To the victor belong the spoils

To the victor belong the spoils is more than a slogan in this account: it is Tom Pendergast’s plainspoken theory of political organization, and a rule that reshaped the distribution of jobs and contracts in Jackson County. Its force lies in the exchange it describes—party work and loyalty bring practical rewards—while the book also shows how public service and partisan advantage could coexist uneasily within the same system.

The Maxim as Political Doctrine

Tom Pendergast described politics as a business that operated throughout the year, not merely on election day. He accepted the spoils principle as a candid account of competition: appointments, in his view, were earned through political service rather than awarded simply because someone was likable. The maxim therefore supplied a rationale for treating government jobs as rewards for the organization’s supporters.

That doctrine rested on a wider commercial and political network. Tom expanded the family’s saloons and wholesale liquor business, while his brother Michael Pendergast became liquor-license inspector for Jackson County, with authority over more than six hundred saloons. Tom also established Ready-Mixed Concrete Company, an early plant-and-truck operation, and acquired interests in paving, construction, concrete pipe, crushing, and other businesses. The arrangement joined political reach to economic opportunity: the organization could influence who received public work and could supply materials for it. When challenged over using political power to secure contracts, Tom defended his products’ quality; the account notes that they were often better than competing goods. The maxim explains the claim to political reward, but does not by itself settle whether a particular contract was well executed or corruptly obtained.

A Machine Built on Daily Service

The organization’s structure followed the election system, with ward leaders, precinct captains, and block leaders. Its presence extended beyond campaigning. Precinct captains helped newcomers get water, gas, and electricity connected, and the organization supplied coal, food, clothing, and medical attention to people in need without paperwork, delay, or the stigma associated with public relief.

This assistance was personal and visible. During winter storms, trucks from Pendergast businesses brought warm clothing to people in the West Bottoms; at Christmas, Tom distributed three thousand free dinners. During the deadly 1918–19 influenza epidemic, he went house to house to find out who needed help, at considerable personal risk. The expected return was gratitude at the polls. For supporters who saw immediate aid arriving without bureaucratic obstacles, that reciprocal bargain could seem fair and proper.

The same electoral system also encompassed outright fraud. Some supporters served as repeaters, voting more than once under different identities. One hospital laundry worker began at eighteen, below the legal voting age, and recalled being driven between polling places in different costumes, casting four or five ballots in a day. Her recollection captures the machine’s capacity to turn election fraud into a kind of performance for those involved. Patronage, mutual aid, and illegal voting were not identical practices, but they operated within the same expectation that political loyalty should be returned with tangible benefits.

Jackson County: The Maxim Put into Practice

The maxim became concrete when Harry S. Truman was recruited to run for eastern judge of Jackson County. The office was administrative rather than judicial, and one of three county judges held a consequential vote over the county’s purse strings. The court controlled road overseers, road crews, clerks, hundreds of other positions, and county contracts. Harry accepted while his clothing business with Edward Jacobson was failing and understood the political importance of the post.

The Pendergasts presented him as a strong candidate for the rural vote: he had a war record, came from a farming family, and was regarded as honest and honorable. His background and character offered the organization political value beyond the office itself. At the same time, the account emphasizes that Harry needed help and knew the debt he owed to those who had brought him into politics.

After the 1922 election, every Democrat won, and the new county court took office on New Year’s Day, 1923. Presiding Judge Elihu Hayes was expected to lead, and supporters of the Fifty-Fifty Agreement anticipated an equal division of county jobs and other benefits. Instead, City Manager Henry McElroy took control from the outset. With Harry voting alongside him, McElroy gave the Rabbits little share: road overseer posts went to Goats, Goats received county jobs, and Rabbits already employed by the county were among the first dismissed. Harry later acknowledged that McElroy ran the court with his vote. In practice, the maxim meant not just that an election winner could claim rewards, but that the victorious faction could displace the promised sharing arrangement.

Spoils and Public Performance

Harry did not initially treat the end of the Fifty-Fifty arrangement as a danger. He concentrated on cost reduction and better services, while understanding that his mentor, Michael Pendergast, welcomed the Rabbits’ loss of influence. Under McElroy and Truman, the county cut a debt of more than a million dollars in half, improved its credit rating, and improved services, especially road work. Harry learned the county’s roads and bridges firsthand; repairs addressed infrastructure that had been badly built or neglected. The account thus refuses a simple equation between machine rule and administrative failure: partisan allocation and measurable improvements occurred together.

The phrase’s significance also comes from its contrasts. In the county it names a system of organization, reciprocal aid, jobs, and factional control; later, Harry’s stature in the Senate grew when he challenged the powerful military-industrial complex and exposed wrongdoing. That later role does not erase his early dependence on the Pendergast organization, just as effective county administration does not undo the exclusion of the Rabbits. The maxim remains a compact description of the machine’s logic—and a measure of the political obligations Harry entered when he accepted its support.