Chapter 22
MISSOURI has the reflexes of its own celebrated mules; this is a state with a kick to it. Here, moreover, you will find almost every American problem in peppery miniature. Rural development versus urban; two great cities with contrasting points of view; politics at their most ferocious; erstwhile machine bosses of Neronian magnificence; a close equilibrium between Catholic and Protestant communities; sectional rivalries between north and south—all this is in Missouri.
In Washington, D. C., I met a trim, small, graying man with shiny spectacles and an alert inquisitiveness. He stood by a big wall map, and, as affectionately as a father poring over the photograph of a beloved child, pointed out various lights and shadows, bumps and hollows, in the Missouri landscape political and otherwise. One thing I know about Mr. Truman is that he loves Missouri.
“Let me give you a cross-section,” this modest, friendly man who was going to be president of the United States three weeks later said, working over the map and reeling off names faster than I could take them down, “Let me tell you about the why and wherefore.” Mr. Truman has visited every Missouri county—114 in all. He talked about friends I should call on, who were the apple of his eye. “They’re ornery, mean folk!” he chuckled. “They’re against everybody but themselves!” I asked Mr. Truman what they were for. “Missouri!”
In Missouri for the first time in these pages we touch the South. This is emphatically a border as well as a middle western state. “Missouri would lose something if the Civil War were ever entirely settled,” wrote the Kansas City Star not long ago. The Missouri boot heel digs directly into what is veritably the “old” South, and one region is called “Little Dixie.” Missouri came into the union as an offset to Maine. The War Between the States split it savagely asunder; it gave 118,000 troops to the Confederate army, 116,000 to the federal.1 In blunt fact the Bushwhackers and others in Missouri fought their own Civil War, within the state’s own frontiers, and traces of this still show.
In St. Louis I first heard about the mechanical cotton picker and its terrifying wonders.2 Cotton is the gravest domestic problem in the economic sphere in America, and Missouri knows this well. One-third of the entire cotton crop of the nation is, believe it or not, produced in the area of the St. Louis Federal Reserve District.
One Missouri peculiarity becomes manifest at once when you look at a map, that each of its two great cities (like Omaha in Nebraska) is on an extreme edge of the state. Europeans will, I daresay, find this more striking than Americans. Try to name any European capital located directly on a land frontier. Americans take for granted what most Europeans envy—the impregnable security of United States frontiers.
The northern tier of Missouri counties is wonderfully rich agricultural land for the most part. Mr. Truman described to me where the glaciers stopped, along the line of the Missouri River, and how they left soil that practically has no bottom. The southern tier, settled in large part by Virginia and Tennessee mountaineers, is less productive. But the state is a literal checkerboard, the crossroads of almost everything; there is scarcely a county without some special interest or distinction. One largely German area is called the “Rhineland.” In one region are the largest lead and zinc mines in the world. Another has (I am quoting an eminent local patriot) “more blue grass than Kentucky and Tennessee put together.” There are Mennonites in most of Missouri; many farmhouses have two front doors side by side, one for use on Sundays only. I once visited a remarkable community in the extreme southwest of the state, called Neosho.3 It was the Confederate capital of Missouri, and lies in what my military mentors called “traditional guerilla country.” Also it produced some famous desperadoes and bank robbers in the civilian sphere, like the James boys. Nevertheless the local citizenry is of a strong religious bent and ouritanical in the extreme.
In the southeastern corner of the state, near Sikeston, is a village of 104 families, 62 white, 42 Negro. In this cluster are represented thirty-seven different religious denominations.
The Ozarks are a world in themselves. These are, as everybody knows, the only block of moderately high land between the Alleghenies and the West; they are older mountains than the Rockies, and they are the backbone of the state. Perhaps oddly, there is little mineral wealth in the Ozarks except zinc and lead; the oil, I heard it put, “drained out to Kansas a couple of million years ago.” There is not so much human wealth either. The Ozarks are the Poor White Trash citadel of America. The people are undeveloped, suspicious, and inert. There are children aged fifteen who have never seen a toothbrush.
In These United States, the compendium edited by Ernest Gruening a good many years ago but a book still very contemporary and stimulating, I find this somewhat mordant passage about the Ozark mountaineers:
They … (Hoosiers, Crackers, Pikers, and so on) were descendants of the bond-servants of colonial days, and being of low degree sought their own kind…. They settled in the malaria swamps of Indiana and Illinois but that was on the highway to empire, and civilization drove them out. They colonized again in Pike County, Missouri, and made the name “Piker” notorious throughout the West as denoting a fellow of feeble wit and feebler initiative. “Crackers,” descendants of the Georgia convict colony, also found refuge…. The mountain people, too, came gradually onward, proliferating in their beloved highland till they crossed the Mississippi and peopled the Ozarks. They are simply a highland race that loves solitude and scorns comfort, literature, and luxury.4
One should have a word for the singular town of Independence, which as everybody knows is Mr. Truman’s own home base. The president’s attitude to it may be guessed from his remark to me that Kansas City is “one of its suburbs.” Independence is the place which, as we know from Chapter 13, many Mormons think will be the scene of the Resurrection; also a Latter-Day Saint community lives in it to this day, comprising those who split off from the original church mostly on the issue of plural marriage; its tabernacle is the biggest building in the town. Also Independence was the jumping-off place for three of the greatest American trails, the California, the Santa Fe and the Oregon. Lewis and Clark started out from Missouri, and so did the first covered wagons to California. The great city of St. Louis grew from a population of 300 to its present 816,048 in the first instance because it was the entrepôt which outfitted the early westward trekkers. Independence has, among other things, a spirited Confederate tradition; Truman’s father was a veteran, and his mother lives near there still. It has incidentally its own method of dealing with the Negro problem. Recently a very old Negro died; white men, including the president’s brother, were his pallbearers.5
Rural journalism in Missouri is something quite special. Everywhere I heard stories about Arthur Aull, editor of the Lamar Democrat, who writes personal notes that have considerable tang. He likes nothing better than to report the marriage of a couple that has just had a baby, or to describe, with names, various misadventures of the inebriated. One item, as reprinted in Life tells of a local worthy who got a divorce because his wife ran off with her brother-in-law while he and the children were at the Baptist church.
