MISSOURI: Vote of Confidence

(2 of 3)

City. A graduate of St. Mary's (Jesuit) College in Kansas, Tom Pendergast took over the family machine in 1910, a dozen years after it had been founded by his genial saloonkeeper brother Jim. When a group of Kansas City reformers began campaigning for a "nonpartisan" city charter to set up a city manager and an eight-man council, Brother Tom, figuring that five men could control an eight-man council and that he could elect them, took over the charter movement too. Since the charter became effective in 1926, Tom Pendergast's control of Kansas City and Jackson County has been undisputed.

To keep Kansas City in voluntary subjection, Boss Pendergast's machine provides some 4,500 full-time jobs, besides a quantity of part-time duties, most of which are assigned to the workers who get out the vote in the city's 460 precincts. The Pendergast arrangement is one precinct worker for every 50 voters. Precinct workers are supplied with cash funds for helping the needy. Pendergast henchmen are famed for their ingenuity. One of them once described an occasion when it was discovered that the opposition had registered six women under eight names each. Instead of complaining, they registered six of their own women under the same 48 names, had them vote first.

A notable feature of the Pendergast machine is that all political employes are supposed to work. This rule is enforced by Pendergast City Manager Henry F. McElroy, a meticulous, stern executive widely feared for his honesty. Although City Manager McElroy is by no means the non-partisan administrator he was designed to be (during the Hoover Administration he refused to apply for an RFC loan for the city on the ground that it was "Republican money"), he boasts of having kept the administration free of deficits and scandal, was credited with keeping Henry Ford in Kansas City during the United Automobile Workers' strike last year. ''Tom and I are partners," Mr. McElroy once explained. "He takes care of politics and I take care of the business. Every Sunday morning, at Tom's house or at mine, we meet and talk over what's best for the city."

Tom's house is a $150,000 mansion in Kansas City's most fashionable district, where the Boss and his family live a comfortable life scrupulously free of politics. Tom goes to bed at nine o'clock, is shaved every morning by a barber, refuses to listen to political speeches, rarely appears in public. A teetotaler, he plays neither golf nor cards, eschews cigars for cigarets, beer for lemonade. He is vain about his grammar, not at all about his tough and much-cartooned visage. The ample Pendergast fortune stems from his Ready Mixed Concrete Co. and the city's largest wholesale liquor establishment, both of which local purchasers wisely patronize. Generous to a fault, Tom Pendergast never ventures into the slums without a pocket ful of 25¢ pieces, each Christmas provides free dinners for about 5,000 families.