Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri, is more than a backdrop in the book: it is the changing city in which Harry S. Truman built his working life and political career, and whose development gives local scale to the larger story of his rise. The narrative follows its movement from river traffic and wagon commerce to railroads, civic construction, and national prominence, while also showing the political organization and open corruption that accompanied its growth.

River Town to Railroad Center

The city’s beginnings are tied to the junction of the Kansas River and the Missouri River, at the Missouri’s great bend. When Johnston Lykins and other promoters were founding the new town, they looked to geography as an argument for its future. The Missouri River offered a natural route downstream toward St. Louis and onward to New Orleans, Louisville, or Pittsburgh; upstream, the land beyond the bend opened toward the Northwest. Their ambitions pointed toward towns and trade, even as the surrounding region was still being crossed by river travelers and wagon trains.

The neighboring Independence, remembered in the narrative as the Queen City of the Trails, supplied a vivid picture of the commerce that preceded the city’s rail connections. Settlers arriving by river found crowded streets, stores, blacksmith shops, and wagon makers. Wagons set out for Oregon, while Santa Fe caravans brought pack animals and Mexican gold to exchange for American goods. One reported caravan, arriving in the spring that Solomon Young and his family came to the area, consisted of twenty-two wagons and carried $200,000 in gold specie. Independence even had a customhouse, an institution that made the inland town seem like a seaport.

The balance shifted rapidly toward rail. The bridge was completed in 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad opened, and within three years seven railroad lines ran into and out of Kansas City. Steamboats and wagon trains were already giving way. Missouri, once regarded as the Far West, had become what the narrative calls the Great Center of the country. This change is central to the city’s identity in the book: its importance rests first on routes and connections, and then on the institutions and ambitions those connections made possible.

By the opening of the twentieth century, Kansas City had reached a population of 200,000 but remained a cow and grain town. St. Louis, by contrast, was an older metropolis associated with old money; the two cities looked in different directions, with Kansas City facing west. To Harry, the city offered a daily view of a country full of energy and confidence. He thought of it as a place where things were happening. On one occasion, he and fellow bank clerks rushed into the street to see President Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. The encounter gave the young Truman his first chance to see a president, in a city where national figures and modern ambition could arrive together by train.

Work, Mobility, and Truman’s City

Kansas City shaped Truman’s early working life as well as his sense of possibility. After West Point rejected him because of his eyesight and his father’s financial difficulties ruled out college, he enrolled in an accounting course at Spaulding’s Commercial College. The cost forced him to leave it. He then worked in the mailroom of the Kansas City Star. Later, after the drowning of his school friend Tasker Taylor, John Truman urged his son to take Taylor’s job as a construction timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad. The work, on a railroad project, was a rough initiation for a young man who had seen little of life.

The automobile became another measure of the city’s changing prospects. Truman bought a large, black, five-passenger 1911 Stafford automobile (Lizzie), hand-built in Kansas City. Only three hundred were made; it had right-hand drive, a brass-framed windshield, and lamps nearly as large as those on locomotives. Although new it had sold for $2,350, Truman paid $650. The house needed paint, and family debts and the cost of a lawsuit over his grandmother’s will strained the household, so the purchase was a substantial extravagance. Truman nevertheless regarded it as a bargain. The car was not merely a display of prosperity: he used it to take his father to a doctor in Kansas City, even though the family held prejudices against Orientals. Truman worried about losing his father and confided that an operation at his age was dangerous.

When Truman entered military service, he painted the Stafford bright red and drove around Kansas City in it wearing his uniform. The city became the setting for an unfamiliar, absorbing purpose: he lived in uniform, recruited others, and found that every day now had focus. After the war, the 129th marched from Union Station through downtown to Convention Hall. Truman and the other officers rode horseback; the troops wore their helmets and full packs, and a crowd lined Grand Avenue beneath flags and a large welcome arch. People cheered and wept, holding up children to see the returning soldiers. The public welcome turned the city’s streets into a stage for the homecoming of men who had marched in France.

Kansas City also supported Truman’s first business partnership. Truman & Jacobson occupied the ground floor of the Glennon Hotel at 104 West 12th Street, across from the Muehlebach Hotel. The location was considered choice. By agreement, Truman kept the books and Eddie Jacobson handled buying, while the two partners alternated serving customers. Later, Truman sold memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club from an office in the Board of Trade Building. He recruited more than a thousand members in a year, clearing $5,000 after expenses at a time when he had a family to support and debts to pay. Roads and highways became his specialty, and he became president of the National Old Trails Association, which promoted highway construction along historic trails and encouraged history-based tourism.

Local Government and the Pendergast Era

Truman’s political ascent took place within Kansas City’s local networks. His first face-to-face encounter with Tom Pendergast occurred early in 1926 in Pendergast’s office, above a wholesale linen supply store at the Jackson Democratic Club headquarters on Main Street. The plain surroundings—a narrow stairway and a neighborhood of small shops, inexpensive restaurants, and machine shops—offered little of the conventional appearance of wealth or power. The city’s banks, office towers, and department stores lay several blocks away. The contrast introduces a recurring feature of Kansas City in the book: political influence did not always announce itself through imposing surroundings.