Leonard Hall, who does a weekly column about the Ozarks for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, recently described one mountaineer who “had six marriages go bad on him but … wouldn’t mind to have another woman if she’s a good one, for they air the best piece of property a man can have around the place.”6
On Pendergast and Certain Corruptions, Past and Present, in American City Politics
Boss Pendergast, the old man, is dead, but it is impossible to write about Missouri or indeed the United States without mentioning him. Why have so many American cities been so fabulously corrupt?
My own memory goes back many years: I remember with curious sharpness the first time I ever ran into crooked politics. Our high school in Chicago had a magazine and I, for some reason never explained before or since, was its business manager. We made up the magazine each month, and took it to a small neighborhood printer, who was an old-school honorable craftsman; we worked long hours with him; he liked us, and we loved him. Then one month the principal of the high school called me in; I still remember how his face was averted, as if he were ashamed of what he was going to have to say. No more could our magazine patronize that small, conscientious, patient printer. There were no complaints. Our printer’s price was reasonable, and his work first rate. But a new city administration had just taken office and its members had various interlockings and interlacings and political debts to pay. So an order came from on high obliging all the small amateur school papers to transfer their business forthwith to a large commercial printing house downtown. What was our total business worth? Not more than a few hundred dollars a year. Enough. The big commercial printer wanted that few hundred dollars from each of the schools, and was in a position to demand it. And that was that.
All over America I ran into little stories about urban politics. I didn’t have to collect them; they stick to the ears.
Item: In one New England city, the new mayor told his crowd on accepting office, “Now, boys, no——————, everything’s got to be clean from now on, for two months.”
Item’. Nugget of conversation about the mayor of a great middle western city: “Oh, the old boy ain’t so bad, he got rich before he was elected.”
Item: In 1936, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch won a Pulitzer prize for exposing “padded registrations,” of which there were found to be 45,000 in St. Louis alone. It printed picture after picture of deserted empty houses—each the address of a hundred “voters.”
Item: In one city until very recently, if some institution should be so unwise as to resist a shakedown, the number of things gravely wrong with its elevators and plumbing, which would instantly be pounced upon by the building inspectors and which might well lead to condemnation of the property, was remarkable.
Item: In one city, when a drugstore proprietor did not contribute to the local machine, policemen stood outside his premises and searched outgoing customers for narcotics, which did not make business flourish.
The chief reason for the growth of corrupt political machines was inertia in the citizen. Bryce wrote about “the fatalism of the multitude,” and years later men like Pendergast proved his point. A factor contributing to civic apathy and consequent graft was the large percentage of urban foreign born. These were too ignorant, too lazy, or too busy trying to earn a living, to care who ran the place, and their immense voting power, bought by favors if not by outright purchase, could swing-most elections.
Four things—of course the generalization is too rough—have led to the serious weakening today of most of the old-style crooked machines. (1) The steady Americanization of the foreign born. (2) Civil service. (3) The decline in influence of the party system as such. (4) That well-known experiment in socialism, the public schools.
Return to Missouri in general and Kansas City in particular. Actually Kansas City is a clean and well-run town these days; it jumped from being one of the worst cities in America to one of the best. Its mayor, though a Democrat privately, runs as a nonpartisan—it was he who led the revolt against Pendergast—and its administration is in charge of an entirely apolitical city manager, L. P. Cookingham. One former source of corruption was a dishonest state judiciary, since it is usually a combination of city boss plus state patronage that makes a machine work. Missouri put in a new judicial system some years ago, by which district, appellate, and supreme court judges are appointed by the governor on recommendation of an impartial committee, whereupon they must go before the people. Later, as their terms run out, they are obliged to run again on the simple and direct issue of whether or not they shall be retained. This arrangement has, it seems, done a great deal to take the state judiciary out of spoils politics.
