Kansas City Make-Work Policy

Kansas City’s make-work policy turned the city’s Depression-era building boom into a source of employment: under City Manager Henry McElroy, thousands were put to work by hand even when heavy machinery stood idle. The arrangement offered wages amid economic hardship, but its operation also reflected the close connection between local government, public works, and the Pendergast organization.

Setting and governing logic

Even during the Depression’s worst years, Kansas City was building. The city’s expanding public program included a new municipal auditorium, police building, waterworks, public market, and City Hall. Against that backdrop, the local government organization provided most of the jobs. The policy’s immediate logic was to employ people rather than maximize the speed or mechanical efficiency of construction: workers used picks and shovels while heavy equipment went unused.

That choice made public works an employment measure as well as a construction program. The book presents the contrast plainly: machinery was available, but leaving it idle meant more men could be hired. The policy thus treated labor itself as a public resource to be distributed, even when that meant completing work less efficiently by conventional measures.

Projects and the Pendergast businesses

One of the program’s seemingly endless projects was paving mile after mile of Brush Creek with thick beds of ready-mixed concrete. That material came from the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company, established by Thomas J. Pendergast, whose organization had substantial interests in construction and related businesses. His wider holdings included paving, concrete pipe, crushing, and construction companies, placing a major supplier of public works within the same political network that helped direct local government.

The overlap brought a practical consequence: municipal employment projects could provide jobs while also creating demand for businesses associated with the organization. Pendergast defended allegations that political power helped control contracts and supply public materials by arguing that his products were as good as any others, and often better. The account therefore presents the building program both as a response to unemployment and as part of a political economy in which public contracts and private enterprise were closely connected.

Employment as political patronage

The make-work program operated within a broader organization that treated politics as a year-round business. Its ward leaders, precinct captains, and block leaders connected residents to practical help. Precinct captains assisted newcomers with utilities and could arrange coal, food, clothing, or medical attention for people in need. In winter, trucks from Pendergast enterprises distributed warm clothing; at Christmas, Pendergast gave out three thousand free dinners. Such assistance cultivated personal ties and gratitude, with electoral support expected in return.

Jobs and favors were also mediated through Pendergast’s daily contacts with applicants. During the Depression, people gathered before dawn outside his Main Street office, and he saw as many as possible before stopping at noon. He wrote brief notes directing officials or his own businesses to consider a petitioner’s needs; the color of the pencil signaled whether the request called for immediate action, future consideration, or no response. This system shows how employment could be allocated through personal patronage rather than an impersonal process.

Political consequences and limits

The county judges’ authority helps explain why local employment and contracting carried political weight. They controlled county funds, hired road overseers and other employees, and determined who received county contracts. When the Pendergast organization recruited Harry S. Truman to run for eastern judge, the position offered a vote on the county court and influence over jobs, contracts, and road maintenance. The organization valued Truman’s reputation for honesty and his appeal to rural voters, qualities that could broaden its electoral support.

Kansas City’s labor-intensive public works were not described as a single isolated project: they formed part of a system where government employment, personal assistance, political loyalty, and business interests overlapped. McElroy later claimed that the city’s make-work program inspired the federal Works Progress Administration. The account attributes that connection to his claim, while showing more directly how Kansas City’s own program joined visible construction to the distribution of work during the Depression.