MISSOURI: Vote of Confidence

One afternoon last week a small two-door sedan crossed the Missouri River bridge at Kansas City, Mo. and sped out over the green spring countryside. At Platte City, 26 miles out, the car pulled up before the Platte County jail, and out stepped bespectacled Bruno Nicoli to begin a four-month sentence. Thirty minutes later the sedan drove through the gloomy gates of the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kans. Out jumped Deputy U. S. Marshal Roy Webb and his bailiff, John Walker, to hand over their second prisoner, Frank G. Fellers, to begin his sentence of a year and a day. Thus behind bars went the first of the 199 election workers and officials indicted for conspiracy in the notorious vote frauds which helped Kansas City's Democratic Boss Thomas Joseph Pendergast carry his stronghold for himself and Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 elections.

Next day Kansas City went to the polls again. Up for re-election were Pendergast's Mayor Bryce Byram Smith, an innocuous onetime baking company official, and a full slate of Pendergast candidates for two municipal judgeships and the eight-man city council. Up against them was a full Coalition slate of Republicans and disgruntled Democrats headed by a 49-year-old Legionnaire, Colonel Fred E. Whitten, pledged to depose the embattled Pendergast Little Tammany as a similar coalition had deposed Big Tammany in New York.

If to Kansas Citizens this attempt was nothing new, many things about Election Day were. On the streets, instead of the cruising automobiles full of the hoodlums who killed four citizens and battered a number of others in the last bloody municipal election in 1934, there was unaccustomed quiet. To insure a secret ballot, Governor Stark's new anti-Pendergast election board had drawn up special instructions for 2,766 judges, election clerks and deputy commissioners. Most important, on the registration rolls were 215,000 names instead of the 243,000 who voted in the 1934 election, or the apparently well-padded 263,000 who voted in the "ghost election" of 1936. Even so, a group of Kansas City women, unconvinced by Boss Tom's bruited promise that he meant to win an election "legitimately," had asked Governor Stark to have the State militia at hand.

But Tom Pendergast, who describes himself as "just an ordinary fellow who was able to keep his word," kept it to the letter. When the polls closed, no one was dead, no one injured. Re-elected by some 44,000 votes was Mayor Smith, together with the two Pendergast judges, seven of the eight Pendergast councilmen. The eighth. Coalitionist Charles ("Tod") Woodbury, was a popular onetime University of Kansas pole vaulter who was expected to bother Tom Pendergast about as much as a flea would bother a Brontosaurus. Crowed the 64-year-old boss as soon as the votes were in: "We won fairly and squarely. It was a vote of confidence." And thus, as it has repeatedly done, to the indignation and bewilderment of reformers over the U. S., Kansas City's Little Tammany settled down for four more years of its particular and highly efficient brand of machine rule.