Pendergast was a symbol. He had little importance in himself—though it is indubitable that, had he not shoved Harry Truman ahead some years ago, Truman would never have become president. One of the reasons that he liked Truman was, of course, that Truman is one of the most honest men alive; all political machines with shadowy edges like to have men of impeccable character “in front.” Thomas J. Pendergast was born in St. Joseph in 1870. He went to St. Mary’s College, a small Catholic school, and became a bouncer in a Kansas City saloon run by his elder brother, Jim. This Jim was a satrap of considerable eminence. Tom was bright and ambitious and he soon saw where the big money lay. He ran a liquor business with one hand, and went into politics with the other. By 1900 he was a street commissioner and a councilman. His patron in these days was James A. Reed, then the mayor and later a famous Missouri senator. Pendergast was both burlier and sharper than most of his confreres. He was an operator on a really big scale and he soon squeezed out all the small fry. Mostly he made his “legitimate” money out of a cement business.7
Almost all Americans will understand at once what this means; the man from the moon may not. Counties like Jackson and cities like Kansas City do an immense amount of public as well as private building. Pendergast was the boss. Therefore, it well behooved any contractor to see that he bought his cement and concrete exclusively from the boss’s companies. The pattern is almost pitiably simple; I will not go into the minutiae. But also “T.J.” had other interests—liquor, gambling, prostitution; Kansas City was a brilliantly wide-open town. Mr. Westbrook Pegler once wrote an outraged column describing a “public restaurant in which the waitresses stripped to their high-heeled shoes.” Suppose you were a neighborhood saloon keeper. You had to buy your liquor from one of Pendergast’s firms, use his cement if you wanted to repair a wall or extend your premises, and pay his lieutenants “protection” if your establishment included vice and gambling. The Pendergast crowd even “put the lug” on the corner policemen. These made $60 dollars a month salary perhaps, 10 per cent of which went to the local ward or precinct “club.”
One of the most remarkable sights in America is Brush Creek, the shallow, winding waterway that leads into Kansas City from the west for fifteen miles. Some years ago it was paved by Pendergast!
My friend Jay Allen delivered a lecture in Kansas City in the early 1940’s, and talked about the collapse of France. Someone in the audience, seeking a pious explanation of this, asked, “But wasn’t France frightfully corrupt?” Mr. Allen’s reply was, “Am I speaking in Kansas City or am I not!”
On the political side Pendergast throve and proliferated. He was, even more than Hague and Crump, the most powerful American boss of his generation; he controlled politics on the city, county, state, and national level. He had, at one time, no fewer than 60,000 “ghost” votes; the names were taken out of the cemeteries. He never took important public office himself (unlike Hague and Crump) but he was a major behind-the-scenes figure in every Democratic National Convention for a generation. Missouri is a pivotal state presidentially, and “T.J.” had Missouri in the calloused hollow of his hand.
I asked people in Kansas City what beat Pendergast. “He got swell.” Also he got careless. A wildly extravagant love of racing gripped him, and for years he was accustomed to bet some $50,000 per days8 on the horses; sometimes he lost, and this cost money. The breakup came in 1939, when the federal income tax authorities went after him; he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and was sentenced to fifteen months in Leavenworth. He died shortly after being released on parole. The pivot of the affair was a $430,000 bribe he reputedly received from some fire insurance companies for “settlement” of a rate issue. The case has a certain relevance in the kinds of tie-up it adduces. The New York Herald Tribune, not a muck-raking organ but one that guards zealously the public interest, wrote as follows:
This settlement had its genesis in 1929, when the State of Missouri opposed an increase in fire insurance rates by 137 companies, and, pending settlement of the litigation, a United States District Court impounded the rate-increase money. By 1935 this impounded money had amounted to $9,500,000.
Half of the impounded money went to the companies involved; 30 percent more went into a trust fund for the companies to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses—and among the expenses, government agents charged after their investigation, was an item of $430,000 that went to Boss Pendergast for arranging the settlement.
Under the original settlement of the insurance rate case approved by the Federal court, only 20 percent of the impounded money went back to the policy holders, but shortly after Pendergast’s release from prison, a three-judge Federal court in Kansas City ordered $8,000,000 refunded to the policy holders on the ground that the insurance companies could not “enjoy any fruits from the decree procured by fraud.” The companies also were ordered to pay interest and costs, estimated at $1,000,000.
We turn now to today. What remains of the Pendergast machine, cleaned up, is run not by T.J.’s son but by his nephew, James M. Pendergast, a lawyer. It sought to “come back” in both 1942 and 1944, but not with great success, and it has comparatively little influence in the city nowadays. However, in 1946, it marshaled all its remaining strength to help Mr. Truman “purge” Representative Roger C. Slaughter, and he was duly beaten by Enos A. Axtell, the Truman candidate. But then in November Axtell himself was beaten by a Republican.
When the city machine began to deliquesce, the Pendergasters put their hope in Jackson County, where they controlled the courthouse. But the 1946 Republican upsurge also knocked them out of this, at least for the time being. Six out of eleven Jackson County seats in the legislature went to the Republicans, and the Pendergast people lost, with one minor exception, all the local jobs that count.
This was part of a national trend of course. The great Democratic machines in New York, Chicago, and Jersey City took tremendous beatings too; almost everywhere the urban bosses were repudiated. Partly this was a natural swinging of the pendulum; in part it was, as we know, caused by the death of Roosevelt, to whose star Pendergast, Kelly-Nash, and Hague always clung hotly; partly it was because so many women, with their great voting power, were sick and tired of food shortages, standing in line, and OPA. An interesting conjecture is what the Republican party will do with its new city victories. “The proletariat went Republican,” I heard it put. Will it stay Republican? Many folk in the Middle West do not, it seems, think that the GOP strength in the congested urban areas is very deeply fixed or based, especially if hard times should come again.
