Thomas Joseph Pendergast was an American political boss. He controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri from 1925 to 1939.
Background
Thomas Joseph Pendergast was born on Jule 22, 1872 in Saint Joseph, Buchanan County, Missouri, United States. He was the fourth of nine children in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. His parents, Michael and Mary Elizabeth (Reidy) Pendergast, had migrated in the mid-nineteenth century from Ireland to the United States, where the father found work as an unskilled laborer, first in Gallipolis, Ohio, and then in St. Joseph. James Pendergast, Thomas' older brother, had moved in 1876 to Kansas City, Missouri, where he eventually purchased a saloon in the city's West Bottoms and another in the North End, both heterogeneous neighborhoods inhabited by low-income Irish, Italian, German, Negro, and native white laborers. At that time neither Republicans nor Democrats had organizations in Kansas City, and neither party dominated local politics.
James Pendergast stepped into this political void and organized the first permanent Democratic club, which soon had control of the wards in which his saloons were located. He was elected to the city council for nine consecutive terms, from 1892 until his retirement in 1910. Popular among the working class, he provided cash relief, food, fuel, and clothing for the poor and dispensed local patronage to his followers. In 1890 James invited his brothers to Kansas City, one of whom, Michael, became an organizer of ward clubs.
Education
ThomasJoseph Pendergast was educated in the St. Joseph public schools and Christian Brothers' College (a parochial secondary school), but it was from his older brother James Pendergast that he learned the art of politics.
Career
Tomas Joseph Pendergast came to work as a bookkeeper in James's saloons, also became active in politics, and in 1896 was appointed deputy county marshal. In 1900, when James was at the height of his political power, Tom Pendergast was appointed to the patronage-rich office of city superintendent of streets, and two years later he was elected county marshal (1902 - 1904). From 1910 to 1914 he served on the city council, the last elective position he was to hold. When his older brother retired from politics in 1910 because of illness, Tom Pendergast inherited the Democratic leadership of the North End and West Bottoms. Driven by a desire for power and money, he now attempted to win control of the city and county party machinery. Besides its working-class elements, Kansas City had a heavy population of native-born white Protestants, and these shared many of the values of the rural population of Jackson County, of which Kansas City was a part. While James Pendergast had been concentrating on organizing working-class ethnic voters, his longtime Democratic rival, Joseph B. Shannon, had actively built support in the county, and the two men had therefore shared elective and patronage decisions.
Tomas Joseph Pendergast, while keeping a tight rein on the working-class wards, undertook to extend his influence to middle-class residential areas by establishing political clubs, which also provided such social activities as dances, picnics, bridge parties, and teas. He won friends by awarding city and county construction contracts to favored contractors, and franchises and tax deductions to cooperative businessmen. Money from business interests supported the services that Pendergast supplied to the middle and working classes, and generously supplemented his personal fortune derived from a wholesale liquor business, a concrete factory, and a third-rate hotel which was also a thriving center of prostitution. Through a series of maneuvers, including alliances with former Shannon supporters and the successful endorsement of his protégé Harry S. Truman for county judge in 1922, Pendergast undercut Shannon's power and emerged by the mid-1920's as the boss of the Democratic party in Kansas City and Jackson County.
Pendergast was the only Democrat in Missouri with the power to deliver a massive block of votes. He used this leverage to influence state patronage and to protect Kansas City's liquor interests. But the greatest boon to his power on the state level came with the New Deal. Indebted to Pendergast for support in the 1932 Democratic convention, President Roosevelt the next year gave the Missouri boss control over many local federal appointments under the Civil Works Administration and, after 1935, the Works Progress Administration. Pendergast demonstrated his muscle in state politics when in 1934 he succeeded in having Truman elected to the United States Senate.
Through WPA projects and patronage, Pendergast became one of the strongest political bosses in the nation. Where persuasion had its limitations, Pendergast elected candidates by stuffing ballot boxes, bribing business interests, and offering police protection to criminals, who intimidated voters and rival candidates. Yet his opponents were unable to break the Pendergast machine, in part because it effectively provided jobs for the unemployed during the depression. It took a federal investigation of illegal voting practices and of Pendergast's income to destroy his power. The investigation was initiated by Maurice M. Milligan, a federal district attorney who was bitter over Pendergast's opposition to the candidacy of his brother Jacob L. Milligan in the 1934 Democratic Senatorial primary.
Revelations of corruption and sensational newspaper headlines moved Gov. Lloyd C. Stark to turn against Pendergast, and in 1938 Stark successfully supported an antimachine candidate for the state supreme court in the Democratic primary. On the basis of this defeat and the findings of the Milligan investigation, the Roosevelt administration deserted Pendergast for Stark. In 1939 Pendergast was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. With the master broker disparaged and in prison, the organization collapsed. Six years later, at seventy-two, Pendergast died of a heart ailment at Menorah Hospital in Kansas City on January 26, 1945. He was buried in the city's Calvary Cemetery.
Achievements
Thomas Joseph Pendergast was widely known as the leader of a Kansas City political organization known as the Pendergast machine. He rose from poverty to become one of the most powerful political figures in Missouri even though he never held a major political office. He shaped the political landscape of Kansas City and the state of Missouri by controlling political candidates and influencing the outcome of elections.
Connections
On January 25, 1911 Thomas Joseph Pendergast married the former Carrie E. Snyder. They had three adopted children: Marceline, Eileen, and Thomas.
