life lies in the scale and timing of the commission income: after electoral defeat, the memberships helped him earn money while he developed a sustained association with highways and automobile-era promotion.