More About Missouri Politics and Similar Confused Topics
To describe what Missouri lives on is easy enough. In the Show Me State we are out of “colonial” territory at last. The banks, both in Kansas City and St. Louis, are powerful, big, and home owned. Missouri is, incidentally, unique in having two federal reserve bank district headquarters; two out of the twelve in the union are in this state. Missouri lives on coal (also home owned) and other minerals, on shoes, flour, brewing, and chemicals (for instance Monsanto in St. Louis), on strongly developed and diversified small industry, on agriculture and cattle and meat packing, on jobbing and distribution in general, and on the railways—both Kansas City (served by twelve major lines) and St. Louis are great railway towns.
Missouri is one of the least predictable of states politically; most electoral races are extremely close, and—like Idaho for instance—Missouri is so representative of stresses and fermentations in the country at large that it has gone the way the country went, on the presidential level, in every election for some forty years. Roosevelt carried it all four times. But it is very touch and go otherwise. Until the elections of November, 1946, one senator was Republican, one Democratic, and of the House delegation seven were Democrats, six Republicans.9 Though the result is almost always uncertain to the very last minute, the pattern is usually the same. Kansas City runs up a large vote one way, and St. Louis the other; the rural counties swing the balance. These are themselves acutely mixed. “Little Dixie” is as solidly Democratic as South Carolina; the Ozark area is predominantly Republican.
The legislature is dominated by agriculture, the rural districts, and the “county rings.” Another lobby is that of the brewers; this is the first time, I believe, that we have come across brewing as an influence. As I heard it said, “The guy for the St. Louis breweries is always the biggest single guy in the legislature.” Also—another first—a powerful lobby is that of the loan companies, which in the good old days blossomed with interest rates as high as 300 per cent a year. The Baptists in the Bible belt play a role, as do the Catholics in St. Louis, and so do the school teachers and the League of Women Voters. The American Legion is not so strong as in adjacent states. Labor has been a comparatively minor force until recently; the war, however, gave a heady boost to industrialization and hence to unionization; in the 1944 campaign, the CIO was the biggest single factor in carrying the state for Roosevelt.10 Finally, two great newspapers, the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, are as influential in their special areas as any in the land. Superfinally, one should remember the sometimes neglected factor of the common man himself, the small citizen, the independent voter. A real issue in Missouri has always been politicians versus people. As much as in any state, the unorganized and uninstructed and unpledged individual voter, for all his failings and futilities, is a potent and pervasive force.
Missouri gave itself a new constitution in 1945. Many state constitutions are, as we know, hopelessly outmoded; that Missouri should have gone to the trouble to make a new one is an indication of its gumption. The new document, over which eighty-three delegates spent a year of work, replaces that of 1875. It provides for a considerable number of reforms; for instance seventy former state agencies are now grouped in fifteen executive departments; justices of the peace who lived on their own fees (this immoral characteristic exists almost everywhere in the Middle West) are replaced by salaried magistrates; the state commissioner of education is appointed on a nonpartisan basis; patronage is presumably checked and a merit system in public appointments encouraged. The provision that caused most struggle was one which aimed to cut down the exorbitant fees charged by the loan companies.
Let us, on the state level, mention only one episode in Missouri’s opulent record of political scandal. This was the celebrated and somewhat comic attempt to “steal the governorship” after the 1940 election. The Post-Dispatch lifted its voice to full thunder, calling it “the most gigantic attempted political steal in the history of the state.” A Republican, Forrest C. Donnell, now a senator, won the governorship11 by a very slim margin, some 3,000 votes. The legislature was Democratic. The St. Louis Democratic bosses met in the. conventional “smoke-filled” room (at the De Soto Hotel to be precise) and worked out a scheme whereby they hoped to keep Donnell from being installed. The case, which had highly convoluted aspects, boomeranged and after much delay Donnell was able to take his seat. One explanation of this is that the St. Louis machine got worried halfway through, because the local repercussions were too inflammatory; their attitude became, “To hell with the governorship, if this thing is going to beat us in town!” Indeed the affair ended with the expulsion from power in St. Louis of the incumbent bosses. They tried to steal one election, and lost another! This may lead the innocent observer to reflect that, after all, the episode has a proper moral ending. Actually it is not so simple. National eminence and copious rewards have, as it has worked out, come to several of the participants.
No political reporter can visit Kansas City and St. Louis without hearing lively talk about the men whom Mr. Truman has fetched out of the wilds of Missouri into, or near, the White House. The list is impressively long—Hannegan, Symington (the son-in-law of Jimmy Wadsworth incidentally), Vardeman, Snyder (who is very well liked and respected locally), Judge Collet, Vaughan, and Clark Clifford. But here we enter the national field; this book must, unless it is to be a million words long, draw the line somewhere, and Truman and the personalities around him are not our province now. Of course jokes about the Missourians in Washington are without end. The one I like best I heard in St. Louis. Two high Washington officials were having a policy dispute. One said metaphorically, refusing to yield to the other, “Okay, you’ve made your case, but I don’t agree with you—I’m from Missouri.” His colleague replied with brisk aplomb, “Tell me anybody who isn’t!”
