The Kansas City Star

The Kansas City Star was a Kansas City newspaper that entered Harry S. Truman’s story first as a source of employment and later as a persistent political and personal presence. Truman worked in its mailroom when financial hardship narrowed his options; years afterward, he disliked the paper’s Republican bias, and its reporting and editorial criticism accompanied disputes over civil rights and local politics. The newspaper’s place in his life therefore joined the everyday need for a wage to the public scrutiny that followed him into the presidency.

Employment in a Time of Financial Hardship

After West Point rejected him because of his eyesight and his father’s financial collapse made college unaffordable, Truman enrolled in an accounting course at Spaulding’s Commercial College in downtown Kansas City. He could not afford to continue. To help support his family, he took a job in the mailroom at The Kansas City Star. The position belonged to a sequence of practical choices forced by circumstance, rather than a planned entry into journalism or politics.

The brief account of the job places the paper within the economic pressures that shaped Truman’s early adulthood. He had already tried an accounting course and had to abandon it; paid work became necessary while the family’s fortunes were reduced. The Star was thus not only an institution he would later judge as a political actor: it was also one of the employers available to him when education and other possibilities had closed off. The narrative does not describe his mailroom duties in detail, but records the job as a concrete step toward helping his family.

A Newspaper He Distrusted

Truman’s later view of the paper was colored by what he regarded as its Republican bias. In a letter to Bess Wallace, he listed The Kansas City Star among the things he disliked, alongside dentists, snobs, hypocrisy, and lawyers. The complaint places the newspaper within his personal judgments, but also gives the objection a political basis: it was not simply a workplace from his youth, but a publication whose partisan outlook he believed was at odds with his own.

That early employment and later antipathy make for a pointed contrast. The paper had offered paid work when Truman needed it; that did not produce lasting loyalty. Instead, he could remember it as an employer and criticize it as a partisan voice. The evidence does not establish that his mailroom experience caused his later dislike, and the two facts are best kept distinct: necessity brought him to the paper, while his objection concerned its perceived political alignment.

Local Politics and Editorial Opposition

The Star reappears in the account of Truman’s intervention in a Jackson County congressional primary. Angered that Democratic congressman Roger C. Slaughter was stalling progress on the Fair Employment Practices bill, Truman decided not to support him and publicly involved Jim Pendergast in discussions at the White House. Truman backed Enos Axtell in the primary. Some members of the old Kansas City organization then returned to methods associated with its earlier conduct, provoking a storm of outrage in The Kansas City Star.

The episode shows the paper acting as a visible critic of local political behavior at a moment when Truman himself had helped shape the contest. When he returned to Independence in early August to vote, a Star reporter was watching 219 North Delaware with binoculars, recording his movements. Truman responded by giving the reporter an exhaustive account of his morning, including details from the bathroom. The exchange turned surveillance into a comic contest over disclosure: the reporter sought a record of Truman’s private routine, and Truman answered by making that routine deliberately public.

The primary’s result did not settle the controversy. Axtell’s victory was treated by Bob Hannegan as a vote of confidence in the President, but reporters in Kansas City uncovered evidence of vote fraud. Three federal judges later found only minor violations. The account does not say that the Star itself established the fraud; it distinguishes the newspaper’s editorial outrage from the reporting that brought evidence to light. Even so, the episode revived doubts about Truman’s propriety and renewed attention to his past connection with the Pendergast machine. The paper’s criticism consequently formed part of a wider public argument about the methods surrounding his political allies and his own influence.

The Paper in the Presidential Test

The Star also supplied an early measure of Truman’s presidency. On his first day in office, Roy Roberts of The Kansas City Star wrote, “What a test of democracy if it works!” The line framed the new presidency as a test of democratic government. Less than two years later, Walter Lippmann judged that the test had failed, seeing Truman as an embarrassment and questioning whether he commanded his party or administration. Lippmann was not identified as writing for the Star; the narrative places his assessment beside Roberts’s earlier sentence to mark the distance between the hopeful question and the later crisis of confidence.

Across these appearances, The Kansas City Star occupies several distinct roles: a source of early wages, a newspaper Truman regarded as politically biased, an editorial opponent of conduct within the old Kansas City organization, and the institutional home of Roberts’s opening-day reflection on democracy. The book does not reduce the paper to a single attitude toward Truman. Its criticism could intersect with scrutiny of his political connections, while the words of one of its writers helped articulate the larger stakes attached to his succession. In that contrast, the newspaper becomes part of the story’s record of how local reputation, partisan judgment, and national expectations converged around Truman.