As presiding judge, Truman served two consecutive four-year terms, from January 1927 to January 1935. His electoral margins grew from 16,000 votes in 1926 to 58,000 in 1930, and his constituency now included the whole county and Kansas City, whose population was nearly 500,000. The book emphasizes the broad approval he received from civic leaders, businesspeople, fellow politicians, the press, government students, and voters. Yet formal accountability to the electorate existed alongside the political organization. Mike Pendergast continued to visit the court and remained Truman’s mentor, sometimes arriving in a dark green Peerless sedan with a driver and his young son. Tom Pendergast was a different kind of presence, and Mike’s eventual withdrawal from the organization left Truman facing a changed political relationship.

The organization’s influence was visible in public works. A bond issue funded additional roads, a new Kansas City courthouse, and a complete remodeling of the Independence courthouse. The Kansas City building was intended to replace an aging Victorian structure with creaking elevators and oiled wood floors. It formed part of an ambitious ten-year civic plan that also included a new City Hall and auditorium, promoted by both the Kansas City Star and Tom Pendergast.

During the Depression, the city’s confidence and hardship existed side by side. A thirty-four-story Power & Light Building, then Missouri’s tallest skyscraper, rose above the city as a conspicuous emblem of progress. Local government, controlled by the organization, supplied much of the employment. Under City Manager Henry McElroy, workers used picks and shovels while heavy machinery stood unused, a make-work approach that McElroy later claimed had inspired the Works Progress Administration. Another huge project paved mile after mile of Brush Creek with Pendergast’s Ready-Mixed concrete.

The prosperity had a darker counterpart. Gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, narcotics sales, and racketeering flourished, and the book identifies Tom Pendergast as the ruling spirit behind the city’s wide-open conditions. Forty dance halls and more than a hundred nightclubs operated. Their entertainment included blues and jazz by performers such as the Bennie Moten Orchestra, Count Basie and his Kansas City Seven, Hot Lips Page, and Julia Lee. The city’s musical life and its illegal economy occupied the same urban landscape: Kansas City offered a rich nightlife, while the political order that enabled its civic work also presided over vice.

A Home City in National Politics

Kansas City remained a source of political support and scrutiny as Truman’s career expanded. In the 1940 Senate primary, he defeated his opponents by 40,000 votes; the final tally was 276,850 for Truman, 236,105 for Cochran, and 147,614 for Milligan. When he later campaigned for reelection as president, he and his family awaited returns in a suite at the Muehlebach, surrounded by old political and Battery D friends. The celebration lasted through a long night, and Margaret remembered being shocked by how drunk many of the guests became. The hotel, previously a downtown landmark in his business and political world, now held the home-city gathering around a national election.

The connection between presidential authority and local politics persisted. When Truman opposed the reelection of Congressman Roger C. Slaughter over his obstruction of the Fair Employment Practices bill, he brought Jim Pendergast to the White House to discuss support for another candidate, Enos Axtell. The old Kansas City organization responded in ways that drew criticism from the Kansas City Star. During a visit to Independence to vote in the primary, Truman found a Star reporter watching his home at 219 North Delaware with binoculars. The episode made his hometown both a political resource and a place where his actions could be closely observed. In the subsequent Republican sweep, Axtell lost his congressional race by 6,000 votes, a result Margaret remembered as mortifying for her father.

Kansas City also supplied personal and political loyalties that followed Truman to Washington. Bill Boyle, whom Truman had known since childhood, came from a prosperous Irish Catholic family deeply involved in city politics; Boyle’s mother had been a Pendergast precinct worker whom Truman admired. Truman gave Boyle successive jobs, beginning with work as assistant counsel for the Truman Committee. Boyle later became a leading campaign organizer, was credited as one of the masterminds of Truman’s 1948 victory, and became chairman of the Democratic National Committee. These ties show how the city’s political relationships could extend far beyond its borders, even as their origins remained local.

After leaving the presidency, Truman returned to Kansas City and took offices in the Federal Reserve Bank Building. There was no official welcome, and few people noticed him as he walked with Roger Tubby to the Muehlebach for lunch with his brother Vivian. He continued smiling and talking. His immediate interest was a presidential library; his papers were temporarily stored at the county courthouse. Before leaving office, he had sent George Elsey to examine possible sites with Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian favored a low, swampy corner near the railroad tracks, while Elsey and Neild pointed toward a more attractive rise with views. The location debate linked the city’s rail-era landscape to Truman’s plans for preserving his public record.

Kansas City’s part in Truman’s story culminates in a return to the memory of Tom Pendergast. Pendergast died in the city at seventy-two, after years of declining health and political isolation. Since returning from prison, he had lived in a large red-brick house on Ward Parkway; his influence had vanished, and a court ruling barred him from entering the old headquarters on Main Street. Truman was not known to have visited him after his release. Nevertheless, on hearing of his death, Truman decided to attend the funeral and flew to Kansas City in an Army bomber. Several thousand mourners filed past the bier at Visitation Catholic Church. Some regarded the vice president’s appearance as an outrageous tribute to a convicted criminal; others saw courage in his refusal to forget a friend. The divided response gathers the city’s central tensions into one act: political association could carry a public cost, but Kansas City remained the place where Truman’s loyalties and rise had begun.