The Two Missouri Queens
What makes cities differ? What makes one somnolent and another gay; what makes one as raw and effervescent as another is sober and sophisticated? Age; geography and history; contrasting types of settlement; relation to the hinterland; demographic variations; also factors mysterious and unanswerable. Kansas City and St. Louis, though in the same state and separated by only a few hundred miles, differ as drastically as any two great cities in the nation.
KANSAS CITY (population metropolitan area 634,093; city limits 399,178) is, or was, a wild buckaroo town, a great railhead for the cattle trade, and “the meanest, most lawless” city in the United States. Among adjectives I have heard for it are compact, dynamic, and obscene. It is also one of the friendliest cities I have ever been in. Above all it is full of restlessness and bounce. ST. LOUIS (population 1,367,977 metropolitan area; 816,048 city limits) is much bigger, calmer, more seasoned, with a wealth more deeply entrenched; it gives a sense of civilization like that of Cincinnati, grave and mature. St. Louis was founded by the French, but coloring it strongly is a very large German-descended population. Also it has intimate Deep South colorations, whereas Kansas City is almost purely western. The emphasis in Kansas City is on raw materials; that of St. Louis on manufacturing and finance. Kansas City faces west; St. Louis faces east and south. One reason why the latter didn’t have the cattle market is that the Ozarks cut off the range. Kansas City is essentially Protestant; St. Louis essentially Catholic. Kansas City is the heart of Democratic power in Missouri, St. Louis the heart of Republican. Kansas City is full of boosters and go-getters; St. Louis, with a certain stagnancy, isn’t so self-conscious or aggressive—except about its baseball teams when they are winning.12
One curious anomaly lies in a point of difference between the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Star, once a great crusading paper, was left to its employees by its founder, William Rockhill Nelson; nobody may own a voting share of its stock without being a working member of the staff. The result of this was to make the Star progressively more conservative, because, as I heard it put, the editorial employees naturally come to take a front-office view. The Post-Dispatch, on the other hand, a Pulitzer property and baronial in management, is probably the most effective liberal newspaper in the United States. This is no country in which to make loose generalizations about the influence of property on politics, or vice versa.
The admirable Star reminds me a good deal of my own newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, in older days. It resisted comics for a long time; for years it printed line drawings instead of photographs; even today, its headlines are so conservative as to be almost invisible. Nobody, not even the president of the company or Roy A. Roberts, the fabulous managing editor, has an office. Everybody’s desk is open and exposed on a vast armorylike floor.
The Post-Dispatch, its editors told me, does not play quite such a direct political role as the Star. The Star really tries to run Kansas City—and run it well—and its influence on eastern Kansas is, as we know, profound. In Kansas City itself it is a monopoly. One item is that the Star will accept no liquor advertising because this might damage its prestige and circulation in the Kansan wastes. Mr.Roberts is a potent influence not only in local politics, but in national. The Post-Dispatch has considerable national influence too, but in a different way. The East St. Louis hinterland is not Mr. Pulitzer’s private colony. The paper leans over backwards, in fact, to avoid direct commitments in local affairs. For instance the owner of the leading St. Louis department store told me that he has never once so much as laid eyes on either of the two senior editors of the Post-Dispatch, and he has met Mr. Pulitzer only once. This is in acute contrast to the habit in most middle western cities where the top publishers and businessmen are usually members of the same clubs, guests at the same parties, and in general close associates. This aloofness on the part of the P-D has even led to the legend that “it isn’t interested in St. Louis!” Actually, though its temper is national rather than purely local, it has largely set the tone of St. Louis for two solid generations.
What appears on the masthead of the P-D every day is worth quoting:
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles; that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
–Joseph Pulitzer
The record of the paper’s citations and crusades is almost endless. It won so many prizes that for a time it withdrew from the Pulitzer competitions. Its cartoonist, Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, is one of the two or three best in the world, and it has one of the most highly developed senses of smell in journalism; at the slightest sniff of graft or scandal, the nostrils of the P-D quiver. When it goes after someone, it all but throws the printing presses. Some of its better-known crusades were those over Teapot Dome, smoke abatement, municipal vote frauds, a utilities scandal (it sent the president and vice president of a power company to jail), Pendergast, and, more lately, the tidewater oil affair. It supported Roosevelt three times, and opposed him once.13 From the beginning, though it has had a large Catholic circulation, it has reported and interpreted the Russian Revolution as intelligently as possible, and for years it has been incisively and copiously anti-Franco, no matter what its Catholic readers may think, and will remain so until Franco is where he belongs, out of office or out of Spain.
Naturally the Post-Dispatch makes enemies. One story describes the Negro who, informed by his doctor that he has syphilis, is jubilant at the news. The doctor is much puzzled by this until the Negro explains, “Well, suh, the Post-Dispatch has always been against syphilis, so I’m for it.”
