"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.

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-c- pieces, each Christmas provides free dinners for about 5,000 families.

State. As the master of a solid bloc of faithful votes. Tom Pendergast has long been the No. 1 Democrat of his State. But in 1932 St. Louis' Bennett Champ Clark went to the Senate without his help and Boss Pendergast has since had to sign a working agreement to claim patronage only in the western half of the State. The truce has lately been strained, to the dis pleasure of Tom Pendergast. First strain came when young Maurice Milligan, whose Brother Jacob was defeated by Pendergast's Harry Truman for the Senate, was appointed U. S. Attorney for the western district of Missouri with Senator Clark's help and began the campaign to clean up the city's voting which culminated in the celebrated indictment of 199 Pendergast heelers for fraud. Then Governor Lloyd Crow Stark, a prosperous nurseryman elected with Pendergast support, unexpectedly rebelled by appointing a new election board of whose four members, Tom Pendergast howled, only one was a "real Democrat." This year, when President Roosevelt reappointed District Attorney Milligan over Harry Truman's lone Senate dissent, many a Missourian concluded that the nation's No. 1 Democrat was promoting a revolutionary realignment in Missouri's Democracy in which Tom Pendergast would definitely take second place.

Although Boss Pendergast announced after the 1936 campaign that active management of his machine would thenceforth rest in the hands of Nephew James Michael Pendergast, he has by no means relinquished his duties as policy maker. Day after last week's election, Democrat Pendergast, after exclaiming that "this is a better tonic than a carload of medicine," indicated that he might be a more stub born obstacle to Democrats Clark and Roosevelt than optimists might think. Having invited reporters into his office for one of his rare interviews, the old boss announced that he was going on the warpath and that his first victim would be faithless Lloyd Crow Stark, should he be a candidate for re-election in 1940.

Roared Boss Tom Pendergast, jabbing the air with his mighty forefinger: "I have never done a thing in my life except support Democratic officials to the best of my ability. I have not received that kind of consideration from Governor Stark. ... If his conscience is clear, I know mine is. I now say let the river take its course."

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