St. Louis, a real metropolis—once it was the third city in the nation, and even today it is eighth—has a quality rare in America: tolerance. It is a great town for civil liberties, and the intellectual climate is practically all that a civilized person can ask. The city is 13 per cent Negro; yet there are no race riots, and the Negro problem is nowhere near the preoccupation that it is in Kansas City. It is 50 per cent Catholic, but several local Catholics collaborated closely with the PAC during the last presidential campaign. St. Louis is the town where Communists speak on Twelfth Street with police protection, and where the liberal press insists that Gerald L. K. Smith has a perfect right to hold a mass meeting.
The Germans are about half the total population. The telephone book is full of Eberts, Muellers, Vogts, Fritsches, Kolbes; I counted sixty-seven solid columns of names beginning with Sch. The Germans came (as they came to the other river cities) after 1848, a sound folk with an advanced culture; they were largely responsible for keeping Missouri federal in the War Between the States; their impact remains very strong, not so much in politics but in giving the city its interest in education, fine craft work, beer, and the arts. The dominant German was for many years the late Adolphus Busch, who arrived in St. Louis in 1857, married a brewer’s daughter named Lilly Anheuser, and organized what became the largest brewery on earth.
St. Louis has two universities, Washington (nonsectarian) and St. Louis (Jesuit); they are friendly rivals rather like Tulane and Loyola in New Orleans. In 1944, by odd and striking chance, a professor in the medical school of each won a Nobel prize. For a long interval we seem to have been in an area where the big cities have only one newspaper. But there are three independent competing papers in St. Louis. The Globe-Democrat is a lusty sheet, and the Star-Times, an excellent paper, is as liberal as the Post-Dispatch, though not so prominent on the national scene.14
I like Kansas City too—the red lights atop its skyscrapers at night (St. Louis doesn’t have many skyscrapers), its war memorial that looks like a silo, its sense of being a gateway, its progressive social-minded bankers, its flavor of Dallas and Fort Worth in one. Its leading hotel, the Muehlebach, is one of the most satisfying in the nation. Also, despite reforms, it is still a kind of middle western Babylon, the nearest place where Texas and Oklahoma can go on the loose. Experts in these matters tell me, too, that it is the best boogie-woogie town in the United States. I went to one Corybantic bar where, under Pendergast, horsebooks and dice tables flourished, and the croupiers, without even bothering to take off their green aprons and eye visors, went out to lunch and nobody paid attention.
Quite a different atmosphere is that in one of the most peculiar communities in the United States, Kansas City, Kansas. Its main street is called Minnesota Avenue; like almost all Kansas main streets it is straight and enormously broad; also, more than any other American street I ever saw, it connotes the derelict. This whole neighborhood seems shipwrecked. A good many shops are walled up and most are dreary; within a block are a line of credit shops ($1.00 down on furniture), automobile loan agencies, and three “Unclaimed Freight” stores.
It is almost impossible to tell in some areas where Missouri ends and Kansas begins, or vice versa. Kansas City (Kansas) is so exploited by its ambitious sister that even the streetcars are routed to go through the Missouri retail district. The frontier actually goes down the middle of the livestock exchange, one of the biggest cattle markets in the world; I know nothing like this in America except the remarkable hotel on Lake Tahoe which is partly in California, partly in Nevada, with the line going through the dining room—you can qualify for a divorce on one side, but not on the other.
The right to vote is determined in the two Kansas Cities by residence, and taxation by where you earn your money. So a Missouri executive who lives in the fashionable part of the Kansas sector lives, at best, a double life. He will pay a Missouri income tax on his salary, and a Kansas income tax on whatever other income he may have. The post office disregards state lines. Mail addressed to Kansas City (Missouri) will be delivered without interruption to residents of, say, Johnson County, Kansas.
Nowadays the night clubs and bars in Kansas City (Missouri) do actually stop serving liquor at midnight on Saturday. So folk in the midst of diversion simply pick up bottles and proceed across the state line into “dry” Kansas, where they may drink unfettered. I visited a fine old pub called the Last Chance on Southwestern Boulevard, very close to the frontier. I am not sure of my notes at this point, but my impression is that, come midnight on Saturday, all you do is move a few inches down the bar, and although there will be no more Missouri liquor, 3.2 per cent Kansas beer begins to flow.
Negro Problem and Education in the Show Me State
Negroes call Missouri a “southern state with northern exposure.” It was a slave state in 1860, and laws prohibiting intermarriage between black and white are on the books. Segregation is the rule in schools, theaters, restaurants, and hotels; on the other hand there is no Jim Crow in transportation. Conductors on southbound trains try, however, to persuade Negroes to sit in the same car, to save the trouble of moving them into a Jim Crow coach when the South proper is reached.
In Kansas City I asked friends what the chief local issue was, and it took some time before they were willing to admit that it was the Negro problem. The whites were, by and large, defensive; they didn’t like to talk about the subject. Yet there was an obvious fear that Kansas City might, like Detroit, explode into tragic riots. People said that Negroes because of postwar prosperity, with increased earning and spending power, were becoming markedly aggressive; there were rumors (as in New York) of “Thursday night bumping.” This is the usual maid’s night out, and department stores are open till 9 P.M.; Negroes, on Thursday in particular, were supposed to have developed the habit of bumping into whites on the streets. As it turned out the “bumping nights” were almost as much of a myth as the similar legendary “Eleanor Clubs” in the South.
In Swope Park, one of the biggest municipal parks in the country, the swimming pool and tennis courts are not open to Negroes; one of the two golf courses is. Reports spread thickly last summer that the Negro community, organized into “push clubs,” intended to invade the park, jump into the pool forthwith, and play tennis. So seriously were these rumors regarded that the police went out to the area in force, prepared to quell disturbances. Nothing happened—because the Negro community itself had never heard of the “plot.”
Negroes are of considerable particularized political importance in Kansas City; for instance the Negro vote was decisive in beating Roger C. Slaughter for renomination in the Fifth Congressional district in 1946.15 It was not merely Truman and Pendergast leftovers that knocked Slaughter out. What really beat him was the Negroes, as a ward-by-ward analysis of the vote will prove. Why did the unanimous Negro vote turn against Mr. Slaughter? That he was an anti-New Dealer who had done everything possible for a long period to impede and defeat Roosevelt-Truman measures was not all. The thing that counted was that he had vehemently opposed legislation to keep alive the Fair Employment Practices Commission. He is quoted as saying, “I sure as hell opposed the bill for an FEPC, and I’m proud of the fact that my vote killed it.”
Kansas City (Missouri) provides, all in all, a glimpse of almost every aspect of the Negro problem—from growing awareness by Negroes of their constitutional rights to growing awareness by whites of what the problem means in terms of conscience as well as legality. One CIO organizer told me, “By God, during the 1944 campaign we had to work with ’em and I even learned to call ’em Negroes instead of niggers myself!” Kansas City (Kansas) across the river presents a sharp contrast to most of this. It is more heavily Negro by a good deal (about 17.4 per cent as against 11.9 per cent for Kansas City, Missouri), but the Kansans are on the whole more tolerant and the sense of incipient tension is much less.
The most interesting over-all aspect of the Negro issue in Missouri is in education. The situation is moderately complex. The University of Missouri at Columbia refuses (like all southern state universities) to admit Negroes. The University of Kansas at Lawrence, Kansas, does admit them. The University of Kansas City (Missouri) does not admit Negroes, nor does Washington in St. Louis. St. Louis University (Catholic) does. At Jefferson City, some thirty miles from Columbia, is Lincoln, a state university exclusively for Negroes. In 1936 a Negro named Lloyd Gaines, on being graduated from Lincoln, applied for admittance to the University of Missouri law school. He was refused. He thereupon sued the university. The case reached the Supreme Court, which in 1939 made a historic ruling, to the effect that the state of Missouri was obliged to give its citizens, white or Negro, equal educational facilities. But a loophole continued to exist, whereby the state could pay the tuition of a Negro at some institution outside the state, instead of admitting him to one of its own white schools; this is the reason why so many Missouri Negroes go to the University of Kansas. But the Gaines case made further action necessary. Missouri was forced to set up a branch of its law school, for Gaines alone, in St. Louis!—in order that the campus at Columbia should continue to remain lily white. This must be the only case in history of a school designed for a student body consisting of one person. Gaines, however, did not appear in St. Louis to take up his unique position.
Then a lively young girl named Lucile Bluford, at present on the staff of the Kansas City Call, applied for admittance to the University of Missouri school of journalism, which is incidentally one of the best in the nation. The registrar did not recognize her application as being from a Negro, and she was accepted. Then, when the school term opened and she arrived on the campus, she was promptly informed that she could not, of course, be admitted. Miss Bluford renewed her application, was refused, and then sued the university. To evade implications of the suit, the state then set up a separate school of journalism at Lincoln—which still exists—again with the intent of keeping, at all costs, any Negroes from infecting the home campus. This segregated school of journalism had only five or six students to begin with; yet it had to be specially maintained with a staff of teachers and the like. Miss Bluford, however, would not attend the ersatz school. It was set up for undergraduates and she was qualified to be a graduate student. So she applied for admittance to the university’s graduate school. Again she was refused. So she filed another suit. Fearing to lose the suit, in which case it would have had to accept her, the university proceeded to abolish (temporarily) its own graduate school of journalism.
Lest this whole episode appear purely incredible, as well as asinine, we should point out again that Missouri is a border state. When we reach the South it will become clearer why such monstrous procedures continue to exist.
Smoke and Railways
Most of the great cities of the Middle West and its periphery have the same problems, in whole new fields that this book has scarcely touched as yet—traction, law and order, slums, water pollution, motor traffic, garbage (believe it or not, the chief issue in the 1945 mayoralty election in Pittsburgh was garbage, no less), honesty in administration, airports, and smoke. Of all American cities, St. Louis has the best record in ameliorating the smoke nuisance; it has, indeed, practically abolished it. Think of Cincinnati or Pittsburgh by contrast!
St. Louis lies close to the great bituminous field in southern Illinois, and coal from this fed its industry for decades. It was, as a result, a city where you had to change your shirt three times a day, and where, literally, it was often impossible to see across the street. There are only two practicable ways to reduce smoke. One is to use more expensive (but more efficient) smokeless coal. The other is to use smoky coal only in conjunction with a stoker or other mechanical contrivance that reduces the amount of smoke produced.
The story of what happened to smoke in St. Louis, in all its detail and interplay, is one of the most interesting in America; if I were a professor of political science I would turn my students loose on it as a classic example of how the public interest, long frustrated, can rise on an issue like this, force political action to be taken, and win hands down.
The situation had become intolerable. The Post-Dispatch, using its familiar one-two punch technique, opened up with an angry editorial and an even angrier Fitzpatrick cartoon. There had been campaigns to abate the smoke evil before, but they were ineffective. The mayor of the time then set up a new apparatus, in which two men distinguished themselves, James L. Ford Jr., a banker with a strong sense of civic interest, and Raymond R. Tucker, professor of chemical engineering at Washington University. Eventually new ordinances came into effect, which forced the citizenry either to use smokeless coal or, in furnaces not hand-fired, to install devices that take the smoke out of “high volatile” bituminous from Illinois. When St. Louis does see smoke these days, it is largely that which blows over from East St. Louis (Illinois), which curious municipality—one of the most backward in the United States—has persistently refused to co-operate.
The chief interests fighting smoke abatement were of course the bituminous operators in Illinois. They were bitter enough for a time to threaten a boycott. St. Louis responded by threatening a boycott in turn, i.e. to buy nothing but anthracite. The fight was in effect won when a clause was incorporated into the projected ordinance empowering the municipality of St. Louis, if necessary, to go into the coal business on its own. Actually the bituminous operators have not suffered. It was the householders and industrial consumers who had to pay for the installation of smoke-removing stokers. Moreover when a person buys a stoker (average cost, $125) it means as a rule that he will not be tempted to change to oil or gas for some little time.
For the romance of railroads, St. Louis is the first city in the nation. At the Union Station the sleek trains are lined up like race horses in adjoining stalls—the Pennsylvania’s Spirit of St. Louis and the New York Central’s Knickerbocker to New York, the Baltimore & Ohio’s Diplomat to Washington, and all the streamliners: The Rebel (Mobile & Ohio) to New Orleans, the Ann Rutledge (Alton) to Chicago, the Burlington Zephyrs to the Twin Cities, the Colorado Eagle (Missouri Pacific) to Denver, the Green Diamond (Illinois Central) to Chicago, and several to Texas and points south and west.
“No train ever passes through St. Louis.” This was a boast once. The Union Station had the largest traffic in the world, because in Chicago, crossing the continent, a traveler had not only to change trains but stations; in St. Louis, only the change of train was necessary.
Many times in Europe I have taken the Orient or the Simplon-Orient Express. With a minimum of fuss, one may traverse the entire continent, from Calais or Paris to Athens or Istanbul, across eight or nine different countries, without once stepping out of the wagon-lit. But, until 1946, it was physically impossible for a person to cross the United States, the most acutely transportation-minded of countries, without changing trains. Fruit and cattle could make the trip without transfer, but not a man or woman. This has been modified now, largely as a result of initiative by Robert R. Young of the Chesapeake & Ohio, and a few transcontinental trains have been set up to go through both St. Louis and Chicago without the former long delays profitable only to the hotel and transfer business.
Last Words on MVA
Near St. Louis, as everybody knows, the Mississippi and Missouri meet. It is, oddly enough, somewhat difficult to visit the actual site of the junction. Also St. Louis, more than any other place in the nation, is the home of MVA. This was another Post-Dispatch crusade, and its campaign was so effective that the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, by a majority of 76 out of roughly 1,500 votes, actually came out for MVA. But the issue as a whole moved out of St. Louis and Missouri into national politics, as we know, with results still uncertain. So far as this book is concerned, we take leave now of rivers and river valleys and river authorities for a considerable time to come.
1 Mr. Truman’s figures. He mentioned also that Kentucky went 96,000 to 94,000 the other way.
2 See Chapter 46 below.
3 St. Clair McKelway once described this community brilliantly in Life, May 26, 1941.
4 Vol. II, p. 357. By C. L. Edson.
5 5 Roy Roberts told me this anecdote and added that the Star hardly gave it a line because nobody thought it was a “story.”
6 This is also from Life, May 27, 1946.
7 That Big Tom was originally a bouncer is from the New York Times, January 26, 1942.
8 New York Herald Tribune, January 26, 1942.
9 As of today both senators are Republican, and also nine of the thirteen congressmen.
10 Of the forty-nine international unions in the country eighteen have units in Missouri now. Biggest is the UAW, because of the Ford and Chevrolet assembly factories and the great sprouting of aircraft plants. At one time Pratt & Whitney at South Kansas City employed 22,000 workers.
11 Not to be confused with Phil Donnelly, the present governor, a Democrat.
12 St. Louis is one of the five American cities with teams in both major leagues.
13 In 1936. It did not, however, support Landon either.
14 One inexplicable point about St. Louis is that the British government considers it one of the four cities in the United States “unhealthy for purposes of leaves of absence.” The others are New Orleans, Jacksonville and Savannah. This is completely mystifying. An explanation may be that the reference to St. Louis got in the Foreign Office Handbook forty or fifty years ago, and through oversight has never been removed.
15 See the New York Herald Tribune, September 8, 1946, for an analysis of this bv Bert